Exodus 20:11

The gospel is easy to understand. It is simple to get the point God makes in the Atonement, even though the details are rich in complexity. But not all the truth in the Word of God is simple. There is the milk of the word and there is the meat of the word. God has absolutely no interest in making all of His truth easy for you to understand. He is interested in you loving truth. Loving it enough to seek it diligently and earnestly, even if it is hard. The doctrine that the "plain-reading" of scripture is always the correct reading, and further that the most literal reading is all God means to say about a matter, has become apathy posing as virtue for too many Christians. I made the case for loving truth in that manner at length in my book, and shan't do so again here.

Instead I want to give a very pertinent example of how this flawed view of scripture leads to an inability to comprehend even the most basic things which God is trying to say. Exodus 20:11 is often used as "proof" that God created the universe in six literal 24-hour days. I talk about Exodus 20:11 some in my book, but I want to go into a little more depth here. Exodus 31:17 is also sometimes used, and what I say here applies to it as well. First let's look at the "plain-reading" of the text from the King James Version:

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Do you see where it says "Six days shalt" in verse nine and "For in six days" in verse eleven? The Hebrew for "six" in those two places is the same, yet one verse says just "Six days" and the other "...in six days". Is the word "in" really a part of the text or is it assumed? It is assumed. In my KJV it is in italics for that very reason. Verse nine has the exact same Hebrew word and it is just translated "six" without the "in" before it, because the word "in" isn't in the text. Exodus 31:15 (and many other places) use the same Hebrew term and don't have "in" inserted before six either. This insertion gives the English reader an idea that this passage is referring to things from Genesis 1:1, the "creation of the heavens and the earth." But that's not the Hebrew text, it is a meaning derived from an assumption of the translator. 

If one was to insert an English word there, "for" might be a better choice. It isn't used, possibly because the Hebrew standard word translated "for" or "because" starts off verse eleven of chapter twenty. It would be awkward to begin a sentence with "for" twice in a row. Yet our English word "for" has a couple of senses. It can mean "because" or "this amount". That's where the awkwardness comes from, but there is no reason why you couldn't use each of the senses consecutively. If we said it, "Because for six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth" it would be a valid translation. He "made" them, but not in the sense that He created them from nothing. He accomplished the work He wanted to do, He "did something with" them. Like the farmer does to his land. He created them "in the beginning". 

The passage is saying that man should rest from his own labors on the land for one day out of seven because for six days the Lord Himself worked and on the seventh He rested.  Farmers do not “create” the earth they farm, but they do make it into something productive. That is mostly what the LORD did during the so-called “Creation Days.” The reason you rest is in honor and remembrance of His resting. To fit the comparison, this passage is about God's work on the heavens and the earth, not His bringing it into existence in a formless and void condition. The context of this passage is of a human farmer working the land, not bringing land into existence from nothing or an unseen realm. It starts assuming the land is already here. It's not a passage about the length of time the universe has been here.

The verbs, that is the activity that God is doing in these two verses, are not identical. Genesis 1:1 uses the verb "bara" and it is translated "created" while Exodus 20:11 uses the word "asah", translated made.  There is overlap in their meaning, but "bara" is used of things that are fiat miracles by God. "Asah" is more general but it is also used in the creation account, for example on days four and six. Genesis 1:1 is a statement saying that God created the heavens and the earth. The six days are a record of His subsequent work on the earth that He had previously created. 

So even if the six days of creation were literal 24-hour days, neither Exodus 20:11 or Genesis chapter one are making a statement about how long the cosmos was in existence prior to "Day One". Other verses may or may not be, but these verses aren't. There is even a strain of theology called "Young Biosphere Creation" which says that God made all living things in six literal 24-hour days but that the universe is old. I don't hold to that theology myself, but there is nothing in the text of Exodus 20 or Genesis chapter one that rules it out either, even if the "days" are interpreted as six twenty-four hour periods.

