foundation of highly incomplete data. Even the basic “facts” can be revised with new fossil discoveries. Hence, the history of paleoanthropology is a history of constant revision and rejection of past ideas. The outside observer may consider this instability to be largely alleviated at present by the exposure of faulty ideas of the past, but even recent discoveries have forced re-evaluations of past assertions. The future will be no different. Hence, alternate theories are hardly the objection that Enns seems to think. More serious is the accusation of ignoring evidence, a charge that might be leveled at this review. We confess that we will not address comparative genomics or radiometric dating or the integration of paleoanthropology with archaeology and many other theological and biblical issues, but this is not because we ignore them. Other creationists are hard at work on these vital scientific issues, and other biblical scholars provide us with confidence in our young-age creationist framework. To casually accuse us of ignoring evidence would be a gross oversimplification. Still, a skeptical reader might point to ongoing disagreements among young-age creationists over the details of the hominin fossil record as evidence of a greater intellectual chaos in the creationist approach. Most striking of all are the opposing reactions to the discovery of Homo naledi. Some creationists have welcomed this fossil form as a newly discovered member of the human family (Wood 2016, Wise 2016, Rupe and Sanford 2017), while others have just as firmly rejected the remains as nothing more than an ape (O’Micks 2016, Tomkins 2019). We acknowledge that these are important disagreements, but we also contend that the energy devoted to these disputes easily distracts from the much more important areas of agreement that many young-age creationists share regarding hominin fossils. The situation is not a hopeless mire of unjustified and contradictory opinions but rather relatively minor but understandable uncertainty on the edges of a mostly stable and widely-accepted model. It is that model that we wish to explore in this review. Before we begin, we ought to clarify what we mean by young-age creationism, since there remains a great deal of confusion about the term. We understand “young-age creationism” to refer to a set of doctrinal commitments, which includes belief that the opening chapters of Genesis record real historical events. Young-age creationists accept a six-day creation thousands of years ago, Adam and Eve as the first humans made in God’s image, a transgression and curse that introduced physical death, a geographically worldwide Flood in the lifetime of Noah, and a linguistic confusion at the tower of Babel. Like most Christians, however, young-age creationists can (and do) disagree about precisely how certain words, phrases, or passages in the Bible should be interpreted. Like most scientists also, young-age creationists can and do disagree about how scientific evidence is best interpreted. We deny the wooden literalism that characterizes the “creationist” stereotype in the guild of biblical scholarship, and we deny the naive species fixity that characterizes the “creationist” stereotype in the guild of science. We simply accept that Genesis 1-11 refers to events that really happened, even as we seek to more fully understand the evidence of the biblical text and the natural world. II. WHAT IS HUMAN? A. The Image of God Humanity is first a theological category that describes those individuals made in God’s image, descended from Adam and Eve, and fallen into sin and death. The image of God has and continues to be the subject of many theological treatises, and we note here only the current discussion of image as 1) a quality or set of qualities that we possess versus 2) a position that we occupy (see discussion in C.J. Collins 2006, pp. 61-63). Traditionally, Christian scholars have taken the image to describe some set of attributes possessed by humans that reflect or represent some qualities of God. These attributes are often emphasized as uniquely human, as opposed to qualities we share with other animals, and humans are described as especially rational and capable of mastering our created environment in ways that animals cannot. More recently, biblical scholars have noted the relationship between the image of God and other divine images (idols) in the Ancient Near East (ANE) (e.g., Gentry and Wellum 2012). With this perspective, the image is understood as a position that we hold rather than an attribute of humanity. Here, we follow Collins (2011, pp. 94-95) by synthesizing the two views. Humans hold the position of representatives of God in creation, and our intellectual qualities enable us to represent God well. Thus, the true mark of humanity is not necessarily what we look like (since that can vary widely even among living humans, and since God is spirit) but how we behave. Even in our fallen, sinful condition when we do not reflect the goodness of God, our actions rise above the far simpler behavior of animals. We also recognize that all humans since Adam and Eve come only from other humans. In our view, humans do not emerge or evolve from nonhuman animals. The creation of humans entails a special physical action by God to make the original human bodies, Adam from dust and Eve from the flesh of Adam. Throughout the history of humanity, the generation of new humans has occurred through normal reproductive means, excepting the miraculous conception of Jesus. With new technologies less than a century old, the possibility exists that new humans could be crafted by means other than sexual intercourse, which at the point of this writing includes in vitro fertilization and cloning, with or without genetic engineering. Since all of these new technologies still begin with some sort of human cells, we maintain that all people generated in this fashion remain human people, made in God’s image, fallen, and eligible for redemption in Christ. Finally, with other creationists we affirm that physical, human death began after Adam and Eve’s fall into sin. Most obviously, since Adam and Eve were the only humans at that time and they didn’t die until after the fall, there could be no dead humans before Adam and Eve. There remains much theological discussion over the nature of the fall and the curse of death (e.g., Stump and Meister, 2020), but we affirm the traditional young-age creationist position that Adam and Eve would not have experienced physical death had they not transgressed God’s law. Because of the nature of human senescence, such a belief also entails that humans must have been physically different prior to the fall in that they would not have experienced aging and natural death as we do. What those differences entail are neither known to us nor important to our objective here. Though it may be interesting to speculate on human physical immortality, the reality is that Adam and Eve did sin and thus brought physical death ROSS, BRUMMEL, AND WOOD Human History: From Adam to Abraham 2023 ICC 67
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