Stopgap Adam

On Facebook I had this exchange with a theistic evolutionist:

Clark 

C. S. Lewis argued for a different approach, by which Adam is not a genetic event, but the physical ancestor of all modern humans who was the first anthropoid endowed by God with nous. Lewis' theory would not be reflected in a sharp genetic ancestor (and so is not historically demonstrable), but is a perfectly plausible historical possibility.

Hays 

But the "historical Adam" of biological evolution is hardly equivalent to the Adam of Gen 2-3 and Rom 5/1 Cor 15.

Clark 

Your claim here is ambiguous. If you're saying that the scientific description of the historical Adam is not the same as the ANE story of Adam or the typological description of Adam by Paul, well of course! That's not big deal. However, if you are saying that the referent of the historical Adam is not the same as the referent of the biblical character of Adam ... why not? I see no obvious reason why the same historical individual cannot play both the scientific role and the biblical role.

Hays 

Well, I wasn't discussing the "scientific" description of Adam, but an evolutionary description. More to the point, an evolutionary narrative of Adam bears no resemblance to the Gen 2 narrative of Adam's origin.

This isn't just a conservative Christian view of theistic evolution. Peter Enns makes the same point in a book review: 

In the long run, however, I am not convinced that all—or even most—of these readers will feel comfortable following Collins. Collins's synthesis requires an ad hoc hybrid "Adam" who was "first man" in the sense of being either a specially chosen hominid or a larger tribe of early hominids (Collins is careful not to commit himself to either option). Although I am sympathetic to Collins's efforts to blaze such a path (and he is not alone), I do not see how such an ad hoc Adam will calm doctrinal waters, since the Westminster Confession of Faith leaves no room for anything other than a first couple read literally from the pages of Genesis and Paul, and therefore entails a clear rejection of evolutionary theory. Further, this type of hybrid "Adam," clearly driven by the need to account for an evolutionary model, is not the Adam of the biblical authors. Ironically, the desire to protect the Adam of scripture leads Collins (and others) to create an Adam that hardly preserves the biblical portrait. Evolution and a historical Adam cannot be merged by positing an Adam so foreign to the biblical consciousness.

Clark

An evolutionary narrative is describing Adam's history and origin with respect to his biological and material past, while the biblical narrative is describing Adam's history and origin with respect to his relationship to God and the spiritual teleology of creation. The referent is the same, but the contexts of description are dramatically different. That's because the evolutionary story and the biblical story do not compete, but complement.

Hays

No, they're not coreferential or complementary but divergent accounts. Gen 2 describes the absolute origin of Adam (and Eve). God making Adam from inorganic material, then animating the pristine corpse. Adam didn't exist at all prior to that action. 

Gen 2 describes the origin of Adam and Eve as the direct product of special creation. 

Genesis describes all humans descending from a single breeding pair (Adam and Eve). 

By contrast, the evolutionary narrative is an undifferentiated continuum. You can't shoehorn Gen 2 into an evolutionary narrative. These are independent and incommensurable explanations. Theistic evolution is a slapdash pastiche of disparate explanations. 

Clark

A truly incarnational theology…

Hays

The Incarnation is a unique, unrepeatable event. It's chic silly-putty to stretch that into some broader principle. 

Clark

There the claim is simply that a careful understanding of our evolutionary past does not show that there was no Adam and Eve.

Hays

Of course it does. There is no unique Adam and Eve in the evolutionary narrative, but hominids and humans with separate genealogies. At best there's a last universal common ancestor, but that's hardly equivalent to Adam and Eve in Genesis.

Clark

Your remark sort of reminds me of those people who try to redefine marriage to suit their own moral desires contrary to God's vision.

Hays

How very droll given your Orwellian redefinition of Adam and Eve.

Clark

The biological history of the human species is the current scientific framework for talking about Adam's material and biological origins.

Hays

If you take macroevolution/universal common descent as a given, then that's a framework for excluding Gen 2-3,5; Rom 5; 1 Cor 15. 

Clark

or a deliberate attempt to sow confusion and discord in the Church so as to discredit Christians who are working within contemporary scientific disciplines to demonstrate the reliability and truth of the Bible's claims.

Hays

i) More of your Orwellian double-talk where you pretend that a narrative of human origins which is completely at variance with Gen 2 demonstrates the "reliability" and veracity of biblical claims. 

When BioLogos was founded, it immediately went on the attack against both young-earth creationists and intelligent design theory, even though ID theory is compatible with theistic evolution. So which side is sowing discord in the church? 

ii) BTW, there are different versions of theistic evolution. Using Gerald Rau's taxonomy (Mapping the Origins Debate), which do you subscribe to: nonteleological evolution, planned evolution, or directed evolution?

