Primeval History (Genesis 1-11): The Antediluvian World

    In the last post, we looked at the biblical account of the garden of Eden (Gen. 2-3) and saw that every single detail matches the history of the Persian Gulf oasis about 12,000 years ago. Many scientific fields from archeology to paleoclimatology to 14C dating come together to support the biblical story. Therefore, contrary to anti-scientific readings of Genesis like young-earth creationism, the Bible and modern science actually corroborate each another. Here we’ll examine the biblical account of the world before the Flood, described in Genesis 4-6, to see if it matches with what we know from science.

    Cain and Abel

After Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden of Eden for sinning, and face the punishments of patriarchy and agriculture (Gen. 3:16-19), we’re next told about their children Cain and Abel. Abel is said to be a sheepherder, and Cain is a crop grower (4:2). Based on the archeology and paleoclimatology of the Persian Gulf basin, we’re able to date Adam and Eve’s expulsion to approximately 10,000 BC. [1] Based on 14C dating of archaeological finds, the introduction of agriculture in the Near East can be dated to ~10,000 BC, while the domestication of sheep became widespread before ~8,500 BC based on Y-chromosome clocks. [2] This fits the timeline of the biblical account.

    More interesting is the account of Cain’s curse after he murdered his brother Abel. God punishes Cain by making him unable to till the soil and forcing him to wander the land for the rest of his life.

Cain said to Yahweh, “My punishment is more than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me will kill me.”

Then Yahweh said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And Yahweh put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.

Then Cain went away from the presence of Yahweh and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch, and he built a city and named it after his son Enoch. (Gen. 4:13-17)

This is only one generation from Adam, and we’re only told of one other child that he had apart from Cain and Abel (Gen. 5:3). So who are the unnamed people that Cain is worried will kill him? And where did he find his wife? And how are there enough people east of Eden for him to build a settlement with? [3]

    This entire passage strongly suggests the existence of other people outside the garden of Eden; it's not conclusive, as a just-so story could be concocted about Adam and Eve having hundreds of children before Cain is expelled, but it's certainly compelling. Although the Bible doesn’t explicitly say that other humans lived before Adam and Eve, nor does it explicitly contradict this possibility. [4] The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens have been found in the Jebel Irhoud cave in Morocco, and two independent dating methods (thermoluminescence and electron spin resonance) arrive at a date of ~300,000 years before present for these fossils. [5] Thus, even if we assume that other species of Homo weren’t ‘true humans’ by the biblical definition, as some old-earth creationists have claimed, humans existed hundreds of thousands of years before Adam and Eve. This is supported biblically by the Cain narrative, which places other humans in “the land of Nod, east of Eden,” at the same time as Adam and Eve.

    Symbolic Ages of Patriarchs?

Following the account of Cain’s curse and his descendants, we’re given a genealogy from Abel’s son Seth to the patriarch Noah (Gen. 5). Unlike other genealogies in the Bible, this one gives the ages of the patriarchs at the time that their children were born and when they died. However, the patriarchs’ ages when their children were born (65-187 yo) and when they died (777-969 yo) are extremely high! From the skeletons of humans during this period, especially the wear of the teeth, we can tell that the average age at death was between 20 and 30 years old. [6] So how can we explain these high ages?

    First, it’s possible that the patriarchs really did live this long because God kept them alive. Science can’t discount the possibility of miracles. However, this is scripturally difficult because there’s no indication of any miracles in the passage itself. There are other biblical reasons to doubt the literality of these old ages as well. For one, Abraham is said to have died at “a good old age… full of years” at 175 yo (Gen. 25:8), but if the ages are literal, then he lived alongside all of his much more long-lived ancestors all the way back to Noah. In fact, three of his ancestors, Shem, Shelah, and Eber, would have outlived him!

