On Wed, 1 Nov 1995 23:50:53 -0500 you wrote:
GM>Abstract: I present more evidence of "human" activity prior to
50,000 years
>ago. These activities illustrate how ineffectual the recent creation of man
>is at explaining the data.
>Stephen Jones writes:
SJ>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.
SJ>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.
GM>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?
Agreed. This is what I am trying to do too, with the "two-Adam" model.
GM>I see nothing in the scripture which requires a few tens of
thousands of
>years and no more for the creation of Adam nor does the scientific data
>"broadly" fit this view.
Agreed. There is no actual statement in scripture that says when Adam
was created. But most scholars who believe in a literal Adam would
place it within the last 10-50 thousand years, based on inferences
from
Gn 1-11.
GM>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!
[...]
gm>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:
[...]
[...]
GM>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 is making the assumption that the "man" of Genesis 1 is the same
as the "Adam" of Genesis 2. The two-"Adam" model would see this
evidence of emerging intelligence such as tool making, as included in
the making of man in Gn 1:26-27.
Christian apologetics has many problems. That is the nature of the
beast. But IMHO it is on the right track when it sees a sharp
distinction between the abilities of Homo sapiens and other hominids.
Gould points out:
"Our closest ancestors and cousins, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals,
and others, possessed mental abilities of a high order, as indicated
by their range of tools and other artifacts. But only Homo sapiens
shows direct evidence for the kind of abstract reasoning, including
numerical and aesthetic modes, that we identify as distinctively
human. All indications of ice-age reckoning-the calendar sticks and
counting blades-belong to Homo sapiens. And all the ice-age art-the
cave paintings, the Venus figures, the horse- head carvings, the
reindeer bas-reliefs-was done by our species. By evidence now
available, Neanderthal knew nothing of representational art." (Gould
S.J., "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History",
Penguin: London, 1991, p320).
The recent Discover magazine also supports this explosive cultural
appearance of Homo sapiens only about 35,000 years ago:
"Among all the events and transformations in human evolution, the
origins of modern humans were, until recently, the easiest to account
for. Around 35,000 years ago, signs of a new, explosively energetic
culture in Europe marked the beginning of the period known as the
Upper Paleolithic. They included a highly sophisticated variety of
tools, made out of bone and antler as well as stone. Even more
important, the people making these tools- usually known as
Cro-Magnons, a name borrowed from a tiny rock shelter in southern
France where their skeletons were first found, in 1868-had discovered
a symbolic plane of existence, evident in their gorgeously painted
caves, carved animal figurines, and the beads and pendants adorning
their bodies. The Neanderthals who had inhabited Europe for tens of
thousands of years had never produced anything remotely as elaborate."
(Shreeve J., "The Neanderthal Peace", Discover, September 1995, p73)
God bless.
Stephen
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