...loosely defined here as believing in Jesus: His deity, incarnation, death, resurrection, and into Him for salvation.
If this is your definition of a Christian, then it seems you have left out the connection between Christianity and the Bible, which makes me wonder why it is that you are only permitting Christian respondents. In that spirit, I think I'll just chime in quick.
Is the entire story just made up?
Essentially, yes.
...do we have evidence that it is impossible that the whole human race hit an 8 person bottle neck just 5k years ago or so
Indeed.
I know Dr. Meyers at Institute of Bible and Science suggests that the Hebrew is a translation of a mistranslation of another language where one little jot or tittle changes the number by a factor of ten, and if you decrease by a factor of ten you have very realistic ages for childbearing and death. I am not yet comfortable with this explanation though.
As well you shouldn't be... it's down-right silly.
quote:
Gen 5:20 -- And all the days of Ja'-red were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died.
Reduce that by a factor of ten and we get 96.2. A rather odd way to measure a lifespan. Besides, I do not believe that people in that area in those times wrote numbers using positional notation and 'tens.'
I have absolutely no philosophical hang-ups to the reality of evolution.
Well, you really shouldn't anyway, since evolution is completely a scientific theory, and shouldn't be polluted with philosophical ...
I have problems not believing Adam was a real person given his role in Romans 5.
Simply because you are mentally and emotional incapable of wrapping your head around the
fact that there never was an Adam, does not mean there ever really was one.
Jon
In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist... might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. - Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. -
I Corintios 14:10_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. - Colin Wells
Sailing from Byzantium