G1 Conference Session 3: Dr. Rob Carter "Historical Adam"

Genesis Apologetics

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Hello, everybody. My name is Dr. Robert Carter. I'm a speaker for Creation Ministries International, and I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes talking to you about the historical

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Adam theological conundrums and scientific implications. The first question that comes up is, why do

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I think Adam is important? Well, frankly, it's theological. There are profound theological implications with the reality or not reality of a figure named

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Adam early in human history. Before I get to the scientific meat of this discussion, I just want to touch on some of the theological implications of the reality of a historical individual named

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Adam, who was, at one point in time, the only human being on earth and from whom all human beings today descend.

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All we have to do is consider what the New Testament says about Adam. In fact, if you look at Luke chapter 3, the genealogy of Jesus goes all the way back to Adam.

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And as far as the Gospels are concerned, Luke is the one who's most concerned about a straightforward, detailed history.

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He's the most historical or the most historian -like writer of his age. And clearly, he's linking people—Jesus, specifically—all the way back to Adam, the original, the first.

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But there are also theological statements in the writing of Paul. Specifically, if you consider Romans 5, verses 12 through 21.

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Let me just read you verse 12. Here, Paul is making a profound theological argument that is turning on the historicity, the reality, of the historical man named

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Adam. He's referring directly to this Garden of Eden scene, where Adam rebelled against God, and therefore,

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God pronounced death was a result of rebellion against God. I mean, how else would this make any sense if Adam wasn't a real historical figure?

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Because Paul here is saying that all death, all suffering, traces back to that event in the

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Garden of Eden. Consider also 1 Corinthians 15, 45. Thus it is written, the first man,

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Adam, became a living being. The last, Adam, became a life -giving spirit. Well, that's interesting.

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Here, Paul is equating Adam and Jesus in a very significant way. You see, Adam, our progenitor, fell.

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Jesus, our representative, rose. Adam succumbed to sin. Jesus overcame sin.

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Adam was given death. Jesus resurrected, gave us a solution to death, which traces right back to the

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Garden of Eden. Now, I'm not going to spend any more time on the theological implications of this. You can go to creation .com and look up more details if you're interested.

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There's some really profound things happening here in the New Testament. We cannot just take Genesis and treat it as mythology, or poetry, or speculation, because of the way the

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New Testament authors refer to it. This also raises an issue of biblical perspicuity. That is, how easily can we read it and understand what is said?

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There are places in the Bible that are mysterious, and will always be mysterious. But there are other places that are crystal clear, specifically when we look at the historical statements in the

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Bible. And Genesis is written as if it were history. When it said that Adam was so and so old when his son was born, and Adam lived so many more years, those are historical statements, very clear ones.

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And the later writers assumed that they were true. So, if those things aren't really true, if we're supposed to understand them in a different way, then when does the

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Bible start being literally able to be understood? That's a valid question.

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Now, I know the theologians have developed all sorts of ways around these questions, but I'm not intellectually satisfied with any of them.

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Because if you take Genesis as history, that assumption can run through the entire rest of the

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Bible without contradiction, without any sort of a conflict. But when you start denigrating

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Genesis as something other than history, you come to all sorts of different theological issues later on, very important ones, such as the verses

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I just read. Taking Genesis as history also gives us a historical grounding for understanding and answering some very important questions that are being asked in our culture today.

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Like, where do races come from? What is the origin of different people across the world?

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And how closely related are we? The Bible gives us very clear answers to those things.

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In fact, according to the Bible, we are all kissing cousins from one end of the planet to the other. I mean, given the amount of time the

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Bible says the earth has been around, given the average human generation time, there might be only 150, maybe 200 generations in all of human history.

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That makes us incredibly closely related, especially if you consider that we all came from Noah's family, who came off of the ark just 4 ,500 years or so ago.

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But a lot of people think there's a conundrum here. There's a conflict between what the Bible says and what science says.

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I mean, if these are historical events in Genesis, we have the science of genetics, which is able to test theories of history.

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Should we see Adam in the data? That's an honest question, and we need to ask it.

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The answer is yes, if you understand what you're supposed to be looking for. The answer might not be what you expect.

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Usually when it happens to me, it's because I had a misunderstanding what the Bible was actually saying. I was making assumptions about the

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Bible that weren't true. But the evolutionists believe they have discovered a Y -chromosome

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Adam that is the father of all men alive today. Now this is not the biblical

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Adam because they put him in a different place in Africa and hundreds of thousands of years ago, not a few thousand years ago.

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The reason for this is something they call the molecular clock. If you add up the number of differences over time, these things add up to long periods of time to explain the number of differences that we see in the

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Y -chromosomes in males around the world today. There's a lot of very complex science involved in that.

