Adam and Eve vs. ... contd

[last paragraph]Given however that the world was created,  a perfectly possible event, [though congressmen do not believe in six day creation because they know they could never do anything in six days] the question turns to whether the human race could indeed trace back to two original ancestors.  Oddly,  in the interview I mentioned on PBS today, the professor began to talk about that quite remarkable reality as though he had said nothing worth noting!  Now if a Creationist speaks of Adam and Eve,  Adam named for the red clay he was formed from, and Eve called the mother of all living, they are accused of dealing with fable, but the Paleontologist is merely referring to scientific theory.]

Two Original Parents

The notion of two original parents though is not at all far afield from current scientific thinking.  In 2003, Time Magazine discussed investigations which trace DNA all the way back to an original pair.  Now whether the success of such an investigation will ever be reached is doubtful due to the state of our methods,  but the fact that at least theoretical the pair could be traced back is under active and open discussion.   The only way there would not be two original parents with human DNA (which is implausible) would be with a strong case for a transitional type,  but that case has all but died:  every transitional type that has been found, has within two decades been discovered as deliberate hoaxes, presumably because even evolutionists know that it is the one string running through their darwinian tapestry that if pulled causes the whole thing to unravel.  If there had been true transitional types,  there would have been countless pieces of evidence by now, as almost 150 years of targeting that main research has been conducted with no results!

Isn't it odd also, that expeditions to find the beginning of human life,  focus on the area of the world where the Bible accounts Eden once was!!!  Genesis tells us both the borders of the place called Eden (the 'Gan' in Hebrew), and yet also makes it clear that without Christ we will not be finding our way back:

10 And a river went out of Edento water the garden; and from thence it was parted , and became into four heads. 11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. 13 And the name of thesecond river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. 14 And the nameof the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river isEuphrates.                                                 and 3:23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken . 24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way , to keep the way of the tree of life.  In the days when I considered the story of Adam and Eve only a fable,  my reasoning was primarily that of most:  that since we do not see talking serpents and flaming angels, that we must put aside the story to 'allegory' instead of history : this is the legacy of Bultmann's  Higher Criticism from Tubingen in which if something does not make sense to us in the Scriptures, it must bow to us instead of vice versa: in other words human reason determines truth in God's Word instead of God's Word forming and making human reason: it is the substance of the classical debate between Sola Scriptura!  and Fides Et Ratio,  the great divide of the authority of the Word vs. the authority of man.  This was the thesis and antithesis of the Garden: begun in Eden, it continues till today about precisely who is sovereign in life, the world and the universe. We have a problem with a speaking serpent in the Garden because as noted, we have never seen one.  We see serpents all the time, but they are often small, quiet save for a rattle or rasp, and they slither away with most of us standing in fear or revulsion, and we certainly do not take a great deal of time to know them.  The Serpent in the garden though is mentioned as  obviously of a different nature than the ones we see today, even the biggest, because he knows in the most sinister way how to reason away God's Word.  He also seems to know, though he deceitfully twists it to his line of reasoning, a little bit more about God and heaven than one would think,  and one can surmise that even though he was 'cast down from heaven' and Jesus reports seeing him fall,  that his war against God is not over: he wishes to take the heart and soul of the ones God created to love.   . 4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die : 5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened , and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
He is calling God a liar, because God said they would die if they ate,  and he is trying to  inculcate his own motives against God: to become as God.   The serpent elswhere is described not as a revulsive thing, but as ornate:     12 Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, andsay unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. 13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering,the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created . 14 Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth ; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. 15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created , till iniquity was found in thee. 16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned : therefore I will cast thee a sprofane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. 17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee. Ezekiel 28: 12-17 The serpent then was of a different KIND than modern serpents, and yet at the same time the forerunner, as God promised he would be distinctly abased:  And the LORD God said unto theserpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go , and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: Gen 3:14 The remnant form of the serpent in most creates revulsion and we have an innate fear unless we overcome it, to stay away from snakes, even when they are harmless.  The fallen angel, the devil or Satan (shatan in Hebrew) continues to war in the divine, but the form, whether it is the current species or not still serves a reminder to the cost to all of the Fall of man. This study is not particularly though about the Fall or the meaning of it, since most Christians are aware of its implications and our need for redemption because of it.  The question is whether it is plausible and can be easily received as HISTORY and not mythology, and I am quite certain that it can.   The issue at hand is whether we can accept as reality something we have not seen before and that is the central issue of faith:  that faith is "the substance of things not seen".   When I first became a Christian, I had heard of 'faith healings' but I did not believe in them.  I was a psychologist, a professor, and we liked to throw around words like 'empirical evidence' and 'operational definitions'. We tested what we could see and verify and argued even about that.  i have seen since both true and false healings:  but when I first saw a real healing, i was dumbfounded and overjoyed.  The first thought a doubting person has is that the event is 'rigged' or set up to look true, and one cannot say that does not occur,even too often.  Real healings though do absolutely occur by spoken word in the Holy Spirit or the laying on of hands, and once I saw the thing,  I never doubted the true again, though it was not the highest point in faith for me nor doubting Thomas.    I saw what I believed could not possibly be.  It just could not, but there it was in front of me, and not just that once but many times later because Jesus, the healer has never ceased to exist via the indwelling Holy Spirit of God. likewise, we cannot imagine nor fathom except in Hollywood or storybook fantasies, that such things could be as 'talking serpents'  but this one before all form was erased was a wonder to look at,  and had a divine persona:  he was jealous, vain, proud, deceitful and cruel and heartless:  he began immediately to try vindictively to take the human race with him.  This is sheer speculation and i will not make doctrine of it, but I wonder, since he was cursed losing his form and beauty,  whether that is not the reason he tries to align himself with earthly power and royalty, 'borrowing' their countenance because his own is no more, or whether part of the unknown interchange between God and Satan about the Messiah required a 'visage so marred'  that he was not desired:  again, don't make doctrine of it, but it would make sense. So the problem then with our belief, is not callous denial,  but that something is reported in Scripture which we cannot imagine and did not see in this world, but that does not mean that it was not the case.   The great deceiver,  the anti-christ or the 'against-Christ' like man though moreso lost his beateous form and countenance because of sin and separation. Adam and Eve as real People To me the most telling evidence that Adam and Eve were real people and not archetypes or myths, is that they had the most extensive genealogy ever kept,  and that to some extent from dates we do know, we can even closely estimate when they were on earth by flood dates by going backwards with the information in the Scriptures.  We know their children and thier lineage. We know the descent to Noah, and the descent afterwards:  myths do not carry extremely dateable genealogies. more to follow....