The Last Creationist Model Standing is the Christ-Centered Model, and That's Good

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." -Arthur Conan Doyle via the character "Sherlock Holmes"

Many Christians still believe that God created the universe less than 10,000 years ago. I devoted a good deal of space in Early Genesis the Revealed Cosmology to showing how they are mishandling the scripture and feel no need to do so again here. Their position is increasingly untenable on the basis of evidence from the natural universe, but no evidence from the natural universe is necessary to show the error of this position. The Christ-Centered Model for early Genesis outlined in the book does not promote an Old Earth Creationist position so much as it promotes a Christ-centered position. Incidental to that is that the Seventh Day is both history and prophecy and not just a space of 24-hours. Indeed none of the "days" could have been 24-hour day/night cycles, for the text of Genesis very specifically defines what a "day" is in chapter one. 

But the latest advances in science are also showing most commonly-held Old Earth Creationist models to be untenable with either evidence from the natural universe and/or the text of scripture. As a result, some are turning to models like John Walton's "Cosmic Temple" idea. While I have no doubt there are strong parallels in Ancient Near Eastern religious practice and the text of early Genesis, I think he has it backwards. Those practices were attempts to co-opt the model laid out in early Genesis, not the reverse. I think the first two accounts in Genesis are earlier than these practices, and influenced them, not the other way around. I am an adherent of a modified version of the Tablet Theory. Even if Moses didn't write Genesis before these other ANE stories, for the early part he was working off of tablets that were older.

Further, Walton believes that the account is "functional" and has nothing to do with the real material universe. I argue nearly the opposite- where the fit seems awkward it is because the text is describing what is happening in two realms at once. That is, the fashioning of both the natural and the supernatural realms, with the natural world being only a "shadow" of the eternal one. I don't consider Walton's model to be a "creationist" model and I doubt that he would either.

What about Old Earth Creationist models like those advocated by organizations like "Reasons to Believe" and people like Ann Gauger of the Biologic Institute? Gauger's model features a very early Adam and Eve, one that would not even be classified as a Homo-Sapiens. The Reasons to Believe Model, which I once advocated until the dates became too difficult to reconcile to the text, suggests a more recent but still very distant Adam, perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. This model then suggests that the flood of Noah was universal in respect to humanity (but not global) in that it reduced the human race to eight persons. It too happened in great antiquity according to this model. Reasons to Believe has in the past shown a willingness to adjust their models somewhat in the face of new data, as scientists should. If Reasons to Believe adopted the Christ-centered model and subjected it to the same kind of testing as its previous models, I believe it would be a huge win for them. As of now, they have a couple of more traditional OEC models.

Here are some "reasons to believe" that these models cannot be reconciled to the text of early Genesis, and the only plausible creationist models remaining are two-population models (Adam is not the founder of humanity, but rather the line of Messiah) as is the one in Early Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology.......

1)  Genesis 10:22 says that Shem was the father of Asshur, while in verse eleven we learn that Asshur founded several cities including Ninevah. The location and period of habitation of Ninevah is known. There was surely no city there prior to 8,000 years ago and probably much more recently than that. Thus the flood was not much earlier than 8,000 years ago and probably more recent than that. So the model is untenable- unless one wishes to postulate tens of thousands of years worth of skipped generations between Shem and his son Asshur in order to push the flood back to a date when all of humanity was restricted to the Levant. Of course there is no scientific evidence that this was ever the case.

2) Cush was the son of Ham (10:4) and Cush "begat" Nimrod (10:8) who was apparently a contemporary of Asshur mentioned above, since verse 11 also states that Asshur went out from the land it previously said was controlled by Nimrod in order to found Ninevah. Therefore it is difficult to attribute a huge number of generations from Cush to Nimrod. And Nimrod is also described as controlling several cities, at least one of whom (Erech) we can locate in historical time. Again, these cities don't go back tens of thousands of years in the past. We can tell roughly when they were founded.

3) The text indicates that Adam and Eve's descendants did not live as hunter-gatherers but were immediately guided into civilized practices like agriculture and animal husbandry. Gen. 4:2 says that Cain was a tiller of the soil, and Abel a keeper of sheep. It is extremely unlikely, to put it mildly, that sheep have been domesticated for 70,000 years. The very first ones were more like 10-15 thousand years ago (and the location and timing of the first domestication of most major livestock is a stunning confirmation of the Christ-centered model). The same is true with agriculture. The Reasons to Believe model must postulate that civilization was lost right after the fall and not recovered until recently. But the text does not indicate that. Gen. 4:20 describes Adah, seven generations from Adam, as the "father" of those who live in tents and travel with flocks. This would not be true if the practice died out immediately afterward and was rediscovered by unconnected individuals tens of thousands of years later.