    Furthermore, all of the thirty numbers in Genesis 5 end in significant numbers: 0, 5 (60 months), 7 (number of perfection), 2 (5 + 7 = 12), and 9 (5 + 7 + 7 = 19). Although these numbers may not seem significant in our culture, it’s as though every age ended in an even number, for example. The chance of this occurring randomly is less than 1 in 1 billion. [7] This indicates that the numbers had symbolic meaning and shouldn’t be interpreted literally. None of the ages in Genesis 11 end in 1 or 6, which isn’t quite as significant, but still comes out to a ~1 in 650,000 chance. [7]

    In fact, in almost every ancient Near Eastern culture, the ‘patriarchs’ of the culture were given artificially elongated lifespans with symbolic value as a sign of respect. For example, the Sumerian King List and Turin King List (Egypt) begin with reign lengths in the thousands of years and slowly decrease from there. Many of these are known to have been real kings from the archeological record, such as Enmerkar and Gilgamesh, but they didn’t have reigns in the hundreds of years. In Egypt, “he died aged 110” was actually an epitaph for someone considered outstandingly selfless, not meant as a literal age. [8] Significantly, this is said to have been Joseph and Joshua’s age at death (Gen. 50:26; Josh. 24:29), and their lives marked the beginning and end of the Egyptian exile.

    Thus, it’s most likely that the ages given in Genesis 5 and 11, and other extreme ages throughout the early part of the Old Testament, were symbolic in a way that was accepted in the ancient Near East as a way to venerate one’s ancestors. If the ages of the patriarchs were symbolic, this also raises the possibility that the Genesis genealogies contain significant gaps, as many other genealogies throughout the Bible do. [9] This explains how Adam and Eve could have lived as long ago as 10,000 BC, even though a literal reading of the Genesis genealogies would place their creation around ~4,000 BC.

    Pre-Flood Wickedness

Before the Flood, the world is said to have been an extremely violent and evil place. According to Genesis 6:5, “the wickedness of humans was great in the land and… every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” The reason that the Flood was sent is because “the land was corrupt in God’s sight, and the land was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11). A group of people called nephilim, who are said to have been the offspring of the “sons of God” and “daughters of Adam,” were “the heroes of old, warriors of renown” (Gen. 6:4), much like the demigods of other mythologies.

    As it happens, there’s actually genetic evidence of this period of extreme violence! Based on an analysis of Y-chromosome diversity among modern humans, we can tell that there was a severe bottleneck among men (but not among women) beginning about 10,000 years ago. [10] In the ancient Near East, which is “the land” under consideration in the biblical account, the bottleneck was most extreme about 8,300 years ago, after which the male population began to recover. [10]

Figure 1. Adapted from Fig. 2 of [10]. There was a severe bottleneck among the effective male population (Y-chromosome population) beginning about 10,000 years ago, which is not seen in the effective female population (mitochondrial population).

    Thanks to computer modeling, we now know that the most likely cause of this bottleneck is extreme warfare between patrilineal clans (descended from one man). [11] When a patrilineal clan is wiped out by warfare, the unique Y-chromosome signature from their common (male) ancestor is lost, while the mitochondrial DNA diversity is retained by intermarriage of women between clans. This violence and warfare is reflected in the biblical account (and, interestingly, not in other ancient Near Eastern flood myths).

    Conclusion

The biblical account of the pre-Flood world (Gen. 4-6) includes the story of Cain and Abel as well as the genealogy of Noah. Although they contain no specific details that can be corroborated by science, nor do they contradict the scientific data. The narrative of Cain’s curse strongly suggests the existence of other people outside the garden of Eden, supporting the findings of science that Homo sapiens has existed since at least 300,000 years ago. The record of extreme violence and wickedness is supported by evidence of a Y-chromosome bottleneck in the Near East around 6,300 BC. Thus, as we saw earlier with the description of the garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, the biblical account of the pre-Flood world and the findings of modern science corroborate each other.

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[1] Jeffrey I. Rose, “New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 849-883.

