RE: [asa] Question for all the theistic evolutionists

Hi Glenn and Burgy
I completely acknowledge the difficulties, no impossibility, of cramming human or animal genetic diversity into a even a hundred thousand years. And I too am impressed by the pyhsical evidence Glenn cites in favor of great antiquity for spirituality in man. But I don't see this as a problem for a neolithic Adam and Noah. I realize this will probably make me a Bible-hating, unbelieving scoffer, but I think the truth of the Bible is spiritual. As christians, Paul tells us we are Abraham's children. But we are no more genetically related to Abraham than we are to Adam and Noah. We don't have to be the lineal descendants of Abraham to share in his blessing, and we don't have to be the lineal descendants of Adam to share in his curse. We are all Adam's spiritual offspring when we sin; we are Noah's spiritual offspring when we trust in God for deliverance, and we are Abraham's spiritual offspring when we trust in Christ for salvation.

It is possible to trace the physical signs of spirituality back in the archeological and paleontological record. Activities such burial of the dead, art work, and physical parameters such as increasing brain size, may indicate a developing spiritual consciousness. And it may be tempting for TEs to speculate at what point in this progression did evolving humans become truly human, or in God's image. But I think the image of God is *entirely* non-physical. In other words I don't think it's possible to say anything at all about when the image of God was imparted based on physical evidence. Of course it seems that God's image bearer would need a brain capable of thought. But other than that restriction, God could have put his image into a snail. By the same token, a race of super intelligent alien beings many times more advanced than us, would not necessarily be in God's image. All of the burials, artwork, or any kind of "spiritual" activity is just a peculiar animal behavior wi!
 thout God's image. I don't think God's image has anything to do with man's physical attributes, whether brain-size, behavior, clothing, lack of clothing, tools, lack of tools etc.

Brent

---- "burgytwo@juno.com" <burgytwo@juno.com> wrote:

=============
Glenn writes: "If coalescence times are 5.5 million years, that
means we can't have had a genetic/populational bottleneck, as the
Bible requires for the past 5 million years. If one believes that
humanity came from a very small population of people, either 2 or 5,
then current ID and TE views which hold that humanity arose in the
last 200 kyr are as laughably wrong as the YEC views of a 6000 year
old earth. And it means that the ID's and TE's are doing exactly what
the YECs are doing--ignoring data on the age of something! They deny
the age of the earth, ID's and TE's deny the age of human genes. So,
I would conclude that I see ID and most TE views doing the same thing
as YEC--making us look silly, stupid, and in denial of the data."

Glenn's argument above, and his vast amount of data on evidences of
human-like activity stretching back 2MY and more, is -- to my mind --
impressive evidence for his position. The 350KY evidences of grave
goods (see his site) is just one such piece of data. There are lots
more. I have never seen any rebuttal to his data. For purposes of
teaching a SS class, I tried to develop rebuttals to some of the
data. For instance, the presence of humanity in cold climates at a
very long ago date argues for the use of clothing, a human
characteristic. A rebuttal to this -- perhaps early hominids had
thick body hair. Or maybe the climate then was mild. Or maybe they
migrated there only in the summer.

I developed other such rebuttals. They all seemed very ad hoc, and
were not at all persuasive that Glenn's data was misleading. The book
WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP (see review below) suggested that some "human"
attributes might be shared by lower life forms. But even that book
did little to challenge Glenn's thesis.

My 3rd post today -- so it is time to be quiet.

Burgy

www.burgy.50megs.com/weep.htm
 

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Received on Tue Mar 13 14:32:04 2007