The following is a review left on amazon.com that highlights William Lane Craig’s heretical view concerning the historical Adam and calls him out for shamelessly distorting the Holy Bible to make it agree with the theory of evolution.

Paul Artale

A Biblical, Logical, and Scientific Trainwreck

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2021

Theistic evolutionist William Lane Craig sets out to discover the real Adam, but begins from a foundation of error assuming ‘evolution’ is already true. Rather than let the Bible be his guide through which he critiques “the [correct] current scientific consensus” [p. 13], he usurps God to become arbiter of the truth over Adam’s origins and aligns with said ‘consensus’. As a consequence, he is blind to the vast historical scientific evidence consistent with Genesis 1-11 and only sees “wild implausibility” and “areas of conflict” [pp. 13-14].

Given the above, further errors are expected throughout the book which doesn’t fail to disappoint:
On Hermenuetics and Textual Criticism

-Ancient Near East (ANE) Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian mythology and religion is elevated as the framework through which to analyse Genesis 1-11 [p. 22]. This is “ipse dixit” and a gross category error that raises pagan and occult literature inspired by devils near to sacred scripture. Craig then concludes Genesis should be read in light of ANE literature [p. 31], which is entirely circular.

A large chunk of the book is devoted to these beliefs which, Biblically, are more likely corruptions and plagiarisms of Genesis, e.g., the final version of the Epic of Gilgamesh having a global flood.
Craig concludes Genesis 1-11 is something called “mytho-history”, a jelly phrase which effectively claims scriptural truths can be built on a substrate of lies (i.e., myths) by splitting truth into “literal” and “non-literal” categories. He lays out a standard Hegelian dialectic on p. 154:

*Thesis: A literal Genesis is implausible so it must be mythological (“Genesis presents a mythological history extremely short by ancient standards”).

*Antithesis: The ‘real’ history of man excludes a literal interpretation of Genesis (“we know the history of mankind”).

*Synthesis: Genesis is “mytho-history” or “Proto-history”.

By his logic, one could claim Star Wars is a ‘true’ “mytho-history” of the 20thC religion Jediism which has about 9,000 adherents, for whom ultimate reality truly is some eternal force.

-Craig accepts the false JEDP hypothesis, which Jesus refutes, and doesn’t mention (or hasn’t read) John 5.46 where Moses is explicitly named as author of the Torah. He instead leans on men like the self-confessed failure Julius Wellhausen and form-criticism creator Hermann Gunkel (who imagined Genesis 1.2 was an echo of the Babylonian dragon goddess Tiamat).

-He references something called “protohistory” [p. 48], an oxymoron since there is only history. Mysterious entities “beyond literary sources” are claimed to be able to identify “preliterary oral traditions” [p. 49]. How this is scientific or rational is not explained.

-He blasphemes claiming that as a condition of his incarnation Jesus accepted many false beliefs of his countrymen [p. 12].

-He doesn’t understand how photosynthesis could occur without the sun [p. 109], which was created on Day 4, but ignores Genesis 1.3 where God had already created light, which in the 400-700nm spectrum would enable all vegetation created on Day 3 to photosynthesise.

-He claims an incarnate Satan as the serpent in Genesis 3.1 is eisegetic [p. 112], yet misses Revelation 12.9 which explicitly calls Satan that “old serpent”.

-He claims there is no evidence for a worldwide Flood [p. 121], when geology shows there are global megasequence rock layers.

-He claims, “ancients lacked capacity for speculative thought, they engaged in ‘mythopoeic’ thinking” [pp. 166-7], but conflates mental capability with spiritual enlightenment; the reason why ancestors made up myths was because God had not given them inspiration like he did to the Jews, not because they were mentally inferior.

-Shockingly, he claims the “humanoid deity” [i.e. Jesus!] of Genesis 2-3 must be different from the “Creator of the heavens and earth in chapter 1” [p. 199]. His non sequitur is since the latter is (arguably) not as “anthropormophic” as the former, there is no theophany. Craig is so blind he can’t even see John 1.1-3.

-Another howler is on p. 207: “No one imagines that Paul had some secret, independent access to the historical Adam apart from the stories of Genesis.” Craig hasn’t read II Peter 1.21; Paul was inspired by God who knows all and so certainly did have “secret independent access” to the historical Adam.

-It gets worse on p. 226 re: I Corinthians 15: “Paul implies that physical mortality is the natural human condition,” meaning physical death is, when verse 26 calls it an enemy, precisely unnatural.

-Craig even has to correct the Apostle Paul [!] claiming that, “Paul has thus misinterpreted the literary Adam.” [p. 240].

On Evolutionary ‘Science’

-Craig simply assumes evolution, asking the loaded question “…when did human beings first appear in the evolutionary process?” [p. 245]. Likewise, the “geological timescale” of deep time is simply presented (cut off at the “Cambrian” though).

-He claims heavy-to-light oxygen ratios [observed in present ice cores] can be worked backwards to determine many past ice ages. No explanation of this ‘science’ and its many assumptions are provided, including its open conflict with the Milankovitch theory which is the supposed freezing/warming mechanism.

-Imaginary lines joining apes and man are presented as ‘scientific evidence’ [e.g., p. 251]. Conspicuously, on p. 255 this isn’t attempted since transitionary fossils between the creatures don’t exist!

-Radiometric Uranium/Thorium ‘dating’ is claimed to accurately be able to ‘date’ cave art in an open aqueous environment across tens of thousands of years.

-Social interaction needs drove human brain evolution [p. 270], a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc evolutionary story tale, since by definition neo-Darwinism is meant to be at base a random and undirected process. He also claims on p. 271 that, “features of behavioural modernity accumulate gradually with time”, and on p. 275, “social selection for cooperative individuals results in new forms of cognition,” which is nothing more than unscientific wishful thinking.

-The ‘science’ presented from paleoneurological evolution is a gene variant ARHGAP11B “presumed” to have duplicated itself 5 million years ago in an imaginary ancestral creature from a gene ARHGAP11A, which then shuffled 55 nucleotides around plus changed a single nucleotide along the way that supposedly promotes brain cell growth!

-More magical evolutionary euphemisms are founds on p. 279 and p. 329 with “genomic reorganisation events” that created three functional NOTCH-related genes only in humans.

-Craig is also a saltationist of sorts: “Modern cognition is a consequence of a genetic mutation.” [p. 283].

-On language he simply informs us again that “the mutations did it” with, “Mutations yielded the species-species specific human speech producing anatomy.” [p. 317]

-Population genetics and imagined phylogenetic trees, which are based on assumptions of neo-Darwnisim/”evo-devo” plus deep time are claimed to disprove a literal Adam and Eve.

-Adam and Eve may have been “biologically and spiritually renovated by God” [p. 376], GMO [!] children raised by nonhuman primate parents! [p. 377]

The above is a small sample of the mischievous madness one will encounter in this book.

Craig is 100% right about one thing [p. 131], “truly, young earth creationists are living in a different universe than the rest of us.” He and his hold to the metaphysic of the lost, but stand against all Bible Believers.

The free advice for Craig and other Theistic Evolutionists is to repent of unbelief in the scriptures historical account in Genesis. Whether ‘good’ intentioned or not, they are acting as agents of Satan to undermine the faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3), who never conceived of anything other than a real Adam and Eve created on the sixth day of creation as it is written.

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