| Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
Jan and I finished out a wonderful ministry year (highlighted by our English Schools Speaking Tour in May) by spending a quiet Christmas together at home, followed by my flying out to the Bay area to speak at a national church conference during the closing days of the year.
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| I don’t normally do church conference speaking, but this one was something special. It was sponsored by Gracepoint Church, which grew out of a Korean/Chinese-American church we got to know years ago while speaking at the University of California in Berkeley. Led by Pastor Ed Kang, the church is young, dynamic, and intellectually gifted, many members being Berkeley students and alumni. We have never seen a church of people so dedicated, so fervent in evangelism, and so committed to the Great Commission. Their vision has been to plant churches around the U.S. near to major university campuses, where the churches can carry out student work. In order to facilitate this vision, teams of members volunteer to leave their jobs and move house to a new city, where they take new jobs or enroll as graduate students (these people are very bright!). There they form the nucleus of a church plant and begin to do outreach at the local universities. I was told that to date there are around 18 Gracepoint church plants around the country with outreaches on about 34 campuses. When I asked whether most of these churches were also Korean/Chinese-American, I was told that while that was the original intent, they’ve been surprised at the diversity of the new congregations, with whites, blacks, and Hispanics in attendance.
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 | Conference at the Alameda County Fairgrounds
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| Upon arriving at the San Francisco airport, I was driven out over the incredibly long San Mateo Bridge to Alameda County, where the conference was being held at the County Fairgrounds. There were about 1300 people from Gracepoint churches all around the country in attendance. They were all Gracepoint leaders (no students were permitted to attend), so I can’t think of a more strategic group of people to help equip. A great many of them are already using our Reasonable Faith materials to give talks, teach classes, share their faith, and answer objections, so there was an immediate bond between us. My contact person Pastor Joong Lee from Austin, Texas, asked me to speak during three 1½ hour sessions on (1) Arguments for God’s Existence (along with objections), (2) A Molinist Perspective on Providence, and (3) a Q & A session responding to previously submitted questions. This was pretty high level stuff intellectually! The response of the crowd to my lengthy talks was overwhelming enthusiasm and appreciation shown by their thunderous ovation at the close. May God greatly multiply the impact of what I shared during this time!
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My study of the historical Adam continues to open new vistas for me. I’m trying to figure out where in the historical record Adam might be most plausibly placed. I just shake my head sometimes at the esoteric material I’m reading. For example, this past month I finished a fascinating book published by the Stone Age Institute Press [great name!] called The Oldowan, on the earliest era of hominid tool-making. It consists basically of flaking stones by striking them together to yield sharp flakes used for cutting. Such tool manufacture and use is associated with Australopithecines in Africa between 2.6 and 1.4 million years ago. That might seem to indicate considerable intelligence. But, incredibly, chimpanzees in captivity have actually learned such stone tool-making and use and even passed it on to their progeny! More sophisticated tools did not come until later.
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More recently I read a book on the evolution of the human brain which introduced me to a new field of study: Paleoneurology! In a very helpful article entitled “Hominin Brain Reorganization, Technological Change, and Cognitive Complexity,” Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick chart the parallel development of the hominin brain and technological development. Intriguingly, at the beginning of the most advanced stage 3 of brain development (750,000-250,000 years ago) Homo heidelbergensis comes on the scene, with a cranial capacity of 1260cc, close to modern man. Here’s their summary of the technological advances that are connected with him:
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A number of technological advances are observed in the archaeological record during this time interval. These include much more refined forms of artifacts, more formal tool forms, new and more elaborate techniques for tool production, new categories of tools in evidence at some sites, indirect evidence of improved hunting technology, and possible evidence of symbolic behavior, including the use of ocher pigments.
• Refined handaxes and cleavers.
• Soft hammers of antler, bone, or ivory or softer stone.
• Platform preparation on the edges of cores and bifaces.
• Stylistic norms become more prevalent and more clearly defined in later Acheulean times. Recurrent shapes suggest that hominin toolmakers had more formal “mental templates” than earlier hominins had, although not as standardized as later hominins.
• Prepared cores.
• Wooden spears are seen at such well-preserved sites as Schöningen in Germany (ca. 400,000 years old) and the broken spear tip from Clacton in England (ca. 300,000). Carefully sharpened and shaped wooden spears suggest that they were part of hunting paraphernalia, either as hand-held stabbing weapons or as thrown projectiles.
• Possible big-game hunting has also been suggested at some sites such as the Acheulean site of Boxgrove in England (ca. 500,000 years ago). The remains from several rhinoceros and horse skeletons bear butchery marks from stone tools.
• Micro-wear analysis on retouched flake scrapers from sites of this period (e.g. Clacton, Hoxne) indicate that a number of these tools were used for hide-scraping, suggesting that cured hides could have been used for such items as blankets, simple garments, cords for stitching or tying things together, or containers.
• Ground pigment pieces from sites such as Twin Rivers, Zambia, are believed to be about 300,000 years old.
• Possible ritualistic or funerary behavior may be seen at the Atapuerca locality, Sima de Los Huesos (ca. 400,000 years ago), where the remains of approximately thirty individuals appear to have been disposed of down a forty-foot shaft in a cave.
• Abstract decoration may be seen in a geometric, evenly-spaced fan-shaped set of cut-marks on a fragment of elephant tibia from the site of Bilzingsleben in eastern Germany, estimated to be between 280,000 and 400,000 years ago. This is an unusual and anomalous occurrence, and such design will not be seen again until the last 100,000 years.
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Isn’t that amazing! It makes me wonder if Adam could not have been created via a divinely induced mutation in Homo heidelbergensis, which would make him ancestral not only to Homo sapiens but also Neanderthals and Denisovans. Other scientists, however, have claimed that Homo heidelbergensis did not have sufficient brain development, despite adequate brain size, to count as fully human. What will future discoveries reveal?
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As we enter 2020, it’s too early yet to report on the exact results of our Matching Grant campaign, but I am told that we have once again met our goal. PTL! I hope in our next Report to give you the precise numbers. I also hope to share some stats on how our various outreaches fared in 2019, as Michael Lepien prepares his report for our Board. This month I’ll be out at Talbot as usual, teaching for two weeks. But this time we’re having my course “Philosophy of Religion” professionally filmed for use in online classes. So this is an especially strategic class. While at Talbot I’ll also be participating in a Saturday conference sponsored by Reasons to Believe on the historical Adam, and then on the evening of January 18 I’ll be speaking on the atonement at Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada. Hope you can join us!
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Trusting the Lord together for a fruitful 2020,
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God Bless you and your ministry DR.Craig. You've been a Godsend for me, since I read about you for the first time in Lee Strobel's book, I've watched nearly everything there is about you on YouTube and I follow your page here in Facebook. Thank you so much for your work. When I was young a combination of emotional traumas from childhood and a lost of my faith in Jesus took me to a really dark place, heroin, homeless, the whole 9 yards. But in periods of sobriety I came across with your work and I found that the objective evidence pointed toward the fact that Jesus is indeed God, in essence thank you for pointing me toward Jesus, you Sir are a warrior of God. God bless you brother!
-Bertito
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