I Have Landed (23 page)

Duncan, facing the new Darwinian world of 1860, should not be compared too strictly with La Peyrère, plunged into the millenarian fervors of mid-seventeenth-century Europe. But both do belong to a biblical tradition larger than their own particular pre-Adamite conclusions—a reconciliationist rather than a contrarian approach to science and other secular studies based on empirical evidence. Reconciliationists accept the Bible as the truthful and inspired word of God, but also insist that the factual discoveries of science must be respected. Since truth and inspiration don't require a literal reading, the biblical text may be interpreted, but never denied or controverted, to harmonize with scientific conclusions. Contrarians, with American “young earth creation-ism” as the most prominent modern version, simply know what the Bible says. If science disagrees, then science must be wrong. Case closed.

The classic problem for reconciliationists interested in the emerging sciences of geology and paleontology has always centered upon the apparent claim in Genesis 1 that God created both the cosmos and all living creatures in a sequence of six days, and that the earth, as inferred from biblical chronologies of the patriarchs and kings, cannot be much more than five or six thousand years old. Many long books have been written on this complex subject, but a simplified summary might identify three major traditions in reconciliationist arguments on this crucial topic.

First, the “gap” theory argues that Genesis must be read literally, but that
an unspecified amount of time—sufficient to fit anything that geology might discover about the earth's age—intervened between verse 1 (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”), and the particular descriptions that begin with verse 2.

Second, the “day-age” theory argues that Genesis 1 got the sequence right, but that the Hebrew word
yom
, translated as “day” in the King James version, may refer to intervals of unspecified duration. So each biblical “day” may represent as long a period of time as geological discovery requires. Third, the “only local” theory holds that Genesis intends to describe only the particular origin of the Jewish people in the Near East, not the full chronology of all earthly time. Adam's children therefore marry the offspring of earlier people from different regions, and Noah's flood may be read as a local inundation, therefore avoiding such crushing problems as whether the progenitors of all living species could fit into one boat. Nearly all pre-Adamite theories belong primarily to this third tradition.

We must grant Isabelle Duncan at least one general point, however harshly we judge the quality of her particular argument, either in the context of her own times or ours: she developed a novel version of conciliationist pre-Adamism by following La Peyrère's idiosyncratic procedure of building a case upon a single biblical text—in her version a much more sensible analysis of Genesis 1 and 2 than La Peyrère ever applied to Romans 5. Almost all previous versions of pre-Adamism had invoked the theory to explain our
current
racial diversity, usually to the detriment of people outside the European cultural context of the theory itself. But Duncan employed the literary and exegetical traditions of pre-Adamism to explain the geological antiquity of humans on earth, while affirming the unity of all living people by descent from a single and recent Adam.

In short, Duncan argued for two entirely distinct and separate creations, both featuring humans. God created pre-Adamites near the end of the first creation; but he then destroyed all life before unleashing a second creation, this time beginning with Adam, the progenitor of all living humans. Thus, pre-Adamites left human artifacts in late geological sediments, but all modern humans are Adamites of the second creation.

La Peyrère's reading of Romans could claim no basis beyond his personal idiosyncrasy. But Duncan's interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis—a strikingly novel analysis within the history of pre-Adamite thought—represented a false solution to a genuine insight. I have often been amazed at how few people, including creationists who swear that the Bible must be read literally, even remember that the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 tell entirely different
tales, when read at face value. Genesis 1 presents the traditional sequence of creation in six days, proceeding from the earth itself, to light, to plants, to the sun and moon, to animals in a “rising” series from fish to mammals, and, finally on the sixth day, to human beings—with male and female created together: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).

But the tale of Genesis 2 could hardly be more different. God makes Adam at the outset, a single male on a lifeless planet: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). God then places Adam in the Garden of Eden, and subsequently creates plants, and then animals, to assuage the isolation of his first creature: “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). God then brings all the animals before Adam, giving his first man the privilege of assigning their names.

But Adam remains lonely, so God makes “an help meet for him” (2:20) from one of his ribs: “And the Lord God . . . took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman” (2:21–23).

I suspect that we generally forget these striking differences because we cobble the two stories together into the combined vernacular version that pleases us most. We borrow the six-day sequence from Genesis 1, but we love the story of Eve's manufacture from Adam's rib, and of the initial situation in Eden—so we graft these “plot devices” from Genesis 2 onto the different resolution of Genesis 1 (simultaneous creation of male and female).

