Part III of a review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

 

Part III of a review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

In this third and final part of my review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve, I will survey and respond to both Walton's response to biblical arguments for an historical Adam and Eve as traditionally conceived as well as his positive arguments that Genesis 2 should not be taken to be describing the de novo creation of Adam and Eve. Parts I and II are already posted. My review of The Lost World of Genesis One is here.

If any fans of Walton's work read these reviews, it is possible that they will think all kinds of things--that I am unqualified, that I am unfair, that I have misunderstood. However, I hope that one thing is clear: I have taken Walton's work, not to say his influence, with sufficient seriousness to devote many, many hours to a sincere and careful attempt to understand, represent, and respond to his positions. I submit that this work rates, at a minimum, due consideration rather than hasty dismissal.

Walton's one textual argument with any force

The only positive textual argument Walton musters (for the conclusion that there were many humans other than Adam at the time that God placed Adam and Eve in the garden) that has any force is the age-old question of where Cain got his wife and who the other people were of whom Cain was afraid and with whom Cain built a city in Genesis 4:14-17 (p. 64). For that matter, one could state part of this same question as where Seth got his wife, since even if Cain married a niece, the niece had to come from somewhere.

These questions are answerable from the traditional perspective, as Walton does recognize. For example, Cain and/or Seth probably married their sisters, and this concept should not be dismissed out of hand. (Sarah was Abraham's half-sister.) I have argued elsewhere that there would be an independent, functional reason (I beg the reader to understand what I mean by this) for God to have created Adam with extra genetic diversity (no, this is not a "belly-button" argument, see "independent, functional reason"). Hence Cain's and Seth's "sisters" may not have been their genetic siblings. As for who the other people were of whom Cain was afraid, Cain may well have been looking forward to the day when there would be more people, descendants of Adam, who would take blood vengeance (a concept well-known in the ancient world) for his fratricide. As for "building a city," why should we take it that this occurred immediately after Cain's murder of Abel? Given the long times that the people in these chapters are said to live, there would have been lots of opportunity in Cain's lifetime for there to be enough people for him to build a city with.

To be sure, these answers are not in the text, which is why this textual argument has any force at all and why it is a puzzle for the traditional view. When we're interpreting Scripture, though, we have to go with the force of all the evidence taken together. If this puzzle is the worst Scriptural problem the traditional view (that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans) has to deal with, that is not much considering the large amount of evidence that they were literally the first humans. Since Walton tries to explain away this other evidence as well, we have to ask whether he deals convincingly with it.

God was "using" false contemporary beliefs "as a framework"

As I mentioned before, Walton does not fall back on this rather desperate move very often. More often he tries to argue that the text would not even have been understood by its original author and audience to mean something material about the origins of man, the various aspects of the cosmos, etc. But occasionally he can't get around it.

This is what he does when it comes to Luke 3, Genesis 5, and I Chron. 1:

It would not be surprising if Israelites in Old Testament and New Testament times believed that Adam was the first human. The hermeneutical issue, however, is more subtle. Were they teaching that Adam was the first human being? Were they building theology on that concept? Or is God simply using their contemporary concepts as a framework for communication?...[W]hile the Bible could be read as suggesting that Adam was the first human being, it is more debatable whether it is making a scientific claim that would controvert the possibility that modern humanity is descended from a pool of common ancestors as indicated by the genetic evidence. (p. 188-9 Bold is my emphasis)

He even goes so far as to use the language of God's "accommodating their current thinking" when he argues that, though he believes in an historical Adam (in some sense) he does not even think that such a belief is mandated by the doctrine of inerrancy.

If we simply say that inerrancy demands that we accept a histoical Adam because he is mentioned in the genealogies, we are failing to distinguish between that which the Old Testament authors may have incidentally believed and that which the Bible affirms as its authoritative teaching. Where might God be accommodating their current thinking? (p. 201, my emphasis)

It is to this notion of God's "accommodating" false current thinking that Walton is evidently alluding when he discusses the genealogies and makes his own interpretation--that Adam was historical but was not actually the first man.

It is rather surprising that Walton ever falls back on this notion, given that he has hammered at the beginning of the book on the idea that we ought to understand and accept the text as the original human author would have understood and intended it:

God vested his authority in a human author [LM: this is a very strong claim], so we must consider what the human author intended to communicate if we want to understand God's message. Two voices speak, but the human author is our doorway into the room of God's meaning and message. (p. 14)

But of course we have no reason to doubt that Moses, the author of I Chronicles, and in particular Luke did intend to communicate that Adam actually was the first man. In fact, since Walton talks about God's "using their contemporary concepts as a framework for communication," he comes pretty close to admitting that the human authors would have intended to communicate exactly that. So, if what the human author intended to communicate is God's message, we should presumably take it that God intended to communicate (since, e.g., Luke apparently intended to communicate) that Adam was literally the first man. It is a pretty big switcheroo for Walton to imply that we needn't bother with the ideas of the original audience and author about whether Adam was the first man, because God was just using their (probably false) contemporary concepts "as a framework for communication."

Moreover, no one would even consider such an idea unless convinced that it is "indicated by the genetic evidence." In other words, the force of the textual arguments is what it is, and it is clearly in the direction of taking Adam actually to have been the first man. To be clear: I don't rule out the possibility that one could be forced, reluctantly, by scientific considerations to reinterpret a text in an unnatural way, but if so, one should just say that that is what one is (reluctantly) doing, not sugarcoat the matter or pretend that the prima facie meaning of the text does not really have the force that it has.

A similar problem emerges in Walton's discussion of Paul's statement in I Timothy that the man was formed first. The force of Paul's statement is quite clear and supports a physically made Adam. Walton's response to the passage, on the other hand, is radically unclear. He says (pp. 94-95) that there are three options. Either Paul is saying that "all men were formed first as Adam was formed first" (obviously false), that a male "by his created nature is first" (probably closer to what Paul meant but still not grappling with the straightforward issue), or that Paul is "using Adam and Eve as illustrations for the Ephesians," which is the option Walton says he favors. But what does that mean if Paul isn't actually taking it to be true that the man was formed first? Oddly enough, on these pages where Walton is allegedly discussing the passage in detail, he can't seem to bring himself to write clearly that one obvious option is that Paul was really saying that Adam was physically formed first. Perhaps Walton's claim is that Paul is "using Adam and Eve as illustrations" without actually intending to say that Adam was formed first (which is in direct conflict with the text) or that it doesn't matter if Paul really meant that Adam was formed first, because God was "working with" Paul's false concepts to make some point (er, that women shouldn't be pastors). Another possibility (which Walton may be hinting at obscurely on p. 100) is that he takes Paul to be alluding to Adam and Eve as figures in a partly non-literal story which the author and his readers both know, as we might refer to Robin Hood's bow or William Tell's apple. This, again, is nowhere hinted in the text and would be an obviously ad hoc dodge. In fact, it is difficult to see how Paul could use Adam and Eve's formation as an argument against women's ordination if in fact he did not think Adam was formed first! One normally would not make an argument from a purely literary allusion. In fact, to answer Walton's question above, yes, Paul is building theology on the claim that Adam was the first human being and formed before Eve.

Reinterpretation of Genesis 2

Genesis 2:7 says, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." The chapter goes on to tell of the naming of the animals by Adam and the forming of Eve, which I will discuss below. Prima facie, these forming accounts sound very much like physical special creation. Even if one takes it that there may be some degree of metaphor involved in "forming out of the dust of the ground," what this does not sound like is merely describing God's "forming" Adam in the womb of a mother (p. 76). (Indeed, if Adam was one of a group of hominids who were given the image of God, as an ensoulment view would suggest, Adam was presumably "formed" in the womb of his mother as a non-human animal; hence his initial "forming" in the womb cannot be archetypal for all human beings! Walton does not seem to have considered this glitch and never addresses it.)

There is no slightest hint in Genesis 2 or in chapter 1 of Adam's mother being around or of a lengthy pre-existing process by which he came into physical existence. Moreover, the statement that Adam was formed from the dust of the ground and that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, in the absence of any textual reason to think of Adam as being born by a natural process, makes the description of Adam's "forming" quite different from statements elsewhere in Scripture that God forms or molds other human individuals. (E.g. Psalm 139, Job 10:9)

Walton, however, insists at length that, in the words of his chapter title for chapter 8, "Forming from dust and building from rib are archetypal claims and not claims of material origins." Here are a few of his arguments that Genesis 2 doesn't actually describe the material creation of man:

Walton claims (pp. 72-73) that the text would not claim that man was formed from dust if a "hands-on" interpretation were intended:

A common alternative to thinking in terms of chemistry is to understand the statement in the text as referring to craftsmanship. In this way of thinking, the imagery is of a 'hands-on' God who has fashioned his creature with loving care and then bestowed on him the breath of life. [LM: Yep, sounds just about right.] The major problem with this is that the ingredient chosen would not make sense if the main idea were craftsmanship. One shapes clay, not dust. The latter is impervious to being shaped by its very nature.(p. 73)

But this is mere caviling. If we are to get into the dusty nitty-gritty, one can of course add water to dust. I doubt that anyone has ever thought that the text was using, to imply divine craftsmanship, the picture of God trying to shape completely dry dust into a form! This is a really trivial complaint. Second, it is quite remarkable that Walton should make this argument given that in the very next chapter he talks about ANE accounts in which humans are said to be formed from clay by the gods. Walton states that these accounts, too, show "an inclination to think about human origins in archetypal terms in the ancient world" (p. 83). In fact, back in TLWOG1 he has also talked about the forming of man from clay in ANE accounts and explicitly argued, "These ingredients communicate instead [of communicating what man was made of] the important issues of identity and relationship." (TLWOG1 p. 32)

So it doesn't matter whether clay is said to be the element or not! Walton draws a conclusion about archetypal or functional origin accounts as opposed to material origins either way! Hence, his complaint about dust rather than clay is shown to be just another part of his ad hoc approach--whatever the text says, clay or not-clay, absence or presence of pre-existing material (see review of TLWOG1), the conclusion is always the same: This is not about material origins!

Besides this argument about dust rather than clay, Walton also argues that the Hebrew word translated "formed" in "God formed man out of the dust of the ground" would be better translated "planned." "God planned the human from the dust of the ground." Therefore, it should not be taken to indicate the de novo creation of Adam. (p. 218, note 4) To support this Walton does a word study of the Hebrew ysr (which I will transliterate in the more common way as yatsar for ease of reading) used for "formed" in Gen. 2:7. Walton's modus operandi here is similar to his approach to asa, discussed in the review of TLWOG1.

He points out that yatsar is used in a number of places in Scripture to refer to God's preparing or ordaining things (like all the days of our lives, the nation of Israel, a series of events) or making something immaterial (such as the human spirit), all of which is quite true. However, just as Walton did not explain that asa is used as a verb repeatedly (even more than yatsar, as it happens) to describe literal human craftsmanship and artisanship, as in the making of the furnishings of the tabernacle, so here he leaves out of account relevant information about yatsar.

Strong's exhaustive concordance defines yatsar as "to mould into a form; especially as a potter; figuratively, to determine (i.e. Form a resolution)." What this strongly (pun intended) suggests is that yatsar considered as a verb is much like our English word "fashion." The concept of craftsmanship is primary. Uses of the word to mean "determine" or "plan" are the derivative or figurative uses, as when we say, "He fashioned a plan." It is precisely backwards to take the figurative use, to treat it as if it is the primary meaning, and to apply it in a case where the text explicitly states that something was "formed/fashioned from" some other substance. That context suggests that it should not be translated as "prepared" or "planned"! In the context of Genesis 2:7, the translation "formed" or even "fashioned" is obviously correct, not some sort of anachronistic aberration. That is presumably why that is how English translations uniformly translate the word in that place!

In Isaiah 44:9-10, the word yatsar is used for fashioning an idol or graven image. Isaiah 44:12 uses the word for a smith's fashioning a piece of metal over heat by pounding it with hammers! Extremely relevant is Psalm 95:5, which says of God, "His hands formed the dry land." No, I am not suggesting that God (aside from the Incarnation) has hands. I am, however, pointing out the association of "formed" with "hands." Yatsar appears to be a hands-on word, and this fits very well with its use in Genesis 2:7--"formed man from the dust of the ground." Like many hands-on words (such as "fashion"), yatsar can be used figuratively. But Walton's references to places where the figurative translation like "ordain" or "prepare" is suggested by context merely causes confusion and misdirection regarding Genesis 2, where the context suggests "formed," precisely as in, "His hands formed the dry land."