[2] Dorian Q. Fuller, “Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent Archaeobotanical Insights from the Old World,” Annals of Botany 100, no. 5 (2007): 903-924; Juan Deng et al., “Paternal Origins and Migratory Episodes of Domestic Sheep,” Current Biology 30 (2020): 4085-4095.

[3] Interestingly, there existed several settlements along the eastern Persian Gulf dating to around this time period (~10,000 BC), which “hints at a population around the eastern Gulf basin and associated tributaries distinct from its northern Zarzian neighbors carrying out some form of intensive plant processing” [1, p. 863]. Note however that “land of Nod” literally means “land of wandering” and may not refer to a specific place.

[4] Note that the Bible never claims Adam and Eve were the first or only humans that existed at the time, contrary to popular belief. All it claims is that Eve was the (genealogical) “mother of all living” at the time Genesis 3:20 was written, without precluding the existence of other ancestors. Paul refers to Adam as the “first man,” but in the same passage refers to Jesus as the “second man,” indicating that he is speaking of the first and second archetypal “man,” not the literal first and second humans (Jesus wasn’t the second human to exist!). For further discussion see Joshua Swamidass, The Genealogical Adam and Eve (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).

[5] Daniel Richter et al., “The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age,” Nature 546 (2017): 293-296.

[6] For example, see Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Jean Noel Bacro, “Brief communication: Estimates of some demographic parameters in a neolithic rock chamber (approximately 2000 BC) using iterative techniques for aging and demographic estimators,” American Journal of Biological Anthropology 102, no. 4 (1997): 569-575.

[7] Carol A. Hill, “Making Sense of the Numbers in Genesis,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 55, no. 4 (2003): 243-245.

[8] R. K. Harrison, “Reinvestigating the Antediluvian Sumerian King List,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Seminary 36, no. 1 (1993): 4; consider the epitaph of Imhotep, a scribe during the 3rd Dynasty of Egypt.

[9] John Millam, “The Genesis Genealogies,” Reasons to Believe, June 2010, https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/the-genesis-genealogies.

[10] Monika Karmin et al., “A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,” Genome Research 25, no. 4 (2015): 459-466; see Supplemental Table S4 for the date of the most extreme bottleneck in the Near East (8.3 kya).

[11] Tian Chen Zeng et al., “Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,” Nature Communications 9 (2018): 2077.

Primeval History (Genesis 1-11): The Garden of Eden

    The “primeval history” in the Old Testament (Gen. 1-11) is the source of a lot of debate and contention among Christians. Many Christians understand these chapters to be entirely allegorical because of their apparent discordance with the findings of modern science, and their similarity to other ancient myths. Some take the primeval history to be a mixture of allegory and true history. Others try to fit together a literal understanding of this history with the findings of modern science. Finally, a minority of Christians – who, like the first group, see a discordance between the Bible and science – simply reject the findings of modern science altogether in favor of a hyper-literalistic reading of Genesis 1-11, arguing that the universe is only 6,000 years old, and there was a global flood about 4,500 years ago.

    Although I agree that the scientific data are inconsistent with the hyper-literalistic reading of Genesis 1-11 supported by young-earth creationists, I don’t abandon either modern science or the Biblical account. In this series of posts, I will argue for a concordist interpretation of the primeval history which agrees with both God’s word and the evidence we find in God’s creation, beginning with identifying the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2-3) with a real, historical location that existed about 12,000 years ago. [We’ll skip over the creation account in Genesis 1 for now because there are so many interpretations of this chapter; maybe we’ll come back to it later.]

