Can We Agree Pre-Adamites is Not a Christian Idea?

Creation vs. Evolution: Some Observations · Great Bishop of Geneva!: Can We Agree Pre-Adamites is Not a Christian Idea?

Here is from the French wiki on Préadamisme.

Malgré la prédominance de la croyance adamiste, certains courants religieux occidentaux et moyen orientaux continuèrent de croire que des hommes ont pu exister avant Adam. C'est le cas de la Familia Caritatis, une communauté religieuse frisonne fondée au début du xvie siècle1. Les Maimonïdes argumentèrent aussi sur les faits présentés par Ibn Wahshiyya.

En 1591, Giordano Bruno mort sur le bûcher pour avoir affirmé par ailleurs que l'homme est parent des singes, faisait valoir qu'il n'était pas crédible que les Juifs et les Éthiopiens puissent avoir le même ancêtre il y a 6000 ans, et que par conséquent soit Dieu a créé plusieurs lignées différentes, soit les Africains sont descendants d'hommes préadamiques2.

Let's try to translate this correctly.

Despite the predominance of the Adamist [monogenic] belief, some of the religious currents of the West and the Middle East coontinued to believe that men could have existed before Adam. It's the case with Familia Caritatus, a religious community from Friesland, founded in the beginning of the XVIth C. The Maimonide Family also argued about the facts presented by Ibn Wahshiyya.

In 1591, Giordano Bruno [later] dead on the bonfire for having furthermore affirmed that man is akin to apes, asserted that it was not credible that Jews and Ethiopians could have the same ancestor 6000 years ago, and by consequent, either God had created several different human lineages, or the Africans descended from pre-Adamite men.

Now, "continued to" is a fairly tendentious way of putting it, since the previous statements, like those concerning rejection of the Sabean myth that Ibn Wahshiyya just reported don't enforce the idea there had previously been any acceptance of pre-Adamites, but that Familia Caritatis was involved in pre-Adamism, well, it so happens, this seems to be footnoted.

Almond, 1999, p. 51. And Almond stands for Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. (ISBN 0-521-66076-9).

The Giordano Bruno assertion from 1591 is also footnoted.

Graves, 2003, p. 25. And Graves stands for Joseph L. Graves, The Emperor's New Clothes : Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, Newark, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2003. (ISBN 0-8135-3302-3).

So, if like me, you reject pre-Adamite men, you should reject Familia Caritatis, an Anabaptist sect founded by Henry Nicholis.

You should also reject Giordano Bruno, a man known as being burned for Heliocentrism — but in reality as this example shows, there was much more to it.

While technically Galileo did not promote Little Green Men, let alone pre-Adamites on earth, Giordano Bruno and Kepler had already set the tone for accepting the certitude to hypothesis of extraterrestrials as popular evidence for Heliocentrism — in the sense that any extra-terrestrial on his own planet would consider his own planet as the centre of the universe with "as much apparent" and ultimately "as little real" ground as we naturally (and reasonably, as long as you don't bring in extraterrestrials) tend to suppose Earth to be so.

I say this was a popular argument. Euler in his Letters to a German Princess instructed her that Newton, a very great physicist, had proven Earth had to orbit the Sun, not the reverse, but he didn't get into details. However, an argument which he did give on her supposed level of understanding was little green men. As I screenshotted and sourced here:

Euler als "Astronom"
https://aufdeutschaufantimodernism.blogspot.com/2017/12/euler-als-astronom.html

This being from letters 58 and 59 to the princess. As far as I can tell from later history, Friederike Charlotte of Brandenburg-Schwedt as well as other members of the Prussian high nobility and princes did believe Euler. And her own impression of his teaching was not the only decisive influence he had:

Friederike Charlotte was partly educated in Prussia, together with her sister Louise. Between 1760 and 1762, the mathematician Leonhard Euler sent her numerous letters in French about mathematical and philosophical subjects. These letters were published between 1769 and 1773 under the title "Letters to a German Princess" and were printed in Leipzig and St. Petersburg. The French edition alone enjoyed 12 printings. It was the Age of Enlightenment and Euler tried to explain physical issues and in particular their philosophical background in a generally understandable manner. Euler may have been employed as her teacher.

In other words, we don't know if they met, we do know that she was receiving epistolary instruction from him, and that the letters were widely spread outside this original context.

So, the tendency was, in the centuries that saw the social triumph of Heliocentrism, to downplay (at least to some readers) the mathematical proofs in favour of speculations about Little Green Men.

It may be worth while to take another look at the English article on pre-Adamism.*

The first known debate about human antiquity took place in 170 AD between a Christian, Theophilus of Antioch, and an Egyptian pagan, Apollonius the Egyptian (probably Apollonius Dyscolus), who argued that the world was 153,075 years old.[1]: 26 

An early challenge to biblical Adamism came from the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who, upon his rejection of Christianity and his return to paganism, accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed co-Adamism or multiple Adamism.[2]: 6  [1]: 27-28,125 

Augustine of Hippo's The City of God contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 10 is titled Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years and the title of book XVIII, chapter 40 is The Egyptians' abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years. These titles tend to indicate that Augustine saw pagan ideas concerning both the history of the world and the chronology of the human race as incompatible with the Genesis creation narrative. Augustine's explanation aligned with most rabbis and with the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as myths and fables, whereas Jewish and Christian claims were based on revealed truth.[1]: 27 

Augustine did take a critical view of the young earth narrative in some aspects, arguing that everything in the universe had been created simultaneously by God, and not seven literal days. He was primarily concerned with arguing against the idea of humanity having existed eternally rather than a Bible-based chronology of human history.[3]

So, not only should a Young Earth Creationist not embrace Anabaptists of the XVIth C, but he should embrace Augustine of Hippo, a clear Catholic.

The last of these paragraphs again has tendentious phrasing, the idea of a simultanous creation doesn't in any way make the universe less young, and a Bible-based chronology of human history, along with rejecting Gap Theory and Day-Age Theory = Young Earth Creationism. Obviously a "one moment creation" is the very opposite of Day-Age or Gap Theories.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Moses
4.IX.2023

In monte Nebo, terrae Moab, sancti Moysis, legislatoris et Prophetae.

* Instead of discussing the wikipedian footnotes, I'll just give them under this footnote:
1) Popkin, Richard Henry (1987). Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Publishers. ISBN 90-04-08157-7. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
2) Livingstone, David N. (2011). Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-8813-7. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
3) Young, David A. (1988). "The Contemporary Relevance of Augustine". Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. American Scientific Affiliation. 40 (1): 42–45. Retrieved 23 April 2021.