Creation Moment 3/21/2021 - Is "pre-adamite" nonsense coming back via youtube "preachers"?

What was thought to be a Flash-in-the-Pan short lived heresy of 2 to 3 hundred years ago---is again--through the internet--making a small come back among those who want their intellectual senses tantalized by what they think is something new and exciting....

"Arguments from Biblical scholars that find ways of reading ancient

near Eastern or evolutionary ideas into the text of Genesis are becoming popular amongst lay people and Christian apologists. .... theistic evolutionist Michael Jones (Inspiring Philosophy) has used several of these arguments to try and refute “young earth creation” (Biblical creation). 

Based on the work of Old Testament scholars John Walton and Michael Heiser, Jones argues that Genesis 1 implies there were more people around than Adam and Eve (i.e., pre-Adamites) and that, therefore, in Genesis 2, which he believes is a sequel to Genesis 1,2 God elects Adam and Eve out of that group of people...

 

HERETIC Michael Jones looking for weak minded Christians in the dark corners of cyberspace

While this view may seem appealing to those who want to accommodate evolutionary thinking with the Bible, there are several problems with it. 

 

Genesis 1 gives us a historical account of the creation of the world that teaches God created all things in six 24-hour days (For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.  Exodus 20:11). 

The flow of the creation account in Genesis 1 leads us to the

pinnacle of God’s creation on day six, when he creates man in his own image (Genesis 1:26–28).

 

Q: Do these verses suggest there were more than two people on earth at this point? 

A: No, since this is day six, mankind was the first couple (Adam and Eve). 

 

---In Genesis 1:26, “man” (ʾādām, is without the article, i.e., anarthrous) refers to mankind because, after using the singular “ʾādām,” it says “let them (plural) have dominion . . .” 

---Then in Genesis 1:27, “the man” (hāʾādām, with the article, i.e., arthrous) is used, 

--------which is followed by “ . . . in the image of God he created him (singular),” 

--------then “male and female, he created them (plural).” 

---Then in Adam’s genealogy, Genesis 5:1–5, it is always anarthrous “ʾādām.” In Genesis 5:1, “ʾādām” (twice) refers to the first man because it refers to “him.” 

---In Genesis 5:2, it refers to “male and female . . . them,” who were “called “ʾādām” when they were created. So “ʾādām” refers to both male and female, but they were the first two humans (Adam and Eve). 

---In Genesis 5:3–5, “ʾādām” clearly refers to the first man, Adam, who fathered Seth and had other sons and daughters. 

---The key to understanding 2:4 is in the opening Hebrew phrase tôlĕdōt (“This is the history of”), as it formulates the structure of the book of Genesis. A number of scholars recognize that here tôlĕdōt serves as a heading that introduces a new section of the narrative.  Interestingly, this is the only time the phrase tôlĕdōt occurs without a personal name, the reason being that “Adam had no human predecessors.”

---Like a craftsman who shapes his material, the LORD God “formed”(yāṣar) the man from the “dust” (ʿāpār) of the ground. The word “dust” is not a metaphor. It can only mean literal dust in the context of Genesis 2–3 because it is to dust that Adam will return due to his disobedience (Genesis 3:19; cf. Job 34:14-15). 

---After the formation of man from the dust of the ground, he is given human life when the LORD God breathes into him the breath of life (cf. Genesis 6:17, 7:15, 22), which is “a clear indication of life—and thereby the lifeless body became a living soul, a living being.” 

---Adam consists then of the material (dust) and immaterial (breath of life). 

---It was not until the LORD God breathed into Adam that he became a living creature (as Paul also indicates in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “the first man Adam became a living soul”)." AIG

Creation Moment 10/13/2020 - Winchell's Wretched Heresy

....even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies... 2 Peter 2:1

"Winchell, unlike Agassiz, argued that evolution was the means by

which God created our ordered world that is now teeming with life. He also taught many ideas now shown to be false. 

One is he used Haeckel’s claim based on his fraudulent embryo drawings to prove ontology recapitulates phylogeny to show human fetuses successively evolved into a fish, a quadruped, a monkey, and a man, thereby rehearsing their evolutionary history (Whedon 1874, 517). 

 

Winchell first published his pre-Adamite theory when a professor at the Methodist Vanderbilt University. The Vanderbilt administrators recognized that his theory, as detailed in Winchell’s 1874 treatise and also his 1880 pre-Adamite book, were both unbiblical and racist. (Davenport 1948, 516). 

 

Another problem these administrators faced was the question, if Blacks were not descendants of Adam, Christ’s sacrifice would not be valid for them, thus “Black people had no claim to the messianic promise—an unacceptable postulate for Christians, even in a racist society” (Farrelly 2008, 684).

 

In The Shame of Tennessee, science writer Maynard Shipley wrote that the “war on evolution in Tennessee” began “when the trustees of Vanderbilt University unceremoniously dismissed Prof. Alexander Winchell from the faculty. They had been thoroughly alarmed upon discovering that an evolutionary wolf had been let loose among the Fundamentalist lambs” of Vanderbilt" (Shipley 1927, 187).

 

The result of his termination was “universal criticism from the

A leaflet at a KKK event in Bryan, Ohio, in the late 1990s. The other side of the leaflet consisted of a long set of references from leading science journals and respected scientists supporting the claims made on the front. Of course, most all of the references were from literature printed before 1950.

secular, and even part of the religious press” (Harrington 1891, 7).

The end result of Winchell’s attempt to harmonize evolution and theism produced a form of theistic evolution that resulted in supporting, and openly encouraging, racism in America and elsewhere. 

