Jac3510 wrote:Yes, but I believe you hold to the idea that there were other human beings on earth, and that Adam is not the father of all men, but only of the covenant people, right?
I don't hold to it, though I am open to the idea.
Now, if I am right ont hat, then to be honest, I don't have any interest in that position nor any arguments about the flood relating to it. I do know, however, that the majority of the people on these boards hold to the orthodox view that Adam was the father of all men.
I'm going to suggest, with respect, that it's dangerous to close your mind to an interpretation which explains the difficulty over which theologians have wrestled for centuries. Until Darwin, theologians could not comprehend any rational justification for accepting Genesis 4:16-17 as it stood. Great wrestling with the text had to take place, in order to reconcile it with the conventional interpretation of Genesis 1:26. It was well recognised that Genesis 4:16-17 implies that Adam and Eve were not the first humans. But since there was no evidence otherwise, the conventional interpretation of Genesis 1:26 was upheld, and Genesis 4:16-17 was glossed over, ignored, or explained away.
Certainly there were Christian (and probably Jewish), commentators who suggested taking Genesis 4:16-17 seriously, but they were in the minority. Geological and archaeological discoveries of ancient man provided additional information that Genesis 4:16-17 should be treated respectfully, instead of being told to go and stand in the corner. But the real watershed was Darwin, of course. Suddenly it seemed that Genesis 4:16-17 had been right all along, and that Adam and Eve weren't the only humans on the planet at the time that they were created. If Christians had capitalized more on the fact that the Bible had beat science to the punch by about 3,000 years, then perhaps Christianity would still have the edge over people like Dawkins, whose mouths would have been shut.
It's worth pointing out that the Genesis creation is the only creation story (I can think of), in which the creation of certain ancestral humans is accompanied by the direct statement that humans already existed (Cain's wife). This is information which would not have been available to a human writer, and as we can see, if a human writer had been writing the creation story they would intuitively have determined (incorrectly), that any ancestral humans must have been the very first and only humans on the planet. This places the Genesis creation in a category of agreement with science which no other creation story has, and must surely give reason to think to those who wish to dismiss Genesis 1-3 as 'Yet another funny creation myth'.
Christian apologists have long had problems fitting Cain's wife into their existing paradigm. I suggest this may be because the paradigm was incorrect. The natural reading is not a problem if the paradigm is changed. A paradigm change is a superior solution to abandoning the natural reading. The fact that science may have discovered the answer behind the natural reading would simply confirm that the Bible was ahead of the scientists all along (same with Babel, and the fact that the earth was already widely populated), and that is a significant contribution to the argument for inspiration and the literality of the Genesis account.
So, I am still asking to those of you advocating a local flood: if human beings were living in countries as far away as Spain as early as 32,000 years ago, then how can you say the flood was local?
This is the problem. If the purpose of the flood was to kill all humans, then the flood had to be global (no matter when it was). Global floods have obvious geological and archaeological problems. If the purpose of the flood was judgment on the covenant community (as I believe it was), then a local flood is a necessary consequence.
In this case you're driven to a global flood on the basis of having to reconcile the available scientific evidence with a particular interpretation of Genesis 1:26. Unfortunately, having resolved the conflict with Genesis 1:26 you then find you've created a conflict between the available scientific evidence and the flood narrative. It seems clear you can't have it both ways.
What I am seeing here is that a particular interpretation of Genesis 1:26 not only causes interpretative difficulties with Genesis 4:16-17 and Genesis 10, but also causes conflict between available scientific evidence on the one hand, and the flood narrative, the dispersion of Noah's sons, and the tower of Babel on the other. I suggest that if the interpretation of a single verse is causing so many difficulties with other Biblical passages and with the available scientific evidence, then the time has certainly come to question that interpretation.