    Biblical Description of the Garden of Eden

The garden of Eden is described in the primeval history as follows:

When no plant of the field was yet in the land, and no vegetation of the field had sprung up – for Yahweh God had not yet caused it to rain upon the land, and there was no one to till the ground, but a spring would come up from the land and water the whole face of the ground – then Yahweh God formed the man [ha-Adam] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul. And Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground Yahweh God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river rises in Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four headwaters. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Kush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. (Genesis 2:6-14)

    Based on the very detailed description of the rivers in vv. 10-14, the author wants his audience to be able to identify the garden of Eden at a specific location. The problem with this, however, is one that most residents of the ancient Near East should have been aware of. The Tigris and Euphrates don’t come from the same river, but instead diverge north of the Assyrian heartland and originate at two different places in modern-day eastern Turkey, contrary to what verse 14 says! There are thus two possibilities: the author of Genesis 2-3 purposely referenced a geographic impossibility to indicate to his audience that the garden of Eden was a mythical location, or the direction of the rivers has been reversed for thematic purposes (as the Tigris and Euphrates do meet downstream in the south).

    If the second possibility is correct, the rivers are being described as though the reader is standing in Eden and looking upstream toward the sources of the four rivers, as a thematic device. This interpretation is supported by E. A. Speiser, a Jewish commentator and scholar of the ancient Near East. [1] Under the assumption that the garden of Eden wasn’t a mythical place, what other details can we determine from the biblical account?

1. The garden was east of Israel (Gen. 2:8)
2. The garden existed at the confluence of four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates (Gen. 2:10)
   
3. The first river encircled Havilah, a land rich with gold, bdellium, and onyx stone (Gen. 2:11f)
4. The second river encircled the land of Kush (Gen 2:13)
   
5. The land of Eden had no rain, but was well-watered by a spring (Gen 2:5f)
6. No people lived there to till the ground (Gen 2:5)
7. This account took place just before, or concurrent with, the beginning of agriculture and gender hierarchies as part of Adam and Eve’s curse (Gen 3:16-19)
   
8. The garden is no longer accessible to humans (Gen 3:22-24)

If the biblical account of the garden of Eden describes a real and not just mythical location, then we should be able to find a place that satisfies all these criteria. Finding out that Genesis 2-3 accurately describes something this far in the past would also be a boost to the literal interpretation of the primeval history, and the accuracy of the Bible in general. So what do we see?

    The Persian Gulf Oasis

In fact, there is a location that perfectly matches the biblical description of the garden of Eden! At the confluence of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun rivers, as well as another river which has since dried up (Wadi al-Batin), there was once an oasis. These four rivers came together to form another river, the Ur-Schatt, in what is now the Persian Gulf. Wadi al-Batin can be identified with the Pishon, as it encircles Havilah (recognized by most commentators to be a location in Arabia), and its location of origin was a gold mine in ancient times (the Mahd adh Dhahab). Some commentators and translators also identify “Kush” in Genesis 2:13 with the homeland of the Kassites in modern-day Iran, which would make it possible to identify the Karun River with the Gihon. [2]

Figure 1. Adapted from Fig. 2 of [3]. The four rivers (Wadi Batin, Karun, Tigris, Euphrates) which drain into the Ur-Schatt River, proposed to be the river that watered the garden of Eden, are highlighted in blue.

    This region, now covered by the Persian Gulf, was exposed land during the last ice age when sea levels were much lower. Although it went through a hyper-arid period with a severe lack of rain from about 24,000 to 12,000 years ago, the Ur-Schatt River continued to flow, and the oasis was well-watered by freshwater springs known as khawakb. [3] During this period, archeological sites around the Gulf disappear, indicating that humans no longer lived there. [3] The oasis was covered by the Persian Gulf from 12,000 to 11,000 years ago as the ice age ended and sea levels rose, making it inaccessible to humans. [3,4] Archeological evidence places the origin of agriculture in the ancient Near East around the same time, and this is speculated to be accompanied by the loss of gender equality associated with hunter-gatherer bands. [5]

    Thus, every single aspect of the account in Genesis 2-3 seems to be corroborated by the archeological evidence from the Persian Gulf:

