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Dear Sister bb: You wrote:

I don't see anything in either Genesis 1 or 2 about the contemporaneous existence of "other tribes" with what transpired in the Garden of Eden.... But surely the purported existence of ""other tribes" would clear up some misgivings that we moderns might have, on the genealogical issue....

Nor do I, Dear Sister, see evidence of "other tribes" in those verses. However, I am ever mindful of the principle that,

"Absence of evidence is not (necessarily) evidence of absence".

As I have oft pointed out, nowhere in Scripture does the term, "galaxy" occur. Yet, we live within one, and God's creation contains far more of them

than the mere, individual stars we (or the recorder of Genesis) could count with our unaided eyes.

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I hope that we, here in this discussion, can avoid the sort of error committed by Moslems in Baghdad, when they attacked ice vendors "...because the Holy Koran doesn't teach us that the Prophet (PBUH) had ice in his drinks!"

Whether we like it or not, (or whether or not it causes us epistemological angst) there is very sound evidence that humans were here, even on this continent well before the dates pontificated by the likes of Bishop Ussher and his ilk. Over ten thousand years ago, humans here in Texas were capably making magnificent stone tools of a sophistication that taxes the capabilities of even the most masterful of us students of the art and science of lithic technology today.

Should our adherence to tradition and our deepest desires to label Adam and Eve as "THE FIRST" cause me to cast aside masterpieces of human artistry like this

when I uncover them in unmistakably ancient context?

I hope not...

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This may come as a surprise, but I am beginning to consider the possibility that Bishop Ussher may not have been too far off (within a factor of 4X or so) in his dating of the creation of Adam and Eve. The "begats" can only be "stretched" so much, and placement of Adam & Eve within the last Ice Age would put them smack in the middle of a thriving Homo sapiens sapiens population ... [Does that make me "YA&E"?] '-)

Of course, YEC folks would still have a problem with the first five days of Creation; but that's their problem -- not mine... '-)

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Well, it's approaching 3AM. Guess I'll consider this an adequate kickoff for my 79th orbit around our local, fusion-powered source of Global Warming energy -- and power down for the "night"... '-)

But to apprehend/ The point of intersection of the timeless/ With time, is an occupation for the saint.... -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages," V, 201-2

Not to claim to be a saint; merely to suggest that Bishop Ussher was not one either.

Nor was the great American ex-patriot poet, T.S. Eliot. But Eliot had grasped that "timelessness" actually directly impinges on human life, while it appears that Bishop Ussher entirely ignores the problem. His sense of "time" is very human -- serial, sequential, irreversible -- and above all, is something that can be measured. And so, using this standard of "measurement," in close consultation with the genealogies as recorded in the Holy Scriptures since Adam, the good bishop concluded that the date of Creation was the year 4004 B.C., meaning the age of the world is roughly six thousand years and counting.

On this point, it appears that the divine revelations of the Holy Scripture and the Natural World itself (see: Romans 1:20), the latter as explicated by scientific inquiry and human experience in general, are seriously at odds with each other.

This cannot be attributed to any shortcoming of Divine Intellect or Will. If there is a disconnect here, the fault must lie on the human side.

I suspect the fault lies in the failure of humans to appreciate their essential existential position, which is that man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness.

The Incarnation of Christ makes this existential fact absolutely crystal clear and beyond doubt. The mortalization, incarnation of a human soul involves placing a timeless, eternal entity into physical embodiment, for a time. That body is fully subject to the natural laws, and so perishes in due course. But the soul itself is eternal, everlasting. But this most essential fact about human nature is what most of us tend to forget. We do not "see" the "timelessness" involved in our own personal being, in every aspect of our daily lives....

Dear TXnMA, you pick off Bishop Ussher for his date, noting that splendid artifacts have been found in Texas that clearly indicate human action of great artistry and technique predate Ussher's inception date by some six thousand years. But in so saying, can you possibly mean that the fabricators of such splendid tools predated Adam and Eve?

I guess the answer to that question all boils down to how we deal with "the time problem"....

Thank you ever so much for writing, dear brother in Christ!