Now one might say, "but He is still saying that He did all His work on the land in six days." That the days of our week are compared to the days of creation might imply that these are the same kind of days, but it doesn’t require it. We must see if there are other passages which speak to the issue of whether God experiences time the way we do. And of course, other verses of scripture tell us that God sees time differently, and in a way that suggests that his “days” take vast amounts of time. 

Psalm 90:4 (NIV) says “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”  Second Peter 3:8 says: “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” And of course the land also has a "Sabbath" rest, (Lev. 25:4) but it is one year out of seven years, not a day out of seven days. So the principle that the "rest" or Sabbath can be more than a day depending on "who you are" is well-attested to.

In the case of God, I would argue that His rest is an eternal one, and scripture supports this view. In fact, the Christ-centered view of early Genesis interprets the seventh day of Creation as both history and prophecy. Scripture teaches that the morning of the seventh day did not even begin until after Christ was on the cross, and it endures till the end of the age. 

So unless you want to take Christ and most of new testament teaching on the Sabbath out of the conversation, and shockingly many people who call themselves "Christians" seem to want to do that in order to defend Young Earth Creationism, the "seventh day" mentioned in Exodus 20 isn't a 24-hour day. Therefore there is no compelling reason to assume the other days of the creation week are either. Indeed, in the Christ-centered model for early Genesis, it isn't the sun producing the "light" from these days, but the Word of God Himself entering the Cosmos produces the light. See "The Light He Called Day."  So then the attempt to make the days about 24-hour periods of physical sunlight and dark once again works to take Christ out of the account. Do you see a pattern here? YEC isn't just wrong because the universe isn't really built that way, it is wrong because it consistently prevents people from seeing how even the creation account points to the work of Christ. Christ Himself said that He was what Moses wrote about (John 5:46). But of course, one can't see Him there in a "literal" "face-value" reading.

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Mayan Creation Myth and Elements of the Genesis Account

I listened to this short video about the Mayan Creation account and was struck by how many elements it shared with Genesis, albeit some in scrambled form. It is clear there is some kind of connection or common origin for the accounts, but these folks were supposed to have separated from Eurasia without, so far as we know, significant contact with the Ancient Near East for more than 10,000 years! It still sounds like they got a scrambled version of the same account.

The account says that at the start there was no light, no sound, no motion, no land. Just water. Obviously it doesn't point to Creation of everything from nothing (or the unseen) as Genesis does, but that is a hard concept for ancient folks to get. Initial conditions they describe sound a lot like those described in Genesis 1:1-2.

Then it describes six "deities" in the waters who help "Heart of Sky" shape the cosmos. This reminds me of the six creation "days" which according to the Christ-centered model for early Genesis, are not light from the sun at all, but rather the Word of God entering creation when God speaks. The light is the "day" and He is the Light. They have six deities while Genesis has God the Logos entering creation six times.

The Maya speak of plants being made before the sun, just like Genesis says the sun wasn't "appointed" or "set in position" until after plants are made. In the Maya account animals are also made but the story says they could not worship. So the deities formed humans from mud, but they couldn't worship either, so were destroyed in a flood! Do you see how the same elements are getting scrambled? They then say another attempt was made with humans derived from wood, but they too could not worship and had to be destroyed, except for those who became monkeys. This leads me to a rabbit trail, the idea of "Others" from the past who were near-human but still not like us. Both science and many ancient traditions tell us that such beings existed.

Finally the gods make a human out of Maize (corn) and get it right. This has shades of Adam, the man made to "tend the garden and to keep it". The idea of man coming along and doing things right is connected to agriculture and thus civilization. Shades of man inside and outside of the garden? Near-humans? Something else?

Somehow these accounts seem to have a common origin. Maybe in antiquity there was contact between the Ancient Near East and South America? In the book I urge people to be open-minded about the idea that Creation itself can communicate its story to unfallen man. Of course, the Lord-God could have told Adam the story of creation in the garden, but there is a case to be made for it being received by other means. Maybe the creation story is much older even than the Garden.

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Book Review: The Genealogical Adam and Eve by S. Joshua Swamidass

I am holding a book that has the power to change the conversation. 