There is more linguistic evidence to this effect. Yatsar can also be used as a noun, and as a noun, it means "potter." It is used to mean "potter" again and again in the Old Testament (Isaiah 29:6, 30:14, Jeremiah 18:4, Zechariah 11:13, and others). Again, this fits very well with the "hands-on" nature of the verb. As "baker" in English is "one who bakes," "potter" in OT Hebrew evidently was a "hands-on fashioner." A relevant verse here is Isaiah 45:9, where it is used in a metaphor of God as the potter and man as unruly clay (!) talking back to God:

Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker-- An earthenware vessel among the vessels of earth! Will the clay say to the potter, "What are you doing?" Or the thing you are making say, "He has no hands."? (NASB)

Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands? (KJV)

This information about yatsar makes Walton's caviling about the use of dust rather than clay and his insistence that "dust" must mean completely dry dust, incapable of being fashioned, all the more obviously a distraction. Genesis 2:7 uses a verb that means to fashion, as a potter fashions clay, and it describes a physical substance out of which man is said to be fashioned. The information about yatsar, taken as a whole, is quite consistent, and the hands-on implication of the verse could scarcely be clearer.

Moving on to Eve: Genesis 2 says,

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

Here Walton does a word study on the word tsela, translated "rib" in most English translations. In this case he is fairly thorough in his presentation of data, but his conclusions are tendentious and unjustified. Walton points out that the word in Hebrew and its cognate in Akkadian more often refer to a side of something, such as the side of the tabernacle in descriptions in Exodus, or as we would use the phrase "a side of beef," than to a single rib. He states that in Akkadian the word refers, though rarely, to "a single rib." He also admits that in the Bible the word is sometimes used to refer to planks or beams of a building (which to my mind fits pretty well with taking it to mean "rib" in Genesis 2). He also points out that older translations, such as the Aramaic targums, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate use a word for translating this verse that can mean either "rib" or "side."

Remarkably, from this mixture of evidence Walton concludes that we must take the word to mean that God cut off Adam's entire side if the verse is taken to refer to the material creation of Eve! "[W]e would have to conclude that God took one of Adam's sides--likely meaning he cut Adam in half and from one side built the woman." He then uses this extreme and narrow interpretation to ridicule any material interpretation of the formation of Eve (p. 79).

But why should the fact that tsela can mean the side of a building or half of a rib cage be used to derive this radical interpretation of the passage and then make an argument? The fact that the word can also mean a single rib, can mean some boards or planks (or even one board or plank?) combined with the careful description in the passage of removing one tsela and closing up the flesh at that place indicates that God's taking a rib or, at most, a portion of Adam's side, is a perfectly legitimate interpretation.

Walton also argues (p. 77) that, since Adam says that Eve is "flesh of his flesh" as well as "bone of his bone" the word tsela cannot refer to "a rib." But this, again, is a kind of caviling. Even from the most narrowly literal perspective, one can speak of beef ribs that also include some flesh with them! Moreover, the entire phrase "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" means that Eve was made from Adam's body. Indeed the word for "flesh" can be translated to mean "body," as in the very next verse, Genesis 2:24, where man and woman's coming together is said to make "one flesh," which of course does not mean to refer to molecules of flesh as opposed to bone! Obviously "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" is an example of Hebrew parallelism (Hebrew, especially poetry, uses parallelism all the time) to emphasize Eve's physical derivation from Adam. To use it against the translation "rib" in the previous verse is not a responsible argument. And against the translation/interpretation "part of his side" (given in one modern translation), this weak argument cannot even be mounted in the first place.

Walton takes these weak arguments about tsela and uses them, together with the fact that the Bible says that God placed Adam into a deep sleep, to argue for the following extremely strange and textually unmotivated conclusion:

From these data it is easy to conclude that Adam's sleep has prepared him for a visionary experience rather than for a surgical procedure. The descriptions of himself being cut in half and the woman being built from the other half (Gen 2:21-22) would refer not to something he physically experienced but to something that he saw in a vision. It would therefore not to describe a material event but would give him an understanding of an important reality, which he expresses eloquently in Genesis 2:23. Consequently, we would then be able to conclude that the text does not describe the material origin of Eve. (p. 80)

Walton's additional piece of "data" is that being cast into a deep sleep can describe the prelude to a vision. He instances the following: Gen. 15:12, Job 4:13, Job 33:15, Daniel 8:18, 10:9. What Walton does not take account of is this obvious fact: In every single one of those verses the person who falls into a deep sleep is said either to be having a vision or dream (the Job verses are explicit) or to be spoken to by God or a divine messenger after falling into sleep (all the others). None of this is true of Adam! The text does not say that he was cast into a deep sleep and that God or a messenger of God then talked to him, and it does not say that he was having a vision. The entire "vision" idea is Walton's own construct, not remotely hinted at in Genesis 2. Walton argues that the Israelites "knew nothing of the use of anesthesia" (p. 79). In the interview he says, "Israelites aren't thinking surgery." (around minute 35 1/2) Considering that the use of opium may have been known in ancient Egypt and that there is evidence of very ancient skull surgery, the absolute confidence with which he makes these unqualified declarations that the Israelites would not have understood this in any surgical sense only serves to suggest that Walton is prone to make overstatements about ancient peoples. In any event, any Israelite hearer who is not simply stupid could recognize that placing into a deep sleep before opening a side would make sense, even if it did not lie in their previous actual experience. Moreover, even the idea that there may be some degree of metaphoric statement in these verses hardly justifies the wholesale construction of the theory that Adam was having a vision!

Interestingly, Walton insists on p. 128 and elsewhere that we should be very careful not to "read the text as if it is communicating in the world of Adam and Eve's knowledge because, as mentioned in previous chapters, we have an Israelite storyteller communicating to an Israelite audience." But his "vision" theory of the forming account of Eve in Genesis 2 switches without justification to the idea that the text is about something communicated to Adam.

All of these ideas--that the forming of Adam in Genesis 2 is compatible with his being born naturally and that the forming of Eve refers to a vision Adam had--are extremely strained interpretations of the texts. One simply cannot sustain the idea that the text does not clearly appear to be recounting the original, de novo formation of Adam and Eve. In fact, so clearly "hands-on" is the text, with detailed discussions of forming man (using the word used for a potter's formation of clay) from pre-existing materials, breathing life into his nostrils, taking out something from his side and making a woman, and so forth, that one has to wonder: What would Walton take to falsify or even disconfirm his view that Genesis 2 is not describing God's de novo, physical creation of man? If he can explain away all this evidence (and other evidence like the use of asa in chapter 1), what is there that he cannot explain away? Just how much more explicit and hands-on would the text need to be, if it even could be more explicit and hands-on, to communicate the physical special creation of the first man and woman?

Conclusion

People have various reasons for accepting full-scale theistic evolution of man with, at most, ensoulment for humans. Generally, these reasons are considered to be scientific. Christians may attempt to find reflective equilibrium by reinterpreting Scripture in a way that is somewhat strained in order to accommodate what they believe to be the requirements of science. What John H. Walton has attempted to do is to argue that the text of Scripture itself, and Christian theology rightly based thereon, do not actually support the traditional view. These arguments are supposed to show that it does not actually require strained interpretations of Scripture to accommodate the present claims of evolutionary science.

In that project, I have argued, he has failed. If you are a full-scale theistic evolutionist concerning mankind, I conclude that John H. Walton has not provided evidence to support your position beyond what you already had before he wrote a word of these books. If you were uncomfortable about your decision before, you should be just as uncomfortable after taking Walton's books into account. Walton has not provided new, expert reasons to bolster theistic evolutionism and show it to be "faithful to Scripture." Whatever your reasons are for it, they should be independent of Walton's arguments, for those arguments are weak reeds to lean upon.

To return, then, to my point in the first post in this three-part review: If you have read or listened to John H. Walton because you were wondering whether Scripture really requires you to challenge "the consensus of science," why not do something else now? You could ask whether solid empirical evidence really requires you to abandon the traditional view of the historical Adam. I submit that this would be at least as profitable a use of your further research and reading time.

A review copy of The Lost World of Adam and Eve was provided free of charge by Intervarsity Academic. A positive review was not required.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on March 24, 2015 10:06 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Adam and Eve) (evolution) (Genesis) (human origins) (origins)

Part II of a Review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

 

Part II of a Review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

In Part I I discussed some important theological, biblical, and ethical reasons for holding that man was physically, specially created, male and female, by God, as held by traditional interpretations of Genesis 1-2. There I defined what I called the "ensoulment view" of human evolution and the origin of the image of God in man. In this section I will relate John H. Walton's views in The Lost World of Adam and Eve to the considerations already given. Then I will lay out some more biblical evidence for the traditional view of the historical Adam and Eve. In Part III I will show how Walton responds to most of this biblical evidence (he does not actually respond to Jesus' words about marriage), and I will evaluate his arguments that the Bible does not teach the de novo creation of Adam and Eve.

Walton treats the ensoulment view as completely theologically orthodox and faithful to Scripture

John H. Walton's view on pure ensoulment (as I defined the term in Part I) has apparently changed between The Lost World of Genesis One (TLWOG1) and The Lost World of Adam and Eve (TLWOA&E). In the former, he said,

Whatever evolutionary processes led to the development of animal life, primates, and even prehuman hominids, my theological convictions lead me to posit substantive discontinuity between that process and the creation of the historical Adam and Eve. Rather than cause-and-effect continuity, there is material and spiritual discontinuity, though it remains difficult to articulate how God accomplished this. p. 139 (emphasis added)

This is the only endorsement that I have found anywhere in the two books of God's bringing about material discontinuity anywhere (after an initial moment of creation ex nihilo) in the creation of the world or the creatures, and I was much surprised to see it. Given that TLWOA&E was being touted already far and wide as removing all possibility of conflict between the "consensus of science" concerning human evolution and biblical theology, I wondered if Walton would continue to maintain a theological commitment to this material discontinuity in the second book. In fact, he does not.

Chapter 21 in TLWOA&E is entitled, "Humans could be viewed as distinct creatures and a special creation of God even if there was material continuity." So much for a theological requirement of material discontinuity. In TLWOA&E Walton states repeatedly that the imago dei is immaterial rather than material. Here (besides the title of Chapter 21) are multiple citations:

[T]he image of God is a gift of God, not neurologically or materially defined. (p. 42)

It is evident in all of these that the image of God is also an element of function (not material) that pertains to all people... (p. 89).

"Human distinctiveness is spiritual" section header, (p. 192)

The image of God provides yet another piece of evidence from the biblical text concerning the spiritual discontinuity that is characteristic of humans in contradistinction to other creatures. The four categories for understanding the image of God presented above [function, identity, substitution, relationship] are not mutually exclusive... (p. 196 emphasis added)

I believe that the image of God is something that is a direct, spiritually defined gift of God to humans. For those who believe that humans are biologically a product of change over time through common descent, the image of God would be given by God to humans at a particular time in that history. It would not be detectable in the fossil record or in the genome. (p. 194 emphasis added)

In his interview on TLWOA&E he says that the image of God is "not something that you inherit" (around minute 1:52)

These quotations constitute a fairly clear endorsement of the position that an ensoulment view would be compatible with a full affirmation of the image of God in man, since the image of God in man is strictly immaterial and indetectable by scientific means.

Walton does not say whether he personally believes in biological evolution of man, though he does say that the scientific evidence for biological continuity of man with non-human ancestors is "compelling and would be readily accepted" were it not for some people's beliefs about the teaching of the Bible (p. 182). As mentioned in the previous post, if the scientific evidence is "compelling," and if there is no theological reason to hold out for special material creation of man, it's difficult to see why he would not adopt a theistic evolution (cum ensoulment) view himself, but he is not fully clear on this.

