Well, then I apologize. please forgive me It appeard to me, when you said,
the account is about metalurgy, when my entire argument was pointing out
that it wasn't that I must have come away with a total misunderstanding of
your point.
glenn
They're Here: The Pathway Papers
Foundation, Fall, and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: philtill@aol.com [mailto:philtill@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 2:23 PM
To: glennmorton@entouch.net; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!
Glenn,
I'm truly sorry that you felt insulted by my response. I didn't make this
clear: the reason I didn't interact with any of your **specific** arguments
is because I actually do agree with all of them -- at least I am willing to
give you the benefit of the doubt on any that I don't fully understand. I
think that probably most people on the list will also agree with your data
that, for example, Neandertals used tents and kept flocks, or that murder
with an axe or spear was first done by a homo erectus. I can agree, at
least I have no reason to disagree, that none of the things mentioned in the
Bible were first invented by Akkadians or Sumerians. I'm even willing to
accept that the mention of metals **could** have been a reference to
wickedness and not metallurgy. I'll grant you that for the sake of
discussion. I have absolutely no problem with it. Therefore, I saw no
reason to argue any of these points.
But nonetheless, most people -- like me -- have not been convinced by these
many excellent arguments that you put forth, and never will be convinced by
them. As you say, you "write things that nobody believes." Don't you care
to know why? If you just add more and more excellent arguments on top of
your previous excellent arguments, do you think you will get a different
response now compared to what you have gotten in the past? I can tell you
without any doubt that you will not get a different response, because you
are arguing the wrong problem. Your particular data and particular
arguments are not the problem, and they never have been.
I was trying to respond to what I perceive is the **real** reason that your
arguments have not persuaded people. I was trying to do this in good faith,
not to insult you. The real problem has nothing to do with the veracity of
your arguments. The problem lies at a higher level. When we synthesize all
the arguments into a view of the Bible, there is one last sanity-check where
we say, "but do I really believe this is what Moses intended his original
audience to understand?" I think this is the step where you lose people.
It is certainly where you lose me.
Language and communication have so many degrees of freedom that they can be
deconstructed and put back together to mean any number of things. It
doesn't surprise me that you have found a way to read the Genesis words and
sentences such that they may refer consistently to homo erectus. Likewise,
it doesn't surprise me that, at the same time, Dick and others can read it
such that Adam is a neolithic individual. I don't believe in "smoking
guns," because there are too many smoking guns lying around and everybody
interprets them differently. The real problem here is philosophical -- what
are the rules of exegesis? What is our theory of inspiration?
Instead of arguing about metallurgy in Genesis, you would make much better
progress arguing these higher-level questions that are actually responsible
for losing your audience. You would need to answer these types of
objections:
1. Why would Moses think that his original audience (13th-15th century BC
Israelites) needed to know about the advances of Neandertal and Homo erectus
cultures?
2. What did Moses put in the text so that his original audience would
understand that he was talking about creatures who lived millions of years
ago, not about the very similar stories and cultural issues that actually
existed in the societies that surrounded them at that time?
3. Why should I believe that Moses' original audience would listen to these
words and picture something completely different than what existed in their
own ANE culture?
4. Do we see a pattern in the Bible that God directly inspires an author
with the names and details of an account when there was no ordinary path of
transmission of those details?
These are just a sampling that I generated off the top of my head.
If you can get people to agree with your basic premises of exegesis, then
the rest of the task will be easy for you. But if you don't address the
major philosophical differences, then no amount of arguing about metallurgy
or homo erectus culture will ever convince anybody, no matter how consistent
your specific reconstruction of the text may be.
I mean this in charity and good faith as an honest response to your post.
Although your arguments about metals are interesting, I don't view them as a
winning argument because of the final "sanity check" that involves the
higher level issues.
God bless,
Phil
_____
<http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/1615326657x4311227241x4298082137/aol?redir=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eaol%2Ecom%2Fnewaol> Check out the new AOL. Most
comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions
of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Oct 23 20:33:55 2006
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Oct 23 2006 - 20:33:55 EDT