Was Adam Real? Surprising Scientific Discoveries!

I believe that more than ever before, biblical authority is under attack. I'm calling on a generation of serious Christians to reclaim the plain reading of the book of Genesis because so much is at stake.

Do you realize that if your children or grandchildren are watching YouTube today, they can come across teachers who are saying that Adam wasn't the first man? That he was just one among many men and that you could be a 100% human and still not bear the image of God. These are the kinds of theological pretzels that people will twist themselves up into to try to avoid the plain meaning of the text.

I cannot put words on the lips of Dr. Marcus Ross, but I want to tell you how excited I am to share his expertise with you. He takes on these issues with graciousness in his heart, with the seriousness of an academic and the precision of a paleontologist holding a PhD from actually a secular institution, but he stands up for this plain meaning of the text.

And I want to tell you about a generous offer that we have here for you. But first, if you want to help get this message out, please give this video a like. But if you make it to the end of this video, you watch the entirety of this video, type in the comments, digging deep. If you do that, we're going to enter you into a giveaway, and one of you are going to win a fossil kit.

As a paleontologist, Dr. Ross, who runs Cornerstone Educational Supply, is going to give us one of his fossil kits to give to whoever wins this giveaway. And actually, at the end of the video, he shows us what's all in that fossil kit. It's so cool and so neat, I had to put a warning on there so that my wife wouldn't try to get in on this giveaway because we are homeschooling our children as well.

And so anyways, without further ado, I would like for you to dig deep into this video and let's join up. Let's work together to get this message out that you can trust your Bible. It makes historical claims not just about Jesus, but it also makes historical claims about Adam and our origins. And I believe that you can trust that book. I believe that you can stand on that book.

Well, let's get right into it. Well, friends, I am so grateful to have Dr. Marcus Ross on again, and today I'm going to be asking him some questions in regards to Adam. He is a paleontologist by training and has received his PhD from a secular university, University of Rhode Island. And I'm just really pleased to bring his expertise to you today. Dr. Ross, welcome on. And I just want to just come right out of the gate and ask you a question.

Before we got started recording here, you were telling me a little bit how you got involved in this book, Perspectives, for views on the historical Adam. And I thought it was really fascinating. I want to share it with the audience. Right after we do that, I think I want to ask you about what sort of positive case we can make in terms of science, in terms of a historical Adam. But let's first just if you would tell me how you got involved in this book. What's the backstory to that?

Well, thank you again for having me on. It was delightful. The last video that we had was was a great time. Really appreciate it. And so very grateful to join you and your great audience. Thanks for everybody who put comments down on the last video and things like that. So, shout out is it was really great. I'm I'm really really pleased to be back.

So, you know, the Lord works in interesting ways. And if we go back to the fall of 2020, I am a professor at Liberty University teaching courses on creation studies, earth science, paleontology. And at the same time that that is is my day job, my wife and I had also started up our company Cornerstone Educational Supply. It had been running for a couple of years and it was growing and it was pulling, you know, some of my attention. You know, five years in now I'm I'm kind of locked into what my company's doing. And as my wife would say it, there's three things that I like to do. I love education and I love teaching. I really enjoy my business and I want to be able to contribute to creation issues and the the broader discussion over creation and origins and sign, but there was only room for two of those. And so in January of '21, I went to my dean and I said to him, I'm going to be stepping down from teaching at the end of the semester. My company is getting big enough that, you know, as a family, we're deciding we're going to go in on this. And I I never thought that I would step down from teaching. I I love doing this, but, you know, that's that's the decision that we're going to do. And the Lord looked at that and went, "So, I've got a guy who's going to quit his job so that he can do this other thing so that he has more time for creation research."

All right. Two weeks after I told my dean, I got an email out of the blue from William Lane Craig. And like staring at my computer screen, William Lane Craig is emailing. I don't know. I mean, I know William Lane Craig, but like I don't know William Lane Craig. And so you click on the button. What's going on here? And here I get an invitation to represent a young earth creation view of Adam's historicity in a book that he is proposing. And I'm rather surprised that that's the case because I to that point had not written very much at all about human origins. My interest in paleontology goes, shall we say, deeper than the human fossil record. I I like dinosaurs. I like mosasaurs and marine reptiles. I enjoy all sorts of things like trilobites and and whatnot. Anthropology was never really a huge deal to me, but I had started to get my my toes wet a little bit in discussing some other books online and and with journals and things like that. Things like Dr. Joshua Swamidas's book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve. I'd been a respondent to that. Was having a debates with him. And so somehow my name filtered its way through. There were other young earth creationists who had been approached but didn't want to. But all of a sudden, I got this email from Bill Craig saying, "Hey, do you want to represent young earth creationism and and represent that view about Adam's historicity?" And I went, "Honestly, yes, I do."

Um, uh, the the me from, you know, 10 or 15 years before that wouldn't have wanted to anything to do with human origins, but it's it's a fascinating study. Uh, it's a really interesting topic. Anthropology is in a renaissance right now and the opportunity to present a younger view on Adam's historicity I was I was ready to jump at and so yeah you know the the way that you get into something you never know you just um kind of said all right I'm going to step away because I want to do more and God says oh okay let's give you an interesting opportunity then see see what happens so praise God uh for for that and I'm really grateful that uh Bill Craig shot me an email you know that January of of 2021 Yeah.

And it's just kind of interesting because it just seems like God providentially led your way, helped you to get in position and that kind of provided some probably confirmation for you like, hey, I feel like I'm going on the right way. So that's that's tremendous. So, um, the other contributors to this book, uh, believe that Adam, if they even believe in Adam, um, that's another subject, another question that we'll maybe get into, but they they like, for example, William Lane Craig, he's going to push him back 750,000 years ago. And I don't see that from my Bible. But um is there but we're going to get into some of the theological questions and things like that. But just kind of right out of the gate, is there anything that a young earth creationist who believes in a recent Adam can say to make a positive case from science, uh, for, uh, for Adam's historicity and and a recent Adam?