In the same way, his brother Jubal is described as the "father" of those who play the harp and the organ. And Tubal-Cain (4:22) is described as an "instructor" in metallurgy. Thus the text contradicts the idea of lost arts.

4) In Gen. 5:29 Lamech the father of Noah references the curse on the soil and the associated toil therein. In other words they were still working the soil. In 8:22 God promises that seedtime and harvest will remain, indicating further that they were agricultural. Noah plants a vineyard (9:20) after landing. 

5) Cain himself is described as founding a city (4:17). Is it realistic to think that men were building cities 70,000 years ago but there is no evidence for them until the last 12,000 years or so?

6) While a case can be made for a skipped generation here or there in the genealogies, the dates for humanity and its near-global dispersal have been pushed so far back that it makes the genealogies useless and even pointless. If the flood was 50,000 years ago how is it that the sons and grandsons of Shem, Ham, and Japheth were constructing/ruling cities whose place in history we know to be less than 8,000 years ago? If the flood was more recent and also really wiped out all of humanity other than those on the ark, then how does it square with the overwhelming genetic and archaeological evidence that most of the old world not covered by ice sheets has been more or less continuously occupied for more than 40,000 years? 

*********

I want to emphasize that the text of the scripture and even creationism has not been refuted by all of these things. Instead long-held theology which is not actually in the bible has been refuted by them. And that's good. The church should reject unfounded ideas about Adam and the flood which were based on the Jewish take on the account. All of the difficulties I mentioned above and more can be resolved simply by doing what the church should have done centuries ago- view the text through the lens of Christ, and put Him at the center of the model. Perhaps science is going to force theologians to do what they should have done from the beginning, and as a bonus all of these paradoxes resolve cleanly. 

Get the Book

You Tube Channel

PS- there is an idea floating out there called "Genealogical Adam" advocated by Dr. Joshua Swamidass, among others, and I should mention it. I don't consider it a competing model but rather a variation on a portion of the Christ-centered model which proposes a different solution to a specific theological problem inherent in any "two-population" model. I think it is too narrow in focus to be considered a "model" for early Genesis. I don't think he advocates for any particular model, just this idea on how to handle the transmission of the sin nature if there were another population of humans outside the garden in addition to Adam and Eve. I also believe he strongly considers the population outside the garden to have evolved, whereas I think both populations were the result of special creation.

Please "like" and "share".This is a conversation that the church needs to have!

Mammalian Vertebrate Study Knocks Macro-Evolutionary Paradigm Flat on its Back

A study of spine evolution in mammals has produced results opposite those expected under the current evolutionary paradigm. As usual, the scientists made a brave show of trying to cram their results into the framework of what is allowable under a strictly naturalistic view of things. But even as they did so they had to use language evocative of intelligent design and collaboration. It was the language that was fitting to use to describe what had happened.

They knew that amphibians and living reptiles such as lizards, have a single type of vertebrae. Mammals have five different types and this allows the mammalian form to be adapted for living in many kinds of environments and moving about in a multitude of ways. The same can be said for mammal vs. reptile teeth by the way. Its as if Whoever was running the show decided that the mammal line was the one They were most interested in developing and mostly left the reptiles alone while continuing to develop the mammals.

Three, Four, Five types of vertebrae - coming 200 million years after the form is set.

Of course it makes little sense that a neutral force would concentrate development on one line to the exclusion of others. So far as they can tell there is no reason why evolution, if it can produce various types of teeth and vertebrate to help mammals, could not have done the same for reptiles. (EDITORS NOTE: Tooth diversity shows up early but appears to have been lost in reptiles many millions of years ago. Never to be regained? ) And yet despite the various forms of reptiles over the ages, the type seems to be locked into one basic shape of tooth per mouth and one form of vertebrate in each kind of reptile. If evolution was really powerful enough to create all that other change, why not vertebrae and teeth?

