The Bible and Pre-Adamic Man

Jay D. Homnick, in an article published in The Jewish Press discusses the biblical and Talmudic views of Creation. In his article Homnick deals with how the Talmud views and interprets God’s act of creation in Genesis 1 and 2. He also discusses the reluctance some people today have dealing with people such as Darwin and Dawkins and “their contention that the processes of natural development could have occurred without being set in motion and/or guided by a supreme Creator.”

In his article, Homnick also discusses how the Bible and the Talmud deals with the issue of prehistoric man. Interpreting passages such as Psalm 105:8 and 1 Chronicles 16:15, the Talmud says that there were 974 generations of prehistoric man that existed before Adam.

The following is an excerpt of Homnick’s article:

As startling as this approach must have been to the assumed orthodoxies in other religions and secular systems, nothing can compare in bombshell status to the biblically hinted, and Talmudically expounded, notion of prehistoric man.

The Talmud in Shabbos (88b) indicates there were 974 generations of prehistoric man. In Chagiga (13b) the Talmud sounds more like those generations were never actualized. The Midrash Rabba (Genesis 28) says they were wiped out.

While it remains somewhat unclear exactly what these 974 generations represent, this seems to be a matter of prime importance that is stressed in two verses (Psalms 105:8, Chronicles I 16:15). These verses point out that the Torah was given to the thousandth generation, which is explained by the Midrash to mean the 974 prehistoric generations plus the 26 from Adam until Moses.

Apparently, this highlights the high level of Torah – that it took a thousand stages in the creation of man, stages designated as “generations,” before man could receive such exalted wisdom.

The Jews traveled through history for millennia studying the Talmud and Midrash, comfortable with a unique concept of prehistoric man, a concept that gave that creature (or idea) a 974:26 edge in pre-biblical generations.

If geology and archaeology have indeed yielded specimens that are indisputably prehistoric men (I am not expert enough to be certain of this), they are substantiating one of the most mysterious parts of the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Personally, I do not believe that Psalm 105:8 is talking about prehistoric man. What amazes me is that many years before Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species and Richard Dawkins published his book The God Delusion, Jewish scholars were talking about prehistoric creatures that existed before Adam. What is also amazing is that they did not see the idea of the existence of pre-Adamic man as a threat to their faith.

Is there a lesson in the Talmud for twenty-first century Christians?

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Adam, Creation, Darwin, Dawkins, Evolution, Prehistoric Man, Talmud

God, Darwin, and Evolution

The New York Times has published a very interesting article written by Robin Marantz Henig on evolution and religion titled “Darwin’s God.” It is a long article but worth reading. The following is an excerpt of the article:

God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. "God exists," he wrote in black and orange paint, "or if he doesn't, we're in trouble." Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since - why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do.

Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, "belief in hope beyond reason" - whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. "Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?" asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. "If you have negative sentiments toward religion," he tells them, "the box will destroy whatever you put inside it." Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver's license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don't believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Atran first conducted the magic-box demonstration in the 1980s, when he was at Cambridge University studying the nature of religious belief. He had received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University and, in the course of his fieldwork, saw evidence of religion everywhere he looked - at archaeological digs in Israel, among the Mayans in Guatemala, in artifact drawers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view?

The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the '80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists - not whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does.

This is different from the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering attention recently, in the form of best-selling books from scientific atheists who see religion as a scourge. In "The God Delusion," published last year and still on best-seller lists, the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins concludes that religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. "Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful," Dawkins wrote. He is joined by two other best-selling authors - Sam Harris, who wrote "The End of Faith," and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University who wrote "Breaking the Spell." The three men differ in their personal styles and whether they are engaged in a battle against religiosity, but their names are often mentioned together. They have been portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world view with a fervor that seems almost evangelical.

Read the article in its entirety by clicking here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: God, Darwin, Evolution, Scott Atran