Category Archives: Adam

Unexpected livestream on my book

Months ago I was put in touch with Rob Rowe, who has a YouTube apologetics channel based in Australia. I heard nothing until yesterday, when on a couple of hours notice he set up a livestream to discuss The Generations of Heaven and Earth, which together with Q&A lasted over two hours. Fortunately I hadn’t forgotten too much of what I’d written.

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The Sabbath was made for man

One of the insights I gained when writing The Generations of Heaven and Earth was what theologian Claus Westermann wrote about the command given to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. He suggested that it was only the command that made relationship possible between man and God, thus enabling true human freedom. As I summarised it in my book: “The freedom of this relationship arises only from the command; without the command there would be no freedom.” Now this is a particularly bold statement in that Westermann has just quoted Gerhard von Rad’s words about the preceding permission to eat from any tree of the garden: “God begins … Continue reading

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Good Creation revisited

A couple of new reviews have appeared on my book Good’s Good Earth, in Studies in Christian Ethics and Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, the latter of which rolls it together with a review of Generations of Heaven and Earth. You can find them by linking to the respective book tabs on the menu above, and clicking on the “Endorsements and Reviews” links.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 7 Comments

Considering an ancient Adam

The Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, as described in my book and that of Joshua Swamidass, makes a recent Adam plausible in the context of the mainstream sciences. Some objectors to this “recent Adam” interpretation wants to put Adam and Eve much further back in the past (which is equally compatible with GAE), and their main reason is the status of the “people outside the garden” in our scenario.

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Interview on Generations of Heaven and Earth

Peaceful Science has just published an interview-style article on the last book here. Hope you’ll find it helpful.

Posted in Adam, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 22 Comments

Hump retrospective 4: the impossibility of Adam

Anyone who reads The Hump regularly is well aware of the answer I found to the apparent scientific impossibility of an historical Adam and Eve. After all, that is the subject of the book of mine that came out last month, The Generations of Heaven and Earth.

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Heads up on “The Generations of Heaven and Earth”

I’ve just checked the proofs on my forthcoming (second) book, The Generations of Heaven and Earth: Adam, the Ancient World, and Biblical Theology, so when it is published by Cascade early next year you can blame all the residual mistakes on me.

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The primates of all England

So this week we took our twelve-year old granddaughter to Monkey World, east of our particular Eden here, in Dorset. It’s just down the road from the Bovington Tank Museum, so we had to be careful not to end up with the Shermans rather than the Simians (or the Chieftains instead of the Capuchins). I’ve seen the brown tourist signs for it for years, and assumed it was a small sad zoo in which fat children could gawp at small sad monkeys in cages.

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Curses, Moriarty

Here’s a thought that would have gone into my book, had I thought of it earlier. One of my minor theses there is that the “curse on the ground,” usually invoked to support the “fallen creation” teaching, actually applied only to Adam’s immediate descendants, and was abrogated in Noah’s covenant. I’m pleased to find overt support for that in Brian Curry’s chapter in the book I’m helping review at Peaceful Science, Christ and the Created Order, where he writes: But even within Genesis this curse lasts only until the end of the flood and is later canceled by God (Gen 8:21). Further, it exercises no systematic relevance within the rest … Continue reading

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Of real and allegorical kings

It seems to me that to those who see the Eden narrative as “allegorical,” that is denying an historical Adam of some sort, it is mainly a kind of mythic aetiological tale about the univerality of human sin. And so, if sin arose by some evolutionary process, or by a mini-fall in each self human life, it doesn’t much matter because evil’s present existence is real.

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