 

Winchell’s fame, his description of Black inferiority, and the intensity of his disgust at miscegenation [interracial marriage] made racists “exuberant,” because they could now claim not only that science justified their racism, but it was supported by a “highly esteemed” scientist from one of the premiere American universities, the University of Michigan (Livingstone 2008, 188). 

Winchell devoted lengthy expositions to Negro inferiority in his pre-Adamite essays, which were often been reprinted by the KKK.

In one such publication, Winchell wrote:

The Negroes have made us a great deal of trouble. . . . The anatomical structure of the Negro is inferior. . . . the black skin, the elongated and oblique pelvis—these are all characteristics in which, so far as the Negro diverges from the White man, he approximates the African apes . . . . I am not responsible for the inferiority of the Negro. I am responsible if I ignore the facts. I am culpable if I hold him to the same standard as the White man. (Winchell 1878, 240)

His Proof of Negro Inferiority book, one of the most popular racist booklets still in use today, is complete with pictures purportedly showing how close Negro brains are to ape brains and Negro-face profiles are to ape-face profiles (Winchell 1982). The book, reprinted a few years ago by a white supremacist group, concludes that the Negro race is biologically inferior, and that the Hottentots are biologically close to gorillas."

AIG

Creation Moment 10/12/2020 - When Agassiz Blended Evolution & Scripture

 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies... 2 Peter 2:1

"The most eminent nineteenth century biologist was Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard.

Agassiz concluded that Adam and Eve fathered one race, the white race, and a separate pair of humans fathered the black races, thus, in his mind at least, satisfying both the Bible and the-then general consensus of science of the inferiority of some people groups (Agassiz 1850b, 184–185). 

Much to the chagrin of evolutionists today, the proof of this view was the then scientific consensus that confirmed major differences in intelligence and other traits which Darwinists used to prove evolution (Chapman 1873, 162–174). Agassiz thus explained the differences between Whites and Blacks as the result of fixed inborn differences due to the separate creations of the races. He first presented these views in the March 1850 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Charleston, North Carolina (Lurie 1960, 260).

Agassiz acknowledged the common belief that all humans have descended from Adam and Eve was both derived from the authority of the Mosaic record and widely accepted, but nevertheless he argued “that this view was flawed” (Agassiz, 1850c, 134–135). Agassiz concluded

What is said of animals and plants in the first chapter of

Genesis, what is mentioned of the preservation of these animals and plants at the time of the deluge, relates chiefly to organized beings placed about Adam and Eve, and those which their progeny had domesticated, and which lived with them in closer connection. That Adam and Eve were neither the only nor the first human beings created is intimated in the statement of Moses himself, where Cain is represented to us as wandering among foreign nations after he was cursed, and taking a wife from the people of Nod, where he built a city, certainly with more assistance than that of his two brothers. (Agassiz, 1850b, 184–185)

Agassiz failed to realize that if the Black “race” was “created” before the Flood, all persons, Black or White, not on the Ark would not have living descendants unless one or more of the Ark inhabitants mated to someone on the Ark, which violates his concerns about interbreeding. Agassiz, cognizant of pre-Charles Darwinian evolutionary writings, such as by Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Robert Chambers, concluded

the view of mankind as originating from a single pair, Adam

and Eve . . . is neither a Biblical view nor a correct view, nor one agreeing with the results of science, and our profound veneration for the Sacred Scriptures prompts us to pronounce the prevailing view of the origin of man, animals, and plants as a mere human hypothesis, not entitled to more consideration than belongs to most theories framed in the infancy of science . . . we are satisfied that he never meant to say that all men originated from a single pair, Adam and Eve. (Agassiz, 1850b, 185 )

Agassiz described Blacks as, by nature, “submissive, obsequious and imitative” (Agassiz 1850c, 144), and, therefore, the question is how we should treat

the different races in consequence of their primitive difference . . . but, for our own part, we entertain not the slightest doubt that human affairs with reference to the colored races would be far more judiciously conducted, if, in our intercourse with them, we were guided by a full consciousness of the real difference existing between us and them (Agassiz 1850c, 144)

Consequently, according to a leading authority on Agassiz, Edward Lurie, it was

mere ‘mock philanthropy’ to consider them equal to whites. Africans, for instance, had been in contact with whites for thousands of years, yet were averse to civilization influences. White relations with colored peoples would be conducted more intelligently if the fundamental differences between human types were realized and understood. (Lurie 1960, 261–262)

Agassiz acknowledged the equality of the descendants of Adam, but concluded “the Fuegians, Hottentots, and the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania] . . . must have originated where they occur . . . . [W]e have evidence of primitive races, extending everywhere.” (Agassiz 1850c, 127, 128)

The evidence of “primitive races, extending everywhere” was reasoned from the observation that wherever men have migrated,

they met aboriginal people existing in the parts of the world which they migrate to (see Agassiz, 1850b 132). Agassiz never openly supported slavery and felt his views on polygenism were not political, but his polygenism views clearly emboldened slavery proponents (Jackson and Weidman, 51).

The weight of Agassiz’s scientific authority confirmed the imprimatur of science to racism without violating the Bible, a view widely accepted in the slaveholding pre-Civil War South. Pre-Adamism was “an idea that could be used equally to relieve the tensions of internal biblical exegesis and rationalize the politics of racial ideology (Harrold 1991, 3; Livingstone 1987, 42). His ideas were contrary to the belief that all people groups were equal because all humans are children of Adam and Eve (Chapman 1873).

 

"Whenever I think of Agassiz I can only recall his statue buried in

the pavement in front of the Stanford zoology building following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a tragicomic reminder of a once famous scientist who ended up irrelevant even to a fellow Darwin doubter like American science polymath James Dwight Dana. ....Agassiz became a lamentable figure lost in the murky shadows of his own Platonist forms.” And there he will likely remain."

AIG/EV&V