Craig and Swamidass

CMI has the same issues with these, as I have with Old Earth Catholics. I'll start linking to both of the CMI reviews ...

Seeking the First Man, Adam
Review of In Quest of the Historical Adam by William Lane Craig,
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, MI, 2021
reviewed by Ben Kissling | Published: 20 January 2022 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/historical-adam-craig

A ‘genealogical’ Adam and Eve?
A review of The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The surprising science of universal ancestry by S. Joshua Swamidass,
Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL
Published: 25 February 2020 (GMT+10) | Reviewed by Robert Carter and John Sanford
https://creation.com/review-swamidass-the-genealogical-adam-and-eve

The very idea that such a genre as “mytho-history” even exists can also be called into question. The only other example of literature included in this unique genre is the text called the Eridu Genesis. The scholar Craig depends upon, Thorkild Jacobsen, cobbled this text together from three separate ancient fragments from different times in history (p. 152). In other words, Jacobsen modified what little survives of these ancient texts to reconstruct what he guesses was a cohesive ancient myth and then makes up a new genre to put it in. Craig then weakly claims that ancient Greek myths like Odyssey and Iliad count as mytho-history too.

According to Craig’s own presentation of the subject, the category of “myth” does not need the extra designation “history,” since the societies that believed and maintained ancient myths always believed they were true and had some historical roots. Craig later identifies the very same Greek myths he just claimed were “mytho-history” as “paradigm examples of myth.” (p. 39) His readers might rightly wonder what exactly is the distinction between the genres of “myth” and “mytho-history” in the first place.

Not only did the society Homer lived in (Homeric society could mean something else, the one he described) believe the Iliad and Odyssey were mainly historic (I would put them at more docu-fiction than strict documentary, as person Hektor could have been made up to give a "reg'lar bloke's" view of the war and as what happened to Ulysses when no one was watching who survived later, except himself, could involve Homer's fictions as much as Ulysses' own), but the society about 800 years later, in 1st C. AD believed that too, and also for the Aeneid (some may have been aware Dido's placing as contemporary to Aeneas was anachronistic) ... and Christians believed this too.

What is St. Augustine's first line of argument against Romans saying one should go back to the old gods? In The City of God he says, first, Alaric sparing the ones who took refuge in churches is a novelty and then .... "look how Athena forsook Troy, despite all of their veneration" ... book 1, chapter 3.

History is not usually inspired, and all sorts of error can creep into all sorts of historians. One being error of explanation ... apart from Athena's aid to Ulysses, there is very little in the Iliad or Odyssey which is attributed to gods and which cannot be reduced easily to either natural explanations or the true God, or (especially Apollo of Iliad I) a devil. Athena helped Ulysses to work deceit, not consistent with the true God or His angels, and "she" helped him find his home and get back to his wife, not inconsistent with the true God. But not totally out of the question for a devil either, if he was expecting a damned soul in return for his favours. On the other hand, Hercules and Theseus are more like the human misery we would expect from a contract with the devil. Any other agency attributed to the gods in Homer's two epics is so easy to classify that it doesn't interfere with a Christian taking this as history. This, meaning the parts observable on earth. Obviously, the "conference on Olympus" is part of Homer's false explanations. And if one thing isn't classified as easily as the rest, this doesn't necessarily make it unreal.

I have already mentioned, some seem to have attacked literal belief in Genesis from the idea that the essence of Paganism is in believing things like Iliad and Odyssey basically true - when it isn't.

So much for Thorkild Jacobsen. And CMI would have been wiser not to call the Homeric epics "ancient Greek myths like Odyssey and Iliad" ... they are history, with some derogations to entertainment, and as viewed by a believing pagan. It is very possible that Hercules viewed himself as the son of Zeus, it is very possible his contemporaries viewed him so, but that doesn't make him so, and it doesn't make him a myth just because his supposed father Zeus overthrowing Kronos and making him spew out the swallowed siblings is one.

There could be non-Christians who viewed parts of the Bible as real history, only as mistold through "wrongly" assuming the Biblical theology. I think there are occultists who take this view of Moses and of Jesus ... well, they are doing to our history what we have been doing to the Pagan histories. Herodotus considered the Trojan War as the first event in properly recorded history and Eratosthenes made a chronology reaching up to Alexander with items like "fall of Troy" and "return of the Heraclids" (to Sparta). We have believed the dates and the names, but not the divinities involved. I am obviously not recommending anyone being a non-Christian or occultist or taking this kind of liberties with Moses and Jesus, I mentioned them for the sake of illustration. I do however recommend believing the Iliad, in its history, but not its theology.

