Commentary: Was Adam the First Man?
Jason Spaceman
------------------------------------------------------------
Bible scholars and theologians call him Adam and scientists and
evolutionists call him "Australopithecus". The question remains, who
was the first man?
The answer depends on who you ask, but it goes further than that. Its
possible that there is an explanation that allows both to be right.
The only "man" recognized as such in the bible is someone who is a
descendant of Adam. That would eliminate anyone who, according to
science, descended from Australopithecus and "early man", because to
religious scholars, that creature isn't man, by definition.
However, to an evolutionist scientist, the term "man" applies to
anyone who is a bipedal hominid, who uses tools, language, and is
intelligent. We see immediately that the two groups are very disparate
in their definitions of "man". To identify who the first man was we
first have to answer the question, "according to whose definition".
Is it possible that there was a form of man that existed for
millennia on this earth before Adam and that the man, Adam, spoken of
by the Bible in the Garden of Eden and afterward, was not the same
creature as the man we read about in our science books of that time.
If we read the Bible "literally", man was created from the dust of
Eden, not as a preexisting creature. Throughout our history we have
taken the name for our species," man", from the Bible, and only in the
last 150 years has the science community taken that term and applied
it to a creature that did not originate in the Garden of Eden. Our
science textbooks speak of man as the creature that was born out of
evolutionary processes over two million years ago.
Is it possible that the two creatures may not be the same,
genetically? Is it also possible that, since we don't have all the
characteristics that Adam had, "modern man" as we know him didn't
exist until around 4500 years ago when the descendants of Adam (and
Noah) mixed with primitive "man" who was already here, and created a
new species? That new species being us, or modern man.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Read it at
http://www.christianpost.com/blogs/creationvsevolution/2009/07/was-adam-the-first-man-20/
J. Spaceman
.
alextangent
wrote:
>
> J. Spaceman
> .
"Throughout our history we have
taken the name for our species," man", from the Bible,"
What is this writer blabbering on about? Man is derived from a proto-
indo-european root man- through proto-Germanic into Old English man.
Genesis was written in the 4th century in Greek, where the stem is
anthrop- or andro- depending on meaning, fer cryin' out loud. Is there
nothing these thieves and charlatans and liars won't steal in the name
of their deity?
r norman
<bl...@rivadpm.com> wrote:
<snip>
>Genesis was written in the 4th century in Greek, where the stem is
>anthrop- or andro- depending on meaning, fer cryin' out loud.
This seems to be rather a stretch. Genesis was either written
personally by Moses some sixteen centuries earlier or, if you prefer,
by a committee cutting and pasting and editing from two or three older
pieces which probably started around 13 centuries earlier up to
perhaps only a millenium before your Greek version. The Greek
language did not even exist at the time Genesis was written down.
Andre Lieven
mad lunatic claim.
Andre
alextangent
> On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:48:33 -0700 (PDT), alextangent
>
They may well have been cut&paste jobs from earlier manuscripts, but
there is no physical evidence predating the Dead Sea Scrolls (150BCE)
which were written in a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic and ancient Greek
(around 1200BCE, earliest writings around 800BCE). If older texts had
been authored in the middle East in 1000BCE then they woud have been
written in a Semitic, not Indo-European, language family; probabaly
Aramaic. In 400CE the Septaguint was written (or copyed and pasted
from earlier documents) into medieval Greek. None of these languages
has the root "man-".
Sanskrit has the word manuh meaning male; in the Hindu creation story
the first man was called Manu. The Hindus, with a much older religion
and Vedic texts from the late bronze age, have a much better claim to
having "named" our species.
--
Regards
Alex McDonald
TomS
<3e7460b6-8b69-47bf...@y7g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>, alextangent
stated..."
>
>On Jul 21, 4:00=A0am, r norman <r_s_nor...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:48:33 -0700 (PDT), alextangent
>>
>> <b...@rivadpm.com> wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> >Genesis was written in the 4th century in Greek, where the stem is
>> >anthrop- or andro- depending on meaning, fer cryin' out loud.
>>
>> personally by Moses some sixteen centuries earlier or, if you prefer,
>> by a committee cutting and pasting and editing from two or three older
>> pieces which probably started around 13 centuries earlier up to
>> language did not even exist at the time Genesis was written down.
>
>They may well have been cut&paste jobs from earlier manuscripts, but
>there is no physical evidence predating the Dead Sea Scrolls (150BCE)
>which were written in a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic and ancient Greek
>(around 1200BCE, earliest writings around 800BCE). If older texts had
>been authored in the middle East in 1000BCE then they woud have been
>written in a Semitic, not Indo-European, language family; probabaly
>Aramaic. In 400CE the Septaguint was written (or copyed and pasted
>from earlier documents) into medieval Greek. None of these languages
>has the root "man-".