It should be noted that when Walton says things like "[T]he analysis of the relationship of Genesis 1 and 2 has raised the possibility that the Adam and Eve account in Genesis 2 could have come after an en masse creation of humanity in Genesis 1 (chap. 7), though Adam and Eve should be considered as having been included in that group" (p. 183), the phrase "en masse creation of humanity" does not appear to mean material special creation. "Creation" (of man) is apparently compatible in Walton's view with the creation only of an immaterial imago dei. This would fit extremely well with what I have discussed and demonstrated at length--namely, that the creation week in Genesis 1 is not thought by Walton to be a description, even a vague description, of God's material creation or material shaping and altering of the world. Rather, it refers strictly to "functional creation"--invisible decrees that take place after the world is already materially in place and working. If the image of God is entirely spiritual and not scientifically detectable, and if the week of Genesis 1 is all supposed to be about God's doing invisible things, then the conferring of the image of God in Genesis 1 on day six of the week should be regarded as immaterial as well, even when referred to as "creation."

Walton does not address any of the metaphysical or ethical problems that arise from a sharp division between man's material nature, which could have evolved in its entirety, and a purely spiritual imago dei.

Walton holds that man was mortal before the fall

At first when I read Walton's interview with Christianity Today on Adam and Eve, I was very baffled. (The interview at CT is now behind a paywall but was not behind a paywall when I first accessed it. If someone wants an exact quote to support what I say when I refer to it, feel free to ask.) What did he mean by saying in that interview both that man was mortal before the fall and also that the tree of life was a remedy or antidote to death? He also says that the tree of life was an antidote to death for man, who was naturally mortal, in the interview on TLWOA&E (1:33).

He describes this theory that the tree of life was an antidote to human death in the earlier book as follows (TLWOG1, p. 100).

All of this indicates clearly that death did exist in the pre-Fall world--even though humans were not subject to it. But there is more. Human resistance to death was not the result of immortal bodies. The text indicates that we are formed from the dust of the earth, a statement of our mortality....No, the reason we were not subject to death was because an antidote had been provided to our natural mortality through the mechanism of the tree of life in the garden. When God specified the punishment for disobedience, he said that when they ate, they would be doomed to death...That punishment was carried out by banishing them from the garden and blocking access to the tree of life...Without access to the tree of life, humans were doomed to the natural mortality of their bodies and were therefore doomed to die. And so it was that death came through sin. (TLWOG1 pp. 100-101)

What does "humans were not subject to it" (death) mean there?

A conundrum arises from the contingency of this "antidote." Walton takes the Garden of Eden to have been a literal place here on earth. Both in the interview on TLWOA&E (minute 57 and 1:01) and in TLWOA&E itself (p. 126) Walton speculates on where, precisely, the Garden might have been physically located.

The theory that man was naturally mortal but was in some sense not subject to death prior to the fall because of the tree of life as an antidote is thus apparently intended to have some sort of literal, physical content, though we learn in TLWA&E that Walton is entirely open to the idea that it wasn't actually a tree. (pp. 124-125) Anyway, on the view Walton is advocating, this "something" of life was apparently actually located in the Garden of Eden and was an antidote to man's natural mortality. Man was denied access to it as a result of the fall, dooming all men to die. So anyone who couldn't get access to it, presumably, would die--of illness, accident, or age--since man was naturally mortal. This raises the question of whether there was anyone who lacked that necessary access.

I was even more baffled when, in TLWOA&E, I discovered that Walton states explicitly that man was subject to animal predation prior to the fall (pp. 53, 159-160)! Now, even if the time period after man existed in the image of God and before the fall is fairly short, if man is subject to animal predation, how could the existence of a "remedy" located in a specific garden guarantee that no human death would take place before the fall, so that man would be "not subject to" death prior to the fall? This is all the more confusing given that Walton states in multiple places that there could have been other humans besides Adam before the fall (see the above reference to en masse creation)--so many that there would be no conflict with the statements of some scientists about a minimal "bottleneck" of thousands in human evolutionary history. (TLWA&E pp. 64, 183, 181-189). In the interview on TLWOA&E (1:04 and following) Walton disclaims as entirely beyond his competence the question of whether man might have evolved in Africa and later migrated to the Middle East, where the garden was located and where the fall took place. In other words, he at least treats this as a possibility and compatible with his theories.

With all those people running around, being mortal and subject to animal predation (even aside from illness, accident, etc.), how could we be at all sure that there was no actual human death before the fall? If a man is completely devoured by a saber-toothed tiger, the question of his access to the tree of life in the Garden of Eden becomes a moot point! And if man perhaps originally came into existence in the image of God in Africa, naturally mortal, and the remedy for death was located in the Middle East...well, obviously there would have been some human death before reaching the "remedy." If one tries to maintain that there were many men before the fall, that man was naturally mortal, that man needed the tree of life as an antidote to death, but that in fact no human death took place before the fall, this seems empirically implausible and dependent on many contingent factors. (No one was actually killed by wild animals, no one was too far away to get to the tree of life in time, and so forth.) So was this actually Walton's view? I was puzzled.

I believe that I have found the explanation of this conundrum: I now have concluded that Walton is not saying that no human death took place before the fall. He is saying only that not all humans were doomed to die before the fall. In particular, Adam and Eve were not individually doomed to die before the fall, because they were assigned as "priests" in the Garden of Eden (TLWOA&E, chapter 12) and hence would have had full access to the "tree" (or whatever it was) that granted life and was located in the Garden. The clearest statement of this is on p. 159:

If we consider the model in which there were humans either preceding Adam and Eve or contemporary with Adam and Eve, we need to contemplate their vulnerability to suffering and death. If death and suffering can be feasibly inherent in a non-ordered world and be retained in a partially ordered world, then any pre-fall human population would be subject to them...In this scenario we would expect to find predation, animal death, human death, and violent behavior....In response to people who inquire as to why God would create such a world where there is predation, suffering and death, and how that could be called "good," I would say we have to understand how all the pieces fit together. "Good" pertained to the order that was being formed in the midst of non-order. The non-order, then, was not good, though not evil either, but the plan for continued ordering involved a process by which all non-order would eventually be resolved. (pp. 159-160) (bold is my emphasis)

Here Walton says explicitly that in the situation he describes prior to the fall we would expect actually to find human death.

Another confirming statement is on p. 74: "Paul is saying only that all of us are subject to death because of sin: sin cost us the solution to mortality, and so we are trapped in our mortality." (emphasis mine)

In the interview with CT, Walton affirms, in response to a question, that the only humans who had access to the tree of life were Adam and Eve.

On p. 154 he implies that the earliest human beings, before the fall, were killing each other:

After all, anthropological evidence for violence in the earliest populations deemed human would indicate that there never was a time when sinful (= at least personal evil) behavior was not present.

This leads into Walton's strained notion that these earliest populations were not "held accountable" for acts that would otherwise be regarded as sins, which I will explore more in the discussion of sex. In any event, the picture here seems to be one in which at least some people in the image of God actually were dying and being killed before the fall.

We can therefore fit all the pieces together by concluding that Walton does not think that there had to be zero human death before the fall but only that there was to some degree a remedy for death available before the fall. This may have been available only to Adam and Eve. Walton's assertions can be made consistent if we take it that, on the view he is promoting as orthodox, there would have been some human death before the fall. In fact, I cannot see any other way to make his statements consistent.

I have already given arguments against this in Part I. It is an extremely strained interpretation of Paul's theology of the connection between human death and sin to say that only some humans were spared from death prior to the fall and that Paul means only that after the fall all humans were doomed to die. It is also incompatible with the natural sense of the horror and wrongness of human death. It is also incompatible with the idea that God's original plan for man was that man be embodied (death being the contrary-to-design separation of the body from the spirit).

The Scriptural evidence that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans, which I will explore more below and in Part III, is relevant here as well. If they were the first and only humans before the fall and did not die before the fall, then de facto there was no human death before the fall. The view that human death is part of the original creation as made and intended by God is impossible to support on textual evidence, and in fact the biblical text argues strongly against it.

Walton's views do not support a robust notion of God's natural design plan for human sex

It is surprising that Walton has relatively little to say in the two books I have reviewed or in the interviews on them about marriage and God's original intent for it. When I got my copy of TLWOA&E I looked immediately for his discussion of Jesus' words, quoted in Part I, concerning God's setting up marriage with one man and one woman "in the beginning." At first I could find nothing. The index of Scripture passages does not show any reference to these verses. Then, as I was carefully reading any footnotes that seemed like they might be useful, I found what appears to be the only reference to Jesus' words in either book.

In the main text leading up to this footnote, Walton says,

We can now see that Genesis 2:24 makes more of a statement than we had envisioned. Becoming one flesh is not just a reference to the sexual act. The sexual act may be the one that rejoins them, but it is the rejoining that is the focus. When Man and Woman become one flesh, they are returning to their original state. (p. 81)

The footnote that follows this is rather surprising, considering the text it follows:

This also makes much better sense of Matthew 19:5-6//Mark 10:7-8....Ontology is more central to this discussion than sex is. Genesis 2:24 may therefore have less to say about the institution of marriage and the nature of marriage than has been commonly thought. (p. 220 note 16 My emphasis.)

Having just lyrically declared that man and woman's becoming one flesh "returns them to their original state," Walton proceeds to insinuate that Genesis 2:24 ("For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh") has "less to say about the institution of marriage and the nature of marriage than has been commonly thought." This is quite astonishing, especially since he alludes in the footnote to the verses in which Jesus explicitly applies this very verse in Genesis to the question of divorce and the nature of marriage!

Walton holds that the "forming" account of Adam in Genesis 2 is an "archetypal" account of Adam's forming which is compatible with Adam's being born from a woman (p. 76). He further holds that the forming account of Eve refers to a dream-vision that Adam had in which God made a revelation about Eve to Adam. It does not actually tell us that God materially made the male first and then the woman physically from the male (pp. 79-80). I will have more to say about Walton's views and arguments about these forming accounts in Part III. On Walton's view, Eve could have evolved physically; the text makes "no claim about material origins" (p. 80).

It is therefore quite difficult to say what Walton means by "returning to their original state" in marriage, since he does not believe that woman physically came from man. Is this "original state" supposed to mean Adam and Eve's well-suitedness in the garden as partners, or what? Nor can the "original state" mean the original male-female pairing, since Walton holds that Adam and Eve might have been part of an "en masse creation" which would have included other male-female pairings.

One might think that some clue to this would come from what Walton thinks God revealed to Adam about Eve in the vision, but that is little help. When asked directly in the interview what God revealed to Adam about Eve in the vision, Walton replies that God revealed that she was his ally in "keeping sacred space." (Around minute 38) He also says (p. 109-110) "God then shows Adam in a vision that woman [in contrast to animals] is his ontological equal, and when he awakes she is brought to him and he recognizes that fact." Around minute 41 in the interview Walton also emphasizes the notion of male-female equality as an important message of Adam's vision. (This from the author who makes so much of the vital importance of entering into the "ancient near eastern mindset" is really a bit much!)

But of course Eve could be Adam's ally and ontological equal without being female. When asked about this very point in the interview, Walton says (around minute 39) that of course Adam "wouldn't view another man" as "the other half of himself." This is a charmingly naive bit of "heterosexism," but Walton must surely know that there are men nowadays who do claim to view another man as the "other half of themselves"! Walton states that "gender identity is under discussion" in Genesis 2 and that mankind is "ontologically gendered" (pp. 80-81), which is good as far as it goes, but in fact his rejection of any physical meaning for the forming accounts in Genesis 2 and his emphasis upon gender equality makes it difficult to see how, on his view, gender complementarity is being taught in Genesis 2. Certainly he never addresses the question of why man's existence as heterosexual should be regarded as any more God's special intention than man's sickness if both came about through God's invisible work in the processes of evolution. And he never addresses the arguments that I outlined in Part I from Jesus' words about marriage and the beginning. In fact, at around minute 40 in the interview he says that Genesis 2 is not establishing marriage as a "sociological institution"!

