Geology Of The Earth Before Adam

Dr. Herman L. Hoeh, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 6/25/1977

“Today we’re going to talk on a number of related subjects which I presume in a certain sense you will have a limited background in some areas, and I will try to make it fairly simple; in fact, it will undoubtedly be over-simplified and in need of certain reevaluation if one was to put it in print.  By its very nature, that subject such as I mentioned that we will discuss this afternoon is constantly subject to revision of information that comes along, where we are dealing with areas of the natural world which involve a limitation of human knowledge to start with.  I wanted to pose the question today for you, in response in a sense to Mr. McNair’s suggestion, that we take a look at the world that existed more than 6,000 years ago, and try to evaluate what we may know of it, and how we came to understand certain things, in areas in which we have a need of reevaluation.  There is always a necessity to be sure that we keep our minds open and to know why it is we arrived at certain conclusions.  First I would like to begin by evaluating the subject of geology and evolution briefly in the following manner:  Evolution arose as a philosophy in the 2^nd half of the last century [1800s].  At the time the Church of God, 7^th Day was being organized in the United States to carry on a work following a separation, with a large group of people that were to become known as the 7^th Day Adventists, where prior to this time all shared a term such as the Church of God, or Adventists, or Millennialists.  Now, evolution as a philosophy spread following Darwin’s two major works, The Origin of Species, and The Descent of Men.  It spread to the United States, and we could conclude that the realm of religion quickly collapsed in terms of offering alternatives, though as late as the Scripps trial in evolution was not accepted as a subject matter to be taught with the same force that it has become taught now, and in other states had been taught.  The Church of God has no history of expounding the meaning of the physical world around us apart from anything we may have been saying in the last few decades.  Thus, if you were to look at the history of the Church of God 7^th Day, you would not find a record of any major exposition of geology, or the new science of archeology, or anthropology.  The Church was very limited and spoke with a comparatively small voice.  And, of course, that Church was the background of Mr. Armstrong’s contact in the 1920s, which has been discussed in his book the Autobiography, and how we came to know and to understand as much as we do, Mr. Armstrong didn’t do this in a corner.  It really came about as a result of his wife’s contact, and then his, with the Church of God 7^th Day.” 

Our Early Views Were Based On An Adventist Sabbath-keeper Geologist Named George McReady Price

“There was, however, during this period, a Sabbath-keeper by the name of George McReady Price, who stood out alone of all geologists to defend what was regarded as a traditional view of creation among Biblical scholars.  Some of you may know of the works of George McReady Price, whose efforts are no longer published by the 7^th Day Adventist Book and Bible houses, although they were until perhaps the turn of the midpoint of this century [1950s].  I had the chance some many years ago to meet Dr. Price.  It was his works that Mr. Armstrong felt were a proper basis to begin our study of the subject of geology, and its relationship, perhaps, to evolution and the Bible, and we therefore had the chance to invite Dr. Price to the college [Ambassador College].  Goerge McReady Price was a very fine gentleman, and warned us that there are in fact to be 2 compartments in our thinking:  In one we must place the theories and in the other those things which may be properly or understandably be thought to be facts.  Now, one of the problems that Dr. Price did not fully grasp was the fact that he took for granted the material writings that were presented by Ellen G. White, who was in the Adventist Movement and a leading spirit in that movement.  He took for granted that the general view laid out in her writings that the world is essentially 6,000 years old, or somewhere between 6 and 7 [thousand years], would be the framework from which geology must be seen.  So that we understand here that anything we have written on the subject of geology and its consequent relationship to anthropology or so-called early man must be seen through the eyes of a man who, though a Sabbath-keeper and understanding God as Creator, had no grasp of Genesis 1:1 or [verse] 2 or related verses.  What we attempted to do in the early years of the college [Ambassador College] was then to take the physical knowledge that was available from the natural sciences [and] to put it together with the Biblical account, then to take as much of the evaluation of George McReady Price had given as possible.  Therefore, we come to the recognition that the Church of God, whether we think of it as the Church of God 7^th Day, the Radio Church of God, or the Worldwide Church of God, as corporate titles or that represent the continuity of the Church of God, that there has been no scientific creationism or no traditional explanation that has been conveyed from one generation to the other.  In other words, it is a new field that has been opened to us as much as it has been opened to the world.” 

Based On Geologic & Archeological Evidence Our Views Were About To Change

“There was a time when one could believe Genesis 1:1 and 2 and any number of verses, and tread over the earth and not be concerned with what lay buried beneath [such as revealed for laymen in the wonderfully short book by Harvard Professor Andrew H. Knoll titled “A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARTH, Four Billion Years In Eight Chapters”].  You read the Bible as a piece of literature, and the understanding you got you obtained only as literature.  That is, what was not said in the Bible as background never entered our minds.  There was no field of anthropology, there was no field of Biblical archeology.  So we see that we came to a general field of study through the eyes of a 7pth Day Adventist, a very respectable man, but a man who himself had not grasped the fundamental difference between a world that existed prior to the 7 Days of Creation and that which has existed since.”

What Most Fundamental Christians Do Today To Their Own Hurt

“With this in mind, we should also take note of the fact that our general view of anthropology or geology was seen as a rebuttal to evolution.  That is, instead of offering a valid, independent explanation of each of the fields of study, anthropology, geology, archeology, and then later on radiometric dating, we tended to view geology as if it must be used to lay aside the philosophy of evolution, and everything else was seen as in some way in the need of combating evolution.  Thus, we tended to read all of the scientific literature in terms of the evolutionary bias of the writer, and if it seems the facts were used to support evolution, we assumed the facts were incorrect, because they were used to support a philosophy that is Biblically unsound and untrue.  Thus, we took for granted that many of the statements made and the finds recovered must in some way be in error because they were used to build up a philosophy of evolution, which in itself is ultimately indefensible.  What we needed to do was evaluate how come we thought what we did.  Let me go back for a moment and explain why evolution is unsound, from one fundamental point of view, which is sufficient to lay aside the whole thing.  If evolution is God’s method of creation—and we are dealing with the traditional view of evolution [i.e. blind evolution] as given in the textbook--the one thing that evolutionary science is unable actually to answer are the great gaps in nature between certain kinds, and I’ll use the broad term, of life.  [Not any longer, many of those gaps are being filled with new archeological finds.]  Those gaps have never been explained, and it takes faith, which again places evolution in the category of a religion, to attempt to defend it.  So, at this point in time we can say, I think, the Church [the Worldwide Church of God] has grown to the point that we are no longer having to combat evolution by feeling that everything that seems to be on the surface in immediate disagreement with our thinking about the Bible is necessary erroneous.”

Radiometric Dating verses Carbon-14 Dating

“We are in a place where since 1947 and 1948 we’ve been confronted with radiometric dating.  Radiometric dating is of various forms.  Some measure things in terms of millions [and billions] of years.  Others, as radiocarbon, would not measure the world in minerals [levels of radioactive decay in rocks], but measure, in a sense, remains in the biological world, and within the last few ten thousands of years at the most.  Now, for many years we have been puzzled by the nature of the evidence of radiocarbon dating, and I will go on to that for a moment.  Radiocarbon we thought must be in some way fundamentally in error, because it seemed to disagree with a primary view of the world that we had [i.e. our Biblical worldview].  This primary view of the world we may define as the two catastrophes.  That is, the account of the Biblical flood in the lifetime of Noah and the account of events that preceded Creation Week that led to a world described in Genesis 1:1 and 2.  The English is: [the world became] without form and void [tohu and bohu].  This is a state of affairs that is not characteristic of creation itself.  You see, taking the Bible as a piece of literature we found two kinds, maybe they were very similar, maybe they were not, but at least two references to catastrophes.  And we therefore drew the conclusion that there was one primary catastrophe since Adam [i.e. Noah’s Flood], and one shortly prior to [Adam, which Dr. Hoeh must be referring to 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were killed off by a giant meteor impact off the Yucatan Peninsula].  And we assume that all of geology, and, therefore, related events in archeology, should in some way fit into [the] two catastrophes, because they were recorded in the Bible.”