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There's a lot of assumption in that. There's a lot of history and history of people's assumptions about where humans came from, specifically from monkeys.

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And so a lot of that is driving the out of Africa theory. Biblically though, we also have one human ancestor.

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His name is Adam, and he lived 6 ,000 or so years ago. Now if you want to know when that was, look up my article,

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The Biblical Minimum and Maximum Age of the Earth on creation .com. That article will take some important biblical events and give you a possible time frame for when those events might have occurred.

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But not only is there a time difference between the evolutionary Adam and the biblical Adam, there is also a location difference.

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We don't know where Adam lived. We don't know where Eden was. After Adam got kicked out of Eden, he went eastward.

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Well, that's not a very descriptive statement, just eastward of an unknown location called Eden. And the reason I say that's unknown is because, first of all, we don't know where Noah built the ark.

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Second of all, Noah floated for five months. There's no geological or geographic connection between the landing place of the ark, which is up in the mountains, and the starting place of the ark.

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We have no idea. Now if you would like, you can check out my two -part article, Where Was Eden?

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Part one and part two, which is on creation .com. And I'll discuss, myself and my co -author, we will discuss a lot of issues involved in trying to figure out where Eden was.

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I do not place Eden in modern -day Iraq. In fact, I think that's a biblical minimalist position where people are assuming that there was just a local flood and that Genesis just came out of some of the ancient legends and some of the ancient mythologies of the

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Middle East. I don't believe that at all. There's another issue about this idea of why chromosome Adam. In fact,

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I've been saying Adam this whole time, but biblically our why chromosome answer is not Adam. It's Noah.

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That is, all men in the world go back to Noah. Noah goes back to Adam, fine.

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But in those 10 generations between Adam and Noah, some mutations might have occurred in Noah's why chromosome, the one he inherited from his father and his father and his father and his father all the way back to Adam.

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And any mutations that occurred would have changed Adam's why chromosome. And since only

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Noah's why chromosome made it through the flood, we don't actually know what Adam's why chromosome was. So we should be saying why chromosome

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Noah. That is the father. Noah is the father of all people alive today. Okay, fine.

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The Bible says that Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. If we looked at a family tree of all the why chromosomes in the world, do you think you would see

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Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth? What if I told you that I'm not expecting three branches?

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There's a whole lot of reasons for that. Not necessarily three. I mean, it is possible. I don't think so. But it is possible that Shem, Ham, or Japheth, that their why chromosome lineage died out.

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Now, because the population expanded rapidly and because the table of nations in Genesis 10 tells us all these different nations that came from Shem or Ham or Japheth, okay,

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I don't think that's true. But mathematically, it could be true. The probability goes down dramatically in a rapidly expanding population, but it's not impossible.

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There's a second reason to question whether or not we should expect three branches, and that is, what if Noah really didn't have any mutations at all?

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He's pre -flood. What if the mutation rate pre -flood was very low? Then Shem, Ham, and Japheth may have inherited identical why chromosomes.

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In which case, all the diversity we see today is post -flood, and they all started from Shem, Ham, or Japheth, who might even had children a couple hundred years after the flood with the same exact why chromosome.

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If that's true, it'll be impossible to actually locate the center point of our family tree.

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Ladies, when you were growing in your mother's tummy, your ovaries were finished after only about 22 cell divisions, and the eggs in the ovaries had been held in protective custody until today.

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Sometimes ovulation might happen 45 years after a woman is born. Well, that egg is not divided.

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Now, there are risks of chromosomal abnormalities as a woman gets older and older.

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This is true. Things like Down syndrome are very much tied to the age of the mother. Okay, fine, but most mutations don't come from the mother.

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Most mutations come from the father, and the older the father is, the more mutations he passes on to his children.

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There's something else that comes into play here, something I call patriarchal drive. I wrote an article about this in the

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Journal of Creation. It's now available on creation .com. It's the idea that old men are genetic poison in a population.

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Why? Because old men pass on a lot more mutations than young men. You see, a man's reproductive cells, they start dividing at puberty, and they don't stop dividing until the man is dead.

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And every time one of those cells divides, it's potentially adding more mutations to any further cell that arises from that cell.

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Because of little copying enzymes, they have to copy three to six billion letters, depending on what stage of cell division we're talking about, and they do make occasional mistakes.

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And those mistakes can propagate over time. They build up, they build up, they build up, so therefore older men pass on more mutations.

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We've actually measured this in genetics in the real world today. But Noah is the oldest father recorded in the

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Bible. I mean, by far, by more than a century, he is the oldest father recorded.

