Adam's Creation

[cabrown]

I've recently been laughed out of a scientific debate at my University for asserting my belief in the Divine Creation of Adam and Eve. I've been studying a lot about theories regarding the creation, and would like some imput. As a premise, obviously the Bible is not very imformative on the subject, and any comment on the issue is pure speculation. The following are the theories I have been able to find:

• The Bible is literal and Adam was created directly from the dust of the Earth, and Eve from his rib.
• Diestic Evolution: God raised man up through evolutionary lines and finally instilled in him a human spirit.
• Transplantation: Adam was born and raised on a distant planet more advanced than our own, and was brought her with Eve as an adult.
• Corprolization: Adam was created as a Spiritual being, then underwent a change or fall to make his body mortal.

What do you think?

 

[Philosoft]

Are you asking for thoughts about only the creation scenarios you've listed or would you like additional suggestions?

 

[Aggie]

I'm assuming the second should be "Deistic evolution". It's pretty much what I believe, and I'm a Deist.

The only difference is I don't think God did anything different with humans spirits than with the spirit of any other animal. There doesn't seem to be any any way in which humans are different from other animals that isn't the result of our higher intelligence.

Anyway, the most important thing is to consider which of these theories is best-supported by the evidence. It's pretty definite that the second is better-supported than the other three. If you'd like some of the evidence there are plenty of people here who should be happy to explain it, although my personal specialty is the origin of birds.

 

[Dracil]

Actually the second should still be Theistic Evolution and I am a Theist.

Theistic evolution is actually rather broad, in its definition, and even within this, people's view can differ quite a bit on just how much intervention happened.

Or put another way, Deistic evolution is a subset of Theistic evolution.

 

[HolyRoller]

I believe the Bible's account on Adam & Eve.

 

[AdJesumPerMariam]

I believe the Bible's account, also.

 

[Captain_Jack_Sparrow]

I believe the Bible account is pure allegory. Adam & Eve are archetypes for man and woman. They were not real people.

 

[michabo]

Dede & Holyroller:

Perhaps you should keep that to yourself in a scientific debate, especially at a university.

Friendly tip...

 

[Phred]

I've recently been laughed out of a scientific debate at my University for asserting my belief in the Divine Creation of Adam and Eve.

As well you should have. Mythology is not science.

I've been studying a lot about theories regarding the creation, and would like some imput. As a premise, obviously the Bible is not very imformative on the subject, and any comment on the issue is pure speculation.

You're using the word "theories" in a pretty loose manner. Creationism is not a scientific theory. Nor is anything related in the Bible, which is not a scientifically based book.

The following are the theories I have been able to find:

• The Bible is literal and Adam was created directly from the dust of the Earth, and Eve from his rib.

Not a scientific theory.

• Diestic Evolution: God raised man up through evolutionary lines and finally instilled in him a human spirit.

Not a scientific theory.

• Transplantation: Adam was born and raised on a distant planet more advanced than our own, and was brought her with Eve as an adult.

Not even a reasonable theory.

• Corprolization: Adam was created as a Spiritual being, then underwent a change or fall to make his body mortal.

Not a scientific theory.

It's no wonder you were outgunned in a scientific debate if you were presenting opinions about mythology instead of evidence. Perhaps it would be a good idea to crawl around this forum for a bit and find one of the posts dealing with "what is science".

 

[The Bellman]

I've recently been laughed out of a scientific debate at my University for asserting my belief in the Divine Creation of Adam and Eve. I've been studying a lot about theories regarding the creation, and would like some imput. As a premise, obviously the Bible is not very imformative on the subject, and any comment on the issue is pure speculation.

The thing with scientific debates is that viewpoints that cannot be supported by science are...well, not even valid. A viewpoint based on a five thousand year old mythology, with not a scrap of scientific support (and, in fact, a great deal of scientific contradiction) will certainly get laughed out of a scientific debate.

I would suggest that you either learn about the science which relates to human origins or, if you want to be/remain a creationist, stay out of scientific debates.

However, your last statement above - "any comment on the issue is pure speculation" is (assuming "the issue" is human origins) simply wrong. Evolutionary theory describes human origins with some detail, and it is far more than "pure speculation", as you would discover if you researched it.

 

[lucaspa]

I've recently been laughed out of a scientific debate at my University for asserting my belief in the Divine Creation of Adam and Eve. I've been studying a lot about theories regarding the creation, and would like some imput. As a premise, obviously the Bible is not very imformative on the subject, and any comment on the issue is pure speculation. The following are the theories I have been able to find:

• The Bible is literal and Adam was created directly from the dust of the Earth, and Eve from his rib.
• Diestic Evolution: God raised man up through evolutionary lines and finally instilled in him a human spirit.
• Transplantation: Adam was born and raised on a distant planet more advanced than our own, and was brought her with Eve as an adult.
• Corprolization: Adam was created as a Spiritual being, then underwent a change or fall to make his body mortal.