There Could Have Been Many E.L.E’s (Extinction Level Events)

“We have had to come to a realization that because two [catastrophes] may be recorded in the Bible, and left to the Bible alone one might draw the conclusion that there are two, doesn’t prove that there may not have been more than two.  [Recently it has been hypothesized that there could have been as many as 22 E.L.E’s over the period of all prehistoric life on the planet, partial Global-Level-Killer events.]  Now, that is a statement.  What we of course need to do is to evaluate whether it is so.  Because there was an event before Adam that is recorded leading to chaos and confusion.  Does this imply that there were no events earlier than that that we might in the area of geology view as catastrophic, or in some nature, at least destructive?  [purchase that book by Professor Andrew Knoll to fill in those details, very interesting.]  For a time we began to see what we had not seen before and I would like then to paint a little picture along the way.  We came to realize that indeed we were looking at things too narrowly.  For every year we have the effects of erosion on the earth, and we should in fact find characteristics of a world before Adam and the Flood, events of the Flood, and events since the Flood. That was the first step in our thinking.  Those of you who live in this area along Lake Michigan, where we were guests, and are, of the Grady’s in their home, will suddenly become aware of what can happen when a lake rises a little bit and there is an immense amount of erosion.  Now, every year there is erosion.  And therefore we began to see that there may indeed be a great deal of evidence that has nothing to do with either the Flood or some pre-Adamic destruction.  And the next step in our thinking along this line was this:  If the devil sinned from the beginning, why should we assume that the world had no evidences of any kind of destruction, or to use another term, erosion, inbetween the first creation of life, the presence of angels, and the ultimate rebellion when the earth was abandoned as an angelic inheritance as Jude defines it?  Is it thinkable that Satan, who was a sinner, and who was a murderer from the beginning, always carried out God’s government until he suddenly rebelled?  And that the only evidence we should have of misguided life on earth should be right at the close, should be at the end of the full period of time?  [i.e. what Dr. Hoeh is saying, if Satan, even before the rebellion was in full rebellion, the evidence of various destructions, Extinction Level Events, should be more commonplace.  And the record of the rocks in geology text books shows there have been as many as potentially 22 E.L.E.’s that have taken place over earths 4.5 billion year age.]  We came to see that it was very possible we needed to take a look at the nature of the created, the forms of life, during the time that angels were on earth.  [Now with the study of geology and paleontology having advanced a whole lot since this was written, his statement about examining the past lifeforms on earth during the period when fallen angels were ruling over it would take us through the periods of time from the pre-Cambrian Period up through the Cretaceous Period when the dinosaur era ended in one big fiery blast of meteor impact.]  Now, of necessity, we have to distinguish between what Mr. Armstrong has been saying that is based on the Bible, and putting various concepts laid out in the Bible together as a literary statement.  We’re examining today not that, we’re examining the world that should parallel such statements, and in this case we’re going outside of the Bible into some other fields of study to see what information there may be to answer some of the questions in the problems we face.  [So we’re looking at the geological, archeological and paleontological evidence discovered so far.]  For a long time we tried to divide the world, if you will remember articles in the earliest 60’s, at the end of what we called the Cretaceous, at the close of the Mesozoic period [he means the Mesozoic Era, which includes going from oldest to youngest, the Triassic Period, Jurassic Period, Cretaceous Period.  At the end of the Cretaceous Period came the KT-barrier extinction, the giant meteor strike in the Yucatan, marking the end of the Cretaceous Period and Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era and Paleogene Period.  So next you have the Cenozoic Era, which includes, going from oldest to youngest, the Paleogene Period, Neogene Period, and Quaternary Period, this last Period beginning the age of pre-historic man, starting 7 million years ago.  Resuming Dr. Hoeh’s sentence,]…at the close of the Mesozoic [Era] that is the middle time zone, as the geologists then used.  And what we found is that we could not describe all the events that have been geologically evaluated and excavated and uncovered, and say that they would fit our account of Creation Week, the world to the Flood, and the world since.  [What he’s saying here is this, that our Biblical explanation for Creation Week to the Flood during the early 1960s, did not match the newly discovered geological, archeological and paleontological discoveries which are now common knowledge.  That the standard Creation Week explanation did not include all the Era’s and Periods of time going back 3.5 billion years to the first early cellular life, and going onward to the Ediacaran, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary Periods, taking us right up to the modern biosphere we live in today, which goes back to about 6,000 years ago.]  So we were having some major problems of how to fit the story together.  In the first place, we have the vast period [of time, eons of time, going back to the creation of earth, 4.5 billion years ago]; and if some of these terms are new to you, put them down as you think they can be spelled and if you want to ask someone if you’re not familiar, and I certainly will deal with some unfamiliar subjects.  If you want to put down some terms, ask some who have had at least high school or college training in terminology, then you can evaluate it further on your reading.  I will try to be as explicit in definition as possible so I don’t lose you in the terms, at least.  We thought that after the world of reptiles [dinosaur age] that the world of mammals was the world of Adam.  This was the picture we drew because we asked ourselves in the early classes that Mr. Armstrong taught, he said there was a world before Adam, then a destruction, and the world since.  We thought in simplistic terms of the before and after, and probably the greatest difference as it then appeared to us would be the difference between the world of cold-blooded reptiles and the world of mammals [i.e. Cretaceous vs. Paleogene Periods].  I will discuss the question of whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded later.  But this was taken for granted even by men who thought they knew.  But there was no way Mr. Kenneth Hermann, who was from Colby, Wisconsin, who is the registrar of the college [Ambassador College], teaching geology, [who] tried to approach it from the geological point of view, and reach into history and from the historic archeological point of view; I tried to go back, and we could never meet satisfactorily, that is, we couldn’t resolve the problems.  We tried from year to year to offer varied alternatives, worlds of so-called ice-ages of the Pleistocene.  That means that when much of North America down into Wisconsin and below were covered with ice, and much of northern Europe into the German plains and the modern Soviet Union were covered with ice in this, a post-Flood situation.  Was this pre-Flood?  If our view was correct geologically speaking, Mr. Hermann drew the conclusion we would have to put the ice ages after the Flood, because we had far too much of what we called the Tertiary--that is the age when mammals began since the reptiles dominated the earth scene--we had far too much that wouldn’t fit into the time between Adam and Noah.  But from a historic archeological point of view that had to be much earlier, something that must have happened shortly after Adam, at the latest.  So we had no resolution of the problem.  [What he’s saying is that all the lifeforms showing up in archeological digs, paleontological digs, was way more than would fit into the Biblical description and current lifeforms that have been around going back 6,000 years, to Adam, all the lifeforms showing up from the end of the Cretaceous up through the Cenozoic Era, up to Adam.]  Now I want to tell you that we didn’t publish all the problems in the Plain Truth, the Correspondence Course or the Good News.  We did drag the students through, trying to evaluate it from year to year to help us see what the problem was.  And remember, the Church of God had no scientific creationism as a valid presentation.  We were coming at it with no background in the Church of God, using literature by a 7^th Day Adventist who in all sincerity attempted to explain the material, did as best he could, but was indeed lacking some Biblical information that was fundamental.  It turns out that even his geology was being seen through the eyes of his religious convictions, much as, if you please, our evaluation of the scientific data was being seen through a model that we created in order to try to fit the evidence of the natural world into the Biblical account.”