The Septuagint was written sometime in the BCE era, well before
400 CE, in something like Koine Greek, not Medieval Greek.
>
>Sanskrit has the word manuh meaning male; in the Hindu creation story
>the first man was called Manu. The Hindus, with a much older religion
>and Vedic texts from the late bronze age, have a much better claim to
>having "named" our species.
>
I do not understand what your point is.
--
---Tom S.
"...ID is not science ... because we simply do not know what it is saying."
Sahotra Sarkar, "The science question in intelligent design", Synthese,
DOI:10,1007/s11229-009-9540-x
Louann Miller
news:9v8a65dg8ojgsj21e...@4ax.com:
> The answer depends on who you ask, but it goes further than that. Its
> possible that there is an explanation that allows both to be right.
> The only "man" recognized as such in the bible is someone who is a
> descendant of Adam. That would eliminate anyone who, according to
> science, descended from Australopithecus and "early man", because to
> religious scholars, that creature isn't man, by definition.
Oh, goody. The old "we get to decide who is and isn't fully human without
using any of that pesky evidence" maneuver. That always ends well.
alextangent
> "On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:25:41 -0700 (PDT), in article
>
> - Show quoted text -
Sorry, all the discussion about word etymology has left me missing the
point too.
"Throughout our history we have taken the name for our species," man",
from the Bible,".
I had a genuine wtf moment at the lack of understanding the writer
displayed.
(a) the literal use of the word "man" for naming the species when
genesis wasn't even written in any indo-european based language from
which "man" is derived
or
(b) that the bible somehow was first to label "man" (in whatever
language and with whatever word) as a species or kind when there's
extensive evidence it didn't.
Either disqualifies the statement as monumentally stupid.
alextangent
> stated..."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >On Jul 21, 4:00=A0am, r norman <r_s_nor...@comcast.net> wrote:
> >> On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:48:33 -0700 (PDT), alextangent
>
> >> <b...@rivadpm.com> wrote:
>
> >> <snip>
>
> >> >Genesis was written in the 4th century in Greek, where the stem is
> >> >anthrop- or andro- depending on meaning, fer cryin' out loud.
>
> >> This seems to be rather a stretch. =A0Genesis was either written
> >> personally by Moses some sixteen centuries earlier or, if you prefer,
> >> by a committee cutting and pasting and editing from two or three older
> >> pieces which probably started around 13 centuries earlier up to
> >> perhaps only a millenium before your Greek version. =A0The Greek
> >> language did not even exist at the time Genesis was written down.
>
> >They may well have been cut&paste jobs from earlier manuscripts, but
> >there is no physical evidence predating the Dead Sea Scrolls (150BCE)
> >which were written in a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic and ancient Greek
> >(around 1200BCE, earliest writings around 800BCE). If older texts had
> >been authored in the middle East in 1000BCE then they woud have been
> >written in a Semitic, not Indo-European, language family; probabaly
> >Aramaic. In 400CE the Septaguint was written (or copyed and pasted
> >from earlier documents) into medieval Greek. None of these languages
> >has the root "man-".
>
> The Septuagint was written sometime in the BCE era, well before
> 400 CE, in something like Koine Greek, not Medieval Greek.
My bad. BCE, and Koine. I was thinking of later Byzantine translations
of the old testament. The root "man-" is still absent in koine.
Gil Rivlis
May be the writer is referring to Hebrew. In Hebrew the word for 'man'
is 'adam' (which, by the way, comes from 'adama', that means 'earth' or
'dirt' or 'soil'). So in Hebrew at least the name of our species is from
the Bible.
alextangent
I should worry. Same author;
http://www.christianpost.com/blogs/creationvsevolution/2009/07/does-string-theory-confirm-the-bible-01/index.html,
Does String Theory Confirm the Bible?
"The field of science I'm talking about is Quantum Physics and
specifically String Theory.
This new paradigm in science began with Max Planck in 1900, and was
furthered by Albert Einstein, and has long been on the fringe of
science, but was little discussed by the general scientific community
at large because of the bazaar predictions and almost unbelievable
experimental results it generated concerning the ultimate structure of
the universe."
The whole piece is nonsense, nicely rounded off by the persistent use
of the word bazaar.
Kermit
wrote:
> From the article:
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Bible scholars and theologians call him Adam and scientists and
> evolutionists call him "Australopithecus". The question remains, who
> was the first man?
A concept which has to be explained to most Creationists is that there
was no first man, any more than there was a first French speaker. They
usually are thinking of this as an actual single human being.
>
> The answer depends on who you ask, but it goes further than that. Its
> possible that there is an explanation that allows both to be right.
> The only "man" recognized as such in the bible is someone who is a
> descendant of Adam. That would eliminate anyone who, according to
> science, descended from Australopithecus and "early man", because to
> religious scholars, that creature isn't man, by definition.