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How many mutations did he pass on to his children? So Shem, Ham, and Japheth could have had radically different Y chromosomes than their father.

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Or, because of the way the reproductive cells clonally reproduce, it's possible that maybe two of the brothers inherited the same cell line, and the other brother inherited a different cell line, and therefore it's very different.

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Or it's also possible they all inherited the same cell line and have very similar or even identical

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Y chromosomes. All three of those possibilities are within the biblical framework here.

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So when you see this tree that I drew of human Y chromosomes, and you don't see three branches, what's your answer?

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Is this bad? Does this mean that Adam is not true? That Noah is not true?

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Or do we put on our thinking caps and try to think through this? I got this data from the Simon's Genome Diversity Project.

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I have done a lot of work on Y chromosome data using the 1000 Genomes Project, Simon's Genome Diversity Project, the

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Human Genome Diversity Program. There's a lot of genetic data out there today, and I've gone through this at length.

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This particular tree was drawn after I filtered a lot of data, because you can't just take raw genetic data.

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It's full of errors. So there's an art to this science, and we have to be careful when an evolutionist makes a pronouncement based on art and assumption, and it's not actually the raw data.

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But this is the best data that I can present to you right now. This is a tree of all the men in the world.

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Every major branch of the Y chromosome family tree is represented here. Let me go through this for you.

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A. These are rare lineages only found in Africa. E.

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Are lineages found in Africa and not Africa. The lineages I and J are found almost cosmopolitanly in Eurasia, and they represent some of the earliest lineages we find in Eurasia.

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R. I am an R. In fact, my subgroup is R1B. I share a Y chromosome with about 80 % of European males.

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In fact, my sub -subgroup is targeted in Ireland. My Irish great -great -great whatever grandfather who fled the

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Irish potato famine was a carter, and he was carrying an R1B. There's Q, which is

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Native Americans. Notice that Q splits off from the R lineage before the

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R's really form. In fact, you can look at the branches on this tree and estimate how long ago it was when this lineage was founded, and the

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R lineage is late in history. It looks like it arose in Central Asia and then spread east, west, and south.

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There are a lot of other miscellaneous lineages here. You'll notice they're all labeled with a letter, and the letters aren't in alphabetical order because they're named after the order of their discovery, not necessarily where they fit on the tree.

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But look at group O. O is very interesting. These are Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

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Most of the people in East Asia belong to group O, and it has this beautiful fan. This is a signature of a population that has remained in one place for a long time and has just grown and grown and grown and grown and grown.

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That's what you see when that's true. Going down to the group A lineages, which are rare in Africa, you see it's kind of spindly and spidery.

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This is the type of thing that happens when a population is very small for a very long period of time.

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Where would I put Noah on this tree? The evolutionary atom is way down off of the

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A branch. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to look at this and say, the Bible says that people expanded rapidly.

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The signature of a rapidly expanding population is a fan, so I'm going to put Noah somewhere in the center of this starburst.

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But I don't know where, and one reason I don't know where is because I don't see three distinct branches. Where's Shem?

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Where's Ham? Where's Japheth? Are you going to say, oh, well, Ham went to Africa? No, that's not true.

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Oh, not at all. The table of nations in Genesis chapter 10 says Ham's descendants lived all over the place, including the island of Crete, which is right next to Greece.

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Ham's lineage also goes up into modern -day Turkey. And interestingly, a giant wave of Anatolian –

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Anatolia isn't named for Turkey – Anatolian farmers pushed up into Europe in ancient times.

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Were some of the descendants of Ham amongst them? You cannot say that the Japhethites settled

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Europe. You don't actually know that. So let me branch off here and talk briefly about the table of nations.

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One of my favorite things in the Bible is a description of the grandsons of Noah as they spread out on the earth.

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However, we have two options here. This was either written as they're spreading out or after they spread out.

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So maybe it is an early Genesis record after the Tower of Babel, someone sat down and said, okay, these guys went this way, these people went that way, and these people went over there.

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If that's true, there's another 4 ,000 years of history after that. And a lot of opportunity for scrambling, invasions, warfare.

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We don't want to talk about what happens to the ladies in a city when the city is conquered by an invading army. What that does is it spreads around Y chromosomes.

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We have trading, we have people wandering, and you can't look at a person and know what his Y chromosome is.

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In fact, if we look at this tree, there's two different parts on this tree that contain men from Papua New Guinea, two radically different parts of the tree, and you can't look at that man and say, oh, you're from this part of that part.

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It doesn't work like that. So because you cannot know the history of a man based on his

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Y chromosome lineage when you look at him, I expect Y chromosome lineages are going to blend over time.

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If that's true, and if the Table of Nations is written early, the signal is going to be completely blurred.

