We must grant Isabelle Duncan at least one general point, however harshly we judge the quality of her particular argument, either in the context of her own times or ours: she developed a novel version of conciliationist pre-Adamism by following La Peyrère’s idiosyncratic procedure of building a case upon a single biblical text—in her version a much more sensible analysis of Genesis 1 and 2 than La Peyrère ever applied to Romans 5. Almost all previous versions of pre-Adamism had invoked the theory to explain our current racial diversity, usually to the detriment of people outside the European cultural context of the theory itself. But Duncan employed the literary and exegetical traditions of pre-Adamism to explain the geological antiquity of humans on earth, while affirming the unity of all living people by descent from a single and recent Adam.
In short, Duncan argued for two entirely distinct and separate creations, both featuring humans. God created pre-Adamites near the end of the first creation; but he then destroyed all life before unleashing a second creation, this time beginning with Adam, the progenitor of all living humans. Thus, pre-Adamites left human artifacts in late geological sediments, but all modern humans are Adamites of the second creation.
La Peyrère’s reading of Romans could claim no basis beyond his personal idiosyncrasy. But Duncan’s interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis—a strikingly novel analysis within the history of pre-Adamite thought—represented a false solution to a genuine insight. I have often been amazed at how few people, including creationists who swear that the Bible must be read literally, even remember that the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 tell entirely different tales, when read at face value. Genesis 1 presents the traditional sequence of creation in six days, proceeding from the earth itself, to light, to plants, to the sun and moon, to animals in a “rising” series from fish to mammals, and, finally on the sixth day, to human beings—with male and female created together: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
But the tale of Genesis 2 could hardly be more different. God makes Adam at the outset, a single male on a lifeless planet: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). God then places Adam in the Garden of Eden, and subsequently creates plants, and then animals, to assuage the isolation of his first creature: “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). God then brings all the animals before Adam, giving his first man the privilege of assigning their names.
But Adam remains lonely, so God makes “an help meet for him” (2:20) from one of his ribs: “And the Lord God . . . took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman” (2:21–23).
I suspect that we generally forget these striking differences because we cobble the two stories together into the combined vernacular version that pleases us most. We borrow the six-day sequence from Genesis 1, but we love the story of Eve’s manufacture from Adam’s rib, and of the initial situation in Eden—so we graft these “plot devices” from Genesis 2 onto the different resolution of Genesis 1 (simultaneous creation of male and female).
No scholarly debate or serious theological objection now attends the obvious and well-documented explanation of these discrepancies. The two stories differ because they derive from two prominent texts among the many separate sources that ancient compilers used to construct the Bible. Modern critics call these texts the “E” and “J” documents to note the different designations of God in the two sources—Elohim versus Yahweh, with the latter title conventionally transliterated as Jehovah in European Christian traditions. (Written Hebrew uses no explicit vowels, so early Christians had to make inferences from the tetragrammaton, or four-lettered sequence, of the Hebrew text: YHWH. Since the alphabet of Latin, the common tongue of early Christian writers, includes neither Y nor W, the necessary substitutions, plus the inferred vowels, yielded Jehovah.) The Pentateuch cannot, therefore, represent Moses’ unique composition as dictated directly by God. The contradictions within Genesis and other books arise from the amalgamation of inevitably different texts. No religious belief should be threatened thereby. The Bible is not, in any case, a factual treatise about natural history.
But Isabelle Duncan did not work within this scholarly tradition. In her conventional piety, she stuck rigidly to the old belief in an inerrant and coherent text, subject to interpretation of course, but necessarily true at face value. In her conciliationist respect for new discoveries of science, she also believed that this inerrant text, when properly read, could not contradict any genuine empirical discovery. Her unique version of pre-Adamism arose from these twinned convictions.
The two creation stories, she acknowledged, must be read as genuinely different in content. But if the biblical text must also be inerrant, what can these successive and disparate tales mean? Duncan must solve her problem by exegetical analysis, not by empirical evidence from science—and she must do so, according to her own lights, “with unshaken submission to the testimony of Scripture.” But how can this double reconciliation (of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2, and of the entire biblical account with scientific evidence) be accomplished if the two creation stories truly conflict?
Duncan begins her book by exposing the paradox within her assumption that the biblical text may be metaphorical, but not factually false:
In the first and second chapters of the Book of Genesis, we find two distinct accounts of the Creation of Man, materially differing from each other, yet generally interpreted as referring to the same event. To my mind, this interpretation has long presented serious difficulties.
She then locates the main problem in Adam’s different position within the two tales—created after the other animals in chapter 1, but before them in chapter 2:
While in the first chapter, these and many other tribes of the lower animals come into existence on the fifth day, and therefore before man, in the other, man is made and placed in Eden before the creation of these humble races, which were formed by a special act of God, intended to minister to a felt necessity of his newly-created child.
She then summarizes attempts by religious scholars to reconcile the two texts as consonant accounts of the same event, for God may surely choose redundancy as a literary strategy! “I do not affirm that Moses, as an inspired writer, was precluded from giving a second account of the same transaction.” But she cannot escape the plain textual evidence, discussed just above, of a contradictory sequence between the two stories. “If we are to look upon the second chapter as standing in this relation to the first [as a second telling of the same event], we must at least expect that they will not be found contradictory to one another. . . . There shall be no irreconcilable difference between them.”
Duncan then devises the ingenious solution that inspired her novel version of the old pre-Adamite theory. Both texts are true, but they tell two stories in proper temporal order, about two distinct events of creation in the history of life on earth. (The Hebrew word Adam may be read as generic, rather than the proper name of a particular fellow, so the stories may designate different progenitors.) Duncan then summarizes her entire thesis:
I was thus led, with a conviction which has become always stronger by reading and reflection [note her two explicit literary criteria, with no reference to the empirical data of science], to perceive that the true way of explaining these passages is to refer them to two distinct creations, belonging respectively to periods far removed from one another, and occurring under conditions extremely different.
To explain the long duration, revealed for the first creation by geology and paleontology, Duncan adopts the traditional “day-age” theory of reconciliation: “I hope . . . to give sufficient reasons for adopting the belief now so generally received by thinking pers
ons, that the six days of creation were in fact six ages, or cycles of ages.” The separate and second creation of Adam, the progenitor of all living people, then suffers no challenge from the geological discovery of deep time, for any needed length can be absorbed by the long history of the first creation.
So far, so good (and not so wacky). But Duncan’s model of sequential creations then leads us to ask a difficult question about the once extensive but now extinct race of pre-Adamites. Where are they? Archaeological evidence had, after much debate, finally established the contemporaneity of human artifacts with bones of large extinct mammals (mammoths, cave bears, woolly rhinos), indubitably assignable to Duncan’s first, or pre-Adamite, creation. But no unambiguous evidence of human bodies—the bones of my bones, if not the unfossilizable flesh of my flesh—had been recovered (and none would be located until the 1890s, when Eugen du Bois discovered the remains of Homo erectus in Java). So if arrowheads and axes testify to a pre-Adamite existence, but no pre-Adamite bodies ever make their way into the fossil record, what happened to the physical evidence?
Does nothing remain to indicate what he was, or how he spent his time, or what was his character? The birds and beasts of these ages, their plants and trees, their flowers and fruits have left distinct traces in every part of the world. Have none survived of man? . . . Where are his remains? We have the bones of the lower animals in abundance in the rocks of their respective eras, where are those of the Pre-Adamites?
Only at this point does Duncan fall into what scientists might label as a realm of folly wrought by overcommitment to a theory, but that Duncan no doubt regarded as a simple extension in the logic of a developing argument. A venerable scientific motto proclaims that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In the early and exploratory days of a theory, failure to confirm will spur a search for evidence, whereas positive disproof will always refute a hypothesis. If this failure continues as the theory develops, and finally persists beyond a reasonable hope for future affirmation, then of course the theory must be dropped. In the case of human evolution, where sturdy flint tools greatly exceed fragile bones in capacity for preservation in the geological record, evidence of artifacts without bodies only spurred the search for bones—an expectation fulfilled within thirty years of Duncan’s publication. (If science had still not found any bones, 140 years later, then we would be considering alternatives—but not Duncan’s scenario.)
Duncan followed the logic of her exegesis instead. If the Bible promises eventual bodily resurrection to all sons of Adam in the second creation, then God probably redeemed the offspring of pre-Adam as well, and at the catastrophic termination of the first creation—hence, only tools, but no bones for pre-Adamites. But where, then, did the resurrected pre-Adamites go?
In a stunning solution to her greatest conundrum, Duncan proposes that the resurrected pre-Adamites must now be the angels of our legends and purported visitations:
I venture to suggest that the Angel Host, whose mysterious visits to our world are so often recorded in the Bible—whose origin is so obscure—whose relations to Adam’s family are so close, yet so unexplained . . . were in their original this very pre-Adamite race, holy, pure and like their Maker so long as they kept their first estate.
But one hypothetical solution engenders other collateral problems that must then also be encompassed within a logic already severely stressed and stretched. If these pre-Adamites were good enough to become angels in our eyes after their resurrection, why did God exterminate them in the first place, while dooming all other, and presumably innocent, plants and animals to a common grave (with no subsequent resurrection for these lower unfortunates)? The instigating event must have been something truly awful to contemplate; what could have distressed God so deeply that global destruction represented his only reasonable option?