But there is more: Walton holds that human beings prior to the fall and prior to Adam's installation as a "priest" in the "sacred space" of the Garden of Eden (that is his interpretation of Adam's being placed in the Garden to keep it) were in a childlike state of non-accountability. In that state, he believes, they likely did commit acts that would now count as sins but were not held accountable for them. He says this in the quotation about violence from p. 154, given above, and also on p. 155:

When a law is identified or when the desires or nature of God are made known, those who receive such information become accountable. By accountable, I mean that they can now be considered guilty of violation and are therefore subject to punishment....This reasoning suggests that even though any human population possibly preceding or coexisting with Adam and Eve may well have been engaged in activity that would be considered sin, they were not being held accountable for it: where there was no law or revelation, there was no sin....In this scenario, the sin of Adam and Eve would be understood as bringing sin to the entire human race by bringing accountability.

The implications of this theory about accountability for the matter of sex are rather disturbing. If we apply Walton's analysis of human violence and his ideas about accountability to human sex (and nothing he says prevents such an application), this would mean that man prior to the fall could have been and plausibly was engaging in promiscuous sexual relations, at a minimum, if not perversions, but that these didn't count as sins for which man was accountable because man was in a state of non-accountable innocence. This would mean, further, that human sex does not have the intrinsic, natural, and embodied significance asserted by natural law reasoning.

If, on Walton's view, God revealed to Adam that he desires monogamy rather than promiscuity or polygamy and that he intends the human male-female bond to be permanent, Walton does not say this. In fact, as we have seen, he says that Genesis 2 has less to do with marriage than previously thought! But even if he has such a revelation tacitly in mind, it would still mean that heterosexual monogamy was not inherently part of the natural and truly original state of man prior to such a revelation. We could rather picture a sort of pre-revelation world in which childlike humans, possibly including Adam and Eve themselves, prior to their being singled out to have priestly functions and given more revelation from God, are having sex with whomever they please but in which this does not really have deep significance, because no law has been given. Walton even refers to Adam and Eve as the "first significant humans," (p. 114, his emphasis) though he affirms that others would have been in the image of God.

To say that any such view of human sexuality would be less than robust, less than biblical, and incompatible with a clear notion of the physically embodied nature of God's design plan for mankind is putting it mildly. Yet it appears to be impossible to rule out given Walton's arguments about pre-fall man. Contrast this picture of early, non-accountable man both with Jesus' words about God's intention for human marriage "in the beginning" and also with the Apostle Paul's statements in Romans 1 that all men do have the natural law of God "written on the heart."

Some more of the biblical evidence that Adam and Eve were the first human beings

There is a plethora of biblical evidence for the traditional view that not only did Adam and Eve exist, they were the first and only progenitors of the human race. I have already discussed Jesus' words concerning marriage and the beginning, which Walton does not attempt to respond to as an argument for the traditional view. In Part III I will discuss Walton's arguments, including his attempts to respond to most of these scriptural arguments for the traditional view of Adam and Eve. In one case (where a long discussion is not required) I will deal in this post with Walton's response to the Bible verse.

Genesis 1:26-27 says that God made man, male and female, in the image of God. Genesis 5 begins "This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and beget a son in his own likeness..." Genesis 5 is here repeating Genesis 1:27 in direct connection with the individual, Adam, whom it seems to be treating as the first human being.

Walton himself acknowledges that "Adam" here in verse 1 and verse 3 refers to one historical individual, Adam (p. 61). However, he takes Genesis 1:27, repeated here in Genesis 5:2, to refer to what could have been a much larger group of individuals, probably including Adam (p. 183). Adam, on Walton's view, might very well not be the first man from whom all others are descended, and he is very concerned to argue that not taking Adam to be the first man from whom, with Eve, all other humans are descended is compatible with a faithful interpretation of the Bible. But this would require a very strained interpretation of Genesis 5:1-3, requiring the text to switch back and forth between clearly talking about one man to talking about a group (not just Adam and Eve) to talking about one man again in the genealogy. Needless to say, the "them" in verse two refers quite evidently to "male and female." Two people is sufficient for the plural; a group of thousands is not remotely implied or required! And the genealogy then moves on to describe Adam's descendants (from Seth onward) as if Adam and his wife are the only first progenitors. There is no hint in the text here of any other initial progenitors of the human race other than Adam and Eve.

I Chronicles 1 begins its genealogy with Adam. Again, there is no hint of any large group of progenitors of the human race.

More tellingly still, Luke 3:38, completing the "backwards" genealogy of Jesus (probably through Mary, with Joseph being the son-in-law of Heli in vs. 23), finishes, "Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God." This explicit statement that Adam was the son of God seems like a direct affirmation that Adam a) did not come into being by some elaborate physical process and even more b) was the first man.

I Timothy 2:13, already quoted in Part I, expressly and unequivocally states that the man was formed first. If Adam and Eve were both the products of a long process of human evolution, and if there were other humans alive at the time, there is no reason to believe that Adam was formed first. Eve could have been naturally conceived, for example, before Adam was. Paul is clearly taking it that Adam was the first man and that Eve was the first woman, and he is clearly getting this from a reading of Genesis 2 that takes it to refer to the physical, de novo creation of Adam and Eve. He is also using this point to support theological conclusions about the role of women in the church.

In Genesis 3:20, we are told, "Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living." The prima facie meaning of this is that Eve is the first woman and original mother of all human beings thereafter. Walton (pp. 187-188) attempts to interpret this in a purely metaphorical sense, instancing Genesis 4:21, which says that Jubal was the "father of all" who use the harp and organ. But for a metaphoric interpretation to make sense, there must be a something indicated by the context or by common sense that it can be a metaphor for. The statement about Jubal is quite easily understood as a metaphor for Jubal's being a kind of ur-musician, an intellectual and artistic forebear. There is no similarly obvious metaphoric meaning which the reference to Eve as the "mother of all living" could have. Walton's elaborate notion that Adam and Eve were the first ones given priestly functions, that they were given access to the "sacred space" of the garden, and all the rest of it, is entirely his own construct, not stated in the text. And it would in any event make a very unlikely meaning for the phrase "the mother of all living." Eve on Walton's view may very well not have been the first woman but was one of the first two people to be accountable for sin, and she blew it, thereby bringing exclusion from the tree of life! After that, assuming a much larger original group of humans, she and Adam just went and lived with all the other human beings, their children interbred with them, and that was that. It seems implausible that anyone would refer to her (completely failed) role as the first "significant" woman by calling her "the mother of all living." So what could the "mother of all living" be a metaphor for? Walton's attempt to deflect the effect of "mother of all living" to a generically metaphoric meaning is a strained and unclear interpretation.

These are not the only positive biblical arguments, but space forces me to stop for now. The forming accounts in Genesis 2 will be dealt with in Part III when I discuss some of Walton's positive arguments for his positions.

Disclaimer: A review copy of The Lost World of Adam and Eve was provided by Intervarsity Academic. A positive review was not required.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on March 22, 2015 10:45 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Adam and Eve) (evolution) (Genesis) (human origins) (origins)

Why do human origins matter? Part I of a review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

 

Why do human origins matter? Part I of a review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

A series of three planned posts, beginning with this one, will include both my own discussion of why the origins of man matter and my review of the second book by John H. Walton that I have read, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (hereafter TLWOA&E). I have read the book in its entirety. My review of The Lost World of Genesis One (TLWOG1) is here. I have decided to break up my review of TLWOA&E into parts to make both posting and reading somewhat easier.

Why does the origin of man matter? Even the origin of animals matters, but why, more specifically, do our origins matter, as human beings? Why does it make a difference what Christians believe on these matters? How could a full acceptance of human common ancestry and material continuity with animal ancestors be problematic for a Christian worldview?

In this post, I will discuss three key areas where human origins matter. My discussion will be tailored toward answering the view of human origins that I take John H. Walton to be promoting as orthodox, since my goal is to present a review of his book on Adam and Eve. Thus, since Walton holds that there definitely was an historical person who can be described by some of the descriptions normally given to the historical Adam (though not all of them), I will not be addressing directly the implications of denying the existence of anyone like the historical Adam. However, I think it will be quite evident that my remarks apply a fortiori to that more radical position.

Ethics, speciesism, and the image of God

Suppose that one holds that the image of God in man is entirely an immaterial matter. Suppose that one holds it to be true or at least a fully open and orthodox option that man evolved by what would appear to be natural processes/secondary causes from animal ancestors and that, at some point in time, God placed into some hominid or group of hominids a purely immaterial imago dei, indetectable by science. I will call this "the ensoulment view." The ensoulment view raises some serious difficulties in the area of ethics.

Epistemologically, how do we now know that some member of the species homo sapiens is in the image of God? Christian pro-lifers who think in terms of the image of God have argued on both ends of the spectrum of life--both at the beginning and at the end--that we tell this entirely on a biological basis. If someone is a living member of the species homo sapiens, he counts as a full person with a full right to life. Even if he is newly conceived, even if he is in long-term coma and is never expected to awaken, it doesn't matter. All men are created equal, and "men" has a speciesist meaning. We know that you are a man, a member of the human race with full human value, because you are a living human being, period. Pro-lifers have rightly rejected as a red herring attempts by the pro-abortion crowd to drag in the theological issue of ensoulment. We have said that we aren't sitting around waiting for a human being to "get a soul" from God, that human beings are equal and protectable from the moment that they exist as members of the human species.

But there is a troubling change in the epistemic situation if one accepts the ensoulment view regarding the history of human origins. On the ensoulment view, there is every reason to think that there was a time in the history of our race when there were biologically type-identical creatures, some of whom were in the image of God and some of whom were not. If that doesn't bother you, it should. If the imago dei is purely immaterial, and if it is entirely possible that people who are physically type-identical to ourselves lack it, then why don't we wonder whether embryos or fetuses lack it until some later point of development? Why don't we worry that people in comas have lost it? If you think that this is an entirely hypothetical view that I am making up as a stick with which to beat the theistic evolutionists, think again. It is a real view held by some "Christian" ethicists that some living human beings lack the image of God. (See Robert V. Rakestraw's contribution to this volume and Robert N. Wennberg's view as quoted here.)

Now, I want to be absolutely clear: I have reason to hope and believe that John H. Walton himself would vigorously reject the views of those "Christian" ethicists. He expressly says, "It is essential to affirm that all people are in the image of God, regardless of their age [or] their physical ability or inability....The image is not stronger in some than others, and it is something that gives us all the dignity of being specially gifted creatures of God." (TLWOA&E pp. 42-43) These are laudable views on the subject of human equal value and dignity, and I commend Prof. Walton for them. I would contend, however, that if one thinks the ensoulment view of human history to be a theologically and biblically viable option, then one lacks the robustly "speciesist" basis that is metaphysically and epistemically needed to undergird an affirmation of the equality of all members of the human race solely on the basis of that membership.

Death

The Apostle Paul is quite unequivocal that human death came through the sin of Adam:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned....Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many....For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:12-16)

These words of Paul echo God's warning to Adam about eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: "But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." (Genesis 2:17)

The words of Paul and the story of the fall and man's subsequent bondage to death find an echo in our own grief over human death. The horror both of a corpse and of a ghost reflects the fact that we feel deeply that there is something wrong about the separation of the material and immaterial in man. This is not how it was meant to be. A great gulf has opened somewhere in the fabric of the world, allowing human death to occur.

Physical death is a sign in our own flesh that something has gone grievously wrong and that the human cosmos is in need of a Savior. Jesus the Healer (the Haelend, as the Anglo-Saxons called him) saves us from our sin. He also promises a new creation in which there is no more death (Revelation 21:4), in which that original wound of human death is healed.

Any theory of man's origins according to which there was human death before the fall of man is enormously problematic from the perspective of Biblical Christian theology. We will see in a later segment how Walton deals with human death prior to the fall.

Sex, complementarity, and marriage

Jesus' teaching on monogamy and divorce is firmly grounded in the reality of God's deliberate creation of male and female in the beginning of the history of man:

Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning 'made them male and female' and said, 'for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way...." Matthew 19:3-8

Jesus' words are recorded similarly in Mark 10:2-9.

At a minimum, Jesus is teaching here that God intended one man and one woman for marriage and that, because of God's original design plan for man, God does not approve of promiscuity and frivolous divorce. (No threadjacks on whether divorce is ever permitted, when, etc.) He bases his position on God's making man in the form of one man and one woman to begin with.