Enter Radio-Carbon Dating, Throwing Another Monkeywrench Into Our Problem--It Was Showing Humans Before Adam--Pre-Historic Man

“Now, while we were wrestling with the question of the ice ages and where to draw the line of creation week in the story, radiocarbon dating came, and all creationists to my knowledge at the beginning assumed that there must be something fundamentally wrong, that is, in times past since Adam the amount of radiocarbon [Carbon-14], that is radioactivity of carbon-14 must have been so much less than it is now that things would appear to be old because the radioactivity is so small, must in fact be much more recent.  Or how else can we explain a Biblical chronology that is certainly somewhere in the range of 6,000 to 7,000 years, whether you use the Hebrew or Septuagint, and I’m not arguing that point for the moment one way or another.  I’m persuaded the Hebrew is correct, but in any case the Bible text limits a world to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 years as an approximation, and yet radiocarbon was dating the Mesolithic, that is what we call the middle stone age or the paleolithic, the old stone age [of man].  And you can have your own ideas of what cave men were like, you know, as tens of thousands of years old, and in fact so much older that you had material of the old stone age that wasn’t even registering in radiocarbon.  That is the lower paleolithic, the lower old stone age as distinct from the middle stone age, the upper old stone age.  The lower cannot even be measured in radiocarbon.  So we had some problems we were wrestling with.  Why should the earlier forms of hominids, or children of Adam [I would call them predecessors of Adam] of the lower Pleistocene or the lower old stone age not even have any evidence of radiocarbon?  Radiocarbon, of course, we absorb all the time in our environment.  It’s a small amount, but nonetheless can be registered.  When a person or a tree dies, it’s no longer taken in, and whatever was the content in the bones or in the wood of the tree, the flesh, of course disintegrates and is not a factor in this measurement.  It ceases.  And as radiocarbon decays over the years, it’s less and less, and when we compare it to the modern amount of radioactivity, we would draw the conclusion of the relative age, because it seems to be less and less as we go back in time.  That is a generalized picture without going any further, because you all should know something of the subject.  Now there were strong evidence that if the Biblical account is true, which it is, and if our view that all these skeletons that were something like or nearly like man were indeed human and paralleled Adam, then we were confronted with an enigma as to how radiocarbon could have been built up from leaving no evidence and then gradually rising to the present level, and we were tempted to create a picture in which we said longevity of the world before the Flood paralleled the lack of radioactivity, and the decline in our age level paralleled the rise of radioactivity.  And it makes nice little charts, but the question is were they true?  They were reasonable, but are they defensible?  In the late 1960’s a number of studies were being conducted independently by the University of Arizona on the bristlecone pine trees found in the White Mountains in eastern California, which lay between California and Nevada, but east of the Sierra Nevadas that are further west in California.  Now here, somewhere between 8,000 and 12 or 13 or 14 thousand feet were remarkably knarled trees, some of which gave every evidence of being over 4,000 years old.  They were the oldest living thing on earth, and when men bored into them with great care and when logs that had fallen in the White Mountain forest, which are not tall--they are very short--some of these trees are no more than 20 feet high after being this age.  They are unbelievable—you have to see them—they grow out this way and they just don’t grow very high.  They are struck with lightning, they die at the top and they keep growing from the root bottom.  I had a chance to visit the laboratory in the University of Arizona.  We have evaluated the material and we came to the inevitable conclusion that something was fundamentally wrong in our concept of radiocarbon dating.  So this became a fundamental problem that we have wrestled with over a number of years.  I addressed the Big Sandy Campus [of Ambassador College] two or more years ago, and said then, Why is it that whereas we claim to have answers to so many things, even answers to what the purpose of man is, what constitutes man biologically in the first place?”

Early Man

“Is Neanderthal really man?  We think of him as homo sapiens.  Or is he Homo Sapiens?  What about so-called Peking man or Java man, properly called Homo Erectus?  Are these the family of Adam?  Or were they contemporary [i.e. living or occurring at the same time] with the family of Adam?  And what about the tools that are present, not only in the sites where the skeletons of these creatures are found, but tools which are present even earlier in the sequence.  What is now found in Africa is Homo Habilis, or Australopithecines.  We have no answer.  We had only problems at that time.  I said, Why is it that a chemist who is a Christian can go into his laboratory and know when he works with the laws of chemistry that he can do it here or in Japan, in India or London and come out with the same result?  Then why is it that a Christian physicist who measures radioactivity is always coming out with the wrong result?  Is the problem in physics or is the problem in philosophy?  And why is it for instance, that middle stone age man, to use these terms, as distinct from new stone age, is somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 years old when radiocarbon measures it, and why is the old stone age some 10 to 12 thousand years old, and so old it cannot even be measured by radiocarbon, and so old that from other means of measurement that we practically have to draw the conclusion we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of years.  [recent calculations are that earliest fossils of man go back 6 to 7 million years ago.]  What is the problem, we said?  When we examined the Bristlecone Pine it became reasonably clear you can examine the large pieces of log that are under microscopes so you can have a very solid idea of the nature of those rings.  Two independent studies were made and they all came to the conclusion there has not been some great increase in radioactivity, that, in fact, radioactivity has been reasonably stable, that somewhere beginning with the 4^th, 5^th or 7^th centuries B.C.--during that period there has been a slight rise in radioactivity, and by 2 to 3 thousand B.C. it has risen appreciably so that instead of radioactivity being practically nil and rising the present, it was the other way, that it rose somewhat in the past.  Thus, evidence, let’s say, of a tree that has 4,000 rings is really registering as if it were only maybe 3,500 years old, radiocarbon [age].  It had actually more rings than radiocarbon.  And something--if you were to add up in two or three trunks that can be clearly assembled to show the years that have gone by, we end up with roughly 6,000 tree rings, let us say, but the radioactivity reads only 5,300, plus or minus some factor.  Now this was interesting, because it is the opposite of every conclusion that every creationist had taken for granted.  And that is that radioactivity was even slightly higher in terms of radiocarbon in the past than it is in the present.  That indeed, trees that we thought were old that should have been younger are in fact even older than they seemed, by 1,800 years.  Upwards of 600 to 800 finally.  It’s within that range.  Now, this, indeed, when we examined the laboratory which I think now was nearly 9 years ago, I wasn’t sure how long it was--no let me correct that, it must have been about 1970.  We have had to draw the conclusion that there was no fundamental error in the Bristlecone Pine measurements.  [So, conclusion, radiocarbon dating was inaccurate, to some degree.  Around this time, 1970 or 1971, while I was working at Arlington Automatic Transmission, we got this customer whose station wagon had an inch of Texas red clay undercoating the car.  I got talking to him, and discovered he was a technician who had been working on the two-stage rockets, with the German V-2 rocket for the first stage.  They were launching them into the upper atmosphere and taking all kinds of readings.  I asked him, having read a Plain Truth Magazine article which stated that Carbon-14 dating wasn’t that accurate beyond 3 to 4 thousand years back due to Carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere not having reached any steady-state.  I asked this rocket technician point blank, whether the readings taken from the instruments sent aloft showed Carbon-14 having reached a steady state.  He said the readings he measured at the time show C-14 levels all over the place, no steady-state condition there.]  Now you can say down in the lowlands, you can say that a tree might have more than one ring, it would be a false ring, in a year.  But up in this high altitude the greater likelihood is a year doesn’t even have enough moisture to present growth.  To check out the evidence, a number of trees were examined at the 8 to 10 thousand foot level, and a separate study made altogether independent was made at the range of 15-15 thousand feet.  These are rough figures.  The statistics and facts may be found in some publications.  They found that the difference over 4,000 years was less than 5 in the number of rings, between the upper reaches and the lower.  And in every instance it was the upper reaches from 10 to 12 or 13 thousand feet, that high altitude, where the rings were shorter or smaller number.  That is where they were missing.  And in examination they found that the missing rings corresponded to the [unintelligible] in the transition from Adam to Noah.  Our understanding of what happened in the time since would be altered appreciably less.”        

Man, A Tool-Making Creature

“Now, what I want to do is point up some of the things that were discovered in Africa, which may help us.  One of the definitions 20 years ago of man that we took for granted in the Church was that man is a tool-making creature.  And any time there was a tool we assumed that was a son of Adam [i.e. this was not a pre-Adamic homo-sapien, homo erectus, or earlier hominin].  Now we discover that however we want to define tools, certainly we to have something more than [a human] merely utilizing an object--there must be involved the shaping in some way of an object.  Used, not like a bird, who drops a stone on an egg to crack it, or the egg on a stone, however you want to do it, but clearly the utilization of an object that goes beyond the natural shape, or its natural use, like a monkey may pick up a broom and just use it.  There has to be a little something more than that to qualify for the concept of a tool.  We have come to the conclusion that indeed our concept of man as a tool-making creature has even been laid aside by science as invalid, and it is one of the revolutionary concepts that has occurred within the last 15 years of thinking.  And it goes hand-in-hand with what we ourselves had to come face to face with.  And that is that the world before Adam was not like our concept at all.”  [I’m not sure what Dr. Hoeh’s getting at, except that any tool-making skills of early pre-Adamic man were rudimentary at best, very primitive.]