1. The oasis was east of Israel (cf. Gen. 2:8)
2. The oasis existed at the confluence of four rivers, the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Batin (cf. Gen. 2:10-14)
3. The Wadi Batin [Pishon] encircled Arabia [Havilah], a land rich with gold, bdellium, and onyx stone (cf. Gen. 2:11f)
4. The Karun [Gihon] encircled the Kassite homeland [Kush] (cf. Gen. 2:13)
5. The oasis was hyper-arid [had no rain], but was well-watered by freshwater springs [khawakb] (cf. Gen. 2:5f)
6. No people lived there at the time because it had been abandoned (cf. Gen. 2:5)
7. This all took place just before the introduction of agriculture and gender hierarchies in the ancient Near East [part of Adam and Eve’s curse] (cf. Gen. 3:16-19)
8. The oasis is no longer accessible as it is under the Persian Gulf (cf. Gen. 3:22-24)

This is a remarkable confirmation of the biblical description of the garden of Eden and the story of Adam and Eve!

    Other Ancient Descriptions of Eden

Genesis 2-3 isn’t the only account of a legendary garden in the Persian Gulf. The same motif can actually be found in several Mesopotamian creation myths, where it’s called “Dilmun.” In the Sumerian creation myth (Eridu Genesis), Dilmun is the land of immortality, called “the place where the sun rises” and “the land of the living.” In the Sumerian myth Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is called “the pure clean and bright land of the living, the garden of the great gods and earthly paradise.” Enki, the creation god, promises to the earth god Ninhursag,

For Dilmun, the land of my lady's heart, I will create long waterways, rivers and canals, whereby water will flow to quench the thirst of all beings and bring abundance to all that lives.

In the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, the location of creation is said to be where the saltwater and freshwater “were mingled together.” Dilmun, the legendary land of creation, is now known to have been a real kingdom located on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, where freshwater springs mix with the saltwater of the gulf.

    Both the Genesis account and Mesopotamian myths record the existence of an oasis in the Persian Gulf in the legendary past. They include similar details as well, for example, both describing the oasis as being “in the east” (or “where the sun rises”) and the existence of the freshwater springs (khawakb). However, the Genesis account contains far more detail and is also more accurate, describing the existence of the Ur-Schatt River and the lack of rain and human occupation. This means that Genesis 2-3 didn’t merely borrow from Mesopotamian myths; it must have had its own source for these details, which weren’t preserved in any other account. I see this as strong evidence for the divine inspiration of the primeval history.

    Implications

The fact that the biblical description of the garden of Eden matches the Persian Gulf oasis so well isn’t just good evidence for the accuracy of the Bible, it also has other implications for the interpretation of the primeval history. For one, underneath the present Persian Gulf, there is a full geologic column stretching back to the Cambrian age. [6] All of this must have been laid down long before the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve were created. Therefore, the young-earth creationist belief that Noah’s Flood laid down the sedimentary rock record must be false.

    Furthermore, multiple dating methods were used to pinpoint the date of the Persian Gulf oasis, including radiocarbon dating, varve counting, and using stone artifacts for relative dating. [3] All these methods, along with the methods of paleoclimatology, corroborate one another and the biblical account, placing all the elements of the story of Adam and Eve some 12,000 years ago. For the account of the garden of Eden to be correct, all these dating methods must also be correct – indeed, the biblical account (if accurate) almost demands it. The earth and human civilization must be older than 6,000 years old, further refuting both the young-earth and gap-theory interpretations of the primeval history. [7]

    Finally, this has intriguing implications for the existence of humans outside of the garden of Eden. Humans existed long before 12,000 years ago (anatomically modern Homo sapiens date back to >200 kya), and there were even humans in the Persian Gulf before it was abandoned around 24,000 years ago. This means that there were other humans who populated the earth before Adam and Eve were created. The Genesis account is silent on the issue of whether humans existed outside of the garden, although there are some hints that they did (Gen. 4:13-17), which I’ll discuss more in the next post. [8]

