Thank you for the ping, Dear Sister!
As you -- and those who have read my posts (and seen my graphics on the subject) are aware, I am very much a creationist and very much a physical scientist. So - this thread should be "right up my alley"... '-)
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The problem I find with the premise of this thread is that it deals with Adam and Eve as if they were unique physical creations -- and were the very first and only pair of their (physical) kind.
Obviously, (as will be shown below) they were not.
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Adam and Eve were unique spiritual creations "ensouled" by the very Spirit of God to be in His likeness (God is Spirit) -- and the very first such of that kind.
Scripture is very clear that the physical bodies of the pair were NOT uniquely created ex nihilo (caused to exist where nothing had existed before). Scripture specifically and clearly states that their physical bodies were formed (made, shaped, fabricated, molded) from physical matter that was, instead, created "in the beginning" by God.
IOW, the physical materials from which their bodies were FORMED were "that which was just lying around" - i.e. "the dust of the ground":
"The Dust of the Ground"
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In other words, the entire premise of this thread is bogus!!
(The clue to that "outlandish" statement is that humankind is extremely genetically diverse.)
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In contrast, genetically, Adam and Eve were genetically IDENTICAL. (Eve was cloned from Adam.)
IF Adam and Eve were the very first two physical humans:
They had the following offspring: sons Cain, Abel and Seth, plus (at least) two additional sons and (at least) two additional daughters. [Validating that offspring count in Scripture is left as an exercise for the reader...]
Their offspring were genetically identical to their parents.
And, since the offspring managed to propagate the species, the only spouses that could have been available to them were their (genetically identical) SIBLINGS.
With that being the (genetic) outcome of Adam and Eve being the very first and only (physical) humans, humankind would be fortunate to even look this good:
As stated above, obviously, that is not the case that exists here on Earth.
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BOTTOM LINE: My answer to the question in the article's title is, "NO!"
Adam and Eve were unique spiritual creations. "Science" (genetics) has no way of detecting that uniqueness.
The question of how the existing radical genetic diversity of humankind came to be (where Cain, Abel, and Seth and their other brothers and sisters got their [genetically different] spouses) is beyond the scope of this article and discussion thread.
I have my own answer -- but neither Hugh Ross, (with whom I agree on many points) nor other participants on this thread, would be expected to agree with it... ;-)
The problem I find with the premise of this thread is that it deals with Adam and Eve as if
they were unique physical creations -- and were the very first and only pair of their (physical) kind....[Rather] Adam and Eve were unique spiritual creations "ensouled" by the very Spirit of God to be in His likeness (God is Spirit) -- and the very first such of that kind.
Scripture is very clear that the physical bodies of the pair were NOT uniquely created ex nihilo (caused to exist where nothing had existed before). Scripture specifically and clearly states that their physical bodies were formed (made, shaped, fabricated, molded) from physical matter that was, instead, created "in the beginning" by God.
I wholly agree with paragraphs two and three above, dear Brother!
However, WRT paragraph one, regarding the "premise" of Fazd Rana and Hugh Ross (and therefore their motive in writing), I think before we draw any conclusions, we ought to understand what they may have thought they were doing.
As far as I can tell, they were taking state-of-the-art genetic science and projecting it back onto the past, to the very Garden of Eden, to see whether there is any scriptural reason by which state-of-the-art genetic science could be falsified. The answer they find: NO, there is no such reason.
At the same time, if they are persons of genuine Christian humility, perhaps they would also tell you that, at best, what they've come up with in their findings can only be speculation. For there is no way to "validate" their findings by means of the scientific method.
A speculation is an immaterial thing, a creature of the human mind. And science, by virtue of its methods, cannot ever reach to immaterial things, and so cannot falsify them in principle. At best, what Rana and Ross have done is to tell a "likely story." And see if it holds up over time.
Oh, that "likely story" business: It's straight out of Plato. He discerned that "truth" as articulated and promulgated to the wider public comes in two alternative presentations: The "likely story" ( Aletheia logos); or "opinion" (Doxa). Though there is no way humanly possible to directly validate (or falsify) either one by scientific means, I suspect Rana and Ross, as scientists and informed Christians, are trying to reach the former, because they see the latter is fatally insufficient in explaining anything meaningful about the human condition.
Well, that's my take anyway, FWIW. Further, it is evident that these two men do not separate faith and reason into two mutually-exclusive categories, where under Aristotle's Third Law (the Law of the Excluded Middle), one must be found "true," instantly confirming the other to be "false." This is a false dichotomy from the get-go, an exercise in comparing apples to oranges....
It seems to me that Aristotle's Third Law is utterly destroyed at the threshold of the quantum world, along with Newtonian physics.
In the quantum world, one does not speak of "either/ors"; one speaks of complementarities. The most famous of which is the question, "is it a 'particle' or a 'wave'?" It turns out, the answer to that question absolutely depends on the experimental set-up used to analyze it. Yet it turns out that both the particle and wave descriptions are entirely valid; and that both are necessary to the explication of the total system of which they are constituent descriptions.
I believe that faith and reason are complementarities in this sense. Good things happen when they work together.
And there is no biblical reason for them NOT to work together, at least on my reading of Romans 1:20:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead....
You put up the Periodic Table of the Elements as a form of description of "matter." In the first place, this wonderful and extraordinarily useful Table is a human construct for the purpose of classifying
atoms; it's fun to watch the Table expand, to take into account newly-discovered atomic structures. But I don't see any neutrinos classified there. For neutrinos are
massless, thus undetectable to direct human observation in principle.
Anyhoot, my point is if "matter" -- the "dust of the ground" -- is just the configuration of atoms, the entire idea of "matter" is completely destroyed, along with Aristotle's Third Law and Newtonian physics, at the threshold of the quantum world....
Having said that, I firmly believe that the "material configuration" of a given human body is derivative from a deeper principle. That is to say, it is a by-product of something more essential, which is utterly intangible in nature. And thus immune from investigation by means of the scientific method, which depends on direct observation and replicable experiments.
What is "more essential" is: the God-created human soul, made in His Image, and destined for eternal life. When God created Adam in Eden, what he created was not Adam's physical, that is mortal body, it was Adam's unique, unrepeatable soul -- created from the very foundation of the world, from the very Beginning.
From the genetic standpoint, you raise an extraordinarily interesting problem: If Eve is merely Adam's "clone," then her genetic heritage is identical to his. And their offsprings' genetic inheritance -- according to current notions regarding genetic inheritance -- would also be identical to their parents'.
So, how do we get from this situation of genetic uniformity to account for the genetic diversity -- within limits, I'd say -- that we see today?
Darwin has no useful answers to this question that I can discern....
You wrote:
The question of how the existing radical genetic diversity of humankind came to be (where Cain, Abel, and Seth and their other brothers and sisters got their [genetically different] spouses) is beyond the scope of this article and discussion thread.
How "Cain, Abel, and Seth and their other brothers and sisters" even got "genetically different spouses" is not only "beyond the scope of this discussion thread," it is arguably beyond all human explanation whatsoever. It seems the Holy Scriptures do not explain this.
I do not credit this as a fault of the Holy Scriptures. I credit it to the innate limits of the human mind, to grasp things utterly beyond its ken.
God alone stands in this gap of human intelligibility. So I put my full faith and trust in Him.
Thank you so very much, TXnMA, dear brother in Christ, for your excellent (and thought-provocative) essay/post!