Episode 186.
I believe we're ready to deal with the Big Question in Origins.
Was Adam a real person?
The technical answer to this question is this,
Adam is the retrojective conclusion of
ancient biology or to state this more specifically,
Adam is the retrojective conclusion of
the ancient biological idea of the immutability of living organisms.
That is, the ancient belief that living organisms do not change.
Let me explain this technical answer.
To freshen your memory,
the term retrojection comes from
the Latin adverb retro meaning backward and Yukari is the verb to throw or cast.
Therefore, retrojection refers to taking
present experience and casting it backward in time to explain the past.
As we've noted, this is the type of thinking used in crime scene investigations.
Police take present evidence at the crime scene and
cast it back in time to reconstruct the past.
Throughout this course, I've been encouraging you to
think like an ancient person and we need to
do this in order to appreciate how ancient people understood human origins.
First, ancient people observed that humans give birth to humans,
who give birth to humans etc..
In this way, it was perfectly reasonable to believe that humans are
immutable and never changed and that they only give birth to humans.
In thinking about the origin of humans,
ancient people would have retrojected the humans birth humans observation,
back in time to the creation of the world.
So humans today were born from earlier humans and
these humans were born from even earlier humans etc..
Ancient people then, reasonably concluded that there must have
been an original first human and that this human was created De Novo,
quick and complete and for the ancient Hebrews,
this original human was Adam.
Returning to our technical answer,
Adam is the retrojective conclusion of ancient biology.
The notion of immutability.
Adam then, is the creation of casting back in time,
the experience of seeing humans giving birth to humans.
And so here is the bottom line.
Adam Never Existed.
Adam was created by retrojecting, or if you wish,
extrapolating the ancient observation of human immutability.
Stated another way, the existence of Adam is based on ancient thinking.
To use the letters A N E,
Adam is an Ancient Near Eastern understanding of human origins.
To be sure, there are some huge implications regarding the idea that Adam Never Existed.
Let's look at some of these.
This challenges Christian Tradition and in particular,
the Doctrine of Original Sin because there is no first man to commit
the first sin and no first man from which sin is transferred to all humans.
This also challenges the Cosmic Fall because there's
no first man to causally connect to the origin of death.
But there is an advantage of not having a historical Adam.
This solves the problem with the fossil record.
The Bible states that death appears after humans but in the fossil record,
death appears hundreds of millions of years before humans.
With no historical Adam,
there's no problem because there is
no first man to causally connect to the origin of death.
Let's examine more closely Gradual Polygenism.
This is the view of human origins accepted by Evolutionary Creation.
Gradual Polygenism rejects scientific concordism
because the De Novo creation of Adam is ancient science.
However, Gradual Polygenism accepts
the spiritual realities of the Image of God and Human Sinfulness.
To appreciate the manifestation of spiritual realities during human evolution,
evolutionary creationists point to the helpful embryology - evolution analogy.
Human embryology and human evolution,
both manifest the Image of God and Sinfulness during a natural process,
but questions of course arise on when or how spiritual realities appear?
Please turn to page 60 in the class handouts,
for a variety of views on the manifestation of human spiritual realities,
during embryological development in the womb.
For example, do we get half an Image of God and half a Sin from each of our parents?
Most would say no, because you can't cut
spiritual realities in half like physical realities,
or do the Image of God and Sin appear in a sharp point in time,
that is a punctilliar event such as fertilization,
or the two cell stage,
or with the first heartbeat or with the beginning of brain activity.
Or is there a gradual and mysterious manifestation
of the Image of God and Sin over many embryological stages?
By using the term mysterious,
it's suggesting that we will never fully understand because the appearance of
the Image of God and Sin is ultimately a theological mystery.
Keeping in mind these various approaches to the manifestation of
spiritual realities during human development in the womb,
let's propose some different ways the Image of God and Sin could have arisen during
human evolution with the appearance of
behaviorally modern humans about fifty thousand years ago.
Evolutionary Monogenism suggests that the Image of God and Sin arose at
a sharp point in time through a punctiliar event involving Adam and Eve.
Punctiliar Polygenism proposes that human spiritual realities were
manifested by a punctiliar event with many Adams and many Eves.
Gradual Polygenism suggests that there was
a slow and mysterious manifestation of the Image of God and Sin over many generations.
As a consequence, there never was an Adam or Adams or an Eve or Eves.
According to Gradual Polygenism,
when do the Image of God and Sin appear in the world?
Roughly, fifty thousand years ago,
with behaviorally modern humans.
They buried their dead with items,
suggesting a religious belief in an afterlife.
And how do these spiritual realities appear?
Evolutionary creationists would suggest that it's through
a gradual and mysterious manifestation over many generations.
End of episode.
Denis LamoureuxAssociate Professor
