Re: Special Creation

If as Ross suggests, God fashioned Adam out of the dust of the earth, (even if he used existing materials), it seems illogical, i.e. not surviving Occam's razor as you suggest, that the genome of this new creature would include preexisting pseudogenes, useless gene duplications, fatal mutations, etc.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: jack syme
  Cc: glennmorton@entouch.net ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 8:52 PM
  Subject: Re: Special Creation

  The thread that touched all this interesting discussion off was the announcement that Alan Templeton's work has falsified the RTB model. Having now had a chance to skim through Ross/Rana's "Who Was Adam," I'm not clear on why that is necessarily so.

  As I understand it, the problem for RTB's model arising from Templeton's work would be that, although the genetic evidence still supports the recent (~100,000 years) emergence of "humans" as RTB define them (home sapiens sapiens) from a smal population migrating out of a Africa, it also suggests those modern humans interbred with indigenous populations of hominids that had migrated out of Africa in two earlier waves ~1.5MYA and ~750,000 years ago. Such interbreeding would suggest the indigenous populations were "human" as well, and thus human-kind is too ancient to trace back to a single Adam and Eve less than 150,000 years ago.

  But Ross/Rana seem to suggest, as I had earlier on the list, that God may have used existing genetic material from earlier hominids when He formed Adam out of the "dust of the Earth." If God did this, then our genome would reflect the history of those earlier hominids, including those two earlier waves of African migration. The "replacement" theory could then still possibly be correct. Obviously, this wouldn't survive Occam's Razor, but neither would just about any theory that seeks actual historical events in Gen. 1 and 2.

  I realize there are other possible problems with the RTB model, but it seems to me that the Templeton data doesn't kill it completely. Have I completely missed something here, or could that body in the cart be shouting "I'm not dead yet?" I admit I'm no genetic anthropologist.
   
  On 3/2/06, jack syme <drsyme@cablespeed.com> wrote:
    I dont see anything in there that suggests that Ross thinks that all homo sapiens today are not human. I agree he claims that hominids, before anatomically distinct modern homo sapiens appeared are less than human. And I agree with you that one could argue that they are human, using Ross's own criteria (religious artifacts, burials etc.)

    I expected them to say the same thing about h. floresiensis. They consider them less than human. Which leads me to another line of evidence against the RTB model. Does anyone know what the earliest date evidence for h floresiensis is? According to the RTB model, God rested after he created man, and no species should be created after Man, so according to RTB no new species after 100k years ago or so. If H floresiensis appeared after this date it would disprove their model.
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: glennmorton@entouch.net
    To: asa@calvin.edu
    Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 5:16 PM
    Subject: Re: Special Creation

     
    For Jack Symes, Michael Roberts, For David Opderbeck

    Jack Wrote:

>>>I will have to look at what you posted over the past month later when I get home. And I dont have a copy of "Who was Adam" I was a subscriber to their message of the month for 2005 when they presented their human origins model over a span of 12 months. And the following is my understanding of their model, It is hard to go back over the old monthly messages as they are not indexed, so if any of you that have the book see anywhere that I am misrepresenting their model please correct me.<<<

    I will make it easy for Jack, here is a quote from the Fingerprint of God and he has not changed that position

    " Man is unique among all species of life. By
    'spirit' the Bible means 'aware of God and capable of forming a
    relationship with Him.' *** Evidence of man's spiritual dimension
    would include divine worship, shown by religious relics, altars,
    and temples. *** From the Bible's perspective, decorating, burial of
    dead, or use of tools would not qualify as conclusive evidence of
    the spirit. Moreover, nonspirit creatures such as bower birds
    decorate their nests, elephants bury their dead, and chimpanzees
    use tools."
        "While bipedal, tool-using, large brained hominids roamed the
    earth at least as long ago as one million years, evidence for
    religious relics and altars dates back only 8,000 to 24,000 years.
     Thus the secular anthropological date for the first spirit
    creatures is in complete agreement with the biblical date.
    "Some differences, however, between the Bible and secular
    anthropology remain. ***The Bible not only would deny that the
    hominids were men, it also would deny that Adam was physically
    descended from these hominids. *** Even here, support from
    anthropology is emerging. New evidence indicates that the hominid
    species may have gone extinct before, or as a result of, the
    appearance of modern man. At the very least, abrupt transitions
    between [hominid]species is widely acknowledged. ~ Hugh Ross, The
    Fingerprint of God, (Orange: Promise Publishing, 1991), p. 159-
    160.

    I have bolded the relevant sentences and since the archive does not use bold, I have offset them with ***'s.

    Two points, the first bolded sentence is his criteria for spirituality. The second is his statement that the hominids were NOT men. And that is why Hugh Ross' view has been falsified from the day it was first written. He claims that altars and religious relics are evidence of spirituality and then denies that what actually seems to exist (religious altars (Bilzingsleben) and what possibly exists,religious artifacts (Tan Tan venus figurine and the Berekhat Ram venus figurine). The latter two items are the first in a series stretching to the Mesolithic of tiny figurines depicting the human form of which the later ones, when found with anatomically modern man are known to have been used in worship as late as this century. It is the mother Goddess religion.

    From their broadcast pnm://broadcast.reasons.org/rtbradio/cu20041102.rm?start=00:04:30.0

    Air date: 11-02-04

    Fuz says, speaking of H. floresiensis:
    "Fuzz: Right, I like to think of the hominids in an analogous way to the way
    I think about the great apes, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans."

    And this:

    "***RTB's biblical creation model considers the hominids found in the
    fossil record to be animals created by God's direct intervention for
    His purposes. They existed for a time, then went extinct. These
    remarkable creatures walked erect They also possessed limited
    intelligence and emotional capacity. Such characteristics allowed them
    to employ crude tools and even adopt a low level of "culture," much as
    baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees do. But while the hominids were
    created by God's command, they were not spiritual beings made in His
    image. This status was reserved for human beings ."***
    "Furthermore, the RTB model treats hominids as analogous to, yet
    distinct from, the great apes. For this reason, the model predicts
    that anatomical, physiological, biochemical, and genetic similarities
    existed among hominids and human beings to varying degrees. But
    because the hominids were not made in God's image, they are expected
    to be noticeably different from humans, as reflected by their
    cognitive and communicative capacities, behavior,"technology," and
    "culture.""
    "The RTB model maintains that while human beings reflect God's image
    in their activities,hominids did not. The model asserts that humans
    are uniquely spiritual and hominids were not. The archeological record
    associated with hominid fossils supplies key data to evaluate this
    prediction." Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam?, (Colorado
    Springs: NavPress, 2005), p.50

    ***
Received on Fri Mar 3 06:47:37 2006