Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Man, Part 14.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Good morning, welcome to Defenders.

We're coming to you today from the safety of my hermetically sealed home office, and I'm glad that you can join us.

The last time I argued that the historical Adam and Eve actually existed, even though their stories are cloaked in the language of

figuralism and mythology. And this raises the obvious question. If the biblical

Adam was a historical person who actually lived, then the obvious question arises, when did he live? And we can

turn to modern science in the attempt to answer this question. For scientists are vitally

interested in a question which is empirically equivalent to our question, namely, when did human beings

first appear on Earth? The historical atom may then be located around that time. First of all,

however, we need to clarify some terminology.

A hominid is the class of animals that includes orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans.

They are all hominids.

A hominin is the class that includes only members of the human lineage since its divergence

from the last common ancestor with chimpanzees.

The class of hominins includes not only modern man, Homo sapiens, but also archaic species of the Gennas, Homo.

It includes as well Australopithecines, which were bipedal African apes.

Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History points out that early individuals

classed as homo, such as homo habilis, homo erectus, homo good offensis, and so on, all have

in common remarkably small brains, hardly larger than those of the Australopithecines.

This is in conspicuous contrast to Homo sapiens, which has a brain more than twice the volume.

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