Scientists theorized that there was an advantage built into the line leading to mammals right from the beginning. This would not solve the problem explained in the paragraph above, but it would push it back in time. Then they could at least appeal to the idea that the changes which led to the mammalian line were simply changes in form to existing parts. That is, they were expecting to find that the line leading to mammals always had five different kinds of vertebrae for evolution to work with, and in time it utilized those differences due to evolutionary forces. Or as the article put it..

While mammal backbones are specialized, the regions that underlie them were believed to be ancient, dating back to the earliest land animals.
Mammals made the most of the existing anatomical blueprint, or so scientists believed. However, the new study is challenging this idea by looking into the fossil record.

Well, they discovered differently. What they consider the earliest ancestors of the mammal line had three types of vertebrae, not five. While that is more than the reptiles started with, it still means that new types of vertebrae popped up long after the purported line to mammals was established. Their expectation was that by then evolution should have just been adapting existing parts, not creating new categories of them. The article speaks of "dramatic changes" in the line leading to mammals. How did these changes occur? Here is where they start using the language of intelligent design in order to adequately describe what they see in the record...

"There appears to be some sort of cross-talk during development between the tissues that form the vertebrae and the shoulder blade," Pierce said. "We think this interaction resulted in the addition of a region near the shoulder as the forelimbs of our ancestors evolved to take on new shapes and functions."

Later, a region emerged near the pelvis. "It is this last region, the ribless lumbar region, that appears to be able to adapt the most to different environments," said Pierce."

So God didn't "make" the new types of vertebrae on these creatures, they made themselves by their parts talking to each other! They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps in Lamarkian fashion. But apparently the body parts of reptiles don't have this same conversational ability. Not that the versatility of mammals comes from evolution. Here is an article about a study showing that mammal fore-limbs were diversified before the dinosaurs! The birds, reptiles and amphibians still haven't seemed to have caught up.

The article ends by making a vague remark about how HOX genes may be involved in the change. I am sure they are, but that is not a scientific standard for explanations, in particular if one is going to assume that evolution is the sole force editing the HOX genes. I find that macro-evolution has different standard of proof than the rest of science. In macro-evolution, if they can imagine a way it might have happened, it is assumed to be true. Subject to further testing still to be sure, but otherwise accepted.

I look at the same evidence and it seems to be screaming Divine Intent, not random process. This would point to at least Theistic guiding of evolution. In truth there are some gray areas between Theistic Evolution, Intelligent Design, and Special Creation and in terms of this evidence its hard to say which it is most pointing to, but its sure not pointing to the naturalistic model.

Scripture of course speaks to the question of the emergence of animal forms, though it too does not give great detail. I am speaking of Genesis chapter one here, under the Christ-centered model for early Genesis chapter two is a special smaller and more limited creation account within the larger account in chapter one. Genesis chapter one says both that God commanded the earth to bring forth living creatures and that God made living creatures after their kind. So rather than body parts talking to one another to produce new features, as the scientist quoted above suggested, God and the earth were communicating to do so. The details on that are left off, but its not naturalistic evolution, and its not even theistic evolution in the most commonly accepted sense of God simply lining the dominoes up and tipping the first one and from there watching things go on their own. He pops up later in the story and does things- like for example, make a class of creatures with new types of vertebrae.

UPDATE: 2021 study finds that the purported ancestors of mammals did not inherit any reptile-like traits in their back-bones. Rather, reptiles, mammals, and synapsids all have distinctly different backbones. Of course they herald it as progress for "understanding evolution" but what really happened was that a hypothesis for how non-mammal spines evolved into mammal spines was shot down. 

Evidence From Plant and Animal Domestication Strongly Supports the Christ-Centered Model for Adam

A chart from a paper by Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution. The dates are in years before present that the various animals were found to be domesticated with the core zones shaded. This paper was published without access to a study which came out just afterwards which pushed back the date on cattle domestication.

*****************************************

There is quite a bit of evidence out there, a sliver of which I will reproduce in this post, that Adam was a real, historical person. There are too many coincidences coming together from our rapidly growing knowledge of antiquity to ignore. Something happened to mankind, starting in a particular place and time-  but not the time predicted by either Young Earth Creationist Models or the dominant Old Earth Creationist Models. Instead, the evidence lines up extremely well with the Christ-Centered model for Early Genesis. This is part of why I say that the Christ-Centered Model is the "Last Creationist Model Standing".