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In fact, there might not be any representation of the Table of Nations in genetic data today. The other option is that the

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Table of Nations was written several centuries later. Now, not as late as the Babylonian captivity. No, that is not true.

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I'm not going to go there. The Genesis was not written while the Jews were in Babylon. They didn't just invent a history for themselves.

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These are ancient records. But let's say that someone's in the in the Middle East area, maybe in Israel or maybe somewhere else in the

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Middle East, and they're trying to describe an ethnology of all the people that they know about. They know as far west as Crete, and northeast

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Africa, and as far east as Iraq, and they know the people around them. But they don't know anything else about any people group who lives beyond that.

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So these people groups are already a product of mixture. So you can say, oh yeah, the descendants of Ham went and settled

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Crete. Well, that doesn't mean that every single man on Crete is a descendant of Ham. That a very important center of Mediterranean trade is not going to retain only one

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Y chromosome lineage over time. If this is true, and the Table of Nations is written later in history, again, that means that the signal will be blurred.

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So either option, I'm not expecting to see the Table of Nations in modern genetic data, because of human behavior and thousands of years of history.

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So who settled Europe? Well, the earliest remains in Europe belong to Neanderthals, and they look like they branch off of the

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A lineage, which is associated with Africa today. After that, we have these people that move into Europe we call hunter -gatherers.

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Now, that's not primitive. That means just people living off the land. Imagine a guy in a cabin in the woods, a log cabin.

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He made his log cabin with his axe. He's a hunter -gatherer. He's not farming. He's hunting. He's collecting berries.

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He's collecting plants. Hunter -gatherers have to be very in tune to their environment, have to be very smart, or the weather kills them.

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And yet these people moved into Europe, genetically distinct from the first people in Europe. And then later on, another wave of people came up, again, from Anatolia, and they brought farming to Europe, and they are very genetically distinct from those other people.

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And yet those first people intermingled with Neanderthals, so Neanderthal genes bleed upwards in the archaeological record.

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And then a new group of people come in that we can see in the archaeological record. We can see it in the genetics. Those genes from that first people bleed into second, genes from the second bleed into the third.

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We have all this intermixing of peoples, and yet they're bringing new genes, they're bringing new technologies, they're bringing new ideas, new pottery styles.

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Now, what I'm getting at here is the new field of ancient DNA. We can pull DNA out of old bones.

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Yes, it's degraded. It sure is. But if that individual has a whole lot of letters that line it up with one of the existing groups of Y chromosomes and doesn't carry the letters from other

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Y chromosomes, you know what group he belongs to. And when we do this, we can see genetically distinct populations in Europe.

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In fact, the hunter -gatherers and the farmers are more genetically different from each other than Europeans are from East Asians.

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So you've probably heard this old, racist, outdated, don't use these terms.

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I'm not advocating using these terms, but you've probably heard the phrase, the words, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid.

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This is outdated, racist terminology that has no place in modern discussions. No one believes this anymore.

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And one reason for that is because when you look at Europeans and East Asians, which are the two of those classic groups that people try to divide us up into, you just look at Europe and we realize we are an amalgamation of people groups that are more distinct than Europeans are from East Asians.

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What's a race? I have no definition of it. Modern genetics has destroyed all concept of race.

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Let me give you another example. My group, R1B, is a recent group we took over Europe. But if you look in Central Africa, south of Lake Chad, in the country of Cameroon, you will find a group of men, some of whom have the darkest skin of any people on the planet, and they share my

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Y chromosome. That means that I am kissing cousins. Me, this Irish Carter, is kissing cousins to men with the darkest skin on the planet.

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And I'm more closely related to them than I would be to other Irish men who come from different branches of the family tree.

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What is a race? So I'm going to wrap up there. I just talked fast. I threw a lot of words at you, a lot of phrases, a lot of ideas.

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I didn't take a lot of time to explain myself. I just want to leave you with the impression, though, that Adam is historically important, theologically important, and genetically sound, if we understand the possible parameters the

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Bible gives us. We have a lot more flexibility than you might expect, and the genetic data does not disprove the biblical

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Adam. If you want more information, just go to creation .com. If you want to learn more about the genetics work that I've been doing, you can just, you know, there's a little search box on creation .com.

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Just go there and type in Carter, or type in genetics, or anything like that, and it'll bring up a world of information.

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Some of that will be a lot easier to understand than what I just presented to you, and some of that is highly technical, because we need a technical analysis.

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We need people like you who might want to help write and develop ideas and research and study maybe this or maybe some other topic.

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So, my friends, be encouraged. The Bible is true history. The Bible is true theology.

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We can use it as a guide to understanding where we came from and where we're going.