Thank you for reminding me of it. Sorry for not getting back to you. I’ve read quite a bit of it. It’s the first time I’ve read any creationist.
His laying out of the chronology of all known hominid fossils in one table, which he says show how hominids have co-existed rather than succeeded one another, thus supporting his view that that the different hominids are really one species, Man, created by God, raises fair questions that the conventional scientists need to address. That’s the strongest part of the book.
But his notion that the earth is 10,000 years old is impossibly unlikely, contradicting everything we know.
His book got me to read some creationist websites, and even they reluctantly admitted the insuperable problems with Young Earthism, such as how do we explain the light coming from stars billions of light years away. And the explanation was that God created the universe 10,000 years ago with the light from the distant stars already “in transit” to make it look to us as though its source was billions of light years away!
So, I’m sorry to say, problems like that make me very doubtful of Young Earthism.
Also, Lubenow’s constant interjection of his opposition to racism is a problem and further weakens his claims to being scientific. If more advanced hominids succeeded earlier and less advanced hominids, then they did, regardless of whether Lubenow thinks this is “racist” or not.
Also, I have long been convinced that Neanderthals were not of the same species as modern Homo sapiens. The morphological differences are just too great. I’ve stood in a museum, looking long and hard at Neanderthal and Homo sapiens skulls, and the shape of the Neanderthal skull is so dramatically different from H. sapiens that to me it seems wrong to put them in the same species. Ditto H. erectus and H. sapiens.
At the same time, Lubenow made me open my mind to the possibility that my former view was wrong. It is certainly the case that the existence of different species of Homo creates a problem for more conventional (i.e., non-creationist) religious people such as myself. If there were several species of genus Homo, then which one was the one created by God as described in Genesis? According to Lubenow, H. erectus and the Neanderthal are the same species as us, and thus they were also created in the image and likeness of God. But was Homo erectus, with his brow ridges and lack of a forehead, made in the image and likeness of God?
My intuitive sense of it is that modern Homo is a different order of being from Neanderthal and Homo erectus. I’m not putting down Neanderthal and Homo erectus, they were marvelous beings and great advances in life in their own right. But I do believe that they were transitional toward man created in the image and likeness of God. As I wrote last November, in response to a reader who asked how I could square racial differences in intelligence with belief in God:
… I have a conviction, formed especially on my visits to the “Ancestors” exhibit at the Museum of Natural History around 1982, that modern Homo sapiens is the end and purpose of biological evolution. The skull of modern Homo is unlike any hominid skull that precedes it, it is a temple of God. All modern humans, including blacks, have that amazing high forehead going straight up from the face and that delicate arched skull that looks like a temple of God. All modern humans are “made in the image and likeness of God,” and so are capable of following God and knowing God. My speculation is that God created the basic form or archetype of man (and perhaps created the basic archetypes of the respective human sub-species as well), and then, once the basic human archetype had manifested physically, it proceeded to show great variation depending on local conditions. And such variation resulted in significant differences in intelligence as in other features.
The nature of God is not contradicted by the fact of human variability and inequality. God does not create an equal world. God is above us. Between us and God there is a ladder, like the ladder in Jacob’s dream, with men and angels ascending and descending it, moving closer to God or farther from God. Blacks are more limited intellectually than other races, and those differences have social and political significance that we cannot ignore, but blacks still share in the basic human archetype as the being who is created in the image and likeness of God.