That's a that's a good question. And I think the answer is yes on that. I certainly try to make a positive case in my own chapter in the book and we'll talk about how that differs from the other views that are there. uh a positive a proactive case that says okay with what we know from the science are there predictions that we can make are there uh postulates that we can set out uh and the riskier the better right in science uh the more specific and that's what I mean by risky the more specific your proposal happens to be the more chances there are out there that it could be knocked down in some way so I'm going to give you an interesting historical factoid uh that relates very nicely here Um, while I was doing my research for my chapter, I I known that young earth creationists have argued that Neanderthals are human beings for a rather long time. Uh, you can read uh the book Bones of Contention, for example, by Marvin Lubin uh back from the early 1990s or so. He had a master's degree in anthropology. Uh you can read some other creationists who were writing in the 1970s, 1980s, but I had a hunch that it went even further back. and I found uh my copy of George McCreedy Price's new geology. Now George McCreedy Price was a 7th Day Adventist writing in the 19s and the 1920s. So here we got 1921 the new geology and he is talking about Neanderthals and he's talking about a particular one um uh called La Chapelle-aux-Saints which was found in a cave in Belgium and it was found kind of curled up in what seemed to be a bit of a depression in that cave. It was excavated out and McCreedy Price says in 1921, "It looks for all the world like this man was buried here by his friends."

Now, chimpanzees and gorillas don't have friends in the same way that you and I talk about having friends as human beings. So, I can go back all the way to McCreedy Price as somebody who was looking at La Chapelle-aux-Saints and the evidence from Neanderthals that this looked like a burial, a very human type of activity. To refer to a Neanderthal as a human being in the 1920s was ludicrous to the scientific community. Absolutely ludicrous. They were stupid. They were hunched over. They uh were brutish. Um, they were caricatured in all sorts of of just, you know, deepest caveman, you know, meme sort of stuff that you could imagine. And yet Price was saying, "Hey, I think this is a human." And I knew nothing of George McCreedy Price when I was be, you know, when I was learning about creationism as a kid. Most most uh American creationists don't know about the Adventists that were writing at that time. And when I looked as a paleontologist at at structures in the Neanderthals, I was pretty well convinced that they were probably humans. And what's happened is over time the anthropology community while still diverse in its opinion has become much much more amenable to looking at Neanderthals as our equivalents in terms of their technological capabilities their intellect etc. uh anthropologist Svante Pääbo uh has been immensely important in this actually won a Nobel Prize for his work on Neanderthals and the evidence for Neanderthals being fully cognizant beings like we are um is I think now incontrovertible combined with now the the evidence that we had interbreeding with them which is something that creationists had been predicting by the way since at least the 1980s and certainly the 1990s, but probably even before I would say ear as early on as the 1970s predicting that if there were a way to determine that there was hybridization that that evidence was there. And at that point in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, what we had to go with was skeletons. And so we'd be looking at uh for example there's a Neanderthal kind of uh late child early teen skeleton that shows an interesting mixture of what seems to be sapiens and Neanderthal characteristics. But all of that was easily argued about on all sides until we had genetic evidence that sure enough there were human Neanderthal hybrids and that you and I and almost every human being on Earth, there are certain groups that don't have this, but um that everybody who lives north of north and outside of sub-Saharan Africa has got somewhere between 1 and 4% usually it's either one or two or two and four depending on who's counting, but somewhere between 1 and 4% of our DNA uh is directly identified as Neanderthal DNA. And if we took all the Neanderthal DNA in the human population today, we'd have about 25% of the Neanderthal genome uh just in our own genes, right? So it's not everything that's there. There's missing bits, but we've got parts of it. Young earth creationists were predicting homo sapiens homo neanderthalensis hybrids for decades because we believed that Neanderthals represented a post-flood people group just as homo sapiens does and we have been I think vindicated in that. So there's I think a great example of creationists who at the time of their writing were way out on a limb according to the conventional view and now it's like yep we we hit that one just, you know, right on the nail right on the head of the nail.

Yeah. No that's that's really good. That's that's that's fascinating. And um by the time I get this edited up it's going to be probably past Easter. But you and I are speaking right now, you know, uh, during leading up to e, you know, Easter Sunday. And people like William Lane Craig, and I'm not attacking him here, I'm just stating facts, are happy to say that the the Bible makes historical claims about, you know, Jesus and the resurrection, and that's amenable to historical investigation. And I think what we're trying to do is we're making an even bolder claim. We're saying that the Bible makes historical claims in the book of Genesis about our origins and makes historical claims about Adam and we're putting it forward and young earth creationists are doing serious research and investigation and really as I had an interview with Dr. Nathaniel Jensen, we're going on offense and we're presenting evidence and we're putting it out there. And so, um, there is this wonderful quote by Spurgeon. I wish I had it exactly. I'll probably try to display it on the screen, but he said something like, "You don't have to defend the Bible. It's more like a lion. You just set it free and let it do its thing. It you let it loose." And, uh, I I think that's why I'm so excited about the work that you're doing as a paleontologist, but also as a serious thinker who's thinking through these topics theologically. And so I want to just kind of take um a little bit of time here and just start walking through some maybe some of the objections. Let's get into some of the meat of the the real discussion here. So the the charge is that as young earth creationists, we are holding to something that's just ludicrous. And the reason why people haven't pushed Adam all the way back 750,000 years ago is because, you know, they're just ignorant of what's going on in science and we, you know, we don't have a clue about what's going on there. Could you speak into let's let's talk could you just outline the mytho-history view real quickly from William Lane Craig and just kind of give a young earth response to that if you would.

