Hernando
The book rests on an interesting hypothesis that aims to reconcile the traditional creationism account from Christianity with the account of evolutionary science regarding Adam and Eve , common ancestry and human evolution.
Joss tries to focus in three creationist premises:
- We all descend from a pair of ancestors.
- These ancestors (Adam and Eve) were de novo created.
- These ancestors are recent, 10.000 to 6000 years ago.
On the surface, his conclusions seem fully compatible with the mainstream science of evolution and common ancestors, which states that we arise as a population (not a couple) in the distant past and through an evolutionary process.
How so?.
He bases his assumption on the fact that both accounts are talking about different things.
While the creationist account focuses on Adam and Eve, who were a couple created de novo by God in a specific place (the Garden), there were actually other people before them, who were living outside this Garden, and are the ones that evolutionary science is referring to.
As long as you can accept the assumption that the creationist account "could" be true, then I would definitely agree with him that you can in fact make that hypothesis altogether with the one accepted by evolutionary science. There are no conclusions for or against it. So a genealogical ancestry approach instead of genetic ancestry is a good way to make sense of this.
There are more details to it, but everything comes down to a set of established prepositions we have to accept beforehand. For example, what is the actual definition of human? For philosophy, theology, and biology, it could mean different things, and where they draw the line in the evolutionary process in which the first "human" really appeared is also different.
I like the author's willingness to accept the evidence while also trying to find (if any) common ground between his Christian faith and science regarding evolution, especially when he (as a computational biologist) understands the latter is a very solid, widely accepted, and hard-to-disprove theory.
The book rests on an interesting hypothesis that aims to reconcile the traditional creationism account from Christianity with the account of evolutionary science regarding Adam and Eve , common ancestry and human evolution.
Joss tries to focus in three creationist premises:
- We all descend from a pair of ancestors.
- These ancestors (Adam and Eve) were de novo created.
- These ancestors are recent, 10.000 to 6000 years ago.
On the surface, his conclusions seem fully compatible with the mainstream science of evolution and common ancestors, which states that we arise as a population (not a couple) in the distant past and through an evolutionary process.
How so?.
He bases his assumption on the fact that both accounts are talking about different things.
While the creationist account focuses on Adam and Eve, who were a couple created de novo by God in a specific place (the Garden), there were actually other people before them, who were living outside this Garden, and are the ones that evolutionary science is referring to.
As long as you can accept the assumption that the creationist account "could" be true, then I would definitely agree with him that you can in fact make that hypothesis altogether with the one accepted by evolutionary science. There are no conclusions for or against it. So a genealogical ancestry approach instead of genetic ancestry is a good way to make sense of this.
There are more details to it, but everything comes down to a set of established prepositions we have to accept beforehand. For example, what is the actual definition of human? For philosophy, theology, and biology, it could mean different things, and where they draw the line in the evolutionary process in which the first "human" really appeared is also different.
I like the author's willingness to accept the evidence while also trying to find (if any) common ground between his Christian faith and science regarding evolution, especially when he (as a computational biologist) understands the latter is a very solid, widely accepted, and hard-to-disprove theory.