    Conclusion

The biblical account of the garden of Eden (Gen. 2-3) includes eight specific details that can be used to pinpoint its location in history. If we examine the archeological record with this in mind, we find that all the details are exactly corroborated by the evidence for a Persian Gulf oasis that was lost to the sea about 12,000 years ago (10,000 BC). This is strong evidence for the accuracy of a literal interpretation of the primeval history (Gen. 1-11). We find that the biblical account and modern science corroborate each other, which refutes anti-scientific, hyper-literalistic readings of Genesis. In the next post, we’ll take a look at the biblical account of the antediluvian world (Gen. 4-6) to see whether this is also corroborated by the scientific data.

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[1] E. A. Speiser, The Anchor Bible Genesis: Introduction, translation and notes (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 16-17.

[2] See for example Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 429; this is supported by the use of “Kush” in Gen. 10:8 and 1 Chron. 1:10, which most commentators and ANE scholars understand to refer to the Kassites, as the other “Kush” (modern-day Ethiopia) is far from Mesopotamia.

[3] Jeffrey I. Rose, “New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 862-3.

[4] Kurt Lambeck, “Shoreline reconstructions for the Persian Gulf since the last glacial maximum,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 142 (1996): 43-57; Gholamreza Hosseinyar et al., “Holocene sea-level changes of the Persian Gulf,” Quaternary International 571 (2021): 26-45.

[5] Dorian Q. Fuller, “Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent Archaeobotanical Insights from the Old World,” Annals of Botany 100, no. 5 (2007): 903-924; M. Dyble et al., “Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands,” Science 348, no. 6236 (2015): 796-798.

[6] Fereydoun Ghazban, Petroleum Geology of the Persian Gulf (University of Tehran, 2007).

[7] The gap-theory interpretation is more in line with modern science, but it still requires a clean break in the archeological record of human civilization about 6,000 years ago when God supposedly ‘reset’ creation. If our dating methods aren’t somehow severely distorted, we simply don’t find any such break going back hundreds of thousands of years.

[8] Note that the Bible never claims Adam and Eve were the first or only humans that existed at the time, contrary to popular belief. All it claims is that Eve was the (genealogical) “mother of all living” at the time Genesis 3:20 was written, without precluding the existence of other ancestors. Paul refers to Adam as the “first man,” but in the same passage refers to Jesus as the “second man,” indicating that he is speaking of the first and second archetypal “man,” not the literal first and second humans (Jesus wasn’t the second human to exist!). For further discussion see Joshua Swamidass, The Genealogical Adam and Eve (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).

Reasons to Believe's Argument for the Trinity

    While doing research for my upcoming series of posts about interpreting Genesis 1-11, I came across an article from the old-earth creationist ministry Reasons to Believe, about “How to Persuade a Skeptic That God Must Be Triune.” This article advances a purely philosophical argument for the Trinity, meant to convince skeptics (both theists and atheists) that certain facts about the consistency of the natural world are best explainable by the existence of a triune God. Similar arguments have been made by other trinitarians, from the medieval theologian Richard of St. Victor to the modern Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I don’t think I’ve responded to this argument before on my blog.

Q: I was talking to a skeptic who wouldn’t subscribe to the possibility of the Christian God being 3-in-1. I gave an analogy of a person being mind, body, and soul, and although this intrigued her, she offered that the mind was actually an extension of the soul. Do you have any thoughts or references that I could access to clarify my position?

A: Most Christian theologians conclude, and I would agree, that it is not possible to separate the soul and the spirit of a human. However, standard Christian doctrine asserts that the earthly body of a human is separable. When a human dies having committed his or her life to Christ, the soul and spirit depart from the body to be with the Lord in heaven. Thus, the body, soul, and spirit of a human is not a good analogy for the Trinity. Every member of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Spirit—have always existed and will continue to always exist.