I just finished reading "The Genealogical Adam and Eve" by S. Joshua Swamidass. He is a medical doctor and researcher at George Washington University in St. Louis. I used to dialogue with him and others at his forum "Peaceful Science". At the time I purchased his book, I did not know that he cited my book, along with that of many, many others.

The buzz I kept hearing about the book was that it had "the power to change the conversation" about evolution and creationism, along with questions about the veracity of scripture. That is no easy task, but to the degree a book can do that, I'd say he's pulled it off. And he is networking and possibly doing the other things that are necessary to "change the conversation" to go along with it, so this is an opportunity.

His "big idea" is that both sides of the debate on human origins can be right. Swamidass proposes that a population outside the garden evolved into humans over time as suggested by "mainstream science", but that this doesn't rule out the possibility that Adam and Eve were specially created by God in the fairly recent past. He says that science cannot prove or disprove whether such an event happened. Further he goes to some trouble to demonstrate that because the number of our ancestors goes up exponentially, Adam and Eve could easily be "the ancestors of us all" in the sense that Adam could be somewhere on our family tree, even if others outside the garden also contributed to our ancestry. So the idea that humanity evolved from shared ancestors with apes could be true, but that doesn't make the account about the creation of Adam in Genesis untrue. Both can be true.

Swamidass suggests what seems an elegant symmetry between science, scripture, and vision. Scripture, in his view, can't tell us about the population outside the garden that evolved because that's not what the story is about, but science can. Conversely, science can't tell us about the pair that God created in the garden but scripture can. If neither community can peer into the contents of the other's narrative, then what is there to fight over? That's the vision, and of course it is an appealing one for many people.

Biologos has largely failed in its effort to get bible-believing Christians to accept evolution as described by "mainstream science". They too claimed to want a "conversation" but in practice they attempted to execute a monologue where they are supposed to do all the talking and "educating" while ignorant fundamentalist Christians get assigned the role of listeners to be corrected of their silly errors and enlightened by the superior wisdom of naturalistic speculations on origins. I think they are still shocked it didn't work. I don't want to go too far into mocking them, because while I don't share their particular ideas I understand where they are coming from. I am very much like them in fervor for the things I believe are true. I too think there are some bad ideas out there and I too want people to accept what I believe are the right ideas. But the conversation has broken down, and the "total victory" they seek is not intellectually defensible anyway, for reasons Swamidass makes clear in his book. Science has its limits.

The guy can turn a phrase, the book is well-written. But what I am most impressed with, because it is a skill I lack concerning things I deeply believe, is the gracefulness of his rhetorical approach. I too, for scriptural reasons having nothing to do with evolutionary origins questions, believe there was a population of humans inside the garden and outside the garden, But when I talk about it I can't help but put it so it comes off like "everyone has Genesis wrong but me". Joshua's genius here is to take the same basic premise and show how it can mean that everyone was right after all. How the heck did he do that?

Part of how he did that is that he did not commit to a particular set of details about the text of Genesis, outside of that framework. Nor should he, if conversation is the goal. Therefore I can't say I agree with the theology of the book. It didn't even have a set theology, other than the cross which of course I do agree with. It just listed options and the list was not exhaustive. For that matter, I am not sure of all the science in the book, particularly the claims about "genetic ghosts", but none of that matters. In a call to conversation, these questions can be part of the conversation.

So the book is an achievement and a difficult one at that. But to truly unlock its potential and actually "change the conversation" is going to require something even more challenging: having an actual conversation. It is much easier to call for open and honest dialogue than it is to really do it, because it means you let go of the details of where the conversation goes- the people participating with you get some say in that too. It means accepting that some people, most people even, who you are inviting into the conversation don't just want to solve a problem, but discover truth. Therefore using Hegelian premises and tactics is inappropriate. A real conversation can explore ideas that aren't a part of the agenda of the facilitators, so long as those ideas can be defended with reason and fact. Put me down as one who is willing to participate in that conversation.

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What Does it Mean to Be "Human" and When Did We Get Here?

