From: brian@lpl.arizona.edu (Brian Ceccarelli 602/621-9615)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Where does Adam and Eve Fit In?  Attn:  Jeff West
Date: 23 Jan 93 00:59:58 GMT
Organization: Lunar & Planetary Laboratory, Tucson AZ.

Jeff West writes:

> Ok, as I understand it you take the creation of Adam and Eve as
> described in Genesis literally, correct?  Meaning that we all have
> decended from 2 people.

Before a number of people start taking your statement out of 
context and begin flaming me, let me restate what I mean by
"literally".  :-)

What I mean by literally, is that I try to interpret the passages
in the Bible based on their content and the passages' literary form.
The literary form can make all the difference on how to interpret
a passage.  For example, when you see a C program; you expect main(), 
{}, comments starting with /* and ending with */.  When you read
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the Dubervilles, you expect the story of
a young woman.  When you read a Shakespearian sonnet, you expect
thoughts to evoke emotion contained within consistent meter and rhyme.
Do you expect to run a Shakespearian sonnet like a C program?
When you read a textbook on General Relativity, are you going to 
read it like a sonnet?  Are you going to read Einstein's General
Relativity for its emotional value and for its meter?

So why do you insist on reading the creation account in Genesis,
a poem, like Einstein's General Relativity?   Do you tell Mother 
Goose that she is a luny unreasoning fool and has lost all her
plausibility for writing "The Cow Jumped over the Moon"?   Was
Mother Goose concerned with the escape velocity of the earth,
the mass of the cow, and Newtonian mechanics?  So why do you 
insist on applying scientific rigor to Moses's poem?  Rather silly
don't you think?  Moses had something else in mind when he wrote
Genesis 1.  Figure it out.  There is a reason--a good reason,
a reasonable reason which made sense to everyone back then.  And
remember, the average Israelite in the 1400s B.C. didn't have the 
Darwinian mindset.


> Where do the people in the Stone Age fit in?  Are these decendents
> of Adam and Eve?  My point being that even though these people did
> have tool making skills and formed communities they were far from
> what we would call educated in a formal sense.  There is also no
> mention in anyway of the god of the OT.  Seems that some pottery
> or carvings on tools etc. would show this awareness.

I guess I didn't make my point clear enough in my last post.  
The Genesis "man" does not necessarily have to be the Stone Age
anthropological man.  The Biblical definition may be, and probably
is, different than the anthropological definition.  Adam was much more 
than "homo faber", maker of tools.  Not all the people running around
during the Stone Age must be the descendants of Adam and Eve.  There
is nothing in Genesis that says they are.

The intersection between the Biblical humans Adam and Eve and their
descendants and the Neandrathals, might very well be the null set.
Same goes for Stone Age man.  Perhaps during the early Stone Age,
God created Adam and Eve--the Adam and Eve which were not only
alive in body, but also alive in spirit.  


Sincerely,



Brian Ceccarelli
----------------
brian@gamma1.lpl.arizona.edu