Stephen Jones writes:
>However, it is also important to understand that God did not intend
>the Bible to be a scientific textbook (ie. the Bible makes no such
>claim about itself), and the points where the Bible and science claim
>something about the same fact *in the same way* are rare, to
>non-existent.
>
>The Bible makes no claim how old the Earth or man are, so PC's are
>need only defend a general range of tens of thousands of years that
>broadly fits the scientific evidence.
I am not going do a point by point discussion of what Stephen raised. My
view about Genesis is that "No it is not a science text-book" The statements
do not have to be detailed like a science textbook is. But I have difficulty
when the statements are not True. I have used the statement "This red car
hit the blue car" is a true but non-scientific statement. Scientifically,
the kinetic energy of the red car was greater than the tensile strength of
the metal due to a low energy of binding of the molecules in the metal frame
and superstructure of both the red and blue cars, so that when they collided
their morphology was altered. This is a scientific statement. But while I
have been criticised for taking Genesis too literally, if I can find a
scenario which fits the observational facts AND takes Genesis historically,
why should I reject it?
I see nothing in the scripture which requires a few tens of thousands of
years and no more for the creation of Adamnor does the scientific data
"broadly" fit this view. Let us start with tool making. I want to point out
something I just noticed about tool making which I believe is unique to
humans. While animals do make and use tools to get food, I have not seen an
instance of an animal making a tool in order to make another tool! There may
be some examples but I have not run across them. If there are no examples of
this sort, then a decidedly human activity can be seen in the fossil record
from 1.5 million years ago!
First the tools. Several animals make tools. Schick and Toth state:
"Examples in the animal world of innate tool-using abilities include a
small but astonishingly varied list of species in nature. In Sociobiology:
The New Synthesis, Edward O. Wilson compiled a fairly comprehensive list of
known instances up to 1975, and no significant increase has been noted in
recent years. Prominent cases of nonprimate tool use include:
1. the mud wasp, which holds a tiny unmodified pebble in its jaw to tamp
down mud to construct its nests.
2. some Galapagos Islands finches, found in these Pacific islands off
the coast of Ecuador, which tear off and use a spine from a
cactus plant to probe and 'fish' for burrowing insects inside a
tree. The
insects sense an invading foreign body and latch on to the cactus
spine and the finch withdraws the spine and eats them.
3. the Egyptian vulture, which will carry unmodified rocks in its beak
and drop them on thick-shelled ostrich eggs in order to break them
open for food.
4. the California sea otters, which crack open the hard shells of clams
and abalone using unmodified stone hammers or anvils. (A visitor
to
the Monterey coast probably will have seen these mustachioed aquatic
mammals diligently rapping away at their molluskan prey.) The sea
otter has two ways to accomplish this floating on its back, the
otter either places the shellfish on its chest and hammers away at
it with a rock held in its paws or else it places the rock on its
chest and then bashes the shellfish against this anvil.
But despite these examples, tool use among animals other than primates is
rare. Only a few other cases could be included here, most of them variations
on a theme: a few more birds that also use twigs as extensions of their beaks
to get food; another bird that bombards eggs with rocks; some insects that
catch prey by throwing sand to knock them down into their pits; and one fish
that spits water at flying insect prey. Several birds, some insects, a
mammal, and a fish: altogether fewer than twenty nonprimate animals that use
tools in the natural world."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent
Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 53,54
and
" "In the 1960s Jane Goodall shocked and fascinated the scientific world
with her documentation of simple tool use and manufacture among chimpanzees
she was studying in Africa. Some individual instances of tool use by captive
and wild chimpanzees had been reported before this, but her work finally
showed the richness and diversity of tool use by chimps in their daily lives.
In the Gombe Reserve in western Tanzania, chimpanzees modify a stick or a
piece of grass by trimming off any side stems and breaking it to a desriable
length in order to fish for termites and ants: they insert the probe into a
hole in the nest and wiggle it around. The insects think it is an invading
enemy, and attack the probe. The chimp then withdraws the probe from the
nest and carefully licks off any adhering insects. Other forms of tool use
documented by Goodall and others include chewing wads of leaves to make
sponges to clean themselves or to draw water out of a hollow in a tree trunk;
using stones or branches as missiles or clubs during confrontations with
other animals or as a form of display to assert dominance; using sticks as
prying levers; and even using twigs as toothbrushes. Thus chimps have shown
the largest and most varied set of tools yet seen in any animal other than
human beings.