A Wood Wose

There is no one agreed-on scientific definition of the word "Human". As a recent book I have been reading points out, there is no one agreed-on theological definition of "human" either. And those two definitions don't necessarily have to be the same. 

Some have used that vacuum to expand the definition so that almost any large-brained tool-making hominid is called "a type of human". I think this expansive definition misses the mark. As I point out in Early Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology, when we say that someone is "inhuman" we don't mean that they can't make a flint scraper! To be like us is to think and speak with recursive language, possess true empathy, and have complex art, and a desire to connect socially which goes beyond instinct and self-interest even into religion. We don't just operate within the natural realm, but wonder about, and in most cases yearn to connect with, something beyond it. 

So my scientific definition of a human would dovetail with the theological definition of a human (which I will get to later). A human is: a member of that species which thinks and speaks with recursive language, has an ability to possesses true empathy, is imaginative and makes and/or enjoys complex art, and has a desire to connect socially which goes beyond instinct and self-interest even into religion. We don't just operate within the natural realm, but wonder about, and in most cases yearn to connect with, something beyond it. 

I submit to you that if one group of hominids had all that, and others did not, then there will be significant barriers to reproduction between those groups, even if there are no genetic or physical barriers. The barriers will be social, intellectual, and spiritual, but they will still be real and would discourage hybridization between groups. Even if the Others had the power of speech, we wouldn't have much to say to each other, especially not talk of the sort that makes one human decide they want to take the other as a life-long partner. They would be looked at in the way Medieval Europeans looked at the fantastical "Woodwoses". 

Under this definition, even some of the fossils now classified as "Archaic Homo Sapiens" show no evidence of being "human", never mind Neanderthals, Denisovans and the rest. Those older fossils have none of the artifacts indicative of those above-mentioned traits. Perhaps those things weren't like us, and even some groups that seem closer to us than they do were still different enough to be Others. 

The claims that Neanderthals made true art are based on ridiculously faulty evidence. Dr. William Amos of Cambridge has put together an astounding amount of evidence which indicates that contrary to what "everyone knows" Eurasians didn't inherit about 1.5% of their genes from Neanderthals. There is another, and better, explanation for the same evidence. And his conclusion is just one possibility. Perhaps the Neanderthal-like DNA in Eurasians wasn't from Neanderthals, but through convergent evolution due to exposure to the same environmental stresses. Or maybe it was a group of "other" Homo Sapiens which had more Neanderthal-like genes who were responsible for the introgression.

Biologically the "Others" Homo Sapiens may have been capable of hybridization with us humans, but all those things I mentioned made us so different that there were social and intellectual barriers to reproduction between us. We went our way and they went theirs- to extinction. So the structural differences between us and them could have been extremely minor, but they would have lacked whatever inner light that makes us what we are. We can descend to their level if we became base and coarse, but they could not ascend to ours. Under this scenario not only was it "Homo Sapiens" who survived out of a whole "zoo" of various hominids over the past 500,000 years, but not even all of H. Sapiens were a part of the group that became us. There was a special group created out of all those.

Some of you might be thinking that this scenario can't be true because our DNA points to a much older origin for humanity. This is a misunderstanding which does not apply to a species which begins as a population rather than a single couple. In the Christ-centered model for early Genesis, there are people outside the garden and Adam and Eve inside it. Humanity starts as a "host" (Gen. 2:1). In that scenario, our species could be much younger than the "Most-Recent-Common-Ancestor" MRCA of our Y-chromosomes or mtDNA. The term becomes misleading for new types which begin as a population. This (MCRA of Y or mtDNA older than species) can be so under either creationist or evolutionary thinking. All that is necessary is for 1) humans to have begun as a population and 2) a long period of expansion after our beginning (no population bottlenecks for a long time). More detail here. 