The Christ-Centered Model for Adam as described in Early Genesis the Revealed Cosmology takes the view that the events in Genesis chapter two are not just re-hashing those of chapter one. Rather it is describing a smaller creation within the larger creation of chapter one. The LORD God "sets up" Adam to have an agricultural lifestyle and even provides versions of some animals which would be useful to a farming ecosystem. That is, new domestic varieties of existing plants and animals were provided to Adam. Adam was, as a part of his mission to reconcile humanity to God, given the means to "jump start" civilization from a life of hunter-gatherers to those who truly ruled the natural world.

Here are some things the book (US) (UK) shows that the scriptures teach about Adam...

1) He lived around eleven to thirteen thousand years ago, reading the genealogies the "long way" but with no gaps in time between listed generations. He is a figure of Christ, not the sole father of humanity. He was formed to bring the line of Messiah which would reconcile and redeem the human race, not start it.

2) He benefited from his time with the LORD God, not only in learning how to tend a garden and handle domestic livestock, but even by obtaining access to domestic versions of plants and animals. The entire world benefited from what even the fallen Adam was able to share.

3) A northern location for Eden, near the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, not their mouth. Afterwards Adam lived just east of the Garden.

******************

Now if you compare those things to the picture at the head of this post, you will see a most amazing thing. Scientists trace the origin of all four our our major domestic farm animals to the same area that the book predicts for Adam, and just after the time predicted for Adam (in this model). The world first received its major domestic stock right there.

The same can be said for many plants. Wheat was first domesticated in the same geographic and temporal region.  Grapes can only be grown in a narrow zone, but this same region is in this zone as shown below...(I have circled in red where I think Noah's ark landed. You may recall he made wine soon after landing, and domesticated grapes originated in that region or just above it 10,000 or so years ago).

So the evidence we have from domestication of plants and animals indicates there was an epicenter for domestication. The account in Genesis makes the garden an epicenter of domestication. What was begun in the garden then spread to the whole earth, making civilization possible. Then, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Adam was an actual person with a real place and time in history. It may not have been what we were taught in Sunday School, but it was real (and in scripture) none-the-less. We may not be able to find his grave, but the echos of what he did with the gifts given to him resound in our world even today, regardless of whether or not their source is recognized.

Get the book

United Kingdom Readers click here.

Please "Like" and "Share" on Facebook to help get the word out!

The Light He Called Day

2

What is the "context" in which the word "day" (Hebrew "yom") is used in the creation account? Christians have gone back and forth over it. One of the glaring omissions in this debate is what the account itself says that "day" means, note particularly what I have bolded in the passage below......

Genesis Chapter One:
2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The Hebrew word "yom" can mean "day" in a lot of different contexts, but this account specifies what is meant by "day". It gives the context. The light is what God is calling "day" in this account. It's not a 24-hour day because the evening has nothing to do with the day, other than the condition which precedes it - things are marked by an increasing condition of darkness. The English translation obscures this because it adds words onto the last sentence of verse five which are not in the Hebrew. There is no definite article in the Hebrew here. It just says...

"(and) There was evening, (and) there was morning, day one."

When written like this it makes it more clear that the evening is not considered to be a part of the day. The light, which comes forth in the morning, is the day. The evening was not a part of it, just the condition which preceded it. This naturally fits and builds with the immediately previous text- as the world in verse three is said to be in darkness to begin with. This condition was then altered by God uttering His first command into creation "Let there be Light".

How did this light come to enter creation? Not by any of the means mentioned in the following days. Once God does a lot of the heavy lifting in the first two days, there is a point where God says something and the text immediately reports "it was so". In these instances some part of creation or God Himself subsequently does something as a part of this process. For example, God divided the light from the darkness once it was present in the world. But he didn't do anything to produce the light itself. There is no verb associated with the creation of the light, such as "dividing". Rather the very act of God speaking into His creation produced the light without any other action necessary. This is a clue, latter affirmed in scripture (see below), that God's Word itself is Light. If I say "I want to speak to you now" then I have accomplished my desire in the very act of saying it. In the same way, God calls light into existence merely by speaking, for His Word is light.

So in the context of the creation account, a "day" is the breaking forth of the light. And the light is God's word. The word for "light" used in Gen. 1:4 is that same root word used in Psalms 27:1 when David says "Yahweh is my light." See also Isaiah 10:17 and Micah 7:8 as well as the New Testament verses at the bottom of this post. Thus the meaning for "evening" and "morning" must be connected to the contextual meaning for "light". The evening is a decline in this light and the morning is a bursting forth of it. But the text does not say that the light is that of the sun, which does not appear in the heavens (though I think it was created in 1:1) until the fourth day.

