Assuming that evolution is the method by which God created Adam, when did Adam live? (A non-literal belief in Genesis is also assumed in that there was an Adam or a belief in the Koran in that Adam was real and a prophet will do.)
(The Journey of Man would be good background reading. It theorizes when the Adam and Eve lived, albeit at different times.)
So, how was Adam different from his father. Did Adam harness fire, invent the wheel, draw a picture, or just realize the existence of God?
As others have said, your question is flawed. However, in a related matter, the Catholic church has no problem with evolution as long as it is understood that somewhere along the line, God imbued man with a soul that made him unique from all other creatures.
I’m sure this gray area has been gone over, but is there any clear distinction drawn around here between “literal belief in the sacred texts of certain Dopers” and “defending ignorance”?Maybe I should take this up at ATMB.
Eh, not horror, just lack of education. And there’s no need to “believe” in evolution–there’s no creed, no articles of faith that are held blindly. The theory of evolution (and no, theory does NOT mean " a wild guess"; look up the meaning in a dictionary before you embarrass yourself). All evolution means is that a heritable characteristic or set of characteristics that allows for greater fitness, i.e.,reproduction, spread through a population faster than those that don’t.
There are any number of resources on the Web and in your local library that could help you understand what evolution is and what it isn’t. The talkorigins.org FAQ is a great place to start.
Now you and your fundie pals can believe that humans were sculpted from clay 6,000 years ago, or that the earth is flat, or that the Fujian flu is caused by demonic possession, but that only demonstrates how the fundies conflate holiness with ignorance.
Oops, I deleted one sentence while I was editing. It should read, “The theory of evolution (and no, theory does NOT mean " a wild guess”; look up the meaning in a dictionary before you embarrass yourself) has been subjected to test after test test; not to accept it is to willfully deny the facts.
I agree with gobear-evolution happened, that’s a fact and the only people who deny that it happen are the people who either don’t understand it, who think it denies the existence of God, or the people whose faiths would be obliterated if not every single sentence in the bible was inerrant.
As for Adam and Eve, they are surely mythical characters in my opinion, but to play the ‘almost’ literalist for a second: You could suppose that Adam and Eve really existed, way back when, the difference between A&E and regular hominids being the soul-which you could speculate is the center for moral reasoning and higher thought.
Granted there isn’t any proof of this, but if you wanted proof we shouldn’t be talking about ‘faith issues’.
I believe in evolution and think that there’s truth to the A&E story. It is the creation of man’s spirit/soul and whatever truth there is to the Garden of Eden, although I think a lot of that is symbolic. Admittedly I feel more comfortable with anything I can think to make the Bible and evolution compatible. And I liked the part in Wizard of Oz where the scarecrow got a brain, so it’s even hard for me to take my “theories” seriously. :rolleyes:
As a Old-Earth-Creationist-bordering-on-Theistic-Evolution…
I do hold Genesis 2 onwards to be historical, and would not be surprised if Adam & Eve were born around 4000 BC, and were the first humans to recognize God as Parent and themselves as potential children of God. There may have been Creator-revering, literate, artistic, tool-using humans before Adam & Eve, but A & E were the first endowed with the ability to be “family” to God and given the challenge of trusting Him and the opportunity to transcend mortality… which they blew.
Well, if you mean that God chose two Neolithic farmers out of the entire population of the earth in 4,000 BCE to be “ensouled” or whatever, that’s a matter of faith and thus can’t be tested. If you mean that God created humans and the whole earth in 4,000 BCE, there’s a ton of evidence to disprove that contention.
Are all people alive today descended from them? There appears to be good evidence that Native American’s were present in North America long before that. Maybe that’s why Christian settlers felt it was OK to massacre them as they weren’t “family to God”.
If you live in England, and are of 100% English ancestry, your ancestors, say, 1,000 years ago (number pulled out of my ass; feel free to supply the right date, anyone) spoke a language we now call “Old English” (oversimplifying here, to make a point). That ancestor was able to converse cleary with his children in Old English, and they communicated clearly with their children, and so on. Until the present day, when the language you learned from your most recent ancestors–Modern English, from your parents–allows you to communicate clearly with them.
You and your 1,000-year-old ancestor speak two different languages. But at no point along the descent that led to your birth was a parent unable to communicate with their child because of language difficulties (except teenagers).
Even allowing, for the sake of discussion, for the existence of a soul–a concept which I prefer to think of as consciouness or mind–the “pre-ensouled” ancestor is analogous to the Old English ancestor, and the “ensouled” Adam is you.
Though I couldn’t have written that less clearly with an ax buried in my head, I hope I’ve brought the analogy across.
To insist on a black/white, line-in-the-sand demarcation between one “state” and another is nonsensical; that’s just not the way these things work.