It turns out that very important changes in our brain structure did not occur until relatively recently. See the original paper here. The ability to use recursive speech and thought is also recent (and takes such a threading of the needle to even occur that I doubt there is any reasonable naturalistic explanation for it, the one suggested in the link being implausible to me). Notice that the link says that it occurred "70,000 years ago" but all the evidence they give that it existed is from 42,000 years ago or less. The one exception being "we spread across the whole globe" which must have occurred after 74,000 years ago. In addition to being the vaguest evidence they gave for recursive thought and speech, other hominids also appear to have spread over large areas of the earth without such an ability. Examples which purport to be "art" from 70,000 years ago are either of doubtful veracity, or crude, and perhaps even functional rather than imaginative, compared to that found from 42,000 years ago and more recently. 

In short, I think there is a case to be made that we haven't been around that long. Perhaps there were some "others" who were already on the way out when we got here, but we haven't been around for 150,000 years or even 100,00 years and I doubt it's even been 70,000 years. Maybe beings physically like us were hanging around for a time, but if one really thinks about what makes us "human" and what we consider "human" in each other, then these poor creatures didn't have it. 

The truth is that even populations that are doubtlessly human turn over on a regular basis. Europe has been well studied. The population which inhabited it 40,000 years ago subsequently was replaced. It happened again 14,500 years ago. There was another major turnover in population seven to nine thousand years ago. Most of the genetic load of western Europeans comes from populations which were not in Western Europe eight thousand years ago! And of course five hundred years ago the population of North America looked utterly different than it does now. If these kinds of things are regular occurrences in our history how reasonable is it to believe that our line bumbled along at the edge of extinction for 150,000 years until expanding in the last 40K, and expanding greatly only in the last 12K? It seems more reasonable to believe that the signs of a narrow bottleneck in our genes are not because we hung on so long at minimal population levels, but that we are a special species which originated in the more recent past. The very traits which made us different from the Others allowed us to pass them by and assume our role over the earth.

My definition of theological human?: A member of that species which has the capacity to bear the image of God. This also is different than what you may have thought, but that is another story. One that is in the book. 

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Why "Y-haplogroup Adam" and "mtDNA Eve" Calculations Don't Matter for Origins Questions

The "Most Recent Common Ancestor" (MRCA) is an estimate of how long ago a group of organisms could have had a single ancestor, whether measuring on the male or female side (or both). It is calculated through a measure of how diverse (through acquired mutations) a gene group is in a species versus how often mutations in a given area of the genome occur. Studies between species, such as chimpanzee and human, assume macro-evolution but other studies use measured mutation rates in the studied group, such as from grandfather to grandson.

In the case of humans, there is a wide range of dates, but the MRCA for Y-haplogroups (passed from father to son only) are at least 100,000 years in the past and may be double that. That is because there is an outlier, Y-haplogroup A00, which is different enough from the others so that it could have taken much more time for the mutations to arise between it and it's closest Y-Haplogroup kin (the other "A"s). Only a very few people from west Africa have this Y-Haplogroup. On the other hand, almost everyone in Eurasia is from a haplogroup of much more recent origin. Maybe 50,000 years or so.

Mothers pass mtDNA on to their daughters only. Thus it is a measure of female diversity sometimes called "mtDNA Eve." This measure is also at least 100,000 years old, with 150,000 years being the more recent estimate. 

These calculations are not just being made with humans. Here is a study which calculated the "Y-chromosome Adam" and "mtDNA Eve" for the great apes. It concluded that the "Y-chromosome Adam" for Chimps was over a million years ago- there is a lot of variety in Chimp Y-chromosomes. Not so gorillas, who had a coalescence time of 100,000 years. Less than humans unless you throw out the divergent A00 samples. 

These studies are deceptive for a number of reasons. In overall genetics I understand that humans are far less diverse than apes. Yet except for chimps, that study produced comparable numbers for MRCA for apes and humans. Yet comparing humans and apes in population genetics is comparing apples and oranges. We don't share the same recent history. Historical and near-historical times have been a period of massive expansion of humans. Except for one period of Y-chromosome loss around seven thousand years ago it is likely that few rare genetic variants have been lost in humans. The last 35,000 years have been prosperous ones for our species overall, and besides that on blip the last 10-12 thousand years have been spectacular.

