Arguing False Choices on Human Origins

Alice C. Linsley

In the following Facebook thread some friends asked excellent questions and I asked their permission to post this at JUST GENESIS. This is the sort of conversation that can help people sort through the issues.

The conversation arose in response to this article about the discovery of trillions of stone artifacts in Africa. The article was posted by a Christian geologist. If humans have been on the earth only 5000-6000 years, they could not have produced the volume of work found at the stone working sites in Africa. At 40 million artifacts per year, it would take a population of 100,000 individuals 100,000 years to produce just 4 trillion artifacts.

• Can there be a a conversation or a dialectic between the facts that make for one's faith and the narrative of "Genesis" that makes for the faith of "creationists" regarding the age of the earth and the origin of man. Can such a dialogue be possible?  - Sidney Davis

  
  
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  Alice Linsley Everything is possible, Sidney, but some conversations are less possible than others. Defining the term "creationist" is where we have to begin. There are different groups: young earth creationism, which is neither scientific nor Biblical; theistic creationism which is very popular with Evangelicals who accept evolutionary theories, some of which have no material support; old earth creationists who believe the Creator initiated creative or generative processes that resulted in humans, and old earth creationists who believe that humans represent a special creation, a sort of crown on the creation pyramid. Some of these are mutually exclusive positions and a dialectic between them is virtually impossible. I find it a waste of time to discuss Genesis with people who believe that the earth is only 6000 years old.
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Read it all here.