And you know maybe we'll we'll touch on some of these others that are in this Perspectives book as well. So again, this was Bill Craig's uh project. He wanted this he wanted this multiple views book because he had just finished and he was ready to publish his his large book, In Quest of the Historical Adam. And you know, he wanted to keep keep the ball rolling. And so he invited um we'll kind of set this up. He invited Kenton Sparks, who is not an evangelical. He holds to an errantist view of the scriptures uh to to present that side of Christian belief about Adam. Uh then Bill Craig uh presents his view of mytho-history. Uh the third person in the list is Andrew Lok, who's also a philosopher and holds to a genealogical Adam and Eve view with some similarities to Joshua Swamidas and some differences but still uh very similar there. And then I as a young earth creationist and the fourth view so that's kind of the spread of the book. You go from, you know, a a non-evangelical and then three different evangelicals, two holding to ancient earth with Adam at different spots, and then a young earth argument for Adam as well. So, you've got your left-wing nut job, you've got your right-wing crackpot, and you've got your two in the middle that are supposed to be the reasonable positions to try and hash out, you know, which of these works, right? And and both Kenton and I kind of joke about that a little bit, him more specifically saying, you know, every one of these books needs a, you know, needs a liberal and I'm the one type of thing. So, we'll we'll hit Craig and Lok first because as evangelicals and as people who affirm inherency and inspiration to the scripture, they're more similar to the way that you and I think about how the scripture should be approached in the first place. But then we hit that famous left turn at Albuquerque, I think, when it comes to Genesis 1 through 11. This is this is where you end up with these strange divergences um amongst different folks about how they take the the Bible here. So Craig certainly never held to anything like young earth creationism. He always thought that that was palpably unbelievable. Uh and you look at his apologetic career, right? The cosmological argument, big bang issues and things like that. He always posited that there was an ancient age to the universe. And uh that even if you grant all of that, I'm going to show you who the divine transcendent creator of the world happens to be because there's only one type of being that could make this sort of universe, no matter how it got started. And he liked fine-tuning arguments and so all this plays in pretty well for him. But he never really dealt with evolution, you know, uh one way or the other through most of his his career. He never believed in a young earth. He uh didn't think that the text of Genesis 1 um, you know, well was sort of historical but sort of not and so he was he eventually settled on this idea that maybe it was what he called mytho-history. Now he's borrowing this term from another theologian Thorild Jakobson who actually uses it in a very different way says that mytho-history is when a historical event is mythologized into fiction. And Craig on the other hand says mytho-history in the Bible is where mythologies are arranged into a chronology and anchored to some sort of historical core. For him that's the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. So the events that are recorded in say Genesis 2 and 3 have only the meagerest connection to history and are primarily myth. Uh Cain and Abel after them are largely myth but they follow after. So, there's supposed to be some sort of historical development, and Adam is a real person. He's mentioned in the genealogies, but the narratives that describe what Adam did, well, you know, we can't really know what was going on. That's just mythology essentially. And when Craig is able to then divorce the events of the narrative and look at the genealogies as only a loose structuring for history, even though he thinks they're historical, they're a very loose structuring. He simply looks and says, "Well, where can I put Adam in in a place?" um he feels committed to a historical Adam not because the Old Testament says anything about Adam but because the New Testament in a couple of places he thinks Paul's argumentation requires there to be a historical Adam to create effects that the historical Jesus addresses and fixes. So Romans 5, Acts 17 are the primary ones. 1 Corinthians 15. Maybe those are the only three that he has any real commitments to. Everything else he says of of mentions of Adam in the New Testament could simply be the New Testament authors mentioning a character that's in the Bible. That character doesn't have to be historical. They're just there for, you know, reference. The way that you and I might talk about the Hobbits and the Lord of the Rings or something like that. I don't think the biblical argument uh the biblical authors are talking about Adam in any way like the Hobbits, but that's the argument that Craig is making. So then he's saying, "All right, what do we do with this historical Adam?" If we do originally come from a singular person, when do we put them um and when do we put them in in a place where science permits him to be? And I think that's key. Craig is looking for a place where science could allow for two original people to be the ancestors for all humans that come afterwards. And because of some genetic arguments and because he thinks that the Neanderthals that we've already talked about show great evidence of being human, he says, "All right, if the Neanderthals are human and we're human, then the ancestor of the two of us must be human. Well, how far back is that?" It's about 3/4 of a million years ago. There's a a fossil taxon called Homo heidelbergensis that may be ancestral to the two of us. So we'll put them there. That works out just fine. Um, now whether Homo heidelbergensis is a real legitimate taxon or actually just part of Neanderthals it really doesn't matter to his argument. He's just saying that the ancestor to human to Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals has got Adam's got to be at least that old if not older. uh but he doesn't like the argument for the humanity of say Homo erectus which would be a little bit deeper down. So three-quarters of a million years gets you the ancestor. Genetically you couldn't say that this can't be just two people. Most anthropologists would say it wasn't. It's not likely. It's got to be a big population. But you can't say that it couldn't be two. And I think the way that I've said that is important for Craig, right? It's I can't say that it couldn't be two. Craig's apologetic is very very defensive. It puts Adam in a location in time that is far enough back that you can't disprove the hypothesis. But on the flip side, speaking as a scientist, it also means that you cannot actually build much of an evidential case for it. You certainly can't pro uh build an evidential case that there were only two people living at that time that became the ancestors for all all people. Um, in fact, I would find it very difficult to to make that argument given that you have fossils of that species around. So unless you're talking about it being the first two members of that species and they started populating and you you got them, that's the only way that you could have two people. But again, Craig's argument is you can't prove that it wasn't that way. True, I can't, but I don't necessarily find that a plausible way to to read the record. Uh, especially if I'm uh a conventional anthropologist.

So, that's how Craig gets to 750,000 years ago. You mythologize mytho-history, but you mythologize the narratives. You say that there's a historical core, but that core is so far deep in the past that it it really doesn't have any bearing. uh the stories don't have any bearing on whatever the events were and nobody's going to have oral history that's going to last three-quarters of a million years. That's that's ludicrous. Um so whatever it is that Genesis 2 and 3 are telling us, it is the the meagerest shadow of whatever the events are. And Craig also doesn't think that things like a a talking serpent or God walking in the in the garden have anything to do with reality. Whatsoever. Um, I I think that's a bad read or or a bad reaction to the to the Bible's text there, but it is the way that he approaches it. He'll he'll refer to it as palpably false or, you know, things like that. He'll use some pretty strong language. So, I'm not uh I'm not putting words in Craig's mouth. He is very very um upfront about how little he thinks about the narratives having any sort of historicity to them.

Yeah, that that's helpful. And and Ed, just to clarify, Lok has a philosophical background. Craig has a philosophical background. Sparks I think was more more into biblical studies if I understand right. So you were really the only scientific contributor to this book. Is that right?

Yeah. It it's weird honestly.

So as as a scientist, what did you think of So let let me back up just a little bit. So, I'm going to ask you about what did you think as a scientist in regards to the scientific arguments they brought, but I also wanted to just mention this is that I wanted to really bring out something that you said where Craig is making defensive apologetics. He's insulating his Adam and Eve as it were such that no one can really falsify it. You go seven, you go, you push him far enough back and it's it's going to be a Craig will be uh if the Lord carries, Craig will be long gone by the time someone would even be able to get close to refuting that. But we're we're doing the opposite, right? We we're saying, hey, we're going to put something forward and this is really amenable to study. And so you've already talked about that a little bit. So that our case is really not just defensive, but offensive. Now what I would like to ask you as a scientist you read through these articles by Sparks, Craig, Lok, how did you feel like they handled the science and where did you think the there were possible weaknesses in the science and then we'll talk about the biblical questions involved?

Yeah. Well for Sparks he isn't he's fully on board with standard approaches to anthropology. His view as an errantist perspective on the Bible means that if the Bible is right about some historical facts, that's great. If it's wrong about some historical facts doesn't bother me. I care more about the theological message. That's that's, you know, where there's importance. But he also doesn't think that, you know, the Bible is the word of God. It it's the word of people who are talking about God. The only real word of God is Jesus himself, right? So, I don't I don't like that argument, but that, you know, that's where he is. And so, when he writes in the book, you know, he kind of says, "Listen, if it turns out that there were only two people at the beginning, that's pretty neat. That that sounds pretty nice, but I'm not bothered if there isn't. I'm not expecting an ancient text written by Bronze Age folks to be making scientific sense in the 21st century." Right? So, for Sparks, he just kind of posits it all. It's like, listen, genetics seems to point towards a common ancestry. The fossil record seems to point towards common ancestry. You got evidence that the earth is ancient. I I don't see any reason to to doubt that stuff. And since I think the Bible is a very human work, he's got a book called God's Word in Human Words where he lays all this out. you know, he's just kind of like, hey, we're going to deal with the text as as it is and what that text is trying to tell us and what what it's what it's doing and not try and bring too much of our modern perspective into the text. We'll probably come back to this point with Sparks and me. And so for him, the science is the science. And if the science favored a young earth, fine. But if it favors an old earth, fine. Not expecting the text to to adjudicate these things. So then really the question is how do Craig and Lok handle the science in the way that they are trying to be inherentists and and match the Bible's account with either a deeply ancient Adam who is the the generator of of the human race or in Lok's case where you put Adam in a different kind of invisible spot. You put him at a point where he could be a genealogical ancestor. Not the only two people who ever lived and made all the people, but actually just one of our many many many great-great-grandparents. But we all have to trace our ancestry to them in order to be in Adam. So this means that in his model, Adam and Eve when they get out of the garden, they have kids. Their kids have wives and husbands with the other people that are out there that were not made in the image of God. And that puts Lok in a weird spot because what he's got to do is he's got to say that there is something about those other people that are not Adam but were made before and alongside Adam through the process of evolution. So God uses the process of evolution but eventually selects or creates an Adam. And this is the new covenant that's going to happen with humanity. is going to happen through him and then his seed filters out. I actually put an illustration in my response to Lok in the book to help people see what this looks like. This it wasn't terribly clear, but what that this means is like the hum the humanity the the image of God in in Adam's lineage has got to diffuse out into this already existing population of the same exact species that Adam is. So if we put Adam at 40,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago, that Adam is probably going to be a Homo sapiens, that's, you know, our own species in conventional anthropology goes back about 300,000 years. So if you say Adam lived 50,000 years ago or Adam lived 100,000 years ago, chances are all the folks that make those arguments are thinking about Adam as looking like you and me and other members of Homo sapiens around the earth. They're probably thinking of him as a white guy. Don't do that. Adam was not a white guy. If Adam was a Homo sapiens, he probably would have been African, but we're going to push Adam I think we're going to push Adam even further out of that. But for Lok's model, Adam's a Homo sapiens. Eve is a Homo sapiens. And their kids then start mating with these other Homo sapiens out there in the world that look exactly like us. But in his view, because they don't have the image of God, they maybe don't treat creation in the same way. They don't have a relationship with God and know him, but they all actually have religion. There's plenty of evidence in the anthropological record that any time that you any any place that you're going to put Adam in Homo sapiens, right, there are people who are carving little idols that are stenciling images on caves or or things like that. There are all the evidences of them being human everywhere. Lok's approach of separating Adam's lineage from the rest of the people that look exactly like him doesn't have any way of adjudicating who is and who isn't human. That's a weird place to be in as a scientist. It's completely useless. There's there's nothing here that helps you determine who is and who isn't human on on a scientific basis because we're the exact same species. And so now we have human I mean everybody's going to call them humans, right? We have humans that are made in the image of God and humans that are not made in the image of God. What a disturbing theological conundrum to put yourself into. It's it's really an own goal on this type of of perspective.

Just to be clear then Lok believes pretty, you know, give or take about the same time we do. Adam lived, you know, a few thousand thousands of years ago, but he wasn't the first man. and there's all these other people around and yeah and so he's trying to say that but all these you and I we we're still descended from Adam because Adam's genetic material has spread throughout the entire world now but that he he was pretty recent and so anyways continue there.

It's not even the genetic information that's important. It's just the genealogical connection, right? So for you and me, we each got half of our genes from our mom and our dad, right? Or 100% half from mom, half from dad. Our parents got half each of theirs from their grandparents and the grandparents got half each of theirs. Right? Now you're at eight. And you know how much genetic information do I have from my great-great-grandfather? A little bit maybe, but with the genetic roll of the dice that happens with sperm and egg and whatnot, it you don't have to go back very many generations before there's no guarantee that you got anything from a particular individual, even though they're your actual ancestor. It's just in the genetic shuffling that happens every time sperm and eggs are made, you lose half of the material. So for for Andrew Lok and for Joshua Swamidas, this is the way to get Adam in our ancestry in a way that is protected from scientific falsification. So Craig protects you by putting you 750,000 years ago. Swamidas and Lok protect Adam by putting him in a place where genetically we cannot identify Adam's contributions to us. But we also know that we can't identify anybody else's genetic contributions to us. So, I can I can, you know, somebody takes a paternity test and determines, yeah, this is your kid or no, or this is one of my cousins or something like that. But you go back far enough in time, none of that's going to be helpful. And so, what they're saying is Adam is one of those many, many, many millions of great-grandparents that are out there. So, not only do you and I have Adam as a great ancestor, but we've also got Uncle Balrog. You know,

He knew he knew Gandalf. Didn't go well for him. But anyway, you got great-uncle Brog out there who's also part of our ancestry, but I can't prove that genetically. All I can go by is, you know, the list on the genealogy.

And their argument is the Bible cares about genealogy, not genetics. So, our argument is going to be all about genealogy. Well, of course, the Bible cares about genealogy. There was no genetics at all in in biblical times. You just kept records of things. But again, a defensive position of putting Adam in a place where science say can't tell you he can't be there. Science also can't tell you that he was there, but he can't tell you that he wasn't one of those great-great-grandparents that we all happen to share. If you go back far enough, our ancestry starts to collapse upon the few people who were there at any given time. Such that for the modern population, for those of us living today, it could be as recent as 3,500 years ago, that we all actually across the entire planet have at least one ancestor in common. We have lots of ancestors not in common, but we have at least one ancestor in common. So the argument here is if we take Adam and we put him far enough back before Jesus, everybody by the time of Jesus has got Adam as an ancestor. Why is that important? Because when Paul says we are all in Adam, that's got to be true when Paul is writing.