Now, let's get to more urgent matters. Do we all descend from Adam?

• 5) The second half of the book discusses archaeological and paleontological data showing that Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. Heidelbergensis (and possibly some specimens of Homo erectus) were in fact quite similar to modern humans in every respect except minor differences in physical appearance.
• 7) Craig accepts that Adam and Eve existed in real history and (unlike Joshua Swamidass) he affirms that they were the ancestors of all humans.

Now, what does this mean? Is Adam only ancestral to all humans who live now, or is he also ancestral to Neanderthals and Denisovans?

If we consider that all humans who live now descend from Adam but also from Neanderthals and Denisovans, and also from pre-Adamite Homo sapiens, Adam is not really the first man.

If we consider all men who live now as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans* descend from Adam, yes, then he is the first man.

But if Adam is the first man and the first man who sinned and got condemned to death, and he lived before the dates (obtained by carbon dating) given for Neanderthals and Denisovans or even before the dates obtained by K-Ar, how can the transmission between the events in Genesis 3 be a historic one?

On the other side, if Adam lived 6000 or 7000 years ago, and the transmission is historic, but there were (according to the dates) lots of men before him, how is he ancestral to all men? Including Pre-Columbians in Americas, supposedly arriving 13 000 years before that, or Aborigines of Australia, arriving there 33 000 years before that?

It is not surprising that Old Earth creationism is the view of some Racist organisations, like the KKK. They doubt that Adam could be ancestral to the Blacks ...

So, to have Adam being both ancestral to all men and an autobiographic historian faithfully transmitted to Moses, we basically need to have Neanderthals and Denisovans within 6000 or at least 7000 years as well - which we can if we explain the carbon dates as due to a lower (and very much lower) initial content** of C14 in the atmosphere. This is what Craig wants to avoid, but really can't, if he admits that Genesis 3 is history and that Adam is ancestral to all men. Which by the way, as Catholics we have to admit, however much some of us might lean to old earth. William Lane Craig therefore equals the typical Catholic Old Earther, except he has been thinking it through sufficiently long to begin to see there is a conundrum.

In fact, Swamidass is proposing the scenario I have seen with some US Old Earth Catholics - like TheOFloinn. I will not take the part where I found out, I'll take his latest repeat offense:

Dr. Coyne's primary error seems to be a quantifier shift. He and his fundamentalist bedfellows appear to hold that the statement:

A: "There is one man from whom all humans are descended"
is equivalent to the statement:
B: "All humans are descended from [only] one man."

But this logical fallacy hinges on an equivocation of "one," failing to distinguish "one [out of many]" from "[only] one." Traditional doctrine requires only A, not B: That all humans share a common ancestor, not that they have no other ancestors. For example, all Americans inheriting the name Hammontree are descended from a single couple in colonial Tidewater Virginia [Jonathon (ca 1693-1758)nand Mary (1697-1726)]. But of course, this does not preclude additional lines of descent. Jonathan and Mary were not all alone in Virginia. Iis easy to see how a group of people may have a common ancestor without having only one ancestor.

Now, here is where this breaks down and where The OFloinn is defining traditional doctrine inadequately, citing the CMI paper on Swamidass:

Under the TGAE model, we have three classes of people to consider. First, we have Adam and Eve and their unmixed descendants. Second, we have the people outside the Garden (POGs) who have not yet mixed with those from the Garden. And third, we have a mixture of the two groups. According to Joshua, each of these groups has a special status (table 1). The POGs are genetically, culturally, and developmentally human. Thus, when Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden and began to mix with the POGs, there were no real barriers to gene flow. The TGAE model imagines that Adam and Eve’s genes freely blended into the much larger POG population, diluting their DNA to the point of disappearance, yet allowing Adam and Eve to eventually become the genealogical ancestors of everyone on earth. Thus, the special quality of Adam and Eve eventually permeated into all humans worldwide, at least by the time of Jesus. This is required, as it allows New Testament authors to assert that Adam and Eve were the father and mother of us all (at least all still alive at that time). At that point, every human being on the planet had become ‘infected’ with the special humanness, and so were subject to the condemnation of sin and were eligible to enter heaven. It is not clear if POGs had souls or if they could go to heaven. [Omitting the table 1] The unmixed POGs would have been in the world for a long time before and a long time after Adam and Eve, and very reasonably could still exist. What was the spiritual status of an evolved POG who had no genealogical connection to the Garden? This is not an idle question. Joshua requires that all people, from the rainforests of Brazil to the jungles of Sumatra to the isolated Sentinel islands, had to have a genealogical link to Adam and Eve by the time of Christ. Yet, even if some traveller made it to North Sentinel in the remote past, and was not killed like the missionary John Chau was recently,4 there is no guarantee that they left children, and no guarantee that the genealogy of those children took over the population. Thus, for most of human history, and possibly still today, there would have been human beings on this earth who were more fully “human” than others. We are very troubled by this proposition.