No scholarly debate or serious theological objection now attends the obvious and well-documented explanation of these discrepancies. The two stories differ because they derive from two prominent texts among the many separate sources that ancient compilers used to construct the Bible. Modern critics call these texts the “E” and “J” documents to note the different designations of God in the two sources—Elohim versus Yahweh, with the latter title conventionally transliterated as Jehovah in European Christian traditions. (Written Hebrew uses no explicit vowels, so early Christians had to make inferences from the tetragrammaton, or four-lettered sequence, of the Hebrew text: YHWH. Since the alphabet of Latin, the common tongue of early Christian writers, includes neither
Y
nor
W
, the necessary substitutions, plus the inferred vowels, yielded Jehovah.) The Pentateuch cannot, therefore, represent Moses' unique composition as dictated directly by God. The contradictions within Genesis and other books arise from the amalgamation of inevitably different texts. No religious
belief should be threatened thereby. The Bible is not, in any case, a factual treatise about natural history.

But Isabelle Duncan did not work within this scholarly tradition. In her conventional piety, she stuck rigidly to the old belief in an inerrant and coherent text, subject to interpretation of course, but necessarily true at face value. In her conciliationist respect for new discoveries of science, she also believed that this inerrant text, when properly read, could not contradict any genuine empirical discovery. Her unique version of pre-Adamism arose from these twinned convictions.

The two creation stories, she acknowledged, must be read as genuinely different in content. But if the biblical text must also be inerrant, what can these successive and disparate tales mean? Duncan must solve her problem by exegetical analysis, not by empirical evidence from science—and she must do so, according to her own lights, “with unshaken submission to the testimony of Scripture.” But how can this double reconciliation (of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2, and of the entire biblical account with scientific evidence) be accomplished if the two creation stories truly conflict?

Duncan begins her book by exposing the paradox within her assumption that the biblical text may be metaphorical, but not factually false:

She then locates the main problem in Adam's different position within the two tales—created after the other animals in chapter 1, but before them in chapter 2:

She then summarizes attempts by religious scholars to reconcile the two texts as consonant accounts of the same event, for God may surely choose
redundancy as a literary strategy! “I do not affirm that Moses, as an inspired writer, was precluded from giving a second account of the same transaction.” But she cannot escape the plain textual evidence, discussed just above, of a contradictory sequence between the two stories. “If we are to look upon the second chapter as standing in this relation to the first [as a second telling of the same event], we must at least expect that they will not be found contradictory to one another. . . . There shall be no irreconcilable difference between them.”

Duncan then devises the ingenious solution that inspired her novel version of the old pre-Adamite theory.
Both
texts are true, but they tell two stories in proper temporal order, about two distinct events of creation in the history of life on earth. (The Hebrew word
Adam
may be read as generic, rather than the proper name of a particular fellow, so the stories may designate different progenitors.) Duncan then summarizes her entire thesis:

To explain the long duration, revealed for the first creation by geology and paleontology, Duncan adopts the traditional “day-age” theory of reconciliation: “I hope . . . to give sufficient reasons for adopting the belief now so generally received by thinking persons, that the six days of creation were in fact six ages, or cycles of ages.” The separate and second creation of Adam, the progenitor of all living people, then suffers no challenge from the geological discovery of deep time, for any needed length can be absorbed by the long history of the first creation.

So far, so good (and not so wacky). But Duncan's model of sequential creations then leads us to ask a difficult question about the once extensive but now extinct race of pre-Adamites. Where are they? Archaeological evidence had, after much debate, finally established the contemporaneity of human artifacts with bones of large extinct mammals (mammoths, cave bears, woolly rhinos), indubitably assignable to Duncan's first, or pre-Adamite, creation. But no unambiguous evidence of human bodies—the bones of my bones, if not the unfossilizable flesh of my flesh—had been recovered (and none would be
located until the 1890s, when Eugen du Bois discovered the remains
of Homo erectus
in Java). So if arrowheads and axes testify to a pre-Adamite existence, but no pre-Adamite bodies ever make their way into the fossil record, what happened to the physical evidence?

Only at this point does Duncan fall into what scientists might label as a realm of folly wrought by overcommitment to a theory, but that Duncan no doubt regarded as a simple extension in the logic of a developing argument. A venerable scientific motto proclaims that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In the early and exploratory days of a theory, failure to confirm will spur a search for evidence, whereas positive disproof will always refute a hypothesis. If this failure continues as the theory develops, and finally persists beyond a reasonable hope for future affirmation, then of course the theory must be dropped. In the case of human evolution, where sturdy flint tools greatly exceed fragile bones in capacity for preservation in the geological record, evidence of artifacts without bodies only spurred the search for bones—an expectation fulfilled within thirty years of Duncan's publication. (If science had still not found any bones, 140 years later, then we would be considering alternatives—but not Duncan's scenario.)

Duncan followed the logic of her exegesis instead. If the Bible promises eventual
bodily
resurrection to all sons of Adam in the second creation, then God probably redeemed the offspring of pre-Adam as well, and at the catastrophic termination of the first creation—hence, only tools, but no bones for pre-Adamites. But where, then, did the resurrected pre-Adamites go?

In a stunning solution to her greatest conundrum, Duncan proposes that the resurrected pre-Adamites must now be the angels of our legends and purported visitations: