>Clearly our anatomy is not the issue. God has no body, so that cannot
> be the basis of our imaging God. Anatomy and behavior is only
>significant to the extent that it permits us to have a conscious
>awareness of our position before God and creation. The image then
>refers to our purpose for being, our relationship with the divine and
>the created world.
I agree. I might point out that the earliest fossil evidence of an idol
in the fossil record is the Golan Venus dated at 330,000 years ago long
prior to the advent of anatomically modern man! The Venus figurines were
fertility idols. I would say that a being which makes idols is aware of
his position before God!
"Fashioning an image, as distinct from collecting one, appears to
have been beyond these man-apes, and was still a long way off in the
future. Until recently, it was thought to be a creative act that occurred
only in the last fifty thousand years of the human story. A recent
discovery in the Middle East has now pushed that date back to three
hundred thousand years, but even this is still quite young compared with
the Makapansgat Pebble.
"The newly found sculptural object - the most ancient man-made image
in the world - is a small stone figurine of a woman, unearthed at an
archaeological site on the Golan Heights. It is extremely crude, but the
head is clearrly separated from the body by an incised neck, and the arms
are indicated by two vertical grooves, apparently cut by a sharp flint
tool. It is a find that establishes the even greater antiquity of the
human fascination with symbolic images."~Desmond Morris, The Human Animal,
(New York: Crown Publishing, 1994), p. 186-188.
"Peltz reported that it was clear that 'human hands had worked a
fragment of pyroclastic rock, namely an indurated tuff.' The illustrations and
arguments presented by Pelcin therefore do not apply. To complement my
microscopic analysis, Peltz and N. Goren-Inbar are preparing an analytical
paper on the geology of the site and the pyroclastic nature of the
figurine. Until publication of these analyses, the debate on possible
pre-Upper Paleolithic symboling may perhaps best be addressed not by
suppositions at a distance but through the microscopic analysis of a late
Middle Paleolithic incised composition from the site of Quneitra, Israel.
I pointed to the Quneitra analysis in my recent criticism of the
Eurocentric presumption that there was a punctuated, apparently genetic
'species' shift in symboling capacity at the Middle/Upper Paleolithic
transition."~Alexander Marshack, "On the "Geological' Explanation of the
Berekhat Ram Figurine," Current Anthropology, 36:3, June, 1995, p. 495.
It would appear to me that the standard Christian explanations of when and
where the image of God first appears in the fossil record is simply WRONG.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm