Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?

While I agree with your conclusion, this argument by itself would not
have sold me on it. I know how my YEC friends would respond. They
would note that to call somebody the 'Father' of something doesn't
necessitate their being the biological ancestor of all who are in that
field. After all, Lavoisier is called the 'Father of chemistry'
without being the ancestor of all chemists. (Or is it Boyle? or
Dalton? Will the real "father" please stand? I've always wondered
about that -- it obviously is a loosely applied term.) But in any case
the point stands that some of Cain's descendants could have originated
the skill which was later attributed to them whether or not their direct
descendants were still around to remain involved in it.

But your point about the common 'non-universality' of the language usage
is very convincing indeed!

--Merv

philtill@aol.com wrote:
>
> There is a good argument that Moses did not believe it was universal
> (in the anthropological sense). Moses designated the three sons of
> Cain's Lamech as "the father of all who travel with tents and cattle"
> (pastoral nomadism), "the father of those who work with copper"
> (metallurgy), etc. It doesn't say they "were the father of those who
> did such things prior to the flood, but who were entirely wiped out
> during the flood." Rather, he puts it in the present tense: /those
> people, who the Isrealites were observing right then and there at the
> time of the Exodus practicing pastoral nomadism or working with metal,
> had obtained those cultural innovations from the people who lived
> **prior** to the Flood./
>
> I think the church has never really allowed the significance of that
> statement to sink in! It is truly breathtaking. If Moses had thought
> that all of Cain's descendants had been wiped out in the Flood, then
> he would never have ascribed the origin of those significant cultural
> features to them. It would make little sense to say that Ham or
> Japeth had taken a vacation from their dad Noah long enough to
> practice some pastoral nomadism, just so they could return to Noah and
> survive the flood and then re-initiate the nomadic life again after
> the flood, such that it was really pre-flood people who had initiated
> it. That's silly! Moses's statement clearly assumes that the
> neolithic cultural innovators who lived **before** the flood were the
> direct explanation for the existence of those practices **after** the
> flood.
>
> In a nutshell, Moses assumed cultural continuity across the flood.
> Thus, he surely must have assumed that the Flood was non-universal.
>
> I think this is entirely reasonable, much more so that to think Moses
> believed the Flood was universal. Moses actually did have a way to
> KNOW that the flood was non-universal. If he knew his Egyptian
> history as it was recorded in his day, then he knew that it went way
> back earlier than Noah's geneology and that it contained no flood. We
> can verify that today by reading it. But the accounts that Moses'
> anscestors had brought with them from Mesopotamia did include a
> massive flood. So it was natural for Moses to realize that he was
> dealing with an historical event that had occurred in Mesopotamia but
> not beyond. The universal-sounding terminology that Moses used to
> describe the flood was identical to the terminology he used to
> describe Joseph's famine, which also he surely knew was non-universal.
>
> Phil

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Received on Thu Mar 22 11:45:13 2007