No Fine Line Between The World Of Cold-Blood Reptiles And Warm-Blooded Mammals, Dinosaurs Could Have Been Warm-Blooded

“Then, recently a revolutionary study was made of the bones of creatures such as the dinosaurs and the conclusion has come that it is impossible to regard all of these creatures as cold-blooded, for the simple reason that the amount of heat that it would be needed to generate life could be useful only with a creature whose body weight would be much smaller.  That in fact the dinosaurs in many categories were warm-blooded.  Or, the structure of the bone would seem to indicate such.  Many of the unusual protuberances on the back are in fact to radiate heat away and not merely to look absurd.  Now, this means that there was no fine line between a world of cold-blooded reptiles and warm-blooded mammals.  That the basic old idea we had was indefensible.  That, further, man was not necessarily the only tool-making creature, for chimpanzees are known to make tools in nature itself in Africa, if you take the studies that are being made today.  Next, that radiocarbon throws into complete doubt the idea that we can gather all of the last or the Tertiary and that which precedes the Pleistocene or the Ice Age, and is supposed to be the earlier age of mammals, or that we can put all of this within the realm of man.  We have had to, in fact, come to the place where we laid on the shelf every one of our primary concepts.  I think we’re going to have to realize that this is essential whether we consider geology, or the definitions in anthropology, of man.  [i.e. science, true science, and our human concepts, interpretations of what the Bible says don’t match.  The Bible, as the Word of God, is true, 100 percent accurate.  It is our concepts, interpretations of what it’s saying that is inaccurate at times, especially when trying to reconcile true science, geology, and fossils within this record of the rocks, and what we think the Bible is saying.  The Bible, what it really says, must square with true science, geology, archeology and paleontology and radiometric dating and physics.]  Our conclusion now essentially must be that each one of these sciences, that is areas of knowledge, should be able to stand on their own and be defensible on their own.  We should be able when we are finished to have agreement between the Bible, between what we are coming to understand of the world of angels, between anthropology, archeology, history and geology and radiometric dating, or physics.  Whereas up to this time we have had only disagreement and no resolution of the conflicts.  [I think anyone who had read this far can see just how intellectually honest Dr. Hermon L. Hoeh is, or was (we’ll be meeting him in the resurrection to immortality soon).]  Having then decided some two years ago to lay aside preconceptions, and to start anew, and to examine each area in itself, I came to a place where I wrote a number of letters to individuals interested in the subject.  I drew the conclusion that we should be looking for the evidence of the Flood, examining the validity of radiocarbon dating at that time, and we should limit ourselves to a period of time that seems to make sense.  I had to draw the conclusion, and without any question, we were within the last several thousands of years going to discover the evidence that man, and of the Flood, and of history, and we could have in fact agreement in these various subject areas.  And when I finished a number of letters which were mailed last year, we went to southwest Africa, and I did not go further in the study.  After returning from southwest Africa we did draw the conclusion as a result of correspondence that there is now no way to lay aside the evidence of radiocarbon dating.  That it is fundamentally sound.  Whether you examine the nature of the way trees are cut and assembled, because you have the fallen logs which have to be matched, the longest living tree is probably 4,300 years old, and there are others which overlap for hundreds or even a thousand or two years, and they go back further, and we have been able to say that indeed the evidence has been built up very carefully covering over 6,000 years of elapsed time.  And will be less than that in radiocarbon years because radioactivity was in fact higher in the past on the basis of the Bristlecone pine trees.  Now, I don’t want to get into the subject of archeology, although that I think is going to be critical to our study.  I want to put that a little later.  What I want to do is to go back to some of the things that Mr. Chris Patton and I were discussing.  He was in the Jerusalem office for quite a length of time, and it is Chris Patton and Miss Grady where the connection is as to why I’m here.  Because the Grady’s daughter worked very closely with the Pattons in the Pasadena area in southern California. 

Back To Viewing Hominids--And Angels

We were discussing the nature of tools and skeletons, and the nature of the time parameters that we are dealing with in anthropology.  We used to read such statements as “Man was an old stone age or lower Paleolithic creature,” or “There were various forms of hominids that lived for so many hundreds of thousands of years.”  And then there were middle old stone age or [the] Neanderthal period, the Neusterian culture that was a few ten thousands of years.  In the upper Paleolithic, the upper old stone age that might have been regarded as ten to twenty thousand years in duration.  And the middle stone age or Mesolithic that might have been regarded in the Middle East as maybe 4,000 or so.  And we used to laugh at all of this figuratively speaking and say “Now how could this be if man is around 6,000 years, and yet this is supposed to take us back 600,000?”  We literally discounted all of this evidence because it didn’t fit the [our] view of time.  We were assuming all along that all creatures in some way either were victims or the sons of Adam.  Let’s take homo erectus, you know, like Java man or Peking man.  We thought that either those must be the sons of Adam, that skeletal type, or the victims of the sons of Adam.  The problem was that if they were victims, where were the sons of Adam during this time?  That is, why do they not leave remains?  Also, we were confronted clearly with the implication that we were viewing things artificially without sufficient satisfaction of a sound conclusion.  We’ve had to come to the conclusion that when Mr. Armstrong on the one hand says that God made angels for a very great purpose which I will not define here, and that he [God] also had a backup system in mind.  That he did not decide that’s if he is going to have a backup system, that’s he would suddenly start it off with Adam and have no preparation.  And we also came to realize that there was no way to differentiate between the tools of early, middle and late Paleolithic—I should say lower, middle and late Paleolithic, there was no way to distinguish the tools from the creatures through skeletons which were always in association.  Thus, we came to the conclusion that Australopithecines were tool-making creatures of an Olduvai culture from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, that there was no doubt that the lower Paleolithic culture was to be associated with homo erectus, that the middle Paleolithic we had always taken for granted was to be associated with Neanderthal, and we began to realize that the tools were to be associated with the skeletons, always in association with the sites.  Now, we had stopped with Neanderthal; we might have gone back one step further, but we didn’t know what to do in an earlier period, and all of this prior to Neanderthal was unmeasurable even by radiocarbon. So, we had to draw the conclusion that we needed a whole new look to see what kind of world it was that angels ruled over.  Now, keep in mind what we did was to say to ourselves--for the moment we’re talking philosophically here--Mr. Armstrong has pointed out that God used angels to complete his creation.  [What I think Dr. Hoeh is stating is that Mr. Armstrong believed God had used angels, those that were under Lucifer to “complete his creation,” meaning the creation of life on earth, terraforming the planet with life, after God’s initial creation of the primitive living cell.  This would have involved genetically modifying lifeforms starting with the cell and going all the way up through complex plant and animal lifeforms, starting in the oceans during the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, right up to the Cretaceous dinosaur age, and then right up through the bio-engineering of early man to homo sapiens.  Considering what we’ve heard about how Lucifer sought alternatives to God’s way of Give, alternatives that involved competition, lying and murder, when viewing the lifeforms presented to us in the record of the rocks, the fossil record, lifeforms appear to have been designed to compete with each other, violently, instead of peacefully coexisting with each other, like the picture painted for us in Genesis 2, in the Garden of Eden, whose lifeforms, including Adam and Eve, were all created directly by God, and probably within a literal 6-day span of time.  God would, and this is speculation, we’ll find out if it’s true and to what degree it's true, but God would present the angels and Lucifer with the schematics for the modifications of lifeforms God wanted to see brought about, as time went along, from one period to the next.  It was those angels carrying out the schematic plans, bio-engineering the changes into those lifeforms, who also bio-engineered into them the way of competition, the way of get, rather than cooperation.]  Now, Mr. Armstrong has been very careful, and he tends to be very careful, in how far he commits himself.  He said that the angels, you see, were given responsibility to complete the creation, and he called them “created objects.”  He didn’t use the term life because he was not yet prepared to.  But I am persuaded that he didn’t mean rocks.  The only thought that we could possibly deduce from Mr. Armstrong’s statement philosophically is that ultimately he’s going to have to use the term “physical life” in place of created objects.  Now, let me then make a statement here.  God is not an experimenter who, after botching up one experiment, tries one after the other failure until he succeeds.  But, God, on the other hand, is not a master magician who says POOF, and the whole universe and all life is suddenly here without forethought.  What we’re going to discover is that if angels were created as spirits, with the need of developing character, so [this would prove] that God had not yet finished the creation of angels when he made them, then that should be noted in Mr. Armstrong’s statements, and we all recognize it, because we have said it, that there had to be this period of test, and God found he couldn’t put his trust in angels.  [At least not all of them.]  Well, what were the angels doing?  Were they merely watching over rocks?  The waters running in the streams?  Were they watching the waving branches, the trees along Lake Michigan?  I mean, was this carrying out the government of God?  The government of God is not merely one angel trying to lord it over the other.  The government has a purpose, and the structure is incidental to the purpose.  And, if one angel is over the other, it’s not because he’s merely to rule the other, but that he has a greater responsibility than another angel might have.  But the function of the angels was in fact made clear that they would have been responsible for the supervision of the created universe.  And, having this responsibility, they needed training.”

