When By One Man, an anti-evolutionary screed by Colin Byrnes and Matt Jamieson was released a few years ago, I made the conscious decision to avoid commenting on it, reasoning that letting it sink into oblivion rather than give it the oxygen of publicity was by far the best option to take. Health issues also played a factor in not reviewing it as the last thing my mental health needed was to wade through yet another factually-inaccurate tendentious anti-evolution rant. In addition, given that the lack of truly new anti-evolution arguments meant that I was posting only intermittently, I simply didn't see the point in giving a frankly decaying horse yet another beating. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how many quotations from 19th and 20the century authors you can string together, if the science undermines your fundamental premise, universal human descent from two people, then your argument is dead in the water and as tenable as defending a flat earth.
The always-excellent Christadelphian Origins Discussion did
however take the time to look at the book, and among a number of potent
criticisms noted two things; it was highly selective in its quotations
from leading Christadelphian writers and was ultimately one long extended argument from authority.
That By One Man was highly selective in its quotations can be seen from a summary chart (taken from Christadelphian Origins Discussion). The green cells represent omissions from the Byrnes / Jamieson book.
That this represents a significant misrepresentation of Christadelphian thinking on this subject, enough to condemn the book as a sober, disinterested review of the subject. As Christadelphian Origins Discussion points out:
These omissions are serious. No-one would imagine from By One Man that WF Barling publicly stated EC should not be a fellowship issue. No-one would imagine that LG Sargent and H Whittaker explicitly stated Adam was made mortal. Other contrary evidence like David Levin’s and Alan Fowler’s views are absent. [1]
I've previously quoted from L. G. Sargent's 1941 article Adam in Innocence from The Christadelphian, and here it would be appropriate to take an extended quotation from this article
The bare terms, stripped of the qualifying and amplifying phrases with which Dr. Thomas defines his meaning, have sometimes been thrown into the bald proposition that “Adam before the fall was neither mortal nor immortal”; which (to quote Euclid and Dr. Thomas) is absurd. A thing is either X or not-X: there can be no “neutral” position between. A man cannot be neither mortal nor not-mortal; and he cannot be neither not-mortal nor not-not-mortal. A thing is either black or not black, white or not white; it is either in the class of objects which have in common the quality of blackness, or it is in the class “not-black” which includes every other kind of colour, shade or tone. But it must come in one class or the other: there can be no neutral position between those two classes.Sargent certainly did not write this as a crypto-evolutionary creationist as to the best of my knowledge he rejected evolution. His swift dismissal of the incoherent idea that Adam was created neither mortal nor immortal is however one that neatly undermines the position of the evolution denialists in the community whose position requires the entire human race to genetically inherit a physically changed nature from Adam. If one accepts what the Bible (as some non-fundamentalist commentators argue [3]) teaches, that Adam was created mortal, then evolution ceases to pose any substantive threat to Christian theology.
If, then, we take “immortal” to mean “incapable of dying” (as Dr. Thomas does in the passage quoted), we must say that Adam in his novitiate was not incapable of dying, therefore capable of dying, and therefore “mortal” as a simple antithesis to immortal, and using the widest sense of an ambiguous term. There is a class, “incapable of dying”; all not included in it must be included in the class “capable of dying”; but the latter class may be divided into two sections: (A) those in whom death is only a capacity—a latent capacity, as we might say; and (B) those in whom it is an active condition. Both are included in one wide classification, “not-immortal”: but it is the sub-class in whom death is an active principle who are, on a stricter definition of terms, called “mortal”, because they are “subject to death, destined to die”. Adam was always within the class, “capable of death”, but on the sentence of God he passed from the sub-class in whom it is a latent capacity to the sub-class who are actively subject to corruption as a law of their being; and in that class all his posterity have remained—all save One, who has been “made perfect”. [2] (Emphasis Mine)
Just the highly-selective quotation from Christadelphian writers is enough to dismiss By One Man as anything other than a tendentious exercise in trying to evade scientific fact by an appeal to authority. Fortunately, given that many prominent Christadelphians have recognised what is readily apparent in Genesis, that Adam wss created mortal, the community is well placed to readjust its understanding of the creation narrative in the light of scientific truth.
References
1. By One Man - a misleading incomplete picture of Christadelphian positions https://christadelphiansoriginsdiscussion.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/by-one-man-a-misleading-incomplete-picture-of-christadelphian-positions/ Accessed 4th April 2023
2. L. G. Sargent "Adam in Innocence" The Christadelphian (1941) 78:14
3. "It is clear from 3:22 that the fruit of this tree was understood to bestow immortality upon the eater.16 What is uncertain is whether a single bite was thought to suffice or whether steady ingestion was needed to sustain a process of continuous rejuvenation. Either way, the text presupposes a belief that man, created from perishable matter, was mortal from the outset but that he had within his grasp the possibility of immortality." Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 18–19. "The tree of life suggests that the human beings were mortal but that eternal life was within their grasp while they lived in Eden." James McKeown, Genesis, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 33. "J. Skinner, H. Gunkel (without expressly saying so) and L. Köhler maintain that death is not meant to be a punishment in this passage. Köhler emphasizes in his Theology of the Old Testament that “the Old Testament … knows nothing of death as a punishment for humanity.…” W. Schottroff too writes: “3:19* does not speak of death as a punishment but presents it as an established fact rooted in humanity’s origin”; so too W. Vollborn, E. Brandenburger." Claus Westermann, A Continental Commentary: Genesis 1–11 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 266–267.