"Some of the most remarkable recent accounts of chimpanzee tool use have
come from West Africa, where chimpanzees in several areas have been observed
cracking open hard-shelled nuts with stone or wood hammers. This phenomenon,
first observed in the early 1970s, was studied in fascinating detail during
the 1980s by researchers such as Christophe Boesch. When the chimpanzees
want to open a type of nut whose shell is too hard to crack with their teeth,
they rest the nut on a tree root or stone to serve as an anvil and bash it
with another stone or stout wooded branch. Most interesting, these
nut-cracking tools are coveted items in the chimp society, often retrieved
and carried about from one nut grove to another.
"Such tool use among chimpanzees is remarkable in many ways. First,
chimpanzees use a fairly large variety of tools in the wild and for a variety
of purposes, not only for the immediate goal of acquiring a morsel of food,
but also for defense or offense, for drinking, for washing their bodies, and
even for cleaning their teeth. Furthermore, they not only use tools, but are
often known to make them, to modify a twig, a branch, or a leaf to do a job
better Most important, perhaps, tool use and tool making by wild chimpanzees,
unlike other animals, appear to be based profoundly upon learning.
Individuals sometimes invent innovative uses of tools in solving some
problem or, more casually, in the process of exploring their environment.
Play behavior among younger chimpanzees probably plays a large role in these
inventions. And even more crucial, tool use seems to be routinely learned by
watching other chimps. Tool use in chimps is a cultural phenomenon, with
regional tool 'traditions' (such as nut cracking, termiting) observed in some
populations but not others.
"Recently, comedian Jay Leno pointed out that if chmpanzees were really
like humans, they would just borrow tools and not return them! Upon viewing
Christophe Boesch's film of chimpanzees hammering nuts in the Ivory Coast, we
found this joke to be remarkably prophetic. Since rock is a fairly rare
commodity in the chimpanzees' habitat, a premium is placed on the large
stones used for nut-cracking activities. These rocks are sometimes begged
(the needy chimp making a supplicating gesture with an outstretched hand),
borrowed (particularly within a family group of a mother and her offspring0,
or even stolen (generally by a dominant male or when the owner's attention is
diverted). The earliest inception of technology thus may have had some
profound repercussions: it could have required new sets of rules of social
behavior and patterns of communication to help share the first real personal
possessions."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 57-58
**
In all these examples there is not one in which an animal makes a tool with
the purpose of making another tool. Man does this all the time. There is
evidence of woodworking in the microscopic scratches on some of the stone
tools found in Koobi Fora.Schick and Toth state:
""With a stone flake, a wooden branch is slowly honed to a sharp point by
scraping. Such an implement could have been used as a formidable spear,
digging stick, or skewer for carrying meat. Final shaping was done by
grinding the point against a rough rock. The use of one tool to make another
tool is one more human characteristic."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth,
Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.159
and
"Although wood generally does not preserve well in the ancient
archaeological record, we can find indirect clues of the use of wood in
various ways. sometimes a tool seems to have been made to mount on a handle
(in recent prehistory and in modern times usually made out of wood or bone).
We don't see any good evidence of this, however, until much later, only
within the last hundred thousand or so years. Another sign is a distinctive
alteration, seen, seen through a microscope, of the edge of stone artifacts
used to work wood. ON 1.5-million-year-old flakes from Koobi Fora, Lawrence
Keeley from the University of Illinois identified signs that suggested they
had been used for scraping wood. Making what, we don't know -- possibly some
other tool."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.160
One fact is certain, neither man nor ape eats wood so whatever the scraping
on wood was for, it was NOT for food. Thus, they were engaging in some type
of woodwork 1.5 million years ago.The only purpose which I can think of for
woodworking at that time is to make some wooden object of use to the carver..
