Our CJAT is ecumenical, so people could have all sorts of views about 'true history' versus 'parable or emblematic story' in various parts of the Bible. For example, I'm on record as saying that understanding evolution is a big help in understanding problems like 'why would a loving God would allow pain to exist?' Even Evangelicals are split about this - I hope you saw the story recently! "But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all." Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history. To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence." Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science." [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst] |