We Can’t Ignore The Record Of The Rocks

“And now we discover the geology suddenly begins to make sense.  We have attacked over many years in times past the idea of the geological sequence, but I challenge anybody to go to the Grand Canyon and avoid the impact of such a sequence.  And you cannot avoid this also in the second largest grand canyon in the world, which is in southwest Africa.  There is a sequence in geology and what we discover is that there are simple life forms, simple if you want to take an artist’s view.  Very complex if you have to do it yourself, and make it.  That’s the distinction.  Now, when an evolutionist speaks of simple life, he’s taking an artist’s view.  That is, there are fewer involved characteristics, they are just simple forms with few cells, not many in elaborate, complex relationships, as in the human being [or other animal or plant lifeforms].  But, they are by no means simple if we were forced to have to design and create them [cellular life, that is].  [For evidence of what Dr. Hoeh is talking about, order and read Dr. Michael Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” where the author, a PhD level microbiochemist.  From the extreme complexity of the cell, even the primitive cells that show up in the record of the rocks going back billions of years ago, cyanobacteria, for example, is not something that could have evolved.  Stromatolites, go back 3.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, at least 2.5 billion years ago.  I highly recommend Harvard professor Andrew Knoll’s book “A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARTH, Four Billion Years In Eight Chapters.”]  We learned in 1974 that it does take some time for some people to poison other peoples’ minds.  And it takes time, as Mr. Armstrong said, for the devil to persuade angels, who were greater in knowledge by far than human beings.  And the devil undoubtedly went back and forth and he kept arguing with God over the necessity of a creation patterned after a different philosophy than God’s.  And God would never listen to the devil and the devil came back always telling the angels [under his authority, about 1/3^rd of them] that God never listens. You know, Mr. Armstrong never listens, you heard that.  Well, God never listened to the devil, either.  And that’s how we came to realize that some things that have been happening as of that time indeed could give us an understanding of what may have happened.  Now, was the world that we uncovered in geology the world of God’s creation, governed by angels who were carrying out the government of God?  I will answer the question by simply stating no.  We are told in the Book of Romans that the whole creation groans and travails in pain, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.  We are told that when the sons of God are manifest, that certain things are going to be restored.  That the world that we see in the future through the eyes of the Prophet Isaiah, the world in which a child can play at the hole of a poisonous snake without being poisoned because it’s no longer poisonous, that the lamb and the leopard and the bear and the ox and the lion and the little child can all be together and they are not devouring one another.  Now you all know what the Millennium is pictured like, don’t you?  Because the whole of nature will be subject to the government of God.  Now this may sound very strange to our ears until we think it through.  The whole of nature is going to be subject to the government of God, and instead of one creature devouring another for survival, we’re going to have an entirely different system of nutrition and a different system of birth-rate.  Because the two are interrelated.  The reason some animals multiply so fast is that if they didn’t they would be exterminated, and if they didn’t, the exterminators would starve.  Our nature today is all based on one thing, devouring [one] another.  [As Mr. Armstrong would have put it, the whole of nature seems to have been designed and motivated by the Way of Get, the way of competition, survival of the fittest, almost as it they had the nature of killing and murder, instead of having the nature of Give, of cooperation.  Mr. Armstrong was always saying there are two ways in life, the Way of Get and the Way of Give.  So I’m putting this in context with what Mr. Armstrong was always saying, and applying it to the creation, as he would have done.]  You get the picture clearly.  Now, if God is going to have to change nature in the World Tomorrow to reflect what his government should be like, the inevitable conclusion is that the world today of nature is not a reflection of the kind of government that God intended to be exercised by the angels throughout nature.  It is in fact a reflection of the devil’s idea of competition, of devouring, and keeping [everything] in balance by each thing competing with something else.  The devil long ago conceived of the idea of competition as being the lifeblood both of our economy and business and society and government…we said that as far as he is concerned, [that is] the fundamental characteristic of the devil’s philosophy.  Each individual may have vanity, and the angels may have their problems that way, that they’ve had to wrestle with and decide as to whether they’re going to let vanity take root in them or not.  And that they were not motivated by something such as human beings are where we are not in control to start with, but born without information, born without knowledge.  The angels had the knowledge and could see the picture clearly--it was a question of what they were going to do and who they were going to listen to.  As God started out he said “I want a nature [the natural world, animals and plants] that’s going to reflect the spirit of love.”  “It’s gong to be a beautiful world, and we’re not going to have competition.”  Therefore the pattern of nutrition and the pattern of birth will not need to have competition to keep everything in the form in which it is.  Can you imagine a World Tomorrow in which mice reproduce at the present rate, but no cat can catch the mouse?  I just ask the question, and what would happen in Africa if we took away competition, but left the birth rate the same?  You see, the whole of nature is going to be changed, both in terms of what an animal eats and in terms of the reproduction system [and rate], because they’re all tied together.” 

Important Distinctions

“All right, what we’re saying then, in no uncertain terms--some thing I will say don’t pertain to a church teaching or doctrine, because it lies outside of the scope of the theological, outside of the scope of the Bible, and we can’t ask our men who are ministers also to be geologists and anthropologists and archeologists and physicists.  In this case we’re clearly dealing with a Biblical statement.  The world that we see around us, Mr. Armstrong has said, reflects the devil’s philosophy, it does not reflect what the government of God would be like.  It reflects the devil’s philosophy, it does not reflect what the government of God would be like.  It reflects the devil’s government of competition and strife and devouring.  But you can look at the whole geology and you will not find a single period [that being the Ediacaran period (565 million years ago), the Cambrian period (541mya), the Ordovician period (485mya), the Silurian period (444mya), the Devonian period (419mya), the Carboniferous period (359mya), the Permian period (299mya), the Triassic period (252mya), the Jurassic period (201mya), the Cretaceous period (145mya to 66mya), the Paleogene period (66mya to 23mya), the Neogene period (23myh to 2.6mya), and finally our period, the Quaternary period (2.6mya to present)] geologically speaking, that corresponds to a nature such as will be in the Millennium [the Millennial Kingdom of God after Jesus Christ’s 2^nd coming].  It is all a nature such as we have it today.  Creatures were devouring in the Tertiary, they were devouring in the Cretaceous, they were devouring in the Mesozoic [Triassic through Cretaceous periods], they were devouring in the Archeozoic, [and] Paleozoic [which encompasses the Ediacaran-Cambrian through Permian periods], for all we know, at least in the earliest forms we can probably assume the same thing [meaning single celled life, like cyanobacteria and other single cellular life].  There is always this competition because it goes hand-in-hand with the statement Jesus made that the devil was a murderer from the beginning—that’s the spirit, competition such as he viewed it, reflected itself in the spirit of murder, and Jesus assigned it—he didn’t say the devil was an adulterer from the beginning, because that is not possible in the realm of angels.  He said the devil, you see, was a murderer from the beginning.  And, indeed, murder, the spirit of it, is a consequence of a philosophy of competition, and he said I want to take the patterns that God has given, but instead of exercising God’s government, I am going to design it in such a way that nature is in balance by competition, by devouring, by strife.  This way, the strongest lion, you know, lasts the longest.  The quickest mouse gets away the most often…Now I think when we see that we have a whole new view.  That when we talk about the devil’s government, we can in fact extend the Biblical account, and we can look in nature and we have to conclude that the whole of the geologic history that we can uncover reflects a world that had gone astray.  And, therefore, there was no reason anywhere along the line to view that there should not have been some catastrophe, local or of wider range, during this whole period.”  [The geologic record records what may be as many as eleven extinction level events, E.L.E’s, the KT barrier meteorite extinction level event only having been one of them.] 

