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Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - C C - Jan 5, 2022
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/mytho-history-evolution-of-adam-and-eve-quest-of-historical-adam/
EXCERPT: One of the most influential conservative Christian theologians goes all-in for evolutionary science and finds room for a Paleolithic Adam and Eve. This has left some schools of Christian orthodoxy scrambling to find a way forward. With any luck, they may start to reevaluate their opposition to evolution altogether.
[...] So sharp is William Lane Craig’s intellect that the professionally acerbic atheist Sam Harris has famously called him, “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”
I was therefore quite surprised when an advanced copy of Craig’s newest book, In Quest of the Historical Adam, arrived in my office with a request for an endorsement. What would I, an atheist and evolutionary biologist, find to endorse in a book about Adam and Eve?
Quite a lot, it turns out. To be sure, evolution is not the main focus of the book. In fact, the first half is an erudite theological discussion of the book of Genesis. I must confess my supreme disinterest as I began to slog through what I expected to be the usual circular reasoning regarding divine inspiration, biblical authority, and so forth. Craig, after all, considers the Bible to be the inerrant word of God and believes that morality flows, solely and completely, from divine commands.
But my expectations were happily dashed. What I actually found was a penetrating literary analysis of the creation story of Genesis, heavily informed by archaeology and recent scholarship on contemporary texts from the ancient near east.
Craig calls this a genre analysis and identifies ten specific resemblances to other texts that attempt to explain primeval history—in other words, creation myths. Some examples of those resemblances include the frequent use of figurative rather than literal language, the inclusion of fantastical elements and representations that are contrary to what we know the author(s) actually believed, and inconsistencies in the text if taken literally.
It was satisfying to read Craig grappling with the fact that Genesis 1 and 2 recount completely different creation stories, that no one in the ancient near east thought snakes could talk, and that literal days and nights could not exist before the creation of the sun and earth. Craig therefore concludes that the creation account in Genesis is mythical.
However, Craig’s analysis goes further and argues that the creation story of Genesis is not pure myth, but rather a genre known as mytho-history, in which the author is indeed recounting real events but in a figurative way. This classification for Genesis was first pioneered in the 1960s by Harvard Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen, who was among the top authorities in the world on Sumer and the Akkadian language.
For example, several Mesopotamian texts include tales of global floods, no doubt stemming from the fact that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers frequently breach their banks with horrific consequences. While it is patently ridiculous to hold an ancient flood story as evidence that the entire planet was ever covered in water, from the author’s perspective, his world was indeed inundated.
The flood narratives are mythical retellings of real events. Importantly, Craig restricts this classification to the first eleven chapters of Genesis, declaring that much of the rest of the Bible does attempt to recount historical events with literal accuracy.
The classification of the biblical creation story as mytho-history provides Christians a means to hold on to the parts of Genesis that are essential to their faith without requiring them to believe the absurdities of a woman made from a rib or a piece of fruit that imparts knowledge upon consumption... (MORE - missing details)
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Syne - Jan 5, 2022
You only have to ask orthodox Jews to find out the Genesis creation account is figurative. No need to compare other creation stories. Orthodox Jews will even tell you that it is a figurative telling of real events.
As I've said, for decades, a figurative creation story combined with a divine hand in evolution renders them completely compatible. And until someone can demonstrate genus-level speciation, we have no way to know how it happened...much like the supposed abiogenesis.
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Magical Realist - Jan 5, 2022
There is no other way of interpreting Adam and Eve in the Bible other than as literal people. Their decendents are listed in the geneologies of the Bible, and unless you want to claim that all these people were figurative too, you're going to have to admit that Adam was a real individual human being. And the ages are also given in the geneologies so that Genesis can be dated as a literal segment of historical time. Hence the long held position of creationism as a literal event 6000 years ago.
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Syne - Jan 6, 2022
(Jan 5, 2022 11:01 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: There is no other way of interpreting Adam and Eve in the Bible other than as literal people. Their decendents are listed in the geneologies of the Bible, and unless you want to claim that all these people were figurative too, you're going to have to admit that Adam was a real individual human being. And the ages are also given in the geneologies so that Genesis can be dated as a literal segment of historical time. Hence the long held position of creationism as a literal event 6000 years ago.
False dilemma. Adam and Eve could have been real people and the story of Eden still be figurative. Hence why orthodox Jews view it as a figurative story about real events. Even today, we have plenty of "based on a true story" that are fictionalized stories about real people.
Nothing about a figurative story requires that every element within it be equally figurative.
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Magical Realist - Jan 6, 2022
I've never heard of a historically real person being the character of a figurative account. Hey if the snake wasn't real, and the garden wasn't real, and the tree wasn't real, maybe God wasn't real either. Just a symbol for fate or whatever.
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Syne - Jan 6, 2022
(Jan 6, 2022 08:09 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I've never heard of a historically real person being the character of a figurative account. Hey if the snake wasn't real, and the garden wasn't real, and the tree wasn't real, maybe God wasn't real either. Just a symbol for fate or whatever.
You've never heard of "based on a true story?" Really? You've never seen a fictionalized telling of Bonnie and Clyde, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc.?
You think the play Julius Caesar is 100% historically accurate? You do realize that all those were real people, right?
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Magical Realist - Jan 6, 2022
(Jan 6, 2022 08:44 PM)Syne Wrote:(Jan 6, 2022 08:09 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I've never heard of a historically real person being the character of a figurative account. Hey if the snake wasn't real, and the garden wasn't real, and the tree wasn't real, maybe God wasn't real either. Just a symbol for fate or whatever.
You've never heard of "based on a true story?" Really? You've never seen a fictionalized telling of Bonnie and Clyde, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc.?
You think the play Julius Caesar is 100% historically accurate? You do realize that all those were real people, right?
A fictional account isn't a figurative account. A figurative account teaches some moral lesson, like fables and parables do. Fictional accounts are only imaginative exercises in fantasy.
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Syne - Jan 6, 2022
(Jan 6, 2022 08:57 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:(Jan 6, 2022 08:44 PM)Syne Wrote: You've never heard of "based on a true story?" Really? You've never seen a fictionalized telling of Bonnie and Clyde, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc.?
You think the play Julius Caesar is 100% historically accurate? You do realize that all those were real people, right?
A fictional account isn't a figurative account. A figurative account teaches some moral lesson, like fables and parables do. Fictional accounts are only imaginative exercises in fantasy.
figurative - (of an artist or work of art) representing forms that are recognizably derived from life.
Many "based on a true story" are framed as allegory to illustrate a moral to the story.
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Magical Realist - Jan 6, 2022
fig·ur·a·tive
/ˈfiɡyərədiv/
adjective
1.
departing from a literal use of words; metaphorical.
"gold, in the figurative language of the people, was “the tears wept by the sun.”"
RE: Christian theologian goes all-in for evolution & finds room 4 paleolithic Adam & Eve - Syne - Jan 6, 2022
(Jan 6, 2022 09:10 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: fig·ur·a·tive
/ˈfiɡyərədiv/
adjective
1.
departing from a literal use of words; metaphorical.
"gold, in the figurative language of the people, was “the tears wept by the sun.”"
Even cherry-picking the definition, "the tears wept by the sun" still represents something real, e.g. gold. That would make the things represented by the snake, garden, and tree real things, contrary to your claim.