This has immense theological implications. For one thing, it argues against the idea that initial conditions in creation were perfect until the fall of Adam. Creation may not have started sinful, but it started as a place of increasing chaos, darkness and emptiness (evening), only becoming illuminated and orderly once God spoke His Word into it (morning). This is just a small part of why I call this view of the text the "Christ Centered Model" for early Genesis. As the verses below indicate, the apostles made the same connection between Christ as being both the Word of God and the Light of the World.

So this is what is really happening on each of the "days" of the creation account. It has nothing to do with literal 24-hour days, except as metaphor. The sun was not even authorized for the tracking of time until the fourth day! Instead, God speaks His word into some aspect of creation and His word transforms some area of creation from increasing darkness, emptiness, and chaos into increasing illumination, fruitfulness, and order. Without God's word this world is in a condition of evening, getting darker and darker. Decaying. Once His word comes forth this condition is reversed for whatever part of creation God addresses. This includes our individual lives!

Get the book

The Gospel of John Chapter One....
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2The same was in the beginning with God.
3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
7The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
8He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
9That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
10He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

John 8:12 "I am the light of the world"

Mark's You Tube Channel on Early Genesis

Is the Evidence for Neanderthal-Sapiens Admixture Exaggerated and Over-Stated?

Cambridge Zoology Professor William Amos thinks so.  He has an alternative explanation for the data which suggests interbreeding occurred. He says that most of the signal can be explained by a lower mutation rate in the group of humans leaving Africa due to the fact that they had little diversity in their genes to start with. It is worth reading the abstract on the above link. That does not even consider the possibility that at least some of the gene similarities are due to viral infections, not interbreeding. That is, Eurasians and Neanderthals share some genetic material because they were infected by the same strains of virus and viruses can insert material into the genome. Eurasians picked up strains that Africans lacked because they lived in the same area as Neanderthals, not because of interbreeding.

To be fair, even Dr. Amos thinks that "some" inbreeding "probably" occurred, but this is yet another example of how the science media takes a "finding" in an area we are just beginning to really understand and repeats it until it becomes part of the narrative even when a lot of questions remain.

It now appears that some of those genes which the OOA humans got from (presumably) Neanderthals was actually the ancestral condition of the gene in both species which had been lost in modern humans. IOW, the Neanderthals did not give the Out-of-Africa Humans strictly neanderthal genes, some if not most of the genetic material scientists are ascribing to hybridization with Neanderthals could simply be the genes our species once had in common with them but lost being returned to us through mating with "somebody". That "somebody" may have been Neanderthals, or it may have been from a group of humans which left Africa earlier than the main OOA group (actually I don't think all of humanity began in Africa, I think almost all of the genes of humanity that survived were from Africa. In this view the OOA humans simply met the few survivors of humanity that had been outside of Africa from the beginning and absorbed or eliminated them so that little genetic trace remains except in a few backwaters as noted in the link above).

So even a large proportion of the "Neanderthal" genes we wind up keeping may not really have been exclusively "theirs" anyway. Thus, whatever the true figure of percentage of neanderthal genome possessed by the average Eurasian, it is liable to be lower than the oft-cited 1.5%. Maybe I'm not "1.5% Neanderthal" as my genetic testing (and that of many of European ancestry) claimed. Maybe its half that, maybe a tenth of that. It could even be none.

The only reason why people cite admix is because some genes in Neanderthals are highly similar in modern humans. These are all "adaptive genes" and cis-regulatory areas. The stretches of the genome which really count (genes coding for structural elements like bone formation and particularly brain function) are different - these are called "Neanderthal deserts" and puzzle researchers.

There is a lab at Stanford University that is working on adaptive evolution......about 30% of mutations in the human proteome are driven by viruses alone. It is high time that people started ignoring D stats and started questioning whether, faced with identical viruses in identical areas, all hominin species (including modern humans) would not anyway identically adapt - ie identical mutations happen in both species because they are driven by the identical viruses. The same would be true in Africa, where parasites not present in the Northern Hemisphere are rife, driving adaptive mutations in the opposite direction. Adaptive mutations in two similar species does not mean admix. In Africa, both chimpanzees and modern humans have adapted to malaria by way of a mutation that causes sickle cell anaemia. No-one cites admix in this instance - it's parallel adaptation.

Let's keep testing.....