Just Who Was It That God Used To Create The Lifeforms During The Various Periods In The Geological Record?

“The devil may have gone so far with certain angels, and he may have wanted to change certain things, and God may have said “Look, I want a change, I want certain new lifeforms introduced—I want to see what you will do with them.”  And so there is no reason to discount what you see when you travel down the walls of the Grand Canyon.  One [geologic] period after another that cannot be accounted for by anything we know of except major periods of time, measured only as angels comprehend time.  Vaster proportions than we.  Now, presumably not more than a third of the angels followed the devil and two-thirds profited by the experience, and took no part in the spirit of competition in developing a biological world, taking, if you please, the patterns that God was setting out, saying ‘This is what I want,’ and in completing them, in fact turning them around to reflect the philosophy of the devil.  [So what Dr. Hoeh, by observation of the geologic record, coupled to the Biblical teachings about angels and the devil, he’s proposing, postulating that God used the angels who followed Lucifer, who were under his authority, to “theistically evolve,” create, bio-engineering the lifeforms--from beginning to end, right up to, but I’d say not including what God created in the Garden of Eden.  If so, this probably took place after God created the first living cell, cellular life, the cell being a highly complex organism, even the first primitive ones (DNA itself being highly complex).  Thus the cell had to have been created all at once.  Then through genetic “gene-switch-throwing,” all lifeforms to follow essentially were GMO’s, genetically modified organisms, from the pre-Cambrian period, up through all the other periods of time, including the bio-engineering of primitive man.  It’s my guess, that inside of the Garden of Eden, all lifeforms, including that of Adam and Eve, were created directly by God, within six literal days, again, all living within the confines of that Garden, wherever it was.  Outside that Garden were all the lifeforms we find in the Quaternary period, including early man, Denisovians, Neanderthals, Australopithecines, some lines dying off in obvious competition beforehand, others melding in with the last development, the homo sapiens.  DNA from Denisovians and Neanderthals has been found in the modern DNA of humans.  But the line from Adam came through the line of Noah, surviving the Flood, but that line had included within it, through the wives of Noah’s three sons, some of the interbreeding that took place between the sons of Adam and of those homo sapiens who resided outside of the Garden of Eden, thus explaining the trace elements of Neanderthal and Denisovian DNA found in that of modern man.  I am merely putting within Dr. Hoeh’s sermon here updates, bringing what he is saying up to date with modern discoveries, and making his ideas clear, showing their intent where his sermon may not have been that clear.]  Now, when Adam sinned it was a much later period of time [6,000 years ago].  God said “Because of this, I’m going to bring a curse on the earth, and you’re going to see what kind of world the devil’s world is that you yourself have opted for.”  [And God didn’t need to bring a curse on that world, it was lying right outside the boundaries of the Garden of Eden, right where Adam and Eve were expelled to, right into Satan’s bio-engineered world of dog-eat-dog competition.  That was the curse God brought into the world of Adam, by expelling Adam and Eve into the world outside the Garden.  When the Flood occurred, wherever the Garden of Eden was, got destroyed, and the other world took over that land area, wherever it was, the world of competition.]  And he said “Cursed is the serpent, you see, above the rest of the beasts of the field, “with the implication immediately that the rest of nature was cursed.  Because in the Garden of Eden we don’t have this experience.  Adam saw all these animals and there was no feeling in the Garden of Eden that he had to be careful of the lion because he was getting hungry, nightfall.  There is no fear that we sense in that account.  And yet it is a world, a very real world, and in the World Tomorrow it’s going to be changed [back to the world that was in the Garden of Eden].  So, God allowed this to be in nature.  [So, outside the Garden of Eden was the already created world of Satan, along with the Neanderthals, Denisovians, Florencians and Australopithecines--who all, by the way, died in the Flood.  Noah’s line, his three sons, from Adam and Eve, was pure genetically, going all the way back to Adam and Eve.  The wives of Noah’s three sons were not of pure lineage, as seen in the DNA of modern man.  People always ask “Where did Cain get his wife?”  Now it seems likely she came from some of the homo sapiens that were already living outside the Garden of Eden.  Now true science is getting closer to the true Biblical account.  Dr. Hoeh was getting close, now we’re getting closer.]  He cursed the earth and whether he acted through, and I presume he would have done so, that he may well have allowed the angelic beings who had fallen to bring about the biological change at that time so that we have the world as we have it.  [I would say the biologic change, as Dr. Hoeh has implied previously, had already been taking place from the beginning right up to the Garden of Eden period of time, 6,000 years ago.]  It seems similar to this, because when God saw to it that the Egyptians lost their firstborn, it says in the Book of Psalms he sent an evil angel.  He didn’t send a righteous one, he sent an evil one to do it--there were plenty of them who would.  So he does use angels, good or bad.  The angels that are bad tend to want to do these things.  They get glee out of it.  [So we see that God forced Adam into this “Alternate World” that already existed outside of Eden, and had existed for millions of years.]  Now, what we’re seeing is that God was testing, then, not only his skills as Creator, with more and more involved forms of life, but he was testing at the same time the character of angels to see how they would supervise it, and apparently all this time God allowed the devil the chance, to see whether after he examined the nature that he was governing or abusing, or whatever term you want to use, whether he would change, or whether he would not, and they finally came to he place, says Mr. Armstrong, that spirits apparently do set their character, and you can go only so far in the realm of spirit until your attitude so poisons you that it can never be altered.”

Bio-Engineering Of Hominins

“And the angels, then, finally ascended when they came to a place in the creation that they sensed that the time had come to act.  Now, what I’m proposing at this point is that the angels were here, not only governing the world that we once thought was wholly cold-blooded reptilian, but governing an early world of mammals [66mya to 7mya], and that God gradually introduced creatures such as Australopithecine, that is the Australo, meaning the southern monkey-like creatures.  I would say ape-like is probably a better definition here in southern Africa, and it could have been other places of the world, that’s not important.  But, for the first time he [God] introduced a creature on earth that used a tool, but could not shape it after a pre-conceived idea.  And while the angels were here he introduced homo erectus [or introduced the schematics for bio-engineering homo erectus for the angels to create], a creature that could make a tool after a pre-conceived idea.  That is, suddenly there was an emphasis on the capacity to generate an idea in the brain and to execute it, and you have to have some kind of hand that will enable this to be possible.  And, of course, we have every bit of evidence that these creatures also came to be abusive and lived in competition, were devoured by competition.  The interesting thing then, Mrs. Leakey investigated in the Olduvai Gorge, she found at the lowest levels stones that could not be the stones where it was knocked or chipped in such a way that it always responded according to the characteristic of the stone.  There was no pre-conceived idea.  And then suddenly with the arrival of homo erectus, that is Java man or Peking man, as they are [were] called, they also existed in Africa and they were not man, but that was the term first used, it was a sad mistake.  We were dealing with a situation in which these creatures had pre-conceived ideas and could, in fact, execute a change in the shape of the stone, so that it no longer merely responded to the nature of the stone, but it responded to the idea of the creature striking it.  And the Australopithecines thought and attempted to duplicate it but could not.  Then, suddenly, we have changes that seem to be attempts to copy by the Australopithecines what the homo erecti were doing with their inability, because they had no pre-conceived thoughts.  Now science is finding creatures like this that are more involved in their complexity than the chimpanzees, and far, far below man.” 