I note here that if God "made" (or ensouled) an entire tribe of people at the outset, the force of Jesus' words would be diminished. Jesus counts on the fact that his hearers will think of "making them male and female" as making one apiece, male and female. Otherwise, in a large original group, there could have been plenty of frivolous breakups and sexual pairings. Jesus' point is that the original state of mankind is that there was precisely one man and one woman and that this is God's model for marital fidelity and exclusivity.

The origins of human sexuality are also relevant from a natural law perspective. If man's body developed by natural processes (aka secondary causes) with an entirely immaterial "imago dei" imbued only later, then the division into male and female is no more evidently the result of God's special intent for mankind than the evolution of the rabies virus. Or, for that matter, the fact that some people experience homosexual spontaneous attractions. One can, of course, affirm that God is intimately involved in everything somehow, but the origin of gender and the origin of the human body as specially God's design is not affirmed by theistic evolution. Indeed, one of the arguments for common descent is that the human genome allegedly contains many elements that "look like accidents" (alleged pseudogenes and the like). Why should we not regard heterosexual sex and male-female gender as more of these apparent accidents in the development of mankind? Or, alternatively, why should we not consider that homosexual feelings are "God's doing" along with everything else and that God means a minority of people to be different in this way, since God is working through everything that happens?

Jesus' words about God's intending to make man male and female, with the undeniable implication that man's physical nature is intended by God specially to be male and female, is a powerful Scriptural argument against this for those who accept Scripture. If we fuzzify the notion of "made," then Jesus is not really saying that God made man as male and female in any specially intended way, any more than God made every other event or outcome that happens in the physical world.

The moral argument against promiscuity is also undermined if the imago dei has no material aspects. A stallion does not violate the moral law or any aspect of his nature by keeping an entire herd of mares as a harem. Yet natural law theorists teach that it is against the law given in our material nature for human beings to be promiscuous or (still more) to engage in homosexual and other perverse acts. If we take these rules to be merely divine special revelations rather than part of the innate nature of human beings, and/or if the first human beings were materially indistinguishable from hominid animals whose sexuality had no moral significance, then the natural law basis for sexual ethics and the innate significance of human sex is called into question.

The Apostle Paul also clearly asserts male-female complementarity in the church on the basis of a literal understanding of the making of Adam and Eve:

But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. I Timothy 2:12-13

Whatever one may think about what counts as "exercising authority over a man," the point is that male-female complementarity is taken by Paul to arise from God's intent to create the man first and the woman second, as unambiguously taught in Genesis 2. To take these accounts to have nothing to do with the physical making of man by God is to undermine this Scriptural argument as well for gender complementarity as the special intent of God.

Thus there are important ways in which the ensoulment view undermines both Biblical and natural law ethics in the area of sexuality and gender.

To sum up "Why does it matter?" there are serious theological, ethical, and scriptural reasons for affirming that there is not merely spiritual discontinuity between man and animals but also significant material discontinuity. This means that Christians should be willing to do serious work before concluding that science "tells us" that there was full material continuity between man and animals and that there could not have been an Adam and Eve in the fully traditional sense of being the first humans. I have written here about these scientific issues, and I also highly recommend the book Science and Human Origins on these subjects.

By no means is the science as cut and dried as Walton presents it as being in his brief discussion in TLWOA&E. While Walton sometimes disclaims capability in the realm of science (see this interview at around 1:04 and 1:52), he does not allow this to stop him from labeling the scientific evidence against the traditional understanding of Adam and Eve "compelling" (p. 182). Furthermore, while he refers repeatedly to the idea of allowing science to "prompt us to go back to the Bible to reconsider our interpretations" (pp. 14, 103), he does not suggest that Scripture prompts us to ask questions about whether the science really says what some are telling us it says. In fact, though Walton showed an awareness of intelligent design theorists in the previous book, his footnote in TLWOA&E (p. 238, proposition 20, note 1) on the scientific issues surrounding Adam contains no reference to the vigorous and interesting work done by intelligent design theorists on the very issues he raises (pseudogenes, genetic bottleneck, and the like). See both Science and Human Origins, my post on the historical Adam, and here, as well as too-numerous-to-link posts at Evolution News and Views.

His footnote on the scientific issues consists of references only to critics of intelligent design--Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, and Graeme Finlay. This is a remarkably one-sided approach to the science, especially coming from one who urges that the scientific side of the matter should be "judged on its own merits." (pp. 71, 81, 181)

Walton does not say explicitly what he personally believes about the origin of Adam. Therefore, when I refer to "the position he is endorsing as orthodox" or other such locutions, the roundabout wording is very deliberate. But consider: Suppose that the scientific evidence is, as he states when he summarizes it, "compelling" that Adam and Eve could not have been the only first humans, with everyone descended from them. And suppose that the project of his book is successful in showing, as his chapter titles state, that "It is not essential that all people descended from Adam and Eve" (chapter 20) and "Humans could be viewed as distinct creatures and a special creation of God even if there was material continuity" (by this he means full material continuity of the human body with non-human ancestors). In other words, the argument of Walton's book is that full-scale theistic evolution of human beings, on the purely physical level, is perfectly compatible with a faithful reading of the Bible and with Christian theology. Given both of these--both the existence of "compelling" scientific evidence and the absence of any theological/Biblical reason to the contrary--why would anyone believe that Adam was physically specially created by God as the first human being and that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve?

Moreover, some consider Walton's biblical and theological arguments to remove all reason for Christians to have a stake in examining the science of human origins. As I aim to show in this series of posts reviewing TLWOA&E, Walton's interpretations of Scripture do not constitute a get out of jail free card for thinking Christians, allowing them to do no research into scientific counterevidence pertinent to the historical Adam on the grounds that "Walton has shown us" that there can be no conflict between Scripture and science on this matter. I have, unfortunately, encountered this attitude in some who cite Walton with great approval; they assert that "the science should be left to the scientists." I would like to think that Walton himself would not endorse such intellectual passivity, but unfortunately his book has had this effect on some in the evangelical community.

I want to suggest that we allow Scripture to "prompt us to ask questions" and to do some looking into both sides of these scientific issues, not passively accept the (alleged, present) consensus of science. If I can show in the segments of this review that Walton's interpretations of Scripture are implausible and strained and that the theological and biblical problems for the full physical evolution of man remain severe, I will have provided a motive for that further investigation.

Disclaimer: A review copy of The Lost World of Adam and Eve was provided by Intervarsity Press Academic. A positive review of the book was not required.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on March 20, 2015 9:34 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Adam and Eve) (evolution) (Genesis) (human origins) (origins)

Review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One

 

Review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

John H. Walton's book The Lost World of Genesis One has (I understand) been very influential among evangelicals in leading them to believe that Scripture is compatible with a full acceptance of whatever mainstream science happens to declare concerning the origin of the world and biological life, including humans. In point of fact, this book says little about human origins; that subject is the topic of The Lost World of Adam and Eve. I have just received a copy of The Lost World of Adam and Eve in the mail and will be reviewing it next.

Since The Lost World of Genesis One (hereafter TLWOG1) gives the foundations of Walton's thinking on these subjects and has been influential in itself, and since there is much to say about the book (all of it negative, I regret to report), I will begin by reviewing TLWOG1. I say "reviewing," though I do not have time to cover all the problems with the book. William Lane Craig has done an excellent job pointing out some of the main problems with the book in three podcasts here, here, and here. Craig goes so far as to say that "there is a deep incoherence in his interpretation" and agrees with the statement from the interviewer that it "doesn't make sense." These are strong words coming from Craig.

An interpretation of Walton's position

A major difficulty is that Walton's view concerning the meaning of Genesis 1 is so unusual that it is difficult to be certain exactly what that view is. The problem is created by the following points:

–Walton is insistent that Genesis 1 is not about the material origins of the entities described. He has an entire chapter entitled "The Seven Days of Genesis 1 Do Not Concern Material Origins." This whole chapter is addressed to and rejects at length the idea that Genesis 1 should be interpreted to concern both the material origins of things and their "receiving functions."

–Walton interprets the seven days of Genesis 1 as literal, 24-hour days (pp. 91-92). This means that he is not adopting a day-age theory or a theory according to which the events in Genesis 1 take place over the long time periods postulated by modern science. In fact, he sees his literal interpretation of the week of days in Genesis 1 as an advantage of his position.

–Walton nonetheless believes that God did bring all the created order into existence somehow, perhaps in a hidden way not detectable by science (p. 120). It is simply that he does not believe that Genesis 1 is about this process.

With reference to the time prior to the Genesis 1 week, Walton says,

The material phase nonetheless could have been under development for long eras and could in that case correspond with the descriptions of the prehistoric ages as science has uncovered them for us. (pp. 97-98)

There would be no reason to think that the sun had not been shining, plants had not been growing, or animals had not been present. These were like the rehearsals leading up to a performance of a play. (p. 98)

–Walton states that, in the seven literal, 24-hour days of the creation week, God "established functions" and "installed functionaries" for the created order (chapters 5 and 6). This is extremely difficult to understand in the light of his insistence that Genesis 1 is not about material origins. Walton makes a strong distinction between material origins and functions. It is difficult to know precisely what he could mean by establishing functions for things like sea creatures, the sun, the plants, etc., when this has nothing to do with bringing those entities into physical existence or making any physical change concerning them. He states that in the ancient world it would be possible (p. 26) for something already to exist materially but not to exist significantly in the sense of "having a function" and appears to want to apply this analysis to his account of the Genesis week.

–Walton explicitly dodges and refuses to answer the question of what an observer would have seen in those seven literal days when he includes that question in his FAQ (pp. 169-170). (One wonders in that case what the point was of including the question in the FAQ.) However, he seems to answer the question on pp. 97-99 by implying that an observer at least up to the time of the creation of man (about which he says little in this book) would have seen nothing but the world continuing to exist physically (the sun shining, the animals living, the plants growing) as it had been for whatever previous aeons had passed. Having just said that everything would already have been physically in place, possibly for a very long time, prior to the Genesis 1 week, he continues a metaphor he has been using of a college campus:

The observer in Genesis 1 would see day by day that everything was ready to do for people what it had been designed to do. It would be like taking a campus tour just before students were ready to arrive to see all the preparations that had been made and how everything had been designed, organized and constructed to serve students. (p. 99)

Walton also says that the "main elements lacking in the 'before' picture are therefore humanity in God's image and God's presence in his cosmic temple" (p. 97).

Craig also interprets Walton to be saying that an observer would have seen nothing visible happening in the Genesis 1 week, because everything would have already been physically in place and working physically. (Excursus: For reasons which I find somewhat obscure and can only attribute to Craig's scrupulous attempt to quote and use Walton's own confusing wording, such as "functioning in an ordered system" and the like, some hearers of Craig's podcasts, including Walton himself, have gotten the weird idea that Craig was saying that Walton says that the animals were frozen in place or that the world was physically chaotic prior to the seven-day week. Craig is unquestionably saying just the opposite--that he realizes that Walton is saying that everything would have been finished, operating, and would have looked normal in terms of physical function during that week. This is why Craig considers Walton's view to be so strange. Craig makes this point quite clear in the initial podcasts, and I am disinclined to spend more space here showing that, but if that weren't enough, he clarifies the matter yet again here. Lest there be any doubt, I myself hereby declare that I am not saying that Walton's view is that the world was physically chaotic, physically nonfunctional, or physically frozen prior to the Genesis 1 week. I am saying just the opposite, as will be seen below.)

Putting all of this together, it is difficult to figure out what Walton means by God's establishing functions and installing functionaries in a sense that has nothing to do with material origins! Perhaps the most charitable thing to do would be to throw up one's hands and conclude that the book is radically unclear. What could it mean for all the plants already to be growing, providing food for animals, the sun to be shining, etc., but for these entities nonetheless to lack functions prior to a set of specific 24-hour days in a specific week? Throwing up his hands in despair at interpreting Walton is what one scholarly critic, Vern Poythress, essentially does after an exchange with Walton.