What do you think?

I think you forgot the most important one: Theistic evolution. God created humans by the process of evolution and Genesis 2-3 is an allegory meant to teach theological truths, not scientific ones.

Now, to take them in order:
1. Genesis 1 says God spoke humans, men and women (plural in Hebrew) together at the same time. So a literal Bible contradicts itself. Not good theology to do that. The Bible is not literal in Genesis 1-3.
2. Possible, but not likely. If God only wanted a sentient being and didn't care about the shape or form, then He could be deistic in this and simply wait until natural selection produced an organism sentient enough to communicate with God. If God wanted the human shape (altho I can't see why God would want a modified ape) then He had to be theistic -- hands on.
3. Transplantation goes against both the Bible and all the scientific evidence, both of which indicate that humans are native to the planet.
4. The theological message of Genesis is that humans were always mortal. The Fall had to do with separation from God by disobedience, not making his body mortal.

 

[lucaspa]

Creationism is not a scientific theory.

Creationism is a scientific theory. It was the accepted theory from 1700 - 1831. It is a falsified theory. But being falsified does not remove a theory from science. It simply moves it from the short list of currently valid theories to the very long list of falsified theories.

the Bible, which is not a scientifically based book.

The Bible incorporates Babylonian science, which was the best at the time. However, the Bablyonian science turned out to be wrong. So yes, the Bible is not a science book. It is a book on theology. However, that theology is set in Babylonian science. Which causes the confusion.

 

[lucaspa]

I've recently been laughed out of a scientific debate at my University for asserting my belief in the Divine Creation of Adam and Eve.

Cabrown, I should have addressed this. The reason you got laughed out of a scientific debate is that none of your ideas are science. They are all based on faith. None of them contain any statements testable in the physical universe or testable by the methods of science.

The scientific evidence falsifies anything relating to direct formation of humans in some miraculous manner. Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that humans evolved from H. erectus and thus we are a product of "descent with modification" -- evolution. Your Deistic evolution is not science. There is no way we can test to see whether God exists or God did this. This has to be a belief.

I'll take it back. Transplantation is scientific theory. After all, Raelianism is a form of this, using ETs as the ones that manufactured humans. However, the data falsifies this one. So it's not a valid scientific theory.

If you are in a scientific debate, the data is such that any position other than evolution is doomed.

 

[The Bellman]

Creationism is a scientific theory. It was the accepted theory from 1700 - 1831. It is a falsified theory. But being falsified does not remove a theory from science. It simply moves it from the short list of currently valid theories to the very long list of falsified theories.

We've done this before. Creationism is not, and never was, a scientific theory. It was, and is, a religious belief. That it was the predominant belief does not make it anything other than a religious one.

 

[cabrown]

As well you should have. Mythology is not science.

You're using the word "theories" in a pretty loose manner. Creationism is not a scientific theory. Nor is anything related in the Bible, which is not a scientifically based book.

I'm somewhat surprised to find that the self-righteous, self-egradizing tones so common in the Christian posts have found their homologs here. It is simply ignorant to say that theorizing is specific to science alone. As you may or may not know, what we know today as science grew out of philosophy, and up until the turn of the last century, scientists were called natural philosophers. Any theory is valid--that is part of the scientific process. I could theorize that we dropped out of the sky, and I would have a valid theory to test. Your somewhat arrogant claim on any valid search for truth, spiritual or scientific, weakens your position as a scientist, because you then don't require religion to use the same standards as other ideas and theories.

And give me a break about the typo, people. It's like the Gistapo around here.

 

[cabrown]

The reason you got laughed out of a scientific debate is that none of your ideas are science. They are all based on faith. None of them contain any statements testable in the physical universe or testable by the methods of science.

Truth is truth for everyone. You should not have to seperate your beliefs about God and your beliefs about the natural world. Spiritual beliefs are not just for church, and if you truely believe them, you should feel comfortable discussing them as truth in any relevent setting. This schizophrenic scientist at work, saint at church personality is cowardly at best, and even hypocritial.

 

[Debaser]

You should not have to seperate your beliefs about God and your beliefs about the natural world.

I'm afraid you're going to have to if you don't want to get laughed at.

There are plenty of people here who have, how shall we say, "Wacky" beliefs-take Irkester and his shirinking sun gibberish for example, but if you're going to bandy them around and call them science then you're going to have to take it on the chin.

This is probably a good place to lay down exactly what they laughed at in your university. You'll find a lot of fellow loons here with.