Neanderthals:  Man Before Adam

“Initially, nature was essentially guided by instinct.  We come then to what we might call creatures of the next order, of the lower Paleolithic, but higher than homo erecti or homo erectuses, and we come to Neanderthal, and angels are still here, governing, but again I would view it from my perspective, that the angels were given a charge and should have indeed guided and shown certain things to these creatures, and indeed may well have, but that they were not human beings, and not parallel to Adam.  As of yet we’re in the time range of, let’s say 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 years ago to maybe 30,000 years or 35,000, somewhere in that time range.  And within that time range we have creatures, homo Neanderthals, and the word homo is translated from the Latin to mean man, but doesn’t mean a human being as we know man.  [And yet, and I’ll explain later, traces of Denisovian and Neanderthal DNA is found in our modern homo sapien DNA, the Neanderthal DNA is found in European DNA and the Denisovian DNA is found in the Asiatic human DNA of today.]  The creature had a larger brain capacity but by no means as refined, and we had to conclude even that the upper Paleolithic creature called Cro-Magnon were, indeed, preceding Adam.  That was, of course, the biggest surprise.  But there isn’t any question that the time range is well before 6,000 to 7,000 years ago.  These creatures were limited to hunting and gathering.  There was art--the art that we call magic.  They painted stuff that could never be seen in light.  They painted stick-creatures, such as demons sometimes manifest to people, and I would suggest that in fact demons put in their brains ideas.  And their so-called painting which we call magic is indeed reflective of the minds of rebellious angels.  Because man does not paint like this.  The only creatures that tend to reproduce paintings of this nature, like the Australian aboriginals, receives all his painting information from spirits.  And the spirits convey to him that the art that they’re doing is from the world of the dream-kind, that is the world before the Australian’s ancestors were on earth.  Which I think fits the story very well.  That the angels in fact put ideas as this artistically in the brains, minds, if you please, even of Cro-Magnon man, as he was called, from Europe.  The upper Paleolithic, the Mesolithic creatures while the angels were still here and before Adam, these creatures, then, must be seen as without [having] the spirit in man.  Creatures governed less and less by instincts, subject more and more to the presence of angels and the influence of angels who could have then have manifested themselves, showing these creatures what they could do.  [I assume God placed the “spirit in man” into homo sapiens, and we know he did for Adam and Eve for sure.]  In other words, God was creating [via the angels following his schematics, from what we have seen before] on earth that I would at the moment call hominids, that is similar to man, that indeed skeletally were more robust, were not as refined, and modern man defined as a refined upper Paleolithic hominid, and that is something that I think we are now coming to see much more clearly, in the total revolution of everything we have viewed before.  [Also, by the fact that trace elements of Neanderthal and Denisovian DNA are found in modern man proves how advanced these hominids were, they were sexually, reproductively compatible, which Dr. Hoeh at the time didn’t realize, because DNA technology was in it’s infancy back in 1977 when he gave this sermon.]  Now by the time that the angels were governing not only the world of reptiles and the world of earlier mammals, the world as creatures in which there can also be tools made, these creatures all hunted and gathered.  Now, let me state some things very clearly.  When Adam was in the Garden he was told to dress and keep it.  His son Cain was a tiller of the fields, or used the plow, as Josephus said.  The first human being [descended from Adam] was therefore at least a truck gardener, or a gardener of some sort, he had the capacity immediately, and his sons were full-blown agriculturalists.  Yet the fact remains that hunting, and hunting alone was characteristic of Australopithecines, homo erectus, Neanderthal, a man named after the Neander Valley, or Thal, in Germany near Dusseldorf, and even Cro-Magnon (unintelligible) compatible with the Biblical account of man.  But we had taken for granted what you probably all have taken for granted, that because science has used the term “homo,” it must be a son of Adam.  When in fact they meant homo nothing like the son of Adam until they added the word “sapiens.”  In other words, they said these are men and these are thinking men.  And then they had a problem because they discovered that thinking man was still different from modern man, so they defined modern man as a thinking man.  Homo sapiens sapiens.  And we were fooled by these terms, but we failed to realize that their description was (unintelligible), that these creatures didn’t look like man, they didn’t live like man, and they didn’t act like man.  We thought they must be man because they were making some kind of primitive tool.  And I puzzled for years how to explain why we should have all of this pre-agricultural sequence, without any question a stratigraphic sequence, and still not come to the level at which we should have seen in Adam and Eve, and Abel and Cain.  Now, there are many things that I could say that I don’t have--don’t want to take the time now, because we’ve gone nearly an hour and 25 minutes already for my part.  What we have come to conclude is, and this is within those of us who are in or outside of the ministry, this is not a requirement, or an official teaching of the church.  We’re dealing with individuals who study in the area of anthropology, geology and archeology.  What we have to come to the conclusion is that there came a time when God had already placed on earth creatures that were significantly governed by less and less of instinct, and more and more they had to learn by copying each other or seeing what angels would teach them.  Or whatever thoughts would enter their brains or minds, whichever term you wish to use.”

Humans, hominins without The “spirit in man”

“There was no “spirit in man,” they were not held accountable for the judgment, or the law.  They were creatures that were being trained at the highest level thus far.  That is, God had created creatures that indeed were approaching, and I use that term carefully, approaching broadly the characteristics physically of angels and Divinity.  [When he says “God had created creatures,” Dr. Hoeh must be saying this in the context of how he believed all lifeforms had been “created” on earth, by the direct bio-engineering of the angels under Lucifer, now Satan.]  And the next step, that any angel could have figured out, is that this could be an alternative route, that all God would have to do is put Spirit in such creatures, and he [God] could make out of them beings that could replace them, and I would suspect that when we get to the judgment that we will discover that the angels rebelled when they did, and decided to dethrone God when they saw that the pattern of creatures [hominins] that God was making [i.e. through them, which really must have made them angry], and certainly in which the 2/3rds of the angels who didn’t rebel were participating.  But the government was still under the devil and it was all a matter of competition and hunting and strife.  We tried to define this for years as the violence in the pre-Flood world.  In fact, it was the violence in the pre-Adamic world that reflected the rule of angels over this world.  But that these creatures were now of such a level of force and potential capacity and that without spirit, that the angels could see that the very next step could be competition of a nature that they were not going to allow.  And the attempt was to abandon earth as a responsibility.  They were going to go on and scale the universe, and above all they wanted to topple God from the throne, so they would never have to have the penalty of consequences of their spirit attitude.  That they, therefore could determine how the world should be governed, the laws that should be set in motion.  And they were going to replace love by competition and strife, and indeed, the spirit of murder, which is the basis of all archeological and geological evidence up to this time.  Now, this is a revelation of no mean proportion in terms of the sciences, but what it also means is that it is possible for the first time to say that radiometric dating is not incompatible with the Biblical account.  That in fact if we don’t use it we are confronted with trying to call creatures human which in fact are pre-human, and we are defining a world that doesn’t correspond to the Biblical account.  Because by the time we reach 16 centuries and a fraction, Noah is building a great ship, and within another century and a half after the Flood we reach a point in time where God says that if nothing now intervenes there won’t be a thing to restrain a man from doing everything that his imagination intends.  Human civilization, if you please, begins no more than approximately 6,000 years ago.  And it’s indeed now remarkable that whereas we were once trying to feel our way back in time through archeology and geology and anthropology to the evidence of the Creation week of Genesis 1, we had indeed found a Creation week record all along, and we didn’t know it.  [And I would say, that goes back 15.75 billion years ago, to the Big Bang and the creation of the Universe, all physical matter, and 4.5 billion years ago, to the creation of the earth.  Radiometric dating proves the earth’s age, and Stephen Hawking’s formulas trace the expansion of the universe backwards to the Big Bang.  This is all discussed in this article at:  https://www.unityinchrist.com/Does/Genesis%201%201-31.html]  We have been calling in history and archeology the evidence of creation week the evidence that is the Flood.  The Flood itself as we were defining it archeologically should have been the evidence of Creation week, and the Flood we had completely overlooked much later in time, and in Palestine we were associating it with the Israelite conquest of Palestine [Canaan]. 