So you get this kind of mere all in Adam type of of viewpoint. If we can put Jesus close enough or, you know, maybe a little bit further back, really doesn't matter where. We can put him wherever the line needs to go and and you can't prove he's not there. But then you have this issue of what do you do with the people outside that look just like Adam and his kids? Are they humans? Are they not humans? Do they have souls? Do they not have souls? How is God dealing with them? Is mating with them against God's will because they are non-souled animals or is it somehow okay? Swamidas even hints that maybe you know maybe Adam was supposed to help them help bring eternality to them. A completely heretical idea. But, you know, maybe he was supposed to bring them the eternality or or the, you know, the persistence of of life that Adam was supposed to enjoy in the garden. Like, I don't want to touch that idea with, you know, an 8,000 foot pole.

All right. But those are some of the sorts of weird situations you find yourself in when you're trying to put Adam someplace outside of a young earth creationist perspective. you you've got to make him either a federal head such that he's a representative for all of humanity so that when he and Eve fall all the rest of humanity falls with him. That's a common perspective that you'll find in covenantal, you know, covenantal denominations, PCA, for example. You'll find that sort of view. Uh or you turn them into a genealogical ancestor and you got these other issues to deal with. or you you do something like Craig's view or there's a variety of other theistic evolution approaches, but most of the time once you get out of these views that we've just gone over, you're more into Sparks's category of the Bible is not, you know, not inherent. And so, I'm not going to be too terribly worried about this. And maybe Genesis 2 through three is a metaphor about why things go wrong and happened when we switched from hunter-gatherer to agrarian uh situations. I actually remember being at a poster where somebody was saying that's what the narrative of the fall was really all about. We abandoned hunter-gatherer society and we started agriculture. I'm like it seems like we got kicked out of agriculture. Uh actually I don't know what's going on here but you know strange sorts of things. So on the science side of things you're you're up against some interesting problems with populations if you take a genealogical view. And if you take Craig's view, then you've got to make some interesting choices about who's human and who's not based on the archaeological record and the anthropological record. I think Craig does a really great job, phenomenal job in his book, not so much in the in the Perspectives. It's too brief, but but in his book, he does a very good job about establishing the evidence for the humanity of the Neanderthals. I'm reading through this stuff going, I'm all in with with Craig. all in with Craig on on that. And I think that he should extend that argument to the evidences of humanity that we see in several other species that otherwise make him a little uncomfortable. He's like, I don't know. I think their brains are too small, so they couldn't be human. like Homo erectus and if you go into his book and you read the the argument against Homo erectus it is almost entirely I'd say 85% of the argument is based on brain size and capacity and what he thinks is therefore their cognitive abilities that must be substandard below ours. Honestly uh I was very disturbed to see in his book that ultimately came down to him not envisioning us being able to go to heaven and see something that looks so unlike us that this is also something that was made in the image of God. That was a very disturbing passage to read because that is sitting at the root of all kinds of racist ideas. is and I'm not saying Craig is a racist.

Right.

In the in the contemporary view of things but the argument that these people look so different from me that I can't believe that they are also the same thing as me is the same argument that was used against Aboriginals that was used against sub-Saharan Africans that was used against Native Americans uh early on, right? We need to avoid that argument like the plague and we need to that I think the science help us to identify who is human in the anthropological record on the basis of good evidences. Some of those evidences will be physical characteristics of the skulls, the bones and the arms, the legs, the spine, all that sort of stuff. But other things are going to be the evidences of activities that are left behind, of tool making, of travel and transportation, of art, of of cooperation. um, you know, so for example, uh, there was a recent discovery after we wrote this Perspectives book, there was a recent discovery of a Neanderthal butchery site of a giant elephant um, this was a really really large elephant and it would have taken quite a team of people to take this thing down like you and I have been to the zoo we've been next to elephants they're intimidating creatures you can't kill one on your own.

Not not even close. And this is an animal that was actually even larger than an African bull elephant. This was one of the largest elephant species to ever exist.

And it must have been hunted down by at least a group of 20 to to really take this thing down. What was more impressive than that was the butchery site that it would have taken something like probably 25 to 30 people working sun up to sun down to butcher the whole thing over the course of several days before the meat starts to go really bad. Which means that actually you've got the entire clan. It's not just 20 people. Like you need you would need a minimum of 20 people. But you're going to have the moms, the kids, the older guys, the younger guys, everybody processing this thing and probably evidence that they were even think doing things like smoking the meats. Neanderthal is making jerky.

Right.

Right. Why? Because it preserves and keeps and they understand this and they know this. That's not what modern apes do. And modern apes are pretty clever creatures, but they do not create jerky out of butchered elephant meat. Right. Right.

Um, we have evidence that Homo erectus very likely, we don't have the specific fossils there, but at the layers that it's supposed to be Homo erectus in Israel um at uh a place called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, um, we're cooking fish by the side of a lake. So, we've got this lake deposit area and we've got these places where there are char areas, right? There were obviously fires and that discolors the soil and there's and there's charcoal in the soil there. And the fish fossils that are found next to these things are baked were were heated to a certain temperature but not higher than that. Like a natural forest fire or grass fire would go hotter. They were looking at the ear bones, what we call ear bones in fish. They're not really ear bones, but these bones inside the skulls of fish. And they're they make metamorphic changes. They actually get physically altered by temperature. And they can tell what the temperature was by the degree of alteration of the bones. And consistently, the fish that were near these little piles of char material were showing temperatures that indicate cooking temperatures. and not a range wildly up above or below that. So, it seems like whoever was hanging around the shoreline of this lake was going fishing and cooking fish on little open hearths and and doing it in a controlled fashion, getting them to the right temperature, but not burning the fish along the way. And the the fossil human or the fossil uh creature that's supposed to be there at that time is Homo erectus which is older and deeper than the Neanderthals. And something that young earth creationists like myself have been hinting at are human for a couple of decades now, several decades at least again to someone like Marvin Lubenau in the 1990s and probably a few people before him. Uh I certainly look at the evidence for Homo erectus and say there looks like they're doing human things here. They are cooking. Uh they are probably traveling great distances and possibly even by boat. I think there's good evidence that they are actually boating to isolated islands where we find their remains. The first Homo erectus was found on the island of Java in Indonesia. that used to be land connected, but there are islands in Indonesia that now have Homo erectus on them that we know were never connected. The only way to get there is to boat. You're not going to take an accidental swim in a tsunami and get there. That doesn't work that way. You need a population to get there. It can't just even be one person, right? You need to get a group of people so that you can establish a colony and have children. So, it seems like Homo erectus was probably boating. And if you're going to be boating out on the open ocean, you need to communicate. You need to be able to say, "Paddle faster. Watch that wave. Look out over here. Hey, there's a fish." You know, all these sorts of things. You need to be able to communicate with the team and communicate with the other boats that are coming because it's probably a few of you.

