So now I present the opportunity for those who believe the idea once promulgated by some noted Mormon apologists, that there were "pre-Adamites", to offer a reasoned defence of this idea. Presumably, you don't believe that our first parents were alone, that evolution is true and had been going on since Darwin's mud pond, but around 4,000 BC God placed them in a pristine Garden surrounded by man-eating carnivores. Or perhaps, you stretch it a bit and think that there's no specific time-frame for Adam, and he could have in fact have been created at around the time humans split from the great apes, some six million years ago. In any case, I wish you the best of luck offering some reasoned arguments.
Here is the text of Nibley's Before Adam, courtesy of the MI. And the conclusion:
Do not begrudge existence to creatures that looked like men long, long ago, nor deny them a place in God's affection or even a right to exaltation—for our scriptures allow them such. Nor am I overly concerned as to just when they might have lived, for their world is not our world. They have all gone away long before our people ever appeared. God assigned them their proper times and functions, as he has given me mine—a full-time job that admonishes me to remember his words to the overly eager Moses: "For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me." (Moses 1:31.) It is Adam as my own parent who concerns me. When he walks onto the stage, then and only then the play begins. He opens a book and starts calling out names. They are the sons of Adam, who also qualify as sons of God, Adam himself being a son of God. This is the book of remembrance from which many have been blotted out. They have fallen away, refused to choose God as their father, and by so doing were registered in Satan's camp. "Satan shall be their father, and misery shall be their doom." (Moses 7:37.) Can we call them sons of Adam, bene-Adam, human beings proper? The representative Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans, to name only the classic civilizations of old, each fancied themselves to be beings of a higher nature, nearer to gods than others who inhabited the land with them (and before them), or who dwelt in other lands. And yet they did not deny humanity to them.
Adam becomes Adam, a hominid becomes a man, when he starts keeping a record. What kind of record? A record of his ancestors—the family line that sets him off from all other creatures. Such records begin very early, to judge by the fabulous genealogic knowledge of the Australian aborigines (A. P. Elkin) or the most "primiitive" Africans (L. Frobenius). Even written records go back to ages lost in the mists of time—the Azilian pebbles, the marking of arrows, and the identity of individuals in their relationships with each other. Whether former speculation about life on other worlds is now to be upgraded to life from other worlds remains to be seen, but Adam is wonderful enough without that. That gap between the record keeper and all the other creatures we know anything about is so unimaginably enormous and yet so neat and abrupt that we can only be dealing with another sort of being, a quantum leap from one world to another. Here is something not derivative from anything that has gone before on the local scene, even though they all share the same atoms. (emphasis added)
Do you agree, or disagree with Nibley? If you disagree with Nibley, then explain your own scenario (maybe Brigham Young's, that Adam was transplanted from another planet?). It's clear to me that both Nibley and B.H. Roberts suffered some "cog. diss" on this question and felt that the creation described in Genesis could not be taken literally. If you disagree with Nibley because you think it's just a dumb idea in the first place, then share some reasons why you think so.
My view is that Genesis is a religious fable, and has no place in our modern scientific understanding.
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