"When That Happened, I Don't Know"

Frank Turek. On this* video, says this:

[0:34] Of course, I believe in a historical [0:35] atom and I think God created Adam out of [0:37] the dust just like it says. ... When that happened, I [0:47] don't know.

If he believes in an Old Earth, I bet he doesn't.

If the atmosphere was old, when a certain Neanderthal breathed, or, since the carbon dioxide is what he breathed out, not in, when he ate food that had recently done photosynthesis or eaten plants, the carbon 14 level of his food should have been close to if not at 100 pmC. We see wiggles in the pmC for carbon dates I totally agree with.

The problem can be restated. Was Adam created before or after that Neanderthal?

If before, how is Adam not 40 000 + years before the present?

If after, how is he ancestral to all men, since Neanderthals are ancestral to most or all men?

Now, if Adam lived 40 000 years BP, or rather even longer back than that, how is:

• Genesis 3 not myth or prophecy rather than history?
• or God fair in His promise of the woman and her seed?

You may consider there is no problem with Genesis 3 being not history. It could be prophecy, right? Wrong, two reasons.

• There is no tradition whatsoever of Moses having a vision of Genesis 3 (there is one of his having a vision of the creation days, if so, Genesis 1 is basically what Moses saw, Genesis 2 what Adam and Eve remembered ... provided it wasn't 36 500 years or more before the Exodus, of course), and therefore we have no actual reason to regard Genesis 3 as prophecy. For Genesis 1 there is not just a commonsense one, but an actual tradition, hinted at, I think, in Jubilees.
• If Moses could access the correct details of Genesis 3 from prophecy, how come he got the trade of Adam wrong, or put metallurgy too soon after Adam or how come he got the generations between Adam and Noah, Noah and Abraham way too few?

So, the alternative to Genesis 3 being history is Genesis 3 being neither history, nor prophecy, but myth.

Now the other problem.

God had in Genesis 2:17 compared the lifespan of Adam after sinning to "one day" ... "same day" implying one day, or less than its full length. With that measure, Jesus arrived on the sixth day. Oh, using some kind of LXX chronology of course, with Masoretic / Vulgate chronology, He came late in the fourth or early in the fifth day. That's a reasonable time to wait, especially if Adam also had a vision of Genesis 1 and knew he had been created himself on the sixth day. Finally, only the Jews remembered this. Meaning the Second Temple Jews. But it had been faithfully transmitted orally, as well as the events, to Abraham coming sixth generation with "minimal overlap" ... let me explain. The next generation after Adam that has minimal overlap with him is not Seth, it's the last generation that was born before he died.

LXX without II Cainan

Adam dies 930, the last born before 930 is Mahalaleel born in 795. He overlaps with Adam 135 years.
Mahalaleel dies in 1690. The last born before that is Noah born in 1642.
Noah dies in 350 after the Flood, the last born before that is Eber, born 267.
Eber dies 771 after the Flood, the last born before that is Sarug, born 663.
Sarug dies 993 and Abraham was already born in 942 after the Flood.

From Genesis 12, the chapters become longer, which suggests they weren't originally orally transmitted as previous ones, but written down on papyrus or clay or whatever Abraham used from the go. So, the earlier chapters (minus 1:1 to 2:4 which were revealed to Moses), including the timeline, were written down after five overlaps between six minimally overlapping generations. That's a reasonable scope for oral transmission. Compare between Trojan War and Homer, if a "bard"** recorded snippets of story from homecoming or defeated warriors*** soon after the event, and he was 20, if he then lived to 80, and if the last generation of new bards he effectively raised were born when he was 60, the same amount of oral transmission would be there from events in 1179 BC to Homer composing a kind of wiki with multiple contributors in 750 BC.

So, the transmission is reasonable, and all along this transmission, one could reasonably hope that 1) the Redeemer would come the sixth "day", and that 2) this would be in time to defeat the Devil. That time was if so shortened so that not every Second Temple Jew should fall to temptations and damnation before the Catholic Church was born on Calvary.°

With a waiting time of 40 000 + years, this is not so. Hope would have been given up, promise would have been forgotten. There would be tens of thousands of years in which no one made it to salvation, because no one had heard the proto-Gospel and put his hope on God sending a woman and her seed to trample on a serpent. Perhaps that doesn't bother you, perhaps you think there were centuries of the Middle Ages when no one was saved. But I'm Catholic. The single one and same Church that Jesus founded is in visible continuity still on earth, it has not revived by rebelling against the papacy and the bishops and the councils and the scholastics. It was never gone. Same thing for the patriarchal Church, even Abraham was not starting it wholly anew, he had heard the truth from Sarug when he was up to 50 years old. And perhaps even from Thera up to when he was 75, him leaving in that case after his physical father spiritually died by becoming an idolater.°° The idea of 10 000 years with no visible continuity between Adam and Noah or Noah and Abraham is intolerable.

God doesn't do that. I'm not considering Vatican II as a Catholic council, most probably, but the paragraph 3 of Dei Verbum°°° is spot on, and you'd wreck the first part:

God, who through the Word creates all things (see John 1:3) and keeps them in existence, gives men an enduring witness to Himself in created realities (see Rom. 1:19-20). Planning to make known the way of heavenly salvation, He went further and from the start manifested Himself to our first parents. Then after their fall His promise of redemption aroused in them the hope of being saved (see Gen. 3:15) and from that time on He ceaselessly kept the human race in His care, to give eternal life to those who perseveringly do good in search of salvation (see Rom. 2:6-7).