And if that is happening, then we're talking about complex language. So, those are some of the the evidences going back to the the proactive case uh in Young Earth Creationism.

Proactive case of establishing the humanity of some of these things are those are some of the evidences that I talk about in my chapter in the book and also in a long paper that I did uh in a different venue with Dr. Todd Wood uh and Peter Brummel for the uh international conference on creationism in 2020 2023. Um, what do we think about these sorts of things? We certainly have our challenges ahead of ourselves with things like radioactive dating and other ways of dating the layers and things like that. Why is it a young earth? But at least in terms of the postulates that young earth creationists have made about who counts as human and why, we have some good anthropological backup for that. That corresponds rather well with some of the specific scientific ways that we've looked at skeletons and tried to determine by cluster analysis who isn't human and who isn't. I won't bore your readers with the details on that one, but there are ways I think that we can identify certainly non-human things in the present world. Chimpanzees, orangutans, etc., humans. And then when we look at the anatomies, we can find that there are things that cluster more with the chimpanzees and some things away and things that cluster with humans. And the anthropological um evidence of their humanity matches very nicely the things that are in that cluster around humans and the things that are showing humanlike characteristic like Homo sapiens and and Homo erectus.

Okay. So that that kind of talks about some of the science a little bit. So let me ask you uh probably one of the questions that come up the most. Um, you know, when people try to object to Adam as a historical Adam or maybe somebody like Lok who believes that yeah, there was a historical Adam but there were people before him. Uh, what would you say to somebody who says, "Well, we know there had to be people before Adam because where did Cain get his wife?"

Yeah, it's it's a question that has been perennial across church history. It's not like this is a new one. Um, and the the answer from church history resoundingly until the the very strata of the modern that we find ourselves in right now is that Cain got his wife from one of the other siblings uh from Adam and Eve, right? One of the other kids um or a niece, whatever the case may be. We I think it's important to understand and this is someplace where where um reading Lok's chapter in this book as well as he's got an extended book on on Adam issues. Um, I'm really curious and I don't understand why he makes the move that he does. He says basically Cain was the first kid, Seth was the second, sorry, Cain was the first kid, Adam, uh Abel was the second and Seth was the third because they're talked about in this order in the Bible. And you're like, "Wait a minute, but in Genesis 5 it says that Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters." And his response to that is, "Yeah, but chapter 5 comes after chapter 4." I'm like, I don't think that you quite grasp how um Hebrew narratives sometimes work because they're not always entirely sequential, especially when you jump out of frame and in frame. Um, so when when Cain gets a wife and takes his wife and goes and builds the city, it's we we don't actually know how much time has passed. We know that Cain is the first child. Um, because uh, Eve does not have a child until after they're out of the Garden of Eden. Um, and even her naming of Cain indicates a hope that this is the seed that's going to overcome the the serpent and the rivalry here. Um, I would not be surprised that Abel is the second child, right? But by the time Cain kills Abel, they've been alive for a while, right? They're they're adults presumably. They're they're men. Um, so what are we looking at for time? We honestly don't know. We we know that Adam was 130 years old when he had Seth. How old was he when he had Cain? When he had Abel? Um, how old was Cain and how old were Cain and Abel when Cain killed Abel? We don't know that either. That could be, you know, it could be a hundred years. No clue. And so, we want to be careful, I think, with the biblical text and not bring too much into it. That's always a a trouble. Every generation faces that of of the problem of eisegesis, of reading into the text, the things that we think from where we are. But Adam and But um, Cain and Abel are adults. That much is clear. They are responsible before God for their own sacrifices. So, they're adults. Um, the fact that Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters means that those other sons and daughters are probably sprinkled around throughout time. Cain, Abel, and Seth are the most important because we're talking about the lineage. We're talking about Cain as the failed lineage, Abel as the lineage that could have been, and Seth as the lineage that is the one that is going to bring us eventually to Abram, who's going to get the promise, right? The faithful lineage that goes through. So, you know, throughout church history, there was never a real problem in saying that it was one of Cain's siblings.

If God created Adam and Eve initially as very good human beings, thinking scientifically here for a moment, not not from the Bible, but scientifically, if Adam and Eve were created very good and they didn't have a whole host of mutations and genetic problems that tend to be matched in close siblings. That's where you get, you know, a lot of really bad genetic problems. And one of the reasons why the Bible also eventually uh disallows close sibling marriage. We get to the law. That's not allowed. But but Abram marries a half-sister, Sarah. Hey, wait a minute. They're infertile. Isn't that interesting? Right. So, I think the effects of this have already taken place by the time we get to Abram. We just don't have a law that says, you know, you really shouldn't do this. It's it's unseemly. But that's not the case for Adam and Eve. They are created very good. Their their whole goal is to populate the world with people. How's that going to happen? It means the initial siblings are going to couple up with their other siblings. And this is not going to be a problem because there is no sin in the world. There is no degradation uh of the genome or anything like that. I trust that God is a very competent creator and isn't going to saddle Adam and Eve with a whole bunch of genetic load that you and I as moderns living in a fallen world are saddled with.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's that's that's good. So, let me move to one of the objections against young earth creationism that's been leveled is that we're not doing our homework enough to really understand the literary genre of of Genesis uh, you know, 1, 2, and 3. We we don't understand that the Bible never intended for us to think that Adam was you know, literal or maybe if it did, it wanted us to take it in a very loose sense and some sort of mytho-history sort of sense. We we don't understand the literary genre genre. How do we respond to that?