Clark

Genesis 2.7 reads in the ESV, "Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." This lone sentence does not say how God made man. "Formed" is not a description of a process, it's not an explanation, but a claim about who is the author of the process that brought Adam into being (who did the "forming"). God is that author."

Hays

i) You erect a false dichotomy between who did it and how it happened. The text says both. 

ii) I never suggested the verb alone carries the whole semantic weight. The text doesn't merely say that God "formed" Adam but describes the process. 

Clark

Saying "God formed me from my mother's womb" (Is. 49.5) does not mean I did not gestate 9 months through natural processes nor that I did not grow up through adolescence the natural way.

Hays

i) Completely different context. Gen 2 is a creation account whereas Isa 49:5 takes the existence of ordinary procreation for granted. 

ii) Moreover, Isa 49:5 explicitly refers to the process of gestation. So your analogy is vitiated by drastic disanalogies

Clark

In the same way in Genesis 1.25 scripture says that God made all the beasts of the earth, without saying how God made these creatures. Scripture does illuminate the "how" in the previous verse, where God says, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds." We see that in the actual process of creation, living creatures evolved out of the earth, though again without further specifying how (perhaps out of the plants that evolved out of inorganic matter in v.12?). Yet the fact that the earth brought all life forth does not make it any less God's action. God is still the creator of all things.

Hays

i) Your interpretation is grossly anachronistic. You're filtering the ancient text through the theory of evolution, but the original audience didn't have that interpretive frame of reference. 

ii) Gen 1 describes the origin of aquatic organisms in relation to bodies of water and terrestrial organisms (plants, land animals) in relation to the surface of the earth, since that's the habit in which these organisms reproduce. Likewise, ancient Jews could see wild vegetation emerging from the earth, and Gen 1 narrates the origin of that cycle. Seeds produce fruit-trees, which in turn produce more seeds. A continuous alternation. 

Clark

So Genesis 2.7 tells us that God is the author of man and has made him to be possessed of God's own spirit. It does not tell us how God has made man, but we can see from 1.12 and 1.24 that an evolutionary process as the how of Adam's creation does not in any way negate God as the author of Adam's being.

Hays

i) You're reinterpreting a more detailed creation account of man (Gen 2) by reference to a less detailed creation account of man (Gen 1). That's retrograde. It's the more detailed account that qualifies the less detailed account, not vice versa.

ii) Your statement is equivocal. Ruach has more than one meaning, which is context dependent. In Gen 2:7, it's about making a lifeless corpse alive by breathing into it. That's not infusing the Spirit of God, but has reference to biological life.

Clark

You propose instead to read Genesis 2.7 as: "God making Adam from inorganic material, then animating the pristine corpse." This is the so-called "literal" reading of the text. It strikes me as a picking and choosing from the text. For to follow it through you'd have to also believe that God has a physical body who used his hands to physically crafted the pristine corpse out of dust by molding the soil as a potter molds the clay. And you'd also have to believe that God has a physical mouth and physically breathed into Adam's nostrils as if doing CPR and thus brought him to life (again, how? What was the process by which breath animated the corpse?) Do you also believe that this physical God performed surgery on Adam, and similarly made woman with the bone and nearby soil? Going to scripture, we see that God is a spirit, and in both Genesis 1 and John 1, he creates through his Word, not through a body. This Word produces natural processes that serve God's commands, and through those natural processes all that God creates is produced. If you reject the heresy of God having a physical body, then I must ask why, if you don't read those portions of Genesis 2.7 literally, do you read the rest literally?

Hays

What you overlook is Pentateuchal angelology, including the Angel of the Lord. According to the Pentateuch, God does sometimes assume human form (or angelomorphic form) to physically interact with earthly surroundings. There are several theophanic angelophanies in the Pentateuch. 

Clark

Evolutionary biology agrees that God made Adam from inorganic material, just not directly.

Hays

Evolutionary biology says nothing of the kind. Rather, you're reinterpreting Gen 2, then gluing that onto a theory of evolution. 

Clark

All life began with inorganic compounds, and then evolved from simple bacteria and plants to human life. Adam was indeed made of the dust of the ground, and he does indeed have God as his author. Evolutionary biology agrees with your further remark that 'Adam didn't exist at all prior to that action [of God breathing in his spirit].' Indeed, Adam did not precede whatever pre-human anthropoid received the image of God to know that God exists and has a purpose for Adam. Adam was the first human, because Adam was the first humanoid to stand in a relationship with God as his image-bearer living under covenant. He was no mere beast of the field, but a new creation, something unlike ever living creature around. Adam was both the first human in the biblical sense and the first to stand in covenant with God.

