It started with William Lane Craig’s “Historical Adam” article at First Things (October 2021):
Should the primaeval narratives of Genesis 1–11 be understood, then, as a compilation of Israelite myths? In raising this question, we are using the definition of “myth” employed by folklorists and classicists: A myth is a traditional, sacred narrative explaining how the world and man came to be in their present form. A myth seeks to explain present realities by anchoring them in the prehistoric past and so to validate a culture’s contemporary institutions and values. In contrast to other forms of folklore, such as folktales and legends, myths are authoritative for the culture that embraces them. They are sacred narratives, and as such their main characters are not usually human beings alone but deities or quasi-divine heroes, whose activities are set in an earlier age or another realm. Stories of the origin of the world and of mankind are just two of the most prominent examples of myth.
William Lane Craig, “The Historical Adam” at First Things (October 2021)
William Lane Craig is treading carefully in these matters but then Peter J. Leith art weighs in:
William Lane Craig (“The Historical Adam,” October 2021) believes that a being corresponding to the biblical Adam actually existed. Paul’s typology of Adam and Christ, he argues, requires an historical, as opposed to a merely literary, Adam (Rom. 5:12-21). But this isn’t your Fundamentalist grandma’s Adam. According to Craig, Adam didn’t exist at the beginning of time, but was preceded by billions of years and many varieties of semi-humans. Adam wasn’t formed from the dust of the ground nor was Eve built from Adam’s rib; our first parents were selected from the ancestors of Homo sapiens known as Homo heidelbergensis. They didn’t live in an idyllic paradise called Eden, nor were they tempted by a talking snake, though they did disobey God, were alienated from him, and unleashed sin and death into the world…
How does Craig know all this? Why preserve the historical reality of Methuselah and Noah while dispensing with their ages? Real persons and events are, he says, “clothed in the metaphorical and figurative language of myth.” But clothes make the man: By what criterion does Craig distinguish one from the other? He offers no argument, relying on readers to share his prejudices concerning plausibility.
Peter J. Leithart, “Doubts about William Lane Craig’s creation account” at First Things (October 1, 2021)
Leithart is president of the Theopolis Institute.
Here’s part of Craig’s response, also at First Things:
2. Mythological narratives need not be read literalistically. In chapter 6 of the book I examine in some detail Ancient Near Eastern myths and show that they are frequently figurative in their representations. I am confident that when ancient Babylonians and Egyptians looked to the sky, they saw neither the desiccated corpse of the dragon goddess Tiamat nor the naked body of the goddess Nut overhead because no such things are there to be seen. Look for yourself! If this point is correct, then why are we bound to read the narratives of Genesis 1-11 with a wooden literalness? And why must we be able to distinguish confidently which aspects are figurative and which literal? So long as my genre analysis is correct—which Leithart does not refute—then a literal interpretation, such as Leithart seems to assume, is not compulsory.
In many cases, however, I think there are good reasons for seeing certain aspects of the primaeval narratives as figurative
William Lane Craig, “Mytho-History in Genesis” at First Things (October 5, 2021)
It’s good that First Things is sponsoring an honest and civil debate.
Leithart is going in two directions at once. He’s going overly literal with an assumption about the precise “species” of humans present at some point in history. And then he departs completely from facts with the bizarre delusional idea that evil was “unleashed” by one abstract act.
Nonsense. Evil is an innate TALENT like math or music. Psychopaths are naturally great evildoers. They are compelled to make great evil, just as Mozart was compelled to make great music.
I suggest that before William Lane Craig writes off the creation of Adam and Eve as merely being a historical myth that he first take a bit closer look at the evidence.
The evidence from the fossil record and genetics is not nearly as compelling as Darwinists, (and Theistic Evolutionists), have portrayed it to be to the general public.
As to the fossil record, John Sanford and Chris Rupe spent four years carefully examining the scientific literature on this subject and found that the fossil record for human evolution is far from compelling,
Also see “Apes as Ancestors” by Jerry Bergman, Peter Line, and Jeffrey Tomkins, which also, via a deep dive into the peer reviewed literature itself, finds the fossil evidence for supposed human evolution to be far from compelling.
Likewise, Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig has collected a fairly impressive list of damning quotes from Darwinists themselves in regards to the narrative of human evolution.