>> Well, genre is a a tricky word. Um, and I think one of the big mistakes that Bill Craig makes in focusing as much as he does on establishing the mytho-history genre for Genesis, which I don't think he succeeds, but um, in his response to me, for example, uh, in in the book, he says, you know, you didn't really, uh, argue your case properly because you should have done a genre analysis, Marcus. Um, he he levels the same charge against uh others as well. Of the four people in the book, Kenton Sparks understands the issues of genre in the Bible better than all of us. He is an Old Testament scholar and he reads Akkadian, he reads Ugaritic. Uh, you know, he reads the original languages. In fact, when we had a a seminar uh where we brought together all of our initial papers for discussion, uh, somebody had brought up an issue about Noah's flood and said that all these local deities, you know, their flood stories are local events. And what God is doing in Genesis, uh, the flood narrative with Noah is he's globalizing it in order to show that he is a a worldwide God. And Sparks came back the next day. This was hilarious. And he said, you know, there's something that just didn't sit right with me about that. I I didn't think so. So I went back and I read Gilgamesh in Akkadian. >> And like >> all right >> like all 30 people there just slowly turn their heads and stare at him because like, of course you do, I guess, you know. And he's like, "No, in that it said all men became like clay. The Gilgamesh epic is a global flood. It is not a local flood to Sumer. It's not a local flood to Babylon." Later on in the Gilgamesh epic, right? So he's reading, you know, he's reading these Sumerian things. He's reading these Babylonian things. He's reading, you know, Canaanite stuff in the original languages. And his response to to um Craig, he says, "Even though I I I consider myself closest to Craig in any as compared to others here, um, I think I kind of understand what the genre of Genesis is and what the meaning of this is. And it it's not this mytho-history thing."

>> Wow. Um, it's very gently put. It's not a put-down, but it's one of those like, you know, Craig is saying genre, genre, genre, and and Sparks has kind of got to say there like >> um, you know, you're talking to somebody who actually really knows the ancient world >> right? Honestly, really, really well. >> So I think this would be really good to interject here. So, um, just for everybody's memory, because they don't have these guys in their head all the time. They're not thinking Sparks is the liberal on on the panel and this this video is about the historical Adam, but these these guys sort of give us a kind of launchpad to talk about these various views that are out there. So, we're not picking on these guys, but these are the views. This is the spectrum that's kind of out there right now. And so what's really fascinating to me and through previous discussion I learned of the people that in a sense you and Sparks agreed more than anybody else in one way. So, here's the thing. Sparks agrees. Yes, the Bible is presenting Adam as, and you can correct me on this, but he's essentially saying, yes, Adam is presented as living a few thousand years ago, several thousand years ago, whatever. And he's presented as historical. He's he's presented all these all these things. Uh, but as my view doesn't commit me to actually believing the Bible's true on that. And so Sparks is saying essentially, I believe the Bible's teaching what Ross says. I just don't believe the Bible. Now, he's going to put it in a lot less crass terms, but putting it in a very simplified term, and and uh Mr. Sparks, if you Dr. Sparks, if you watch this, we're not putting you down just so people can get a perspective. Basically, he's saying, "Yes, I agree with what Ross is Dr. Ross, Dr. Marcus Ross is saying on what Adam who who Adam was as far as what the Bible's teaching, but I just don't believe it."

>> Yeah. And and that comes across really well in our uh in the dialogue chapters that follow our main discussion. Uh, Kenton is a a really great gentleman. His responses to each people uh each of the the people in the book are are really gracious. Um, as I said, he and I got to uh to be at the at this colloquium, this symposium to present our papers. Uh, Bill Craig unfortunately was in the hospital and and Lok was uh stuck in China. Um, not sure if he'd be able to get back if he left and but he he Skyped in and and zoomed in for the discussion. But, you know, Kenton and I found ourselves at one point, you know, looking at each other. I said, you know, strange bedfellows, aren't we? And he said, "That's exactly what I was thinking." Uh, we really do think that the text is doing the same thing. We think that it is establishing a creation that occurs over the course of six actual days. Um, that Adam and Eve are the first and only human beings created and that all humans that ever lived come from there's nothing that looks like them. There's nothing like that outside of them. Uh, that when they're ejected into the garden, there's it's an empty it's a human empty world. U, that the flood is a global event. Uh, and that the fall is something that has cosmic effects on all of creation. Kentin as a as a non-inerrantist thinks that's exactly what the Bible is trying to teach us. And I as an inerrantist as as uh said that's exactly what the Bible is trying to teach us. And it's Craig and Luke in the middle saying >> that's not what the Bible is trying to say. >> It's trying to say something different, right? And uh, I mean, we could, you know, we could be talking about John Walton uh as just as another important voice uh in how do you read Genesis 1 through 11 as you know, he takes a view of cosmic temple stuff and order and and archetypes, etc. You know, is Adam historical? Walton would say probably. I think so. But if he isn't, it's not a big deal because he's more important to be an archetype than he is to be the original individual. Right? So just to to throw out another option that's floating out there in these things right now.

>> So if I could just interject real quickly just so the audience gets a hold of this. >> The one who knows the most about the genre literature and who is most plugged into understanding what the Old Testament, you know, literature would be saying. He is agreeing that the Bible's presenting a a historical Adam in this sort of young earth framework. Now he distanced himself. I don't I don't believe that. But he says that's what the Bible's teaching. And the one in the book who knows the most about the science objectively, who has his PhD in paleontology is comfortable saying, "Yes, I can agree as well uh that the Bible is teaching a a young um is teaching young earth and I believe in a historical Adam and and I actually believe it." So just so people get the picture uh the one who knows the most about the genre says the same as the one who knows the most about the science. So I want everybody to catch that and just go ahead and continue your thoughts there Dr. Ross, but I didn't want anybody to miss that.

>> No, thank you for for making that very clear and it it's it's a situation that has been very very much the same for decades now actually. If you take a look at u commentaries on Genesis, um, there are commentaries written by believers. There are commentaries written by non-believers of of those who are skeptical or you know, and and believers of a variety of different persuasions of errantists and inerrantists and and what have you. I've read much of them. I I've read a lot of the commentaries and books and and the like. And what is really interesting is that those who tend to be non-inerrantists and the inerrantists, so there's the me and the Sparks guys or the people kind of like Sparks but who are not Christians, um, tend to agree this is this is exactly what the text is trying to do. And why would you try to force it into something that it isn't? Now, a lot of the other uh positions within evangelicalism that are not young earth will try to to make an argument. Well, listen, the liberals are happy to caricaturize the Bible as making ridiculous scientific arguments because it's in their interest to show the Bible as being ridiculous, right? They don't believe in the Bible at all. So, the young earth and and the global flood, science, science has shown that's not possible. But they're willing to to set themselves on it so that they can help make the Bible look bad. And I can tell you from talking with someone like Kenton Sparks, right? Got to spend a couple of days with him and and really enjoyed him a lot. Um, again, he doesn't care what the science says or doesn't say. If the science said that we all come from two people, he's happy with that. And isn't that a neat way that it matches the Bible? But because he doesn't think that the Bible is committing us to inerrancy, he's fine if the Bible says something else. And so his commitment is to read the Bible the way that he thinks the original authors and hearers would have understood it and not to look for hidden meanings or not to look for end-arounds. That gets him a preferred perspective. And I can under I can appreciate that sometimes young earth creationists have come to the Bible with scientific ideas and models about how they think the the created world was made or how they think the flood happened and they bring that into the Bible and say, "Look here in the Bible, it's talking about a vapor canopy or look here in the Bible, it's talking about plate tectonics or look here in the Bible, it's talking about whatever my pet theory against relativity happens to be, whatever it is." Right? >> I want your listeners to understand that the best and Young earth creationism rejects that as well.