We would obviously agree on the second part:

Then, at the time He had appointed He called Abraham in order to make of him a great nation (see Gen. 12:2). Through the patriarchs, and after them through Moses and the prophets, He taught this people to acknowledge Himself the one living and true God, provident father and just judge, and to wait for the Savior promised by Him, and in this manner prepared the way for the Gospel down through the centuries.

So, Adam being created 40 000 + years ago, that won't work.

How about Adam being created 7200 years ago, as the chronology I use clearly suggests? BUT with old earth and all dating methods accepted? So, still dating for instance a given Neanderthal to 40 000 + years BP, or Cheddar man to 8300 BC?

In that case it would be problematic to say he was ancestral to Amerindians and to Aboriginees when the Europeans arrived! You'd be making the case for KKK who believe White Men only descend from Adam. The Catholic Church condemned that position when the writing of Isaac La Peyrère was put on the Index in the 17th C. pretty soon after it was locally condemned by Jean de Wachtendonck on Jan. 3rd 1656. Unfortunately, the Index Librorum in the last edition from 1948 which was a site, has been taken off the internet, I cannot verify the exact moment when a congregation in Rome added it to the next edition of the Index. Nope. Jesus died for Black, Yellow, Red and White, because Adam sinned as ancestor of Black, Yellow, Red and White.

Or, you could pretend "carbon dates don't mean anything" ... despite the fact that of all the dating methods, carbon dating is the only one with a high degree of matches checkable by other means. For someone checking for petrol, you don't need to know the exact number of millions of years, you just need to know it's shale (a specific type of rock, I think of calcar) and that it's "millions of years old" ... carbon 14 is used to detect forgeries, like paintings~ or sculptures, and check if such and such a skeleton could belong to this or that historic figure. Since the time when carbon 14 is roughly 100 pmC, it works. We can check that as far back as when we have written chronologies. Or as far back as Troy. The historic date transmitted through the aoidoi (or bards) to Eratosthenes~~ matches the carbon date for one of the levels of Troy.

But for back in the time of Ötzi, we cannot check that that way. If the world is young, like 7000 + years, the carbon level might have still been not 100 pmC but rising towards that value in his day.~~~ However that only works if the atmosphere is young, otherwise, if it was older than 30 000 years, the carbon 14 level would already have reached c. 100 pmC, which one may suppose is the equilibrium point between carbon 14 forming at a certain addition from the outside of the atmosphere and carbon 14 decaying by multiplication by a specific value lower than 1 for a specific time period. 0.5 for 5730 years. 0.707 for 2865 years. 0.841 for 1433 years. 0.917 for 716 years .... each time you half the time, you square root the decay factor. In c. 30 000 years, maximally, that reaches equilibrium, and the solution I propose needs the equilibrium to have been reached very recently. I also propose it reached equilibrium quicker, the production was hastened while God produced shortening of lifespans and an ice age by more radioactivity than we'll see, overall even more than an atomic war, but more drawn out in time, at least prior to heaven and earth passing away in fire. So, a world younger than 30 000 years, even if equilibrium was reached, allows Adam AND ALL HUMAN REMAINS to be within the last 7200 years. It puts Mungo man about halfway between the Flood and Babel, and the earliest human visit (but not remains) to the Americas in that same time span, and Clovis culture a bit later, but still pre-Babel.

And if you believe Genesis 14 is history, my solution also allows a date of c. 1935 BC (when Abraham was c. 80 years) to be carbon dated, as evacuation of En Geddi has been carbon dated, to 3500 BC. But again, after carbon dating, it only works with a "young" earth.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Martha
29.VII.2025

Tarasci, in Gallia Narbonensi, sanctae Marthae Virginis, hospitae Salvatoris nostri ac sororis beatorum Mariae Magdalenae et Lazari.

PS, the video involves 4 good arguments against macro-evolution, but unfortunately pretends we cannot know when Adam lived, basically at all, or reject an old earth, and also pretends that Jesus' death and resurrection makes as much sense if Adam's sin was in a totally different setting, basically, which is not true./HGL

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBvn5pRXAjk
** In Greek the word would be ἀοιδός.
*** Homer would have drawn on both Greek and Luwian traditions, representing Achaeans and Trojans.
° 6 times 1000 = 6000. 6 times 930 (Adam's lifespan) = 5580. Jesus came 5199.
°° See the sermon of St. Stephen, Acts 7. He could also have left after his spiritual father, if that was Sarug had physically died.
°°° https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html
~ You may have heard of a painting in South Africa carbon dated to 10 000 years old. It so happens, modern oil paintings also use acrylic colour as a fast way of making some detail glossy, and acrylic is a kind of plastic, so, uses OLD carbon. When you mix old carbon from acrylic with new carbon from linen and from whatever oil was used, you get a medium age. Like 10 000 years.
~~ https://darrell75657.tripod.com/centerforthestudyofancientwales/id143.html
~~~ https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2024/01/carbon-date-of-otzi-conventional-plus.html