It is also very problematic to believe any kind of human could have acquired human characteristics by evolution. And it is fairly "wise" of Swamidass to avoid the issue of whether they have souls.

Scholastically speaking, it is impossible for someone to have language and thought without having a soul. The alternative "[unmixed] People Outside the Garden" have souls would therefore mean Adam was not the first man.

But suppose they didn't have souls, this would definitely mean that they weren't human and could not behave like humans. The fact that evolution believing and atheist biologists imagine we can behave like humans without (any of us) having souls is not a thing to imitate and even less to imitate partially, making souls and the option of paradise an added extra not really part of human nature. If someone from the garden interbred with a soulless "POG" this would involve not just religious bad affiliation, but also the rape part, if not the infertility part, when it comes to bestiality. Without souls, one isn't people and can't consent. Even supposing the people from the garden bestowed a soul on spouses they took, this would really have involved raping "POGs" to make them human.

Given that we both know Neanderthals and Denisovans have left genetic markers in us and that we know they were human, we can safely say, this means Neanderthals and Denisovans would also descend from Adam - or he would not have been the first man. BUT this means taking them into the timeline of Biblical chronology and therefore to break with the "certitudes" of modern dating methods. On pain, obviously, of otherwise making Genesis 3 a very distant and uncertain retelling of what happened, or a prophecy, which, unlike the six days, no one is claiming for Genesis 3.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Marius and Martha***
19.I.2022

PS - I took on mainly the version in which non-Adamites were only anatomically human, but soulless. However, the idea that mankind had 10 000 ancestors in Adam's time of whom Adam and Eve were only two has its definite problems too. Not in the narrative as a pure narrative, but in relation to the theological perspectives opened by NT comment, like St. Paul. "People from outside the garden" dying is problematic through "through one man, sin entered the world and through sin death" - but suppose we got around this by assuming he meant only "penal death" while physical human death could have existed nevertheless (as said, problematic, and I am not buying it), we still have the question why rational humans who were not tainted by Adam's sin would be so attracted to his kin that by intermarriage they forsook their own freedom from original sin. As obviously what it means to call Adam the first man, rather than one of the first men, and why mankind should be cursed for the sake of only one ancestor out of 10 000 rather than, as in ordinary theology, for the sake of the sin of the soul male ancestor in his generation and that the first./HGL

* I do not think Denisovans and Heidelbergians are two different populations. From Denisovans, we have a genome, from Heidelbergians a morphology and from Antecessor men in Atapuerca we have a population matching fairly well both Denisovan genome and Heidelbergian morphology.

** This would partly mean simply lower in percentages. If overall CO2 content was 15 times higher before the Flood, I'm not saying it was, this would automatically have made the C14 content 100 pmC/15, supposing the original content in absolute quantity was similar. The 6.667 pmC would give 22400 extra years for our carbon daters. I think the pre-Flood content was lower than that, and not necessarily for the sake of possibly 15 times higher overall CO2. This is one of my reasons to place Neanderthals and Denisovans, with most recent carbon dates for actual body parts at 40 000 BP, before the Flood. After the Flood, C14 content was rising, very rapidly.

*** Romae, via Cornelia, sanctorum Martyrum Marii et Marthae conjugum, et filiorum Audifacis et Abachum, nobilium Persarum; qui Romam, temporibus Claudii Principis, ad orationem venerant. Ex eis vero, post toleratos fustes, equuleum, ignes, ungues ferreos manuumque praecisionem, Martha in Nympha necata est; ceteri sunt decollati, et corpora eorum incensa.