I am not sure what the most charitable thing is to do given the extreme oddity of Walton's position taken as a whole, but here is my best shot at interpreting what he is saying, though not in words that he himself uses: Walton is saying that the world was developed by God by some process or other, possibly a very, very long process, the empirical details of that process to be determined independently and entirely on the basis of modern scientific considerations. However, this process, with the possible exception of conferring the imago dei on mankind (more on that in my review of the second book), occurred prior to the literal week of literal days described in Genesis 1. Finally, during that week, God engaged in a purely invisible, non-physical process of deeming, decreeing, or dubbing the non-human entities in the world to "have functions" and deeming or dubbing some of them to "be functionaries." This deeming or decreeing was new and in some sense took place at literal points in time in that week of 24-hour days. Hence, God dubbed the period of light on the earth "day" on day 1 but did not dub the sun "the greater light to rule the day" until day 4, though the sun was there and working in the ecosystem already all along. God deemed or dubbed the plants to have the function of growing and producing seeds on a literal day 3, even though he had already brought that function of plants into the world of physical reality before, possibly long before, by some means or other. God's non-physical acts of deeming or decreeing were performed in this week because he was preparing for the arrival of man in his image and preparing the cosmos as "sacred space," and such invisible acts of deeming (for some reason) were necessary to "give functions" to these entities.

This is a truly strange position, as far as I know unique to Walton, and it sits extremely oddly with many of his own expressions, e.g.

"[O]n the second day, God established the functions that serve as the basis for weather" (p. 58),

"[H]e brought them [the materials] together in such a way that they work" (p. 59),

"Then [on the fourth day] he did the work so that they [the sun and moon] would govern as intended," (p. 66)

These and similar statements are naturally interpreted to mean that the verses in question refer to God's bringing about physical states of affairs on those days, and that this is what the text is about. But that cannot be what Walton means, given his other statements. The interpretation about decrees with no detectable consequences is the only way that I can reconcile all of Walton's explicit statements about what Genesis 1 is and is not about. It seems to be the only possible way to reconcile his repeated insistence that his functional view literally cannot conflict with the findings of modern science because Genesis 1 is not about material origins with his position that the days of Genesis 1 are supposed to be literal 24-hour days. It also fits together well with his and his followers' frustrated response to the idea (which they misinterpreted Craig to be raising) that Walton was saying that things were not functioning just fine in a physical sense prior to God's "giving functions" to them. This "giving functions" and "establishing functionaries" must therefore mean something very different from what we would normally mean by such phrases.

The interpretation of Walton to be saying that God makes only invisible decrees in Genesis 1 is supported not only by the constraints of Walton's declarations and by his statements about what an observer would or would not have seen but also by other positive statements in the book:

"It is the divine decree or divine assignment that dictates the role and function of the various elements." (p. 30)

"Genesis 1 also emphasizes the spoken decrees of the Creator, and these decrees initiate the functions and give the functionaries their roles." (p. 64)

"On day four, God began with a decree (v. 14) that identified the functions of these celestial functionaries." (pp. 64-65)

I strongly suspect that some people who are fans of this book do not realize how restrictive Walton's requirements are and take the book instead to be endorsing a more moderate Framework Hypothesis according to which Genesis 1 is about God's bringing things into physical existence (material origins), possibly over a long period of time, but gives no details about how God did it. On such a view, the days of creation needn't correspond to any particular time periods (and could describe what actually took very long periods of time), and the order of the events need not be taken to correspond to the order in which the entities came into material existence. But this does not mean that Genesis 1 is not about material origins, simply that it cannot be expected to correspond to independently known scientific details about material origins. On that view, Genesis 1 would actually be about the period of time that, on Walton's view as best I am able to interpret it, occurs before the literal week described in Genesis 1.

Replies to several arguments for Walton's position

At this point I am going to reply to several arguments that Walton makes for his own view. Not only is the view highly implausible on its face, but the arguments are quite poor.

Walton says that he was inspired to write this book and to develop this view when he reflected on the place in Genesis 1 where it says that God "called the light day." He reflected that this statement must refer to a period of light, not to light itself, since it is a period of light that is day, not light per se. He then argues that, when it says that God divided or separated the light from the darkness, this must also refer to periods of light and darkness. Then he continues,

Now comes the clincher. If "light" refers to a period of light in verse 5 and in verse 4, consistency demands that we extend the same understanding to verse 3, and here is where the "aha!" moment occurs. We are compelled by the demands of verses 4 and 5 to translate verse 3 as "God said, 'Let there be a period of light.'" If we had previously been inclined to treat this as an act of material creation, we can no longer sustain that opinion. For since what is called into existence is a period of light that is distinguished from a period of darkness and that is named "day." we must inevitably consider day one as describing the creation of time. The basis for time is the invariable alteration between periods of light and periods of darkness. This is a creative act, but it is creation in a functional sense, not a material one. (pp. 55-56)

This argument for Walton's position is incredibly poor. First, even if we took the word "light" throughout verses 3-5 of Genesis 1 to refer to a period of light, and even if we took the entire description of day one to refer in this sense to the "creation of time," this would prima facie be an act of material making on God's part for the very reason that Walton himself gives--namely, that on earth one part of the basis of time measurement is the alternation of periods of light and darkness. Hence, even saying that this entire passage is about God's bringing about periods of darkness and light on earth is prima facie a statement about God's doing something material. Here we encounter Walton's extremely strange, sharp division between "material" and "functional." In the real world, material structure and the function of the material world go together. It simply does not remotely follow that, if these verses are all about God's making alternating periods of light and darkness, they are compatible with a situation in which there already were alternating periods of light and darkness on earth, prior to the beginning of the chapter, and God simply made invisible decrees of "deeming" these periods to be called "day" and "night." That would be an extremely strained and implausible interpretation even if we took it that all of verses 3-5 are about the creation of a period of light rather than light itself.

But even that premise is poorly supported. Walton's entire "aha!" moment seems to rest on the argument that we must interpret "light" throughout verses 3-5, including when God says, "Let there be light!", as meaning "a period of light." But why should we assume that? This is an extremely rigid and unsupported notion of interpretive consistency on Walton's part. Surely both the original readers and we can decide whether "light" means "a period of light" or light itself based on the rest of the verse. Verse 3 could easily mean that God created light itself while verses 4-5 refer, based on their actual statements, to God's making it the case (which would still be a material act) that there are alternating periods of light and darkness on earth.

Walton gives several more arguments for his position with admirable succinctness in a long podcast interview available here. (I have listened to the interview in its entirety.) There (beginning at approximately 1:42), when asked why Genesis 1 could not be about both functional and material creation, he gives two reasons why he believes that it is not. I recognized these as corresponding to things he says in the book, but I find his statements of these points clearer in the interview, so I will use that version here. He says that if Genesis 1 were about material origins, we would "expect that it would start with no material, but it doesn't. The material's already there when it starts in verse 2." Here Walton is referring to the statement in verse 2 that the world was formless and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I am not particularly inclined myself to hold out for taking that verse to be a reference to the absence of all matter. In fact, when I read the book but had not heard the interview I was puzzled as to why Walton made such a big deal out of arguing that that verse implies a disorderly but material state. What was the point? Now I realize that he wishes to argue that if the chapter were about God's making things materially the chapter would start with a state of absolutely no matter--a materially empty universe, or no material universe at all.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine why we would expect this. In fact, the text works extremely well if we take it that verse 2 describes a state where there is matter, but where there is no life (for example), no ecosystem, no dry land, etc., and the subsequent verses describe God's materially bringing these things into existence. Walton's statement about "what we would expect" if the chapter were about the material origin of things is just epistemically false, and I cannot think of any argument that would support it.

Moreover, there is an irony here that illustrates the ad hoc nature of Walton's approach to argument. In the book he argues that the word bara (which I will discuss further below) does not refer as has often been thought to creation ex nihilo and that a clue to this fact is that "no materials for the creative act are ever mentioned" (p. 43). Walton points out that this is why the verb has often been thought to refer to creation out of nothing; he argues that instead we should take the absence of previously existing materials out of which things are made to be "better explained as an indication that bara is not a material activity but a functional one." (p. 44 Macrons eliminated from the Hebrew verb for typographical simplification.) So in that place, Walton argues that the absence of pre-existing materials provides an inference to the best explanation that no material creation is taking place when the verb bara is used. But in the interview he argues that the presence of already-existing material in verse two is best explained by the conclusion that the entire chapter is not about material origins! This varying treatment of the presence and absence of preexisting material is a very bad sign for the possibility of either confirming or disconfirming Walton's position.

In the interview, Walton also argues thus, "If it were material, you would expect it to deal with objects day by day. It doesn't. There's hardly any of the days that deal with objects." Now, on the face of it, this is a completely misleading description of the chapter and must rest on a tendentiously narrow concept of "objects." Similarly, he says on p. 94, "Of the seven days, three have no statement of creation of any material components (days 1, 3, and 7)." As I have already pointed out, if day one deals with God's making it the case that periods of light and darkness alternate on the earth, this would need to involve material events and material changes. Moreover, if day one is about God's making light in verse three, then this would have been making something that is part of the physical order. (Let us have no carping about whether the ancient Israelites believed that light was "made of matter" or "a material object" in some technical or scientific sense. Our present-day scientists still debate the precise nature of light. But the ancient Israelites, like ourselves, would have had every reason to think of light as part of the material world--as something that allows sight, makes things grow, and makes things warm.) Day two, as Walton himself acknowledges (p. 56), deals with the making of the firmament. Whatever precisely the firmament is in ancient views, it is, again, part of the material order of things. Walton states that day three has "no statement of any creation of any material component," but in actuality day three describes God's bringing dry land into existence out of the sea and God's calling upon the earth to bring forth plants. These are of course "material components" of the world in any normal sense of that phrase, so unless one uses some tendentiously narrow meaning of "create" or "material components," day three certainly does appear to refer to the creation of "material components."

Day four describes the making of the sun, moon, and stars. A famous crux in the interpretation of the chapter concerns the question of how there could be night and day (day one) earlier than the making of the sun (day four), and various solutions have been proposed. Walton's idea that God made a physically invisible and indetectable decree about the daytime on a literal day one but waited to make such a purely non-physical decree about the sun until literal day four hardly seems to be an improvement on other solutions. E.g. That, during the period represented by day four, God caused the sun and moon to be clearly visible by clearing away atmospheric debris.

In any event, in discussing day four we come to Walton's tendentious use of the term "objects." Earlier in the interview (around minute 27) Walton states that the ancient Israelites would not have understood the sun, moon, and stars to be "material objects." His argument for this concerning the stars is that they believed that the stars were engraved on the sky and did not realize that they were suns that were farther away. But even leaving unquestioned this description of ancient cosmology, that is not an argument that they did not understand the stars to be part of the material world. An engraving is part of the material world! It is only by taking "objects" in an oddly misleading sense that Walton gets from "the ancient Israelites thought the stars were engraved on the sky" to the conclusion that the ancient Israelites would not have thought that the making of the stars in day four was about God's causing material things to happen! Walton's treatment of the sun and moon is similarly confused. He states in the interview (around minute 27) that the ancient Israelites thought the sun and moon were lights and that other ancient peoples thought they were gods. Therefore, he concludes that they could not think that God's making them was God's making "objects" because they "didn't know" that they were objects. This gives the impression that all ancient peoples thought that the sun and moon were utterly outside the material realm (whatever that could possibly mean). Saying that they were "lights" doesn't show this anyway. A lamp is a material thing. Beyond that, a theory of the nature of light is not required for believing that lights are part of the material realm and that making lights is material creation.

Support for this point comes from a very unexpected quarter. In doing some research on the claim that the ancients believed that the stars were engraved on the sky, I came across the following statement:

What they observed led them to conclude that the sun and the moon moved in roughly the same spheres and in similar ways. The sun moved through the sky during the day and then moved during the night into the netherworld, where it traversed under the earth to its place of rising for the next day. The stars were engraved on the sky and moved in tracks through their ordained stations. Flowing all around this cosmos were the cosmic waters, which were held back by the sky, and on which the earth floated[.]

The author of these words calls this a description of "cosmic geography," and it is clearly a description of physical cosmology as the author believes it to have been understood in the ancient world. Who is the author?

John H. Walton!