But you don’t have to take John Sanford’s, Jerry Bergman’s, and Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig’s word for it, The following study on dental morphology found that, “They conclude with high statistical confidence that none of the hominins usually proposed as a common ancestor, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. erectus and H. antecessor, is a satisfactory match. “None of the species that have been previously suggested as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans has a dental morphology that is fully compatible with the expected morphology of this ancestor,”
Given that teeth are, by far, the most complete fossil evidence we have for testing the claims of human origins, I consider the preceding study to be a fairly compelling piece of empirical evidence against the entire Darwinian narrative of human evolution.
Moreover, none other than the American Museum of Natural History itself stated that, “When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it’s just a big mess–there’s no consensus whatsoever,”
Paleontologist Günter Bechly weighs in here:
Moreover, it is not as if we do not have more than sufficient reason to doubt the narratives that are offered by Darwinists when it comes to their claims about human evolution. The entire fossil record, when viewed in its entirety instead of just piecemeal as it is with human fossils, is VERY antagonistic to the entire Darwinian narrative.
From the Cambrian explosion onward, the entire fossil record simply refuses to conform to Darwinian expectations,
Thus Dr. Craig can personally buy into the (mythical) Darwinian narrative for human evolution all he wants, yet the evidence from the fossil record itself tells us that it would be very prudent and wise for us to take the Darwinists’s claims for human evolution with a large grain of salt.
Other than a mention of population genetics, I saw Dr. Craig reference no genetic evidence in his article.
In regards to population genetics, Dr. John Sanford has done yeoman’s work showing how the mathematics of population genetics actually falsifies Darwinian evolution rather than confirms it.
First off, natural selection itself, (the imagined ‘designer substitute’), has now been cast to the wayside by the mathematics of population genetics:
Secondly, Dr. Sanford has now also shown that. when realistic rates of detrimental to beneficial mutations are taken into consideration, then the mathematics of populations genetics also falsifies Fisher’s erroneous assumption that fitness must always increase:
Dr. Sanford, whose credentials in genetics are impeccable, has analyzed the mathematics of population genetic inside and out,,,
,,,, and, time and time again, Dr. Sanford and company have found that the mathematics of population genetics falsifies Darwin’s theory.
Thus, if Dr. Craig really wants to know what population genetics can actually tell us in regards to whether human evolution is even possible or not, I suggest that Dr. Craig talk to Dr. Sanford, (or at least study his papers), and not talk to Darwinists and/or Theistic evolutionists, such as Venema, who, in my honest opinion, have been very misleading with the evidence from population genetics. (as well as misleading with the evidence from genetics as a whole)
As to the genetic evidence itself, the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is nowhere close to the 98.5% figure that is widely, and falsely, believed.
Both Dr. Richard Buggs and Dr. Jeffrey Tomkins have found, from the best data currently available, a genetic similarity figure of about 85%:
Moreover, although some may argue that 85% genetic similarity is still a pretty high degree of similarity, it turns out, directly contrary to Darwinian thought, that genetic similarity has very little, if anything to do with morphological similarity.
To drive this point home, Dolphins, Kangaroos, frogs, etc.. etc… although being very different morphologically from humans, are found to have very similar DNA sequences to humans.
Darwinists, despite their assumption that genetic similarity directly relates to morphological similarity, simply have no evidence that morphology is reducible to DNA sequences.
As Jonathan Wells states in the following article, “Studies using saturation mutagenesis in the embryos of fruit flies, roundworms, zebrafish and mice also provide evidence against the idea that DNA specifies the basic form of an organism. Biologists can mutate (and indeed have mutated) a fruit fly embryo in every possible way, and they have invariably observed only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly.”
And starting around the 15:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells reveals that the central dogma of Darwinian evolution, (which simply stated is “DNA makes RNA makes protein makes us”), has been shown to be incorrect at every step.
Darwinists simply have no evidence that morphology is reducible to DNA.
Moreover, this failure of the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinists occurs at a very low level, much lower than DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that “even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,,” The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
And indeed, advances in quantum biology have now shown that Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, are not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand biological life in the first place:
Where differences are greatest between chimps and humans, (and between all other creatures), are not in the genetic sequences, but are instead found in alternative splicing patterns.
As the following paper states, “A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,, the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,”
In fact, due to alternative splicing, “Alternatively spliced isoforms,,, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,,” and “As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes (Pan et al., 2008), collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms,,”
This finding is simply completely devastating to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists
Thus in conclusion, the evidence from population genetics, as well as the genetic evidence itself, simply does not line up with Darwinian presuppositions, much less does it lend any support to Dr. Craig’s claim that God did not create man de novo, from the dust of the ground.
As Stephen Meyer stated in the following interview, “I see nothing from a genetic point of view that challenges the idea that humans originated independently from primates,”
Verse: