RE: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

Dear Glenn,
   
  While I don’t condone your outdated andropocentric language (e.g. ‘we men,’ as if no women are significant or present, e.g. Janice et al.) or old school approach to contemporary science and religion dialogue, I do think at least one formulation in your message is quite delicious and worthy of elaboration.
   
  Glenn wrote: ‘When Adam is.’ Not ‘when Adam was’ or ‘when Adam could be.’ Can it really have been said so simply and superbly?
   
  This trio of words could (if it would) turn into a sort of ‘theme song’ for philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and theologians to indeed come together in questioning topics such as ‘consciousness,’ ‘identity,’ ‘original (self)-awareness,’ and ‘common descent’ from a non-origins-of-life perspective. Why? Because human-social sciences do not deal primarily with such empirical-quantitative measures as natural sciences adhere to in their disciplinary policy manuals (c.f. 'modern' science).
   
  Origins, meaning, purpose and teleology are indeed significant to human-social sciences – and yet many social scientists have forgotten or marginalized these things, in part due to evolutionary logic based on materialism and scientism. The fact in this case is that we can’t blame naturalists as being anti-origins, anti-meaning, anti-purpose or anti-teleology because the author of the statement ‘When Adam Is’ is apparently a (type of) naturalist himself! I am left wondering if the author’s view of anthropology includes cultural and/or linguistic anthropology or simply physical anthropology?
   
  Nevertheless, what a wonderful mix of ontology, epistemology, space and time, simplicity and complexity, historical realism, social understanding and individual meaning this expression by Glenn brings! It simply beckons the import of hermenuetics!
   
  The responsibility really belongs to all scientists, scholars and everyday people to discover ‘when Adam is’ – in her or his own heart or mind, in a laboratory, at the library, or on a field trip or expedition! Arthur Custance’s notion of a ‘second Adam’ then adds urgency to re-including discourse about Adam beyond the confines of the evolutionary paradigm.
   
  G. Arago

Glenn Morton <glennmorton@entouch.net> wrote: Yeah, but Dick, what happened to your recent Adam? Are you not going to defend it, given that there is nothing in Scripture which requires him to be a Sumerian now?
   
   
  glenn
They're Here: The Pathway Papers
Foundation, Fall, and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm

                                 
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Received on Wed Oct 25 16:44:33 2006