>> Yeah. >> For me, I do not come to the Bible for science. I'm not trying to glean scientific information from the Bible and think that the that God has hidden scientifically useful information for thousands of years from millions of Jews and Christians because he wanted to wait until the 21st century when we could finally understand what this verse is really about. I don't think he was doing that. I think that's a bad way of approaching the Bible. So, what do I do as a young earth creationist? I look for historical claims that the Bible makes and descriptions of events or items that I think have importance that allow us to bracket our scientific investigations that give us clues that our scientific investigations should go in a particular direction based on the historical and factual statements made by the Bible. So, I'm not looking for the Bible to tell me about plate tectonics. But if the Bible is telling me about a flood that lasts an entire year, that's telling me that there is an event going on that is utterly unlike normal floods. Radically different. If it goes on for an entire year and it covers the entire world, there are mechanisms at play that are vastly different than conventional meteorology. And so as a young earth creationist, I favor a model called catastrophic plate tectonics, which is going to move the plates of the Earth's surface around in a very fast and rapid fashion that is going to work to push the ocean levels up high and inundate the land. That's going to involve a lot of geyser-like formation that will result in massive amounts of rain that come down. So that when the Bible says that the floodgates of heaven were opened and the and uh the fountains of the great deep burst forth, I'm not looking for Noah to be giving me a u a scientific description that the fountains of the great deep are are a particular thing that only scientists can figure out. No, that's that's the flowing water of of the oceans and the windows of heaven. That's a Hebrew euphemism for rain, but but it's a lot of it, right? So much rain is coming down and the waters are rising so much that it's like the the it's like the world's atmosphere has been obliterated, right? Because the flood is an undoing of creation that brings us back to kind of the condition that the earth was at the beginning of creation. That is unformed, unfilled, and covered with water.

>> Yeah. Yeah. That's what the Bible is trying to tell me theologically. My scientific investigations will then give me some parameters to investigate the hows of that.

>> And my goal as a careful Christian scientist is to not conflate those two. Um, but that also goes for my old earth friends and my theistic evolution friends. Don't go to the Bible and make claims that the Bible is has hidden away scientific information that can only be gleaned now by 20th and 21st century scientists that the Big Bang was really there in the passage of Genesis 1 through you know, 1:1 and the like that it's not there. Let the text tell you itself and understand that it was written to particular people at a particular time. It's got to make sense to them. If it doesn't make sense to them first and foremost, then you're almost certainly wrong.

>> Yeah. No, that's wrong. >> That's good. Well, Dr. Ross, thank you so much for being so generous uh with your time here. Uh, if you would, um, I mentioned at the beginning of this video that there was a box of fossils and we were going to put that out as the giveaway and I told everybody that they could get a chance to get their eyes on it towards the end of the video here. Could do you have that handy? Could you could you show that to us?

>> Cornerstone Educational Supply is the company that I run. We do science, education materials, uh, biology, chemistry, etc. But I'm a paleontologist and we started the company making rock, mineral, and fossil kits for homeschoolers based on the sorts of things that I used in my laboratories uh, when I was teaching at Liberty University. So, we've got uh, Cornerstone's deluxe uh, fossil kit. It's got uh, 20 some odd fossils in there. I'll pick up a couple and show them off to your audience. This box is a little scattered. It's the one I teach out of uh when I do like homeschool groups. But uh Oh, we've got things uh like couple of different types of shark teeth uh from a few different locations uh on Earth. We've got Oh, super fun. Let's see. Echinoderms. Hard to see there. Trying to get the camera to focus. There we go. Echinoderms. uh plant fossils, things that you've probably never heard of like bryozoans, uh little microfossils that are in these little vials, little surprises inside there. Um, all sorts of of wild stuff because I wanted people to be able to get their hands on fossils, enjoy them, learn from them. They will get a uh geological time scale that helps them to understand both the ancient age view of the world as well as a young earth creationist perspective of the fossil record. Put them side by side. So, it's kind of like a handy little translation device actually when you're learning about it, and a bunch of text on the back. You also get uh full descriptions of all the specimens that are on there, where they're found in the geological column, where they were found on Earth, um, and also things like environment and life habit, what were these critters, who were they, what did they do, and um, I put extra fossils in this kit compared to all the other ones because I'm biased towards my fossils. So, they'll get something really cool.

>> Oh, that's great. Well, my wife homeschools. Uh Amanda, I'm just going to let you know that you are barred from trying to get this kit. Uh, so, uh, it's certain restrictions apply. So, every one of the rest of you make sure you type in the comments. Uh, digging deep and uh, we in a sense it feels like we just barely scratched the surface and uh Dr. Ross has generously agreed to come back on. Type in your comments in in the uh in the comment section as well and we'll try to get to some of those next time we have him on. And again, Dr. Ross, thank you so much for your time. And I feel like every time I look forward to editing this because when you're you're doing this, they doing the interview, you're like, "Ah, I didn't catch that. I'm trying to, you know, my here and my camera's up here and I'm looking at the wrong spot." Anyways, I thoroughly enjoyed this and I believe looking forward to watching this again for myself as well as I dig deep.

>> Well, that that's very kind. Thank you so much, Stephen. It's a delight to be on the show uh with you. I look forward to, you know, the next the next uh time that we get to be together. I look forward to the comments from folks. Um, I used to teach a class called Creation Studies uh 290 and also another Creation Studies 390, a beginning and advanced class in creation. So yeah, you know, we covered a a wide swath of ground, but you know, really thin on on a lot of topics and Genesis is a a boundless book. Um, we spent a lot of time in it and so I'm really excited to see the types of questions that we get and uh, you know, kind of a popcorn Q&A sounds like a fun time.

>> Yeah. No, that sounds good. So, if you like this and you want to find out how Dr. Ross ended up on the front page of the New York Times.