 

[lucaspa]

We've done this before. Creationism is not, and never was, a scientific theory. It was, and is, a religious belief. That it was the predominant belief does not make it anything other than a religious one.

I've done it before. You and I haven't. Creationism, particularly YEC, makes statements about the physical universe that coud be tested. Thats all you have to have to be a scientific theory.

Theories are imaginative constructs thrown out for testing. It doesn't matter where the inspiration for the imagination comes from. After all, Punctuated Equilibrium was inspired partly by Marxism (according to Gould). That doesn't remove PE as a scietific theory. That the early creationists got their inspiration for the theory from the Bible is irrelevant. Even that the theory mentioned God is irrelevant. You have to start somewhere. The theory was formulated as a scientific theory, was tested, and was falsified.

A problem with declaring creationism as not science is that you then have to decide what is science and what is not. Scientists and philosophers of science have tackled that problem for 400 years and failed. There is no clear-cut demarcation between what is science and what is not. Now you are in a morass and can't exclude the teaching of creationism from schools. The criteria that Judge Overton used was savaged by Laudan and Quinn in their essays in But Is It Science? edited by Michael Ruse. We can go into that.

What confuses the issue today is that creationists refuse to admit that the theory is falsified. But that too is irrelevant. Falsification is independent of their acceptance of it. You have to separate the individuals that advocate a theory from the theory itself. Creationists are very bad scientists, but that doesn't affect the scientific status of creationism.

"There is another way to be a Creationist. One might offer Creationism as a scientific theory: Life did not evolve over millions of years; rather all forms were created at one time by a particular Creator. Although pure versions of Creationism were no longer in vogue among scientists by the end of the eighteenth century, they had flourished earlier (in the writings of Thomas Bumet, William Whiston, and others). Moreover, variants of Creationism were supported by a number of eminent nineteenth-century scientists-William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, and Louis Agassiz, for example. These Creationists trusted that their theories would accord with the Bible, interpreted in what they saw as a correct way. However, that fact does not affect the scientific status of those theories. Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more unscientific than postulating unobservable particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended. The great scientific Creationists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered problem-solving strategies for many of the questions addressed by evolutionary theory. They struggled hard to explain the observed distribution of fossils. Sedgwick, Buckland, and others practiced genuine science. They stuck their necks out and volunteered information about the catastrophes that they invoked to explain biological and geological findings. Because their theories offered definite proposals, those theories were refutable. Indeed, the theories actually achieved refutation." Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism pp125-126

 

[lucaspa]

Truth is truth for everyone.

But there are different types of truth.

You should not have to seperate your beliefs about God and your beliefs about the natural world.

And you don't if you are a theistic evolutionist.

Spiritual beliefs are not just for church, and if you truely believe them, you should feel comfortable discussing them as truth in any relevent setting.

The problem is that this wasn't a relevant setting.

This schizophrenic scientist at work, saint at church personality is cowardly at best, and even hypocritial.

Cabrown, there is a difference between creation and creationism. Creation is a theological statement: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" That's creation. What comes after that is a how God created.

Now, you can go to a scientific meeting and say "I believe God created." as a statement of your beliefs that lie outside of science. However, as soon as you begin talking about how God created, you are into science. You must present evidence acceptable to science to back up the how. And science is very limited in the type of evidence it accepts. The evidence God left us in His Creation clearly shows that all current theories about the how of creation are wrong except evolution.

 

[lucaspa]

Any theory is valid--that is part of the scientific process.

Absolutely NOT! Not any theory is valid. Validity is determined by testing.

This is based on deductive logic. True statements can't have false consequences.

Theories are statements about the natural world. Let's take your example: "I could theorize that we dropped out of the sky, and I would have a valid theory to test." Yes, you have a theory to test, but now you must test it. The theory is not yet valid.

The next step is to make deductions if the theory is true. Deductions are consequences you should see if the theory is true. Some consequences of your theory are:
1. Humans should be unique on earth.
2. There should be no transitional fossils linking humans to any other species.
3. Humans should appear 1) either all over the world at the same time or 2) be very limited in geographical area.

Next step is look at the physical universe to see if you find your consequences.
1. Humans aren't unique on the earth. Instead, they bear a wide range of physical, physiological, mental, and genetic similarities to other species on the planet.
2. There are numerous fossils of transitional individuals giving a fine grade of transitions from H. erectus to H. sapiens.
3. Humans were not all over the world at the same time. They were in Africa but not in a very limited geographical area.

So, observations of consequences shows that your statement has false consequences. Therefore your theory is false -- invalid.

What happens is that you should test your theory yourself before making it public. Only after you have tried very hard and failed to falsify the theory itself should you make it public. There's no sense in wasting their time falsifying a theory that you can easily falsify.