    This is also a bad analogy because, biblically, the soul is an emergent property that exists when a body and spirit are joined (Gen. 2:7). Furthermore, each of these three aspects (body, soul, and spirit) only make up a single human person, so it doesn’t correspond to the belief that the one God is three persons. [1]

As to how we can better argue for and establish the existence of the Triune God, I have found by experience that one of the best ways is to show people how science makes sense only if God is Triune. One example would be to point out that love is not possible unless there are at least two persons to express and receive love. The problem with strictly monotheistic religions like Islam and Judaism is that a nonloving entity supposedly created beings that give and receive love. How can the lesser create the greater? To put it another way, in strict monotheism, God must create in order to have any possibility of giving or receiving love. If God is a single person, he is unfulfilled until he creates. For the Trinitarian God, creation is an option. It is not a need.

    This philosophical argument is often made by social trinitarians, who believe that the three persons of trinitarian theology are three selves in principle capable of interpersonal relationships. [2] Their reasoning may be summarized as follows:

1. Necessarily, God is perfectly loving (premise).

2. Being perfectly loving implies actually loving another (premise).

3. God was free to create or not to create (premise, based on God’s aseity).

4. Therefore, if God necessarily loves another, this other must be within himself (from 3).

5. Therefore, God loves another within himself (from 1-2, 4).

6. Therefore, God is multi-personal (from 5).

The weak point of the argument is premise 2. Trinitarians who use this argument are being inconsistent in how they apply this premise. If we make an almost identical argument, but for another attribute of God (his perfect forgiveness), it leads to a clear absurdity: [3]

1*. Necessarily, God is perfectly forgiving (premise).

2*. Being perfectly forgiving implies actually forgiving another (premise).

3. God was free to create or not to create (premise, based on God’s aseity).

4*. Therefore, if God necessarily forgives another, this other must be within himself (from 3).

5*. Therefore, God forgives another within himself (from 1-2, 4).

6. Therefore, God is multi-personal (from 5).

This reductio ad absurdum shows that, if we apply premise 2 to God’s forgiveness (premise 2*), it implies that God has an eternally sinful person within himself, whom he eternally forgives. To avoid the absurdity, the trinitarian must show that premise 2* is sufficiently different from premise 2, which is difficult or impossible to do on purely philosophical grounds, since the two premises are almost identical.

    Of course, the trinitarian could appeal to 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”) to show that God is perfectly loving in a different way than his other attributes. But then the argument moves from pure philosophy to an argument from revelation, and a claim that the New Testament is best interpreted in a trinitarian way. This certainly won’t convince any non-Christian skeptic, nor will it convince anyone familiar with unitarian arguments about the New Testament and early church history. The New Testament clearly teaches and assumes that God just is the Father alone, and trinitarianism was not widely believed in the early church until the 4th century, which is hard to explain if it’s truly taught in the New Testament. [4] Even in the case of 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”), the context establishes that “God” refers to the Father, separate from the Son and the Spirit (4:9-16), so this philosophical argument (if true) would prove that the Father is multi-personal.

    What then does it mean to say that God is perfectly loving, or that “God is love”? It means that, given the existence of another person, God will unfailingly love that person. It doesn’t guarantee the necessary existence of that person, any more than God’s perfect forgiveness guarantees the necessary existence of a sinful person. It’s possible to imagine a world where God never created another person, in which case his perfect love would still exist but wouldn’t be expressed, just as it’s possible to imagine a friendly person living alone on an island (he has no friends, but if he did meet anyone, he would befriend them).

The problem with polytheistic faiths is that the multiple gods possess different creation plans and goals. Thus, in polytheistic religions like Hinduism, there is the expectation that the natural realm will be inharmonious and filled with inconsistencies and unresolvable anomalies. However, centuries of scientific research reveal the opposite. The more we study the record of nature the greater level of harmony and consistency we see and the longer the list becomes of resolved anomalies.

