RE: mtDNA Eve and the determination of humanity

Dear ASA friends,

there has already been a lot of discussion on this thread of defining biblical
humanity and dating Adam. Several times, I felt tempted to say something, but I
had a lot of work - after all I'm retired ;-).

Crucial difficulties of the various positions and attempted solutions came up
again and again, but another possible solution was never mentioned. And that's
what I'd like to throw in here, without, however, going into much detail.

I agree with you, Dick (and Carol Ann Hill), that Adam cannot be located
anywhere else but in Southern Mesopotamia, and that he cannot be dated at any
other time than about 4000 BC, not much earlier.

But I agree with you, Glenn, that humanity must be much older than that, even in
the biblical sense of "created in God's image". In our 1999 PSCF paper, A. Held
and I mentioned the Drachenloch excavations ("Cave bear skulls were possibly
presented as offerings in a Swiss cave approximately 50 ka ago") by H. Baechler
(who, by the way, was Swiss, not German). I agree with you that genetic data
require a biological continuity between all humans living today with fossil
H.sapiens (including earlier than Quaternary ones), as well as their hominin,
hominid, hominoid, and earlier forerunners, although I may differ regarding some
technical details [you may look at Rohde D.L.T., Olson S., Chang J.T. "Modelling
the recent common ancestry of all living humans", Nature 431 (2004), 562-566].

And I agree with both of you that the accommodationist view is unsatisfactory.
It arbitrarily separates Gen.12-50 (having an "historical basis") from Gen.1-11
("broken myth" having no historical basis). But its crucial defect is not even
these questionable genre attributions, but an inconsistent view of inspiration.

So what is a possible solution comprising all of these agreements? I am
convinced that we must separate, in time, the "creation" of humanity "in God's
image" of Gen.1:27 and the "formation" of Adam of Gen.2:7. And we must agree to
God "creating" the essential spiritual aspect of humanity (out of nothing!) in
creatures being biologically and psychologically descendents of earlier
creatures (i.e. evolved). This has much to do with what I discussed in my recent
paper, "Dimensions of the Human Being and of Divine Action", PSCF 57/3, 191-201
(2005).

This concept is in violation of the dogma of inherited sin (German "Erbsuende",
English usually much less specifically "original sin"), but I consider this
dogma to be false, in any case. Sin and sinfulness, being a spiritual quality
(or rather defect), cannot be inherited biologically. And Paul emphasises as
much: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death
through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned..." (Rom.5:12).
We all are not sinners because we all descended _from Adam_, but because we all
sinned _ourselves_. By the way, Adam is not mentioned in Rom.5:12.

Adam _is_ referred to in what follows, Rom.5:13-14: "... for sin indeed was in
the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no
law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not
like the transgression of Adam..." This emphatically does _not_ say that those
"from Adam to Moses" inherited their sin from Adam. But it implies the parallel
between those "from Adam to Moses" and those before Adam ("Preadamites"): they
had "no law", their "sinning was not like the transgression of Adam", their "sin
is not counted", and "death reigned" over them (however much or little Paul may
have known about Preadamites).

In this view, Adam is the "federal head" of humanity, but not their progenitor.
In the 1999 PSCF paper mantioned we wrote: "In spiritual terms, he was the
typical representative of the old (fallen) human species, both before and after
his time, just as Christ is the risen 'firstfruits' of the new humanity of those
'born of the Spirit', both before and after his time on earth.", with the
endnote, "Romans 5:12-21. In this context, physical descent is irrelevant, for
the old humanity (not necessarily for old Israel), just as it is for the new.
Adam's being called 'the first man' does not refer to biological genealogy, as
can be seen in Christ's being 'the second man' and the 'last Adam' (1
Corinthians 15:45-47). John 3:8."

Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)