On Sun, 13 Apr 1997 15:15:25 -0500, Glenn Morton wrote:
>GM>Against my better judgement I will respond to your ad hominems.
My criticisms are not "ad hominems", ie. "against the man". I
criticise Glenn's theories and his methodologies, not his person. If
Glenn can point to even one "against the man" personal criticism I
have made against him (or anyone else), I will unreservedly
apologise.
GM>I am very concerned with Christians getting the facts correct.
>This emans that when I see someone saying something which is not
>true, or has counter evidence I am going to point it out. You can
>call this "trying to disqualify" others butit is merely my attempt
>to try to get Crhistians to do more research and really know the
>detals of what they talk about.
My point was that Glenn ignores some competing views and then after
attacking those he thinks he can handle (eg. Hugh Ross, YEC, etc) he
then claims that his view is the only one that fits the facts. He
usually ignores Pre-Adamite theories (eg. Kidner) and above all, he
hardly ever advances his own 5.5 mya Australopithecus/Homo
habilis/Homo erectus theory in the same debate.
GM>At 06:39 AM 4/13/97 +0800, Stephen Jones wrote:
SJ>This gives modern man a 130,000 year tenure.
>
>The problem here is with Glenn's interpretation of the word
>"modern". Wilcox is using it in the sense of the sudden appearance
>of *fully* modern man only 40,000 years ago:
>
>Define "fully modern". Is this someone who has our technology? Do
>they need to have invented TV? Must they be farmers to qualify as
>fully human? Must they be able to draw pictures on cave walls to be
>"fully human"? (The Tallensi of Ghana were unable to draw 2d
>pictures when they were first encountered in the 1930s See Meyer
>Fortes, "Tallensi Children's Drawings," in Barbara Lloyd and John
>Gay, eds. Universals of Human Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
>University Press, 1981),pp. 46-70)
>
>
>Or must they have lived at 40,000 years to be fully human?
I know from experience it is a waste of time trying to define
"fully modern" and "fully human" with Glenn. Suffice it to say that
Wilcox has a different meaning of the word "modern" than Glenn does,
so before Glenn criticises Wilcox, he should find out how he is using
that word.
SJ>"Modern humans exploded across the map of the world around
>40,000 years ago." (Templeton J.M. & Herrmann R.L., "Is God the
>Only Reality?" 1994, p135)
GM>At the risk of being charged with "disqualifying others, Templeton
>and Herrman are wrong. The only place modern humans exploded across
>40,000 years ago was Europe.
Stringer disagrees:
"Clearly, our African forebears were sophisticated people. Bands of
them, armed with new proficiencies, like those men and women who
had flourished on the banks of the Semliki, began an exodus from
their African homeland. Slowly they trickled northwards, and into the
Levant, the region bordering the eastern Mediterranean. Then, by
about 80,000 years ago, small groups began spreading across the
globe, via the Middle East, planting the seeds of human modernity in
Asia and later on in Europe and Australia. In each region, these seeds
slowly germinated until, about 40,000 years ago, something caused
them to blossom with an explosive population growth." (Stringer C.,
& McKie R., "African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity", 1997,
p5)
GM>"The earliest evidence of modern humans in Europe is found between
>35 and 40 kya; in China, perhaps as early as 67 kya at Liujiang; in
>Australia, 55 kya or earlier; in America, at the earliest 35 kya
>(but according to many, only later, 15-20 kya. An important gap in
>the record, from 100 kya to 50 kya yields no information of events
>in most of Asia regarding a.m.h."~L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paoli
>Menozzi and Alberto Piazzi, The History and Geography of Human
>Genes, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 64
>
>Modern man was found from south Africa to China by 67,000 years ago.
>The spread was gradual over many millenia and was not an
>"explosion'.
See above. Stringer thinks it was.
SJ>But even accepting for the moment Glenn's figure of "65%",
>Wilcox's basic argument is still valid, namely that the difference
>between "modern humans" and "Neandertals" is *vast*, eg:
>
>"The modern humans that apparently replaced the Neandertals were,
>in" only 65% "of their tenure, walking on the moon!"
GM>Maybe if the Neanderthal had had another 35% of the time he would
>have set foot on the moon. Technologically, neanderthal and modern
>man were equals until they died out.
The point was that "modern humans" did it without needing "another
35% of the time". And Stringer disagrees with Glenn on
"Technologically, neanderthal and modern man were equals":
"Before Zafarraya was excavated, the last Neanderthals were known
from Saint-Cesaire and Arcy-sur-Cure in France where 36,000-year-old
and 32,000-year-old remains have been discovered respectively.
However, using radiocarbon and uranium-thorium measuring techniques
at Zafarraya, scientists have now pushed forward that date by more
than 2,000 years. 'Quite clearly Zafarraya was used by
Neanderthals for a long time after we thought they had been rendered
extinct,' adds Dr Hublin.
But what has caused the real surprise is the nature of the stone
implements left behind in the cave. They are Middle Palaeolithic.
Elsewhere in Europe these basic scrapers and knives had been
replaced by Aurignacian tools - named after the site of their discovery,
Aurignac in southern France. This kit was far more sophisticated in
nature and first appeared about 40,000 years ago. It is uniquely
associated with Homo sapiens, and is characterised by its long retouched
blades; short, steep-sided scrapers, and bone points. Until this time, bone
tools had rarely been made. With the arrival of the Aurignacian kit they
became common in Europe.
