Posted on 07/20/2016 7:57:38 AM PDT by fishtank
Neandertal-Human Hybrids: Old earth apologetics gone real bad
by Fred Butler
Published: 19 July 2016 (GMT+10)
Recently on Twitter, I had a back and forth with a Reasons to Believe apologist. Our exchange began after I tweeted the following comment in response to another apologetic tweet, “Let’s talk about Hugh Ross & his pre-Adamic man theory. You apologetic folks ignore its problems.”
The next day, the Reasons to Believe apologist tweeted to me the following response, “Brother at RTB we do not believe in PreAdamic humans. Adam was the 1st human & specially created.”
Now in fairness, he is absolutely correct. I had mis-tweeted, as it were. Technically, Ross, and RTB apologists, argue that there were soulless hominids that pre-dated the creation of Adam. Those hominids were a lot like modern man, but they lacked the image of God that Adam and all his descendants have. They were animals, much like a higher functioning version of the great apes.
None the less, I responded by asking him the following question, “Are Neanderthals human beings, then?”
A little bit of background is in order to explain my question.
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
The antediluvians may have been breeding hybrids, but not with apes:
“1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Genesis 6:1-4
Direct attacks on Ross, eh? They must be taking the limelight away from the YEC’s.
I disagree that sons of God were angels. I think they were simply followers of God and sons of men were men of this world, non-followers like secularists or atheists.
+1
Has to be! That's how those Giants (Nephilim) were made. Two humans of different religious or political differences got together and...that sexual union creates 8-10' tall (human?) half-breeds with six fingers and six toes. Not long after that God decides to flood the world (there were reasons).
Why would the Bible describe the children of regular human matings as “nephilim”, the same word it uses to describe the Philistine giants? It seems obvious there was something more unusual about the pairings if the writer of Genesis found it noteworthy, thought it important to mention the unusual offspring produced by them, and noted both of those immediately preceding the decision of God to wipe out the wicked men from the earth with a flood.
It’s known in biology that the more healthier the human being, the taller and stronger they are. My reading of Scripture is that everything in a pristine Antediluvian world was simply bigger. The fossil record testifies to that.
I don’t read the description in Genesis that they were giants because of genetic manipulation, just that they were giants as part of their creation.
What typically happens to people who are children of Christians and atheists or Muslims?
They are neither believers or non-believers. They open mindedly accept things and reject things without being able to figure out why it should be accepted or rejected.
You’re right that there are some complexities to this but that is no reason to abandon a perfectly good and fairly common sense tool we can use to categorize creatures.
A good rule of thumb is that if two types of animals can breed (or if they can both independently breed with another species as you noted), that is positive evidence of a common ancestry, but the inability to breed can never in and of itself be positive evidence of a lack of common ancestry.
For wicked figures to arise, talking of themselves as “sons of deity” (to generalize the term) could be another way that mockers of Christ hit the earthly scene.
At least in a strictly evolutionary-descent model it is.
In a progressive creation model, all bets are off.
Which creationist narrative are you talking about when you insult people?
There are two in Genesis.
All atheists and others hateful toward Christians like to pile on literalists who believe word-for-word the second narrative.
While I don’t agree with the latter, I’m not going to call them “idiots” and “short-bus people” because they don’t agree with me. That’s a leftist tactic.
“The most staunch old earth theologians...”
Hold your horses there, there are a great many of the “guided evolution” variety that believe in whatever just-so stories the secular scientists pronounce, with their only caveat being that they think there was some invisible hand guiding the process.
“You don’t think like I do, therefore you don’t think at all” is a meme that has popped up over and over in history and led to some pretty grand falls.
Terminology has to be understood in context too. The idea of a reality that can be flexed by deity would be quite acceptable to the ancients. God’s day and our few billion years could easily be accepted as compatible. I think, ironically, that too much of a “modern science” mindset has blinded us to possibilities that the ancients would not have even blinked at.
How do you account for Neanderthal genetic markers being present in modern day humans, and in fact being more prevalent in areas that Neanderthals were known to inhabit, if they could not interbreed?
We can suppose this for sake of theory, but the “guidance” needed would have had to be excruciatingly particular. The result is almost equivalent. Almost, not exactly, because it would imply some “begots” in the account that would not otherwise be there. Also what we see does not behave like anything Darwinian, to say the least. The bigger the creature, the easier it is for a given genetic move to toss it into the ash heap of history; but our modern record shows an appearance of species that burgeons at the tree tops, not at the roots.
We would need to look at the details, and respect the fact that viruses and some bacteria can copy what we call markers too — as well as the thesis that this is simply a riff that the Lord worked into similar species for similar purposes.
So what? That doesn’t actually answer any of my questions, and besides, such children wouldn’t be any worse of an abomination than the unbelievers who already existed, so why would it be noteworthy?
How about answering just one question, though. If “nephilim” wasn’t understood to mean literal giants, then why in Numbers 13:33 do the Hebrew scouts tell David that they saw “nephilim” in Canaan who were so large regular men were like grasshoppers compared to them? We later meet some of these sons of Anak in Canaan and they are indeed described as men of giant stature, such as Goliath, so we know the description is not simply figurative.
I’m not speaking of models, I’m speaking of the real world.
The average height of the Hebrew Israelite, in this time period, was about 5’4. If they came across some a people averaging 6’0-6’4, because they were healthier, they would think that they were meeting giants.
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