>
> However, to an evolutionist scientist, the term "man" applies to
> anyone who is a bipedal hominid, who uses tools, language, and is
> intelligent.
Well, that leaves out most of the humans I know.
> We see immediately that the two groups are very disparate
> in their definitions of "man". To identify who the first man was we
> first have to answer the question, "according to whose definition".
It's not just definitions. Scientists can use different definitions of
"life", for instance. For the sake of conversation they can
temporarily agree to use one. They do not disagree with the facts of
the matter (except perhaps on a cutting edge area of research, in
which the facts are still ambiguous and insufficient to confidently
make claims).
But for a biblical literalist and a scientist, there is a profound
disagreement on the facts of the matter. For anyone who understands
evolution, the concept of a single pair of humans from which we all
descend displays a serious misunderstanding or ignorance of the
matter.
>
> Is it possible that there was a form of man that existed for
> millennia on this earth before Adam and that the man, Adam, spoken of
> by the Bible in the Garden of Eden and afterward, was not the same
> creature as the man we read about in our science books of that time.
Don't see how. There wouldn't be any oral tradition, I would think,
passed on for millions of years. I think it is reasonable to say that
we weren't speaking in modern-type languages until we were modern
humans.
>
> If we read the Bible "literally", man was created from the dust of
> Eden, not as a preexisting creature.
Quite a few theists, however, have no trouble taking this as a
metaphor for saying that we are creatures of the Earth. It is as true
a statement as saying that we are made of stardust.
> Throughout our history we have
> taken the name for our species," man", from the Bible, and only in the
> last 150 years has the science community taken that term and applied
> it to a creature that did not originate in the Garden of Eden.
This happens whenever we see a new thing that has some characteristics
of a noun we use, but not all.
Are bean bags chairs?
Is Zen Buddhism religion?
Is Pluto a planet?
Was neanderthal human? How about homo floresiensis?
> Our
> science textbooks speak of man as the creature that was born out of
> evolutionary processes over two million years ago.
>
> Is it possible that the two creatures may not be the same,
> genetically? Is it also possible that, since we don't have all the
> characteristics that Adam had, "modern man" as we know him didn't
> exist until around 4500 years ago when the descendants of Adam (and
> Noah) mixed with primitive "man" who was already here, and created a
> new species? That new species being us, or modern man.
I'm glad this person is trying to accommodate science into his world
view, but this is so confused that I'm having trouble understanding
what he is suggesting. I *thinks he is saying that Adam and Noah were
homo erectus (or even australopithicus!), and interbred with a *less
human species to form a hybrid species - us. WTF?
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Read it athttp://www.christianpost.com/blogs/creationvsevolution/2009/07/was-ad...
>
> J. Spaceman
> .
Kermit
Jim Willemin
news:2b2d8e68-5138-4bae...@t13g2000yqt.googlegroups.com:
> On Jul 20, 7:13�pm, Jason Spaceman <notrea...@jspaceman.homelinux.org>
> wrote:
>> From the article:
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
<snip>
>> �Is it possible that the two creatures may not be the same,
>> genetically? Is it also possible that, since we don't have all the
>> characteristics that Adam had, �"modern man" as we know him didn't
>> exist until around 4500 years ago when the descendants of Adam (and
>> Noah) mixed with primitive "man" who was already here, and created a
>> new species? That new species being us, or modern man.
>
> I'm glad this person is trying to accommodate science into his world
> view, but this is so confused that I'm having trouble understanding
> what he is suggesting. I *thinks he is saying that Adam and Noah were
> homo erectus (or even australopithicus!), and interbred with a *less
> human species to form a hybrid species - us. WTF?
>
I think what it sounds like is that the author is postulating a
different, Divinely created species of hominid - call it Homo adamensis
or something - that was created from dust in the image of God and
received the breath of life from Divine exhalation. This species would
not be the product of evolution, but would be genetically similar enough
to Homo sapiens to interbreed and produce 'modern' H. sapiens. This
notion of course suffers from a whole mess of problems, not least of
which is that there appears to be no difference at all between H. sap.
of say 5,000 years ago and folks on the street now, which suggests that
the admixture of H. adamensis (or whatever) has no discernable effect.
A second problem is the time factor - getting the Divinely created
genetic pattern distributed throughout the range of Neolithic humans
(i.e. globally) in time to be a universal trait in the present
population. The alternative here, that some folks are 'children of
Adam' and some aren't, provides a wonderful excuse for all kinds of
genocidal exercises (e.g. Rwanda). However, it does provide a rationale
for Ray's hypothesis of 'God-blindness'.
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Read it
>> athttp://www.christianpost.com/blogs/creationvsevolution/2009/07/
> was-ad...
>>
>> J. Spaceman
>> .
>
> Kermit
>
>