Hays

In Gen 2, God doesn't select a hominid from preexisting hominids, on whom he confers the image of God. You're interjecting stuff from outside the text. You're creating gaps in the text that are not in the text, then filing in the artificial gaps with extraneous postulates foreign to the narrative viewpoint. That's not how to exegete an ancient text. 

Clark

"Special creation" is nothing more than the claim that at one moment of time Adam did not exist, and at another moment of time Adam did exist, with God as the ultimate cause of Adam's existing. If you further claim that between those two moments, there were no natural processes by which God created Adam, you have read into the text something it does not say. Does the text say that on Day 4 of creation, God made the sun and moon and stars with no natural processes?

Hays

i) You repeat the same hermeneutical blunder when you simplify Gen 2 by reducing it to a more general creation account (Gen 1). 

ii) In addition, there are critical disanalogies between the origin of man and the origin of other creatures. Gen 1-2 doesn't dissolve them into a single common process. 

Clark

Or does it just say that he made them, allowing us to affirm all that General Revelation testifies about how God made them, through the evolution of galaxies and solar systems?

Hays

When interpreting an ancient text like Gen 1-2, the only general revelation that's pertinent is the prescientific information available to an ancient observer. You're methodology is like a urologist who reinterprets Ezk 1 in terms of flying saucers and extraterrestrials. 

Clark

For all truth is God's truth.

Hays

Which doesn't tell us what is true. Only that if something is true, it's part of God's overall truth.

Clark

What amazes me is that all of this stuff has long been settled in the Church universal. Why continue to be a stumbling block to people accepting the Gospel by insisting that they must choose between the best science of General Revelation and a particular exegesis of Genesis 1-2? John Stott, probably the greatest instrument of God in the last century second only to Billy Graham for proclaiming the Gospel, wrote the following excerpt back in 1970, nearly fifty years ago! How slow we are to learn!

Hays

If you wish to make John Stott your pope, that's your prerogative. But he's not the voice of the "church universal". And funny how you appropriate the "church universal" in the same breath as you preemptively discount how Gen 1-2 was understood for centuries and millennia prior to Darwin.

Clark

What has been the historic Christian doctrine with respect to the relationship between the testimony of God's creation and the testimony of God's written word (e.g. Augustine's doctrine of creation, Aquinas' doctrine of primary and secondary causation...

Hays

One problem is that you commit a level-confusion. Science isn't general revelation. Science is a fallible human interpretation of nature. In addition, scientists make assumptions about induction and the uniformity of nature, while some take that a step further by making methodological atheism axiomatic for the scientific method. Those are assumptions they bring to the study of nature, not assumptions they derive from the study of nature. 

Clark

Calvin's doctrine of accommodation in the books of Moses.

Hays

That's widely misunderstood. For a corrective:

https://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014RethinkingAccomodation.pdf

Clark

Do you not listen to those God calls to teach you?

Hays

Why should I presume that God called Aquinas to teach me?

Clark

Do you set yourself up as an authority to judge everyone else?

Hays

As opposed to what? Blindly submitting to a teacher? I'm directly answerable to God for what I believe. I don't have the right to contract that out to a second party.

Calvin, Aquinas et al. are entitled to a respectful hearing, but their opinions are only as good as the supporting arguments they adduce in defense of their opinions. Their opinions and reasons must be open to scrutiny. 

That responsibility varies according to the aptitude and opportunities of Christians. 

It isn't even possible to submit carte blanche to any particular teacher since Christian philosophers, theologians &c. disagree with each other. 

Clark

Well, unless you believe in the infallibility of the church (are you a Roman Catholic?), traditional interpretations have precedent but they are not guaranteed to be without error…Steve, do you defend a geocentric model of the solar system? The geocentric view of the universe was more widely held by the historic church than any particular interpretation of Genesis 1-2, understood to be the correct interpretation of a large number of scripture passages, not least of all Joshua 10. And as Sproul is at pains to show, it was scientists studying God's creation that corrected our interpretation of scripture. Why is it okay for the Church universal to change its historic understanding of Joshua 10 on the basis of scientific inquiry into the world, but it's not okay for the Church two hundred years later to improve its understanding of Genesis 1-2 on the basis of scientific inquiry into the human past?

Hays

You need to keep track of your own argument. You were the one, not me, who make the alleged witness of the church universal a criterion to justify theistic evolution. I pointed out that your appeal was wildly unrepresentative. That's responding to you on your own grounds. That doesn't commit me to your standard. Rather, it shows that you're inconsistent by your own standard.

Clark

Can you accept that Christians can reasonably disagree about whether or not biological evolution conflicts with scripture?

Hays

Why should I presume to vouch for the bona fides of theistic evolutionists in general?