Re: Special Creation

Yes I have seen you mention this. I have not seen much of a response to it and that is in part why I made this thread. The issue is not just where Adam is in the timeline, but was he created specially or not. Or maybe we need some more work to understand what it means that God "created" man.

The traditional interpretation is that Man is created ex nihlo. (bara) There is no mention of using the rib of an animal for example, like Eve was fashioned (banah) out of Adam's. And this is the issue that has to be addressed. Was man created ex nihlo like the heavens and earth or was he fashioned, shaped out of what was already around? Just from that simple look at it, it would seem that since the author used barah for Adam, and banah for Eve, the biblical view does not seem to support your idea.

In a practical sense, I dont knows what "genetic clay" is. When microbes are engineered the genetic material that is inserted is not taken from the dust of the earth or the ground, but from other living organisms.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: jack syme
  Cc: glennmorton@entouch.net ; Terry M.Gray ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 9:21 AM
  Subject: Re: Special Creation

  So the scientific evidence suggests that we have to abandon the idea that our progenitor, whether it was 100k or 1.5 Ma, was created out of nothing with no connection to the rest of the tree of life.

  Jack -- another possibility: could Adam have been specially created out of "something" -- "the dust of the ground" -- that included genetic material (skin cells, hair, etc.; or stem cells?) from earlier hominids? There is no "appearance of a connection" fallacy here -- there is a real connection, but it is not the one evolutionary science suggests. The "clay" the master potter used to form man was "genetic clay." Which seems to make sense to me. When biotechnology today "creates" an organism -- say, a microbe that digests oil wastes -- it doesn't do so ex nihlo, it clones existing microbes and manipulates existing DNA to produce desired characteristics. If we humans are able to "create" garbage-eating microbes within only fifty years or so of learning about DNA, couldn't God have specially created a human in a similar way?

  I've been thinking about this alot over the past couple of weeks, and the above is something that came to me. I don't want to suggest it's the "right" view or even "my" view, but it does seem feasible and seems to have been omitted from the conversation so far. I'm sure I got this from somewhere. Does anyone know of a paper or book or recognized position that takes this kind of approach?

  On 3/1/06, jack syme <drsyme@cablespeed.com> wrote:
>
> In all of this discussion about geneologies, mtDNA, and Adam, an important theological point is not getting pushed aside somewhat and that is the idea of special creation. Was Adam created out of the dust of the earth as a new creature or not?
>
> In the evolutionary model humans are part of the tree of life. We all have a common ancestor that utlmately evolved into chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans. So we are geneticall connected to primates, and mammals to a lesser extent, and all vertebrates, etc etc. And in fact the scientific evidence supports this. We have been focusing lately on templetons autosomal analysis of human migration. But MHC loci, psudogenes, and chromosomal banding patterns, clearly connect us to apes.
>
> So the scientific evidence suggests that we have to abandon the idea that our progenitor, whether it was 100k or 1.5 Ma, was created out of nothing with no connection to the rest of the tree of life.
>
> At this point, I am leaning towards Dick's view. If the creation of man means nothing about his actual first appearance (in a biological sense) then there is no reason to make Adam a homo erectus. I am concerned about Glenn's argument against evidence for a substantial flood in neolithic times, which I think is the strongest argument against Dick's view, (and this would apply to Phil's view also).
Received on Wed Mar 1 10:08:18 2006