Re: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historically

Murray,

Seems to me you have roughly described speciation in general. This is why it
puzzled me so much when someone asserted here that there wasn't a first
human. There is always a first organism.

Of course the subject is the biological half of humanness which ignores the
other essential part of humanness, the mind. It completely ignores the
mind. This is why JP&MB are so fascinating in that they assert the mental
world of humans does not map onto a genome.

One can hypothesize that the first B, having a mind, related to the other B,
and ignored all A's thereafter because they weren't capable of that
relationship. They might have moved away and lost the ability to interbreed
rather quickly.

I think it is more interesting to worry about the question of if the genome
doesn't produce the mind (because the mind is vastly more complex than the
information the genome contains) then why do fetuses grow human minds and
not alien minds?

I don't see where anybody has ruled out God stitching us together in the
womb. Literally. Not biologically though. Mentally. Scripture says He
stitches us together in the womb, but it might not have been talking about
biological stitching.

This raises the issue of supervenience, or "do minds supervene on material
objects?"

I don't see a contradiction between biological evolution and the idea that
God fabricated the mind of Adam and thereafter had a relationship with
Adam. The mental evolution isn't biological and unlike the biological may
not be explainable in terms of natural processes. Even if it were to turn
out that biological evolution is itself is indeed explainable in terms of
natural processes.

Thanks,
Dave C

>
> Now it should be obvious that there certainly will, at some point, be a
> first B - HOWEVER, probability distributions being what they are, the
> likelihood is that the offspring of that B will be an A.
>
> So, if one traces a particular line of descent then one would, I imagine,
> see something like;
>
>
> A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-B-A-A-A-A-B-A-B-A-A-B-B-B-A-B-B-B-B-A-A-B-B-B-B-B-B-A-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B
>
> i.e. as time passes one sees an increasing prevalence of individuals who
> have the requisite amount of X to be considered properly human.
>
> So, yes, one CAN pick a "first human" BUT I don't think it follows that
> this individual marks THE transition

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Oct 4 11:27:12 2009