This description of the sun, moon, and stars, which unequivocally places them within the physical realm, is from Walton's Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, p. 166.

So the insistence that the ancient Israelites could not have understood the making of the sun, moon, and stars to refer to "the manufacture of objects" (as in the interview) must rest on some entirely unhelpful use of terms like "manufacture" and "objects" to give the impression that the description of day four could not have been intended or understood to mean that God brought aspects of physical cosmology into physical existence or even physical visibility.

Day five, of course, deals with God's calling upon the sea to swarm with sea creatures and God's making the birds. Sea creatures and birds count as "material components" and even "objects" on any unbiased reckoning.

Day six says that God made land animals. There can hardly be any problem with calling land animals "material." Then day six says that God created man in his own image. I am deferring most discussion of Walton's views concerning the creation of man to a review of the later book, but I will only point out here that man does have a clear material component--a body--and therefore that the description of day six in Scripture can hardly support a generalization like, "There's hardly any of the days that deal with objects." Even if one takes the image of God in man to be a purely spiritual matter with no physical implications (which I do not), the text does not say, "Let us make the image of God." It says, "Let us make man" and also says that God created man. Prima facie, the text describing day six says that God made man materially as well as spiritually, though of course there are those who will argue that it doesn't really mean that God created man materially. But that is a separate argument. My point here is just that the text does not prima facie support Walton's generalization that most of the days do not contain references to the making of physical things "day by day."

In the book Walton makes various ad hoc maneuvers concerning days four, five, and six (p. 95), such as saying that "the text explicitly deals with them [the entities] only on the functional level." Whatever this could mean, the idea that the text gives the impression of not having to do with material origins is simply incorrect, arising from Walton's repeated and unsupported opposition between references to functions and discussion of material origins and structure. (Again, the functions of a thing depend, very often, upon its material structure.) Walton even goes so far as to treat "swarming" as a "function" of sea creatures in day five, which is somehow supposed to support the idea that, when God calls upon the seas to swarm with sea creatures, this could mean that God made an invisible decree about sea creatures that had already been swarming for a long time!

In other words, contrary to what Walton says, virtually every day (except for day seven, when God is said to rest) "deals with objects day by day." This is just one example (another is Walton's argument about the objects of the verb bara, which I will discuss below) of the fact that Walton makes generalizations that are simply not supported by the data, even his own data.

Based upon an analogy that Walton makes in The Lost World of Adam and Eve (pp. 44-45) where he recapitulates his points concerning Genesis 1, I can anticipate a response Walton might make to the foregoing argument. He also uses this analogy in the interview on TLWOG1 beginning at about minute 25. Nick Peters, the interviewer, asks Walton about the fact that the heavens and the earth seem to be material and are said to be created by God. Therefore, why would we not think that Genesis 1 is about material creation? Walton replies with the analogy of our telling the story of how a house was built as opposed to telling the story of how a family came to make it their own home and live there. Walton states that, in telling a story about making something your home, you would refer to "material stuff," because a home story (a discussion of how the house came to function as a home) "presupposes material." However, it would or could still be a different story from the story of how the house was manufactured.

It is difficult to see how one can make an argument out of such an analogy, but I will try to respond to it as if it is an argument. The first response is that this has precisely no force independent of Walton's attempts to argue that, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the several different expressions in Genesis 1 that refer to God's making things, creating things, and causing things to be or to emerge are really not about material origins at all! The fact is that one would not normally tell a story that was purely about coming to look at a house or even deciding to buy a house in terms of making, creating, and causing to be or causing to appear. Genesis 1 does not merely "presuppose material." On the face of it, Genesis 1 appears to be, in Walton's terms, a "house story" rather than a "home story," especially if "home story" is taken to have zero material meaning. I will discuss later Walton's unconvincing attempts to argue that the expressions in Genesis 1 mean something entirely different from any concept of material origins.

Second, a "home story" actually does usually contain descriptions of material making, preparation, and decorating. For example, if someone comes to prepare a home to be functional for upcoming habitation, he will engage in material activities such as painting, cleaning, getting the electricity, gas, and water flowing, and making desired alterations. And of course moving day is highly material in nature and often has stories that can be told about it--how we got the big sofa into the living room. Even a sentence that might seem to be the kind of thing Walton has in mind, like, "We made this the study," does not refer solely to a verbal or mental act of decreeing that room to be the study! The story of how you made that room the study will include physically preparing it to be the study--installing a desk and bookcases, making sure that the lighting is right, and so forth. Hence, the very metaphor that Walton uses undermines his attempt to sever functional origins from material origins.

Could Walton's arguments be used to support a different position? (Includes responses to more arguments)

At this point one might ask the following question: Even if my "best shot" interpretation of Walton's view is correct, and even given that Walton's own view of what Genesis 1 is about is highly implausible and unsupported by the arguments just surveyed, does his research into such matters as the Ancient Near Eastern mindset and the meanings of words such as bara (create) and asa (make) lend significant new support to a more moderate and more widely held view than his own? For example, does his research lend credibility to a moderate Framework Hypothesis as I defined it earlier even though that is not his own view? Walton himself defines the Framework Hypothesis in a much looser sense than the one I have given here; he uses that phrase to define a position which merely states that the first chapter of Genesis gives a literary framework for creation. I am talking about a somewhat more definite Framework Hypothesis, which is by no means unknown, and asking whether his scholarly work and arguments can also support something like that (as opposed to, e.g., either standard young-earth creationism or a day age theory such as that held by Hugh Ross) by vagueifying (to coin a term) the meaning of Genesis 1.

I believe that the answer even to this question is no, for several reasons.

1) Walton holds extreme, unargued, and demonstrably false views about the mindset of the ancient Israelites, rendering him an unreliable guide to the meaning of biblical passages or to the mindset of ancient peoples.

Walton is unfortunately given to sweeping, unqualified statements which are not followed by any attempt to respond to obvious counterexamples or counterarguments. The most striking examples of such statements occur in a passage in which he literally denies that ancient peoples, including the Israelites, had any distinction between the natural and the supernatural or between the miraculous and non-miraculous.

...[T]here is no concept of a "natural" world in ancient Near Eastern thinking. The dichotomy between natural and supernatural is a relatively recent one. Deity pervaded the ancient world. Nothing happened independently of deity. The gods did not "intervene" because that would assume that there was a world of events outside of them that they could step into and out of. The Israelites, along with everyone else in the ancient world, believed instead that every event was the act of deity–that every plant that grew, every baby born, ever drop of rain and every climatic disaster was an act of God. No "natural" laws governed the cosmos; deity ran the cosmos or was inherent in it. There were no "miracles" (in the sense of events deviating from that which was "natural"), there were only signs of the deity's activity (sometimes favorable, sometimes not)....[Here follows a brief discussion implying that anyone who believes in a distinction between the natural and the supernatural is on the verge of becoming a deist.] There is nothing "natural" about the world in biblical theology, nor should there be in ours.... As a result, we should not expect anything in the Bible or in the rest of the ancient Near East to engage in the discussion of how God's level of creative activity relates to the "natural" world (i.e., what we call naturalistic process or the laws of nature). The categories of "natural" and "supernatural" have no meaning to them, let alone any interest....The ancients would never dream of addressing how things might have come into being without God or what "natural" processes he might have used. (pp. 20-21)

Note that these paragraphs do not simply say that the ancient peoples were more inclined to view things as the activities of God or the gods than we are or that they were quick to think that phenomena were due to the personal intentions of a deity. The statements are much stronger than that--namely, that they had literally no concept of the natural world and no concept of a miracle, because everything was taken to be an act of a deity. Taken literally, such a claim cannot be an accurate description of even the most superstitious, animist tribesman, who nonetheless must have some concept of the natural order of things in order to hunt for game, make tools, cook food, care for his offspring, and avoid being eaten. Human beings would not survive to adulthood without some notion of what is "natural."

Moreover, there is ample evidence that these statements are false about the ancient Hebrews, specifically. The following is merely a partial list of places in the Old Testament where God performs a miracle and that miracle is seen as a sign because it is not what is expected to happen otherwise. Indeed, it is impossible to see how any of God's wonders or mighty acts in the Old Testament could have the function that they manifestly do have and are meant to have of serving as a sign (to verify revelation, to humble God's enemies, to show God's people that God is leading them, to show that God is the only true God, and the like) if what Walton says is true.

–the miraculous conception of Isaac,
–the burning bush,
–Moses' temporarily leprous hand and other signs given to him to convince the Israelites,
–the plagues of Egypt,
–the parting of the Red Sea,
–manna in the wilderness,
–water from the rock,
–fire from heaven in the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal,
–the healing of Naaman from leprosy

I've only gotten up to the book of 2 Kings, nor is this an exhaustive list of miracles up to that point. If there were no ancient concept of the distinction between the miraculous and the non-miraculous, if the normal growth of plants were as much a sign of the activity of a deity as anything else that might happen, why would Moses have turned aside for a bush that burned without being consumed any more than for a bush growing as usual? If the things Moses was able to do could not be distinguished from what was natural, because there was no conception of what was "natural" in the ancient mind and everything was the "activity of deity," why does the text refer to the people as "believ[ing] the voice of the sign" (Exodus 4:8)?

The conception of Isaac deserves special mention. The text expressly emphasizes the fact that, in the delicate wording of the King James, it had "ceased to be after the manner of women" with Sarah, who had been barren all her life anyway. She was post-menopausal, and both she and Abraham were very old. The text explicitly states that it was because of knowledge of such biological facts that Sarah laughed at the promise of a son (Genesis 18:11-12). This is a clear counterexample to Walton's statements about the lack of a concept of nature and the lack of a distinction between the miraculous and the non-miraculous in the ancient Israelite mind. God's provision of a son to Abraham and Sarah had its force as a sign precisely because they had a robust, intelligent, and empirical concept of the order of nature. They therefore knew that this was a miraculous conception which would not have happened without an explicit act of God, an act different from God's involvement (however one parses that) in the ordinary process of conception.

In his mostly negative review of TLWOG1, Old Testament scholar C. John Collins similarly disagrees with Walton's characterization of the ancient Israelites as having no concept of the natural and the supernatural. Collins uses the example of Balaam's ass to make the same point that I am making here.

Collins also points out that Walton endorses the elimination of the distinction between natural and supernatural in our own theology but that Walton makes no use of the vocabulary and distinctions readily available in Christian theological literature for articulating a more nuanced view of the relationship between God's miraculous and non-miraculous activity and the natural powers God has placed within the creatures.

Nor is it necessary to be especially learned or to have special vocabulary to be capable of acknowledging both God's connection with the world and also the natural/supernatural distinction. I grew up in a Christian culture where God was routinely thanked for healings that, it was understood, had in all probability come about entirely through natural processes. God's work through the natural processes was recognized and gratefully received, while at the same time these laymen had no difficulty understanding that there are such things as supernatural events, which are a different matter. The entire Old Testament, through innumerable passages, indicates that the Israelites thought in pretty much exactly those terms.

If Walton can make emphatic and false statements about the Old Testament mindset, without even attempting to qualify his claims or to account for obvious counterexamples, his expertise at putting us into the mind of ancient peoples is called into grave doubt.

2) Walton gives no cogent reasons to think that ancient peoples were unconcerned with material origins or even with the details of material origins.

Suppose that I wrote a document in which I said that I made a dress "in order that" I might wear the dress to a party. Suppose that the document then went on to state that I first bought the cloth, then cut the cloth, then sewed it together according to a pattern, and so forth. Would the introductory statement that I made the dress for the purpose of wearing it to a party do anything to detract from a material meaning of the statements in the rest of the passage about my making the dress? Of course not. Similarly, even if no details of making were given but if I said that I made the dress on such-and-such a day and also said that I made it for the purpose of wearing it to the party, would the purpose statement mean that I didn't also intend you to understand that I physically made the dress on that particular day? Of course not.

There is no reason to think that an interest in function is opposed to an interest in material origin or that a statement that a thing is made to serve a function should cause us to think that the author didn't mean to say anything about the thing's material origins in that same passage. As William Lane Craig says, function and material origin go hand in hand. This should be obvious. Yet again and again, Walton will take a passage, whether from Scripture or from another ANE source, and use the fact that it shows an interest in the functions of physical things which the passage says were made by God or by a god--functions such as giving food, making months and seasons, and the like--to argue that the ancients were interested in or talking about function rather than material origins! As a non sequitur, this takes the cake.