To complete her argument, Duncan resolves this last puzzle. A wayward group of pre-Adamites rebelled against God, and the entire creation had to suffer for their transgression. As for these miscreants, they remain among us as the fallen angels—Satan and his devil host. Moreover, in destroying the earth (and leaving signs for us to recognize this event as an ice age, as recently discovered by the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz), and then resurrecting the bad with the good, God gave two warnings to his subsequent Adamites that they too should fear the wrath to come if they transgressed and followed Satan:
Lucifer was the tempter, a Pre-Adamite of mortal mould, ambitious, enterprising, proud and able. His victims too were men, who yielding an ear, more or less willingly, to his falsehoods, subjected themselves to the same condemnation. The divine anger involved the ruin of the rebels. . . . God left on our globe, everywhere, the unmistakable evidence of the stupendous power he wields when he comes forth in His Majesty to shake terribly the earth.
We now understand that Duncan constructed her fascinating and groundbreaking chart for the full pageant of life through time (discussed in the introduction to this essay) not as a scientific innovation, but as a theological scenario for the earth’s history, as constructed within the pre-Adamite tradition of textual analysis. The key white strip of Agassiz’s ice-covered world may be validated by geological science, but this catastrophe represents, for Duncan, the agent of God’s wrath after the satanic group of pre-Adamites fell from grace, and “God’s great plough” (Agassiz’s own description of the glacial age, by the way, but for different purposes and intentions) swept the planet, destroying the work of the first creation, and preparing a furrow to welcome the new race of Adamites, our own puny selves, to a humbled planet.
What, ultimately, can we say for Isabelle Duncan’s theory, beyond noting an entertainment value far in excess of most incorrect proposals about human prehistory? A scientist might be tempted simply to dismiss her view as a disproven conjecture: she invented an elaborate theory to explain why prehistoric artifacts, but not prehistoric bones, had been preserved in the geological record—and she was dead wrong because we have since found bones aplenty.
But if we dig a bit deeper and ask why she developed such a peculiar explanation (bizarre to a scientist, to be sure, but even a bit odd for most theologians of her time), then we need to consider the more general theme of restriction. We can then learn something important from Isabelle Duncan because her blazingly obvious restrictions may help us to analyze our own, more subtle, limitations—for we always view the natural world within a blinkered mental compass, and we usually don’t know how to see beyond our presuppositions (the reason, of course, why many false views of indubitable past geniuses seem so strange to us today).
Duncan operated within the limited procedures of literary exegesis upon a document that she did not permit herself to view as potentially inaccurate. Such a conviction does not leave much maneuvering room for the broad range of hypotheses that we must allow ourselves to entertain if we wish to resolve truly difficult questions about the natural world. This perspective inevitably leads us to ask whether the more obvious limitation imposed upon Isabelle Duncan—the peripheral space granted to intellectual women in her time—also contributed to her overly narrow focus. Did she accept her limited lot, or did she long to rebel? In only one passage of her otherwise impersonal (however passionate) book does she lift the veil of her frustration and allow her readers a brief peek beneath. She needs to refute a potential objection to her claim that God resurrected the pre-Adamites as angels. These people must have included both males and females, but our literature only mentions male angels. So where did the female pre-Adamites go? Duncan answers that they also became angels, but invisible angels because our literary biases place them beyond notice, just as our social biases often relegate contemporary women and children to a similar fate:
There are many other indubitable truths on which for ages the Bible has been silent. The very existence of women on the earth during centuries, might be questioned were it allowed to be necessary that the Bible should assert it, and there are long ages during which we have no notice of little child
ren.
In other words, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or, as Hamlet said in the same scene that includes his sardonic commentary, “What a piece of work is man”:
O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and could count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
I’m afraid that we must pay the price in scary thoughts if we wish to fracture the confines of our mental comfort.
8
Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy
IN 1897, THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF DETROIT CARRIED OUT an extensive experiment with a new and supposedly ideal curriculum. In the first grade, children would read The Song of Hiawatha because, at this age, they recapitulated the “nomadic” and “savage” stages of their evolutionary past and would therefore appreciate such a like-minded hero. During the same years, Rudyard Kipling wrote poetry’s greatest paean to imperialism, “The White Man’s Burden.” Kipling admonished his countrymen to shoulder the arduous responsibility of serving these “new-caught, sullen people, half-devil and half-child.” Teddy Roosevelt, who knew the value of a good line, wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that Kipling’s effort “was very poor poetry but made good sense from the expansion point of view.”