This is highly indicative of human activity. For those who want some piece
of wood from that time, you need to realize that wood is a very perishable
material. The oldest wooden digging device is from 3500 years ago (Schick
and Toth, p. 157) The oldest wooden object is a spear is from
Clacton-on-Sea, England and is dated at 400,000 years ago. (Schick and Toth,
p. 172). There is no animal which fashions weapons. Chimps may use sticks to
kill a fellow chimp, they were not fashioned for that purpose. Only man does
this.
Fagan states:
"By 130,000 years ago, plant grinders and pounders were in widespread use, so
less-palatable meat and vegetable foods could be processed, then cooked,
before consumption." Brian M. Fagan, _The Journey from Eden_ New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1990, p. 61
This is certainly NOT an animal activity. Not the pounding of the food, but
the FASHIONING of a tool to pound the food. In the above examples of otter,
they use a rock but do not fashion the rock for a pounder.
Fagan writes:
"The first Europeans and Asians were small *Homo erectus* bands, originally
tropical and subtropical hunters, who were adapted to live within a range of
temperatures around 80 degrees F (27 deg. C). This particular temperature is
the critical level at which humans neither cool nor warm their bodies,
neither sweat nor shiver. We can withstand surprisingly large variations
about this temperature, by maintaining an artificial microclimate around
ourselves as near to this temperature as possible. For *Homo erectus* to be
able to adapt to the more temperate climate of Europe and Asia, it was
necessary not only to tame fire but to have both effective shelter and
clothing to protect against heat loss."Brian M. Fagan, _The Journey from
Eden_ New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990, p.75-76
Ok. if they had to have clothing and fire, The earliest confirmed use of
fire by H.erectus is from Beijing China with Peking man. 500,000 years ago.
There are two cases of possible fire from 1.5 million years ago (Ian
Tattersall, The Fossil Trail (New York:Oxford University Press, 1995), p.
202-203) but they are controversial. But animals do not use fire.
As to clothing, there is microscopic evidence of that on the tools also.
Schick and Toth write:
"But in the very remote Stone Age past, our primary evidence for hide
working comes from Lower Paleolithic sites in Europe, the earliest about
three hundred thousand years ago, where stone artifact edges show the
telltale microscopic wear pattern of highly rounded, rough, and pitted edges
with scratches perpendicular to the tool edge, indicating a scraping motion.
In the earliest Stone Age, we have no direct evidence of the working of
hides. Once a skin is cut away from an animals's body, it can be worked with
stone tools, ideally flakes or retouched flake scrapers, to remove adhering
meat and fat, which will normally make the skin go rancid. It is usually
easier to remove adhering tissues by staking the skin on the ground with hair
side down and allowing it to dry in the sun. A sun-dried skin (rawhid) can
serve as a stiff carrying device, but to make a softer, more pliable material
that can be used as clothing, ususally some chemical tanning agent (such as
brains, urine, ash, and water) must be used. Whether Oldowan hominids had
such technologies is unknown, but it seems more likely that a strong reliance
upon clothing for warmth was especially correlated to hominid movements into
more temperate parts of the world later in time."~Kathy D. Schick and
Nicholas Toth, Making Silent
Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.162
There is also evidence for hide scraping from Hoxne in England. I do not
know the age of this, but it is older than 100,000 years.
They state:
"A dominant tool form in these technologies was the side scraper,
produced by removing chips off one side of a flake to stepen or resharpen an
edge. Wear studies suggest that many of these were used for scraping hides
or working wood. Other common tools include denticulates (flakes retouched
inot a sawlike, toothed edge) and unifacial or bifacial points."~Kathy D.
Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1993), p.290
This is from 200-100,000 years ago.
These activites seem to imply a human type of activity prior to the time most
christians wan Adam to have existed. The only way I know to harmonize the
data is to do something like I have done by moving the time of man's creation
further back. When you couple these observations with the first art object
at 300,000 years, the broca's brain at 2 million years, it is not too
difficult to see that Christian apologetics has a problem here.
glenn