Moreover, as Craig notes, Walton's own example passages from other ANE sources do show the gods apparently engaging in material making, so they do not support Walton's position. For example, on p. 32 Walton says that in Hittite literature one creation myth talks about "cutting heaven and earth apart with a copper cutting tool." On pp. 32-33 he quotes the Egyptian Papyrus Insinger as stating of the god, "He created food before those who are alive, the wonder of the fields. He created the constellation of those that are in the sky, so that those on earth should learn them. He created sweet water in it which all the lands desire." Perhaps most striking of all, on pp. 33-34 Walton says that the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, shows Marduk "harnessing the waters of Tiamat for the purpose of providing the basis of agriculture. It includes the piling up of dirt, releasing the Tigris and Euphrates, and digging holes to manage the catchwater."

Walton gives no argument whatsoever, none, to think that the author or audience of the passage about the Tigris and the Euphrates did not believe or mean to say that the god Marduk physically released the rivers and constructed the catchwater holes.

Walton gives no reason to think that the ancients did not believe (and were not interested in saying) that the gods literally separated the heavens from the earth. To speak in Walton's own style for a moment, we may think that such ideas are manifestly false taken literally, but we should try to enter the ancient mindset and ask ourselves whether they thought that such things were true in a physically literal sense.

In other words, we are left just where we were before: Whether or not a passage is making a statement about material origins or is intended to tell us about the details of such material origins has to be decided on some basis other than noting that ancient peoples were interested in functions or that the passage itself refers to a function for the thing made. We will have to look for other clues. There simply is no prima facie tension between being interested in function, or talking about function in a particular passage, and being interested in and talking about material origins. Indeed, one would often talk about both, since a thing's ability to perform a function will depend upon its being made a certain way materially.

Similar problems vitiate Walton's attempted argument concerning the Hebrew word bara, translated "create" in Genesis 1. He gives (p. 42) a chart of all the Biblical uses of this word with their objects. As one might expect, Walton has extra notes in a comments column concerning the purpose or function for which such entities were created. He then tries to imply that, somehow, the existence of a statement about function is evidence that the context of the word bara "require[s] a functional understanding," (p. 43) which of course he will then assume means a functional rather than a material understanding. Stranger still, he says (p. 43), "This list shows that grammatical objects of the verb are not easily identified in material terms, and even when they are, it is questionable that the context is objectifying them." Craig rightly expresses astonishment at such a statement, since the chart itself shows numerous places where the objects of the word are partly or wholly material entities--human beings, a cloud of smoke, sea creatures, the stars, rivers, etc.

This discussion of bara in Walton is intended as an argument for Walton's functional-not-material-creation view, and it should be evident that it does nothing whatsoever to support that extreme view that Genesis 1 is not about material origins at all. If anything, his chart showing the uses of bara supports exactly the opposite conclusion about the meaning and use of that word! It is a sign of Walton's difficulty in seeing what constitutes an argument for what that he goes on in later pages (94-95) to speak as if he has shown that the word bara does not concern material origins: "The nature of the governing verb ('bara', create) is functional" (p. 94). (Macrons eliminated in quotation for typographical simplicity.)

But by the same token, his argument concerning bara does nothing to support a moderate Framework Hypothesis either. Why should it? The objects of bara, both in Genesis 1 and elsewhere, are frequently material entities. As Craig also points out, even when they are not (as in the case of God's "creating a new heart" or creating darkness) God is still being treated in the passage as the immediate, efficient cause of what is created. (Digression: Walton objects in the interview to Craig's using the phrase "efficient cause" on the grounds that this is an "Aristotelian category" which is therefore an imposition of alien categories in a biblical context. Craig's point, however, is to clarify a point at which Walton himself is unclear. Craig is pointing out that even when what is made is immaterial in nature, such as a new heart, the passage implies that God brings it into existence in the sense of being its immediate prior cause. When God creates in me a clean heart, God does not merely look at a clean heart that is already there and make decrees about it! If you don't like the phrase "efficient cause" for this concept, use another. The argument is on point and should be understandable even by those who will not countenance the use of the phrase "efficient cause.")

Hence, we are again back where we started from when it comes to interpreting Genesis 1. We have this word "create" which is applied to various physical entities in the passage, and we have to look at the passage and make up our minds as to whether the passage is meant to contain any literal, physical information and how or whether to try to reconcile it with modern science. Walton's chart of the uses of bara does nothing even to support a loose interpretation of the text of Genesis 1 as containing no empirical information about the order in which things appeared, etc. A fortiori the chart does nothing to support the conclusion that Genesis 1 could be recording invisible divine decrees concerning entities that already existed physically long before!

The same is true in spades of Walton's discussion of asa, translated "made" in Genesis 1 and applied in Genesis 1 to the firmament, animals, man, and the two great lights (sun and moon) and by implication to the stars after the sun and moon. Walton makes much of the fact that asa is one of those multi-purpose verbs that can be translated either "made" or "did" and then tries to insist that it should be translated "did" in Genesis 1. Hence, God "did" two great lights rather than God "made" two great lights. This, in turn, is meant to support his idea that all the references to God's making things using asa in Genesis 1 could mean God's "establishing functions," and we are back again to Walton's own unsupported notion of "establishing functions" in a way that has no material consequences.

Does the observation that asa can sometimes be translated "did" support either Walton's view or a more moderate Framework Hypothesis? I cannot see how. How the word should be translated depends on context. The word is very frequently used in a way that must be translated as "made" (or as "fashioned" or something similar). For example, it is used for the making of Joseph's coat of many colors, for Aaron's making the golden calf, and for the fashioning of a candlestick, curtains, and numerous other furnishings of the tabernacle (see Exodus 36). To say that God "did two great lights" is an improbable locution since the objects of the verb are part of the material realm of cosmology (see discussion above), and there is therefore no reason to think that the verb in that context should be translated as "did." Walton is depending on a strained translation of the word with no justification other than the attempt to make room for his peculiar view of immaterial making of things. (Ad hoc again.) Indeed, asa, given that it is very commonly used for making in the sense of fashioning, is particularly well-suited for describing material creation. It is a hallmark of the unfalsifiability of Walton's entire approach that he insists on saying something or other to try to move the reader away from the prima facie material creation meaning of asa in Genesis 1. One cannot help wondering, given his treatment of bara and asa and of other locutions ("Let there be light") what the passage could say which Walton could not explain away as still "not about material origins."

A moderate Framework Hypothesis is not particularly harmed by the translation "made." One simply says that God made the two great lights but did not necessarily do so in a sudden way, in a way that would have appeared miraculous, or in a particular order relative to other physical entities. Translating the word "did" does nothing to help that hypothesis.

Walton also argues that, since the other ANE creation stories concerning man are about the creation of man, the race, rather than about specific individuals with individual histories, their statements concerning the materials out of which man was made (such as the blood of a god, divine tears, or clay) should be taken not to have any chemical or scientifically literal significance but to "communicate instead the important issues of identity and relationship" (p. 32). Using this argument to support a similarly non-literal interpretation of the creation of man in Genesis is awkward for Walton, because of course Genesis does talk about specific individuals in chapters 2-5. Walton is mostly avoiding talking about the origins of man in this book, and his views may have not have been fully formed on the subject when he wrote this book. But he does try to argue that the statement that God formed man out of the dust of the ground in chapter 2 has nothing to do with man's material origins because, as in the case of the ANE texts, this initial statement is meant to apply to all human beings, since later verses after the fall imply that all of mankind "is dust" and will therefore return to dust in death. Hence, argues Walton, the statement that God made or created man is meant even in the first instances (in chapter one and in chapter two) to have nothing to do with the the material origins of man.

This is an argument of sorts, but it is an extremely poor one. Why should the other ANE statements that man, the species, was initially made from clay or from the blood of a god not be taken literally to refer to some first group of human beings that were made, from whom others are descended? After all, Christians have generally taken statements in Genesis 1 and 2 about God's making mankind to be statements that God made the first human beings, from whom others are descended. Why should we assume that, because texts refer to the making of the race, they do not literally mean that the first members of the race were made from such materials? It seems to be only because we ourselves do not believe that human beings are literally now made of clay, dust, or the blood of gods. But perhaps the ancients did. Do we know for a fact that they did not think that human beings are in some physical sense made of earth? We know that some people long ago believed that physical things are literally made of the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water, so this is not at all impossible. The argument that the ancients didn't have modern concepts of chemistry tells us little, for having a worked-out chemistry is not necessary for believing that one physical entity is made in part from another physical substance.

Even more plausibly, perhaps the non-Israelites or Hebrews thought that all men are made from the substance of the earth just in the sense that they are descended from the first man, who was literally made from the earth. Compare the statement by the author of Hebrews (7:9-10) that Levi paid tribute to Melchizadek because he was in the loins of Abraham.

Do we know independently that ancient Babylonians did not think that all human beings, by inheritance from the first human beings, are made of the blood of a god? Or perhaps they only believed that human beings were initially made from the blood of a god but that that property (being made of the blood of a god) could not be inherited. There are plenty of possibilities, but nothing in the fact that the the statements are about the making of the race leads to the conclusion that the statements were not taken to have any literal, physical meaning.

In other words, this argument about the making of the race is forceless; it leaves us where we were before as far as figuring out to what extent Genesis is about physical origins or the details thereof.

Conclusion

This post is already more than long enough. It is no exaggeration to say that I have been unable to find a single cogent argument for Walton's conclusions in this book, and I have not even detailed all of the poor arguments the book contains. I have not discussed the additional passages (such as pp. 119ff) in which Walton displays an inability to account for the nature and role of miracles in Christianity and in the world. Nor have I discussed his willingness to adopt, perhaps even to endorse (he is not always clear on this), a rigidly naturalistic concept of science (pp. 114ff, p. 130, p. 154). I have not taken time to go over his discussion of Intelligent Design (pp. 125ff), which is cramped at every turn by his acceptance, at least in practice, of the idea that science is incapable of saying anything about teleology, nor have I discussed his impractical recommendations for the teaching of origins science in public schools in a fashion that is "teleologically neutral" (pp. 152ff). Nor have I discussed his argument for taking the making of the firmament in day two to have nothing to do with material origins (pp. 55-58).

Even the attempt I have made here to see if his arguments can be used in support of a different, somewhat less implausible position has yielded no results.

A fan of Walton's work who is a Facebook friend suggested that I read Walton's second book on this subject, The Lost World of Adam and Eve, which has just become available, and that I would be interested and educated if I did so. I have thus far had time to read only portions of that book (which just arrived) and have listened to a two-hour interview with Walton about that book. (Yes, that makes two two-hour interviews altogether that I have listened to.) Precisely because of the existence of the book on Adam and Eve, I have said little here about Walton's views concerning Adam and Eve. I can already see, from what I have read thus far, that his views about man have changed in one crucial respect between the two books.

By reading and reviewing TLWOG1 itself I have learned that a book that has been quite influential among smart evangelicals depends a great deal on assertion in the absence of cogent argument. One can only conjecture as to the reasons for its influence. Those reasons may include an assumption that Walton's assertions must be correct and backed up by good reasons, since he is taken to be an expert on the mindset of Old Testament people. The reasons may also include a deep-seated desire not to have to struggle to reconcile Genesis with mainstream contemporary science. Walton's complete separation between Genesis 1 and material origins certainly is intended to absolve the reader from any such duty of reconciliation, though one would have thought that a less extreme Framework Hypothesis such as I have outlined would have approximately the same effect on that front. Perhaps what readers hope for from Walton is more ammunition for making Genesis 1 vague, whether or not they adopt Walton's own specific view. In any event, since The Lost World of Adam and Eve attempts to build on Walton's arguments in TLWOG1, it is just as well to have pointed out in excruciating detail that he does not establish much of anything in The Lost World of Genesis One.

This is hardly a good omen concerning The Lost World of Adam and Eve.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on March 12, 2015 3:40 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Adam and Eve) (evolution) (Genesis) (human origins) (origins)