    Reasons to Believe (RtB) now explains why monotheism (i.e., the existence of a single perfect God) is the best explanation of the consistency we see in the natural world. This argument may well be true, for in most (all?) polytheistic religions, there are stories about the gods disagreeing and fighting over how to run the world. I’m not sure how effective this would be at convincing an atheistic skeptic, as RtB hasn’t yet argued for the existence of any gods in this article — could the consistency of the natural world be equally well explained given the existence of no gods? In any case, this argument is irrelevant to the Trinity now that we’ve debunked the claim that a single perfect God must be multi-personal.

Science, therefore, establishes why God in some sense must be uniplural, as the Hebrew word for God (Elohim) used in Genesis 1 implies. The uniplurality of God also explains why both singular and plural pronouns are used for God in Genesis 1:26–27.

    These claims are very tenuous, and aren’t agreed on even by most trinitarian scholars. I debunked them at the beginning of this blog post. The fact is that plural titles like Elohim were used as majestic titles, not just for God, but also by the Canaanites for their own gods, for other humans in the Bible, and also for the Father and Jesus as individual persons (Ps. 45:6-7; cf. Heb. 1:8-9). As for the plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26-27, this is almost certainly referring to the divine council which was with God in the beginning (1 Kgs. 22:19; Job 15:8; Psa. 89:7; Dan. 7:10, 26). The divine council’s decrees could be spoken of interchangeably as God’s own decrees, as shown by Daniel 4:17, 24.

One question that remains is why three Persons and not two, four, or more. Both creation and the redemption of billions of humans reveals a division of labor that points to three Persons. Also, John in his first epistle explains that God’s spiritual light in the world has three components: life, love, and truth, wherein the Son takes responsibility for bestowing life, the Father takes responsibility for bestowing love, and the Holy Spirit takes responsibility for bestowing truth.

Psychologists point out that when two people isolate themselves from the rest of humanity, they frequently become codependent in their relationship. A third person breaks the codependency. This need for three persons is illustrated in marriage. The bride and groom unite to become one, where the bride and groom become an ezer (essential military ally) for one another. However, for this alliance to truly build an increasingly loving relationship and an increasingly productive ministry, the married couple must completely embrace God as their ezer.

    This argument for three persons is incredibly selective, and it shows that RtB is starting with their conclusion and trying to find premises to justify it. Psychologists also point out that good relationships involve respect for boundaries and giving the other person space if they need it. Does this prove that there’s a place where the Father doesn’t exist so that the Son can have alone time, which means God isn’t omnipresent? Psychologists point out that good relationships involve accepting each other’s shortcomings. God doesn’t have shortcomings, so does this mean that the Father and the Son can’t be in a good relationship and therefore aren’t perfectly loving? Clearly, RtB is simply assuming that God is three persons and looking for arguments to back it up.

In conclusion, the universe, its life, and God’s plan revealed both in nature and Scripture for the redemption of billions of human beings reveals the work of three supernatural Persons who are one in essence, character, purpose, and plan.

    While there may be an effective argument for this, RtB certainly hasn’t made it. At the most, all they’ve shown is that the consistency of the natural world is better explained by monotheism than polytheism, which unitarians shouldn’t have an issue with. As for me, I’ll stick to the clear teaching of scripture that there is one God, the Father alone, and Jesus is his human Son, the Messiah, and our Lord (John 8:40; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:4-6; 1 Tim. 2:5).

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[1] For more on these three aspects of a human person, see my blog post, “Body, Spirit, and Soul.”

[2] For other Trinity theories, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Trinity.

[3] Dale Tuggy, “Antiunitarian Arguments from Divine Perfection,” Journal of Analytic Theology 9 (2021): 264-266.

[4] See my series of blog posts on the history of unitarianism and trinitarianism in the early church; for a more academic treatment of the data, see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988).