With apes the record is the exact opposite. They have been driven to endangerment of extinction while humanity has been growing. Many minor Y-haplogroup types and mtDNA types which existed in these apes just a few thousand years ago are now probably extinct. Humans have lost some too, but overall humans have prospered so much that almost all Y-haplogroups around three thousand years ago are probably still around today and in greater numbers. Suppose Orangutans are driven to extinction (ignore those in captivity for this thought-experiment). When the last few families are left on a single island, the MRCA will be the great-grandpa of that small group of families. This explains why the graphic in the study (which I linked to above) shows that the Y-haplogroup "Adam" for Orangutans was only 200,000 years ago even if the species itself has been around longer. 

So the MRCA does not tell us anything about when a specific species came to exist. It could have come to exist long long before its measured MRCA. There could have been gorillas around long before 100,000 years ago even though the Y-chromosome MRCA , gorilla "Adam", was only 100,000 years ago.

The reverse is also true. A type of creature could also be much younger than its Y-haplogroup or mtDNA MRCA ("Adam" and "Eve). This is true under naturalistic evolutionary assumptions and it is also true under the most creationist assumptions of the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in the book.

The reason for this is that new types do not have to originate (with or without Divine help) from a single founding pair. A new type could begin from a population rather than a pair. And that population could start with more diversity than any one male and female founder. Thus calculations back to the time when there was only a single couple would be calculations back to the time of a fictional event. 

For example, suppose someone took a handful of Shih-tzus and bred them with a handful of Corgis. These are dog breeds developed in the recent past, perhaps the last 500-800 years. But each breed was developed from opposite ends of the dog family which goes back over 10,000 years. If this population crossed and produced a new hybrid breed, the hybrid would have greater diversity than either founding population (Shih-tzus or Corgis). It may have features identical to neither. It would be its own thing. The breed may not exist until this year. But if we ran DNA tests it would show the MRCA to be even further back in the past than the date that either parent breed was developed. That's because it would go back to the time when Corgis and Shih-tzus had a common ancestor, maybe 10,000 years ago. It would just look like the population spent most of its existence in an "extreme bottleneck". 

That's just what the human population looks like. The human mtDNA and Y-DNA seem to have a MRCA which goes at least 100,000 years in the past and 200,000 years might be a closer estimate. At the same time, we are all very similar in our nuclear DNA. It looks like our species had a long, long bottleneck. So the current belief is that Homo Sapiens spent most of its existence with a very small effective breeding population size of only 10,000 or less (note that if all individuals in this group are genetically super-alike the actual population size could be much larger than this). 

It isn't reasonable to think that we descend from a population that barely hung on for such vast stretches of time and then suddenly found a way to become the most common and dominant large animal on the planet. The simpler explanation is that, however we got here whether creation or evolution, we are a relatively recent arrival. Younger even than our Y-haplogroup and mtDNA MCRA date would indicate. 

The evidence indicates that whatever was walking around on two legs that looked something like us 150,000 years ago was still very different from us in how they acted, spoke, and perhaps in other ways. Whether this is because we are the evolutionary product of small segments of two hominid populations subsequently mixing and producing something new, or God creating something new in a small population of existing hominids, or even creating them anew with the barest of genetic information as a template, the bottom line is that there is no reason to think "humans" (in the sense of beings like us) go back to these calculated MRCA dates. Those dates can give a false picture. Beings like us were formed, by whatever means, when the evidence indicates that there were beings around who acted and thought like us. And that is much closer to 40K ago than 150K ago.

In conclusion, unless a species originated from a pair, MRCA for mtDNA and Y-haplogroups don't tell us anything about the origin of a species. They are just a measurement of time back to an event that never existed. This is because they could represent a time long after that species was formed (as with gorillas) or a time long before one was formed, as well may be the case with humans.

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(note: the Christ-centered model for early Genesis has humanity starting as a population and not just a single pair as it has people inside the Garden- Adam and Eve- and people outside the garden- whoever Cain was afraid of)

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Creation-Evolution Wars. To Some Extent a False Dichotomy?

Why the Christ-Centered Model Destroys Skeptic's Arguments on Christ

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