The Aurignacian kit reveals an entirely new way of working stone, and
demonstrated a deeper, more complex form of thinking. A Neanderthal
making a Middle Palaeolithic stone tool would simply pick up a lump of
flint, and strike it with another stone until a handaxe or spearpoint had
been shaped. But when a modem human craftsman began his
Aurignacian handiwork, he or she would strike down at the top of the
flint block, shaving off many flint slivers which would ultimately have
many purposes - scrapers, knives, spearpoints, engraving tools, piercers
and much more - betraying the presence of a far more complex mental
template, one that clearly envisaged many simultaneous options in a
single act. Neanderthals basically exhibited only one. They created a
simple Palaeolithic penknife. Modern humans produced a Stone Age
Swiss Army knife."
(Stringer C., & McKie R., "African Exodus: The Origins of Modern
Humanity", 1997, p107-108)
SJ>Glenn just ignores the whole point that the best that Neandertal
>man did was make a bone flute (or whatever Glenn wants to claim),
>whereas "modern humans" have already been "walking on the moon".
GM>If walking on the moon is a measure of humanity, they you and I
>are not human. Neither of us have walked on the moon. In fact by
>this definition, there are only about 20 humans on earth. Tis sad
>to see so many people walking around deluding themselves that they
>are human.
It is arguments like this that convince me it is largely a waste of
time debating at length with Glenn.
SJ>In any event, Glenn who calls Wilcox and other Christian
>apologists "wrong", himself believes that Adam and Eve were "Homo
>habilis or Australopithecus" who lived 5.5 million years ago:
>
>"The only way to fit the scriptural account with the scientific
>observations is to have Adam and Eve be Homo habilis or
>Australopithecus." (Morton G.R., "A Theory for Creationists", DMD
>Publishing Co., 1996, http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm).
>
>Yes I do and I thank you for noting my old address. My new web page is
>
>http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm
Glad to be of service!
SJ>Reflectorites will note that Glenn hardly ever advances his own
>theory of man's origin when he is trying to disqualify other
>theories. His strategy seems to be to attempt to disqualify all
>competing Christian theories of man's origin, leaving his own the
>last one standing by default.
GM>Science often works by eliminating other possibilities. There is
>nothing wrong with doing it that way. To paraphrase Sherlock
>Holmes, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left,
>no matter how improbable, is probably the case."
No doubt "Holmes" first considered *all* "possibilities". He did not leave
one possibility off the table and then bring it on at the end when
all rivals had been "eliminated".
GM>Christian explanations of fossil man are totally untenable
Not all "Christian explanations of fossil man are totally untenable".
Glenn just ignores those that are tenable (eg. Kidner). Here is
another from John Stott, prominent conservative evangelical Anglican
that I found the other day in "a Christian apologetical book" :
"This is an example of how one theologian, JOHN STOTT, believes that
evolution in this sense can be related to the creation story in
Genesis:
`It seems perfectly possible to reconcile the historicity of Adam
with at least some (theistic) evolutionary theory. Many biblical
Christians in fact do so, believing them to be not entirely
incompatible. To assert the historicity of an original pair who
sinned through disobedience is one thing; it is quite another to deny
all evolution and to assert the separate and special creation of
everything, including both subhuman creatures and Adam's body. The
suggestion (for it is no more than this) does not seem to me to be
against Scripture and therefore impossible that when God made man in
His own image, what He did was to stamp His own likeness on one of
the many 'hominids' which appear to have been living at the time.
Speaking hesitatingly as a non-scientist, the extraordinary
homogeneity of the human race (physiological and psychological) has
always appealed to me as the best available scientific evidence of
our common ancestry.
The chief problem in the reconciliation of Scripture and science
regarding the origins of mankind concerns the antiquity of Adam. If
Adam and Eve were a historical pair, when do you date them? There
are two main alternatives. The first is that they were very early
indeed, many thousands of years sc, so that all the cave-drawing,
tool-making hominids were descended from them. The difficulty here
is that we would then have to postulate immense gaps in the Genesis
story and genealogies. The second alternative is that they were
comparatively recent, even as late as 5 or 10,000 BC. This
reconstruction begins with the biblical witness that the dawn of
civilization, adumbrated in Genesis 4:17-22, almost immediately
follows the Fall. If this is correct, then even the fairly advanced
(although prehistoric) cave-drawing hominids were pre-Adamic. The
difficulty here is the claimed scientific evidence that true humans
were living in some parts of the world long before this period. But
were they Adamic? Anatomically they may have been virtually
indistinguishable from modern man; but by what criteria can we judge
if they bore the image of God in a biblical sense?
It may be that we shall not be able to solve this problem until we
know more precisely what 'the image of God' means, and how much
cultural (and even primitive religious!) development may have been
possible to pre-Adamic hominids who nevertheless did not possess
the divine likeness.
(Chapman C., "Christianity on Trial", Lion: Tring Herts. UK, 1981,
pp118-119)
GM>and never, never talk details. Why have you never seen in a
>Christian apologetical book a discussion of the carpentered wooden
>plank from Gesher Benot Ya'qov, Israel which would have had to have
>been made by Homo erectus? I will answer that. Because most
>christians don't want to know the details because it harms their
>viewpoint. so we live in a world of our own delusion rather than in
>the world as it really is.
While I would like to see more "details" being discussed in
"Christian apologetical books", whether Homo erectus made planks or
not is not it is probably not a major issue to most Christian
apologetes.
God bless.
Steve
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