A Re-Evaluation Of History As We Taught It Within The Worldwide Church of God and its Compendium of World History

That means that there is a major change in the archeology and geology and the Compendium, and a significant need to re-evaluate the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but no major need to evaluate the history of the other nations where indeed there has been no overlapping of history.  You see, our problem was we had to force the pre-Flood history after the Flood, because we had so much that was pre-Adamic that we were making pre-Flood.  Now, I want to state a few things since this is in a sense a captive audience.  If you need to stretch, why go ahead.  (break in tape continuity.)  We found in the Bible clear evidence of certain things we had not seen before, with respect to the account of archeology and the Israelite conquest of Palestine [Canaan].  First of all I would like to explain some simple things that will be very easy for you to follow.  In the account of Joshua we have the story of the destruction of Jericho, and the walls fell down.  Garstang (?) in the 1930’s in excavating Jericho found walls that fell down, associated them with late bronze, and was in error.  He said “That’s proof that Joshua’s conquest was somewhere in the late bronze.”  Katherine Kenyon proved after the second world war at Jericho that these walls fell down at the close of the early bronze.  I drew the conclusion that since those walls were Joshua’s, therefore the early bronze must have been between somewhere of the time of the flood and Joshua’s conquest.  Mr. McNair may remember our discussion of this.  Because we took for granted, brethren, that those were the walls of Jericho that fell down before Joshua.  Now, the problem is in reading the account, Joshua pronounces a curse.  He said “Cursed is anyone who rebuilds this city” (Joshua 6:26-27).  Yet, shortly after the close of early bronze, and early bronze is a cultural period measured by archeological artifacts of a pottery nature, basically we come to the middle bronze, which I thought therefore was the period of the Judges, and the late bronze I thought was that of the divided monarchy as a whole of Israel and Judah, contrary to the way most archeologists have it.  Now most archeologists said the walls that fell down at the end of the early bronze had nothing to do with Joshua’s account, but I was stuck in my mind with the idea that Garstang had in the first place that those were late bronze walls.  And then we’re confronted with the fact that the rebuilding of Jericho took place and is given in the account in 1^st Kings 16:34.  In the rebuilding of Jericho, where a man was cursed for doing so, we have this rebuilding that took place in the days of Hiel the Bethelite, long after the Judges.  Now, my problem that I discovered was how to account for the massive middle bronze age Jericho of the Judges when indeed there shouldn’t have been a rebuilding of Jericho from the time of Joshua until Heil the Bethelite, apart from a military outpost that was there in the days of David.  I never understood what that problem meant, I thought, well, maybe we can explain it by Ruth’s family staying there. 

The Fall of the Walls of Jericho At The Time Of Joshua
Were The Period Of The Middle Bronze Age

The answer to the question is simple:  The walls that fell at the end of the early bronze are the walls at the close of the pre-Flood world that collapsed either shorty before, or as a result of an earthquake or at the time of the Flood.  And the middle bronze which I thought was of the [period of the] Judges was in fact the time of the Canaanite civilization.  And only recently did I fully realize that there were walls that fell down at the end of the middle bronze that nobody had paid any attention to, which were really the walls of Jericho.  Then I said to myself, Well now what about the fact that a site called Itel, meaning “the heap,” called Ai by the archeologists near Bethel terminated at the end of early bronze, and Joshua says right next, the Book of Joshua, verse 28 of chapter 8.  And, how were you to explain, I was saying to myself, the fact that this Ai ended at early bronze and had nothing to do with middle bronze, nothing in late bronze?  Then I was reading the account of Abraham and Genesis.  When Abraham came to Palestine [Canaan] in chapter 12, verse 8, he removed and came to a mountain which was east of Bethel and west of Ai, which was east of the mountain.  And there is a hill or small mountain, whatever the term, a mountain can have various terms, you know, immensities, but in the case certainly there is a significant rise that could be called a mountain or a prominent hill between Bethel and Ai, that as we have it today Ai is not east of Bethel, properly, and there is no hill between.  And I came to realize that one of the other proofs of my archeology was wrong, that indeed Ai has never been excavated, and therefore, when this heap called Ai by archeologists because they think it is ancient Ai, ended in early bronze, it was no proof at all.  That, indeed, early bronze is not therefore proved to be between the Flood and Joshua, but on the basis of Jericho should have been pre-Flood, and therefore Ai is yet to be excavated, and one of the strongest proofs that I had offered was invalid because the layout of Ai and Bethel do not seem to correspond with the Biblical account, Genesis chapter 12.” 

3^rd Proof, Age of Hazor Excavations:  Early Bronze Age in the Middle East is Pre-Flood World

“Now, in the conquest of Palestine [Canaan], the third and strongest evidence against anything that I had said before of the archeology of Palestine involves the conquest of Hazor.  This is the city in the north.  Now, we are told that at that time Joshua, chapter 11, verse 10, he turned back and took Hazor and smote the king with the sword.  Hazor, prior to this time was the head of all those kingdoms, and he smote them and he burned Hazor with fire, and I remember telling the students at the time I was even drafting the Compendium, now on the basis of what we know, when we come to early bronze in Hazor, because we’re not down there yet in the excavation, we will find an ash layer terminating early bronze and there will be a major city ending at that period, and that is a destruction of the Canaanite civilization.  We had in fact material only going down through the late bronze and into the middle bronze at most.  Some years later, Yagail Yabin (? [Yigael Yadin: Yigael Yadin was an Israeli archeologist, soldier and politician. He was the second Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and Deputy Prime Minister from 1977 to 1981]) had investigated Hazor and gotten all the way down to bedrock.  When he encountered the early bronze remains, the areas separating early bronze from middle bronze had no ashes.  And, in fact early bronze was a miniscule, unimportant community.  It was middle bronze that had at its close the major ash heap.  It was middle bronze that was the largest site of Hazor, the site of the largest dimension that existed at Hazor up to that time or to today.  I had to draw the conclusion that if we had no more evidence than Hazor and Jericho, that our original evaluation was all wrong.  That if we’re going to take the Biblical account and believe it, if we’re going to look at archeology, we have to draw the conclusion that early bronze Hazor is indeed pre-Flood, that middle bronze is a Canaanite civilization, late bronze the period of [the] Judges, and now for the first time, broadly speaking, we discover that the historians and archeologists have been fundamentally correct in placing the record.  It means that the middle east, speaking now not somewhere in Australia or North America here, that early bronze, or as Captain Kenyon’s term is, proto-urban, that is the beginning of urban life, that proto-urban, or early bronze is for practical purposes the pre-Flood world.  And, I was placing the Flood at the beginning of the early bronze, and it turned out that the evidence proves many characteristic changes, archeologically speaking, in terms of water-laid deposits, the evidence was that of Creation week and not of the Flood.  And the evidence of the Flood was at the close of the early bronze, and we had been overlooking all along, and we assumed in Palestine that that was a destruction by Joshua, because it terminated a civilization.  Whereas we were blaming the Philistines for what indeed was Joshua’s destruction at the end of the Middle Bronze.  And we were blaming the Assyrians for what was the Philistine-Israelite conflict at the end of the late bronze.  And we never did resolve what to do with the end of the iron age, which really was the period of Nebuchadnezzar.  [That sounds confusing, but he’s in a somewhat confusing manner, saying everything he and the Worldwide Church of God had believed about the dating of Creation week, the Flood, Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan, the period of the Judges, David’s battles with the Philistines were all wrong.  What has proved correct I have place in bold-italics to clarify what’s being stated as true as opposed to our, the Church’s inaccurate previous dating.]  This means further, therefore, that the pyramids of Egypt, of the Old Kingdom, which paralleled the Early Bronze Age, was pre-Flood.  So, there is a major need for a revision of our thinking, and of the [two] volumes [of Dr. Hoeh’s Compendium of World History] that some of you are familiar with.  But the interesting thing is, that it doesn’t change the history of most nations because that history is solid.  It was Egypt and Mesopotamia where we had taken for granted certain things from the 7^th Day Adventist, Dr. George McReady Price.  We took for granted that the word homo must mean man, we took for granted that tools must be made by the sons of Adam, we took for granted that radiometric dating was invalid [when it wasn’t], we took many things for granted until we finally were confronted with Biblical evidence that proves that we have to shove the record of man into its proper position, and that we can in fact now see that as soon as man is on earth, man, intellectually, with the “spirit of man” in him, suddenly takes off.  That as anyone will tell you who is a historian, that the development of civilization associated with the literary world, is a record that goes back to about 3,200 BC or 3,100 BC radiocarbon years, unadjusted by Bristlecone pine.  And, if you therefore adjust them by Bristlecone pine, you are somewhere between 3,900 and 4,800 years BC for the beginning of writing, which actually means, therefore, that apart from the first 100 or 200 years at most, maybe 150, apart from the earliest stage at which man was just beginning to reproduce and multiply, humanity has been associated with writing, and all the great concepts and inventions of civilization have arisen, and the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom was the collapse that was the result of the Flood.  The collapse of Mesopotamia was the same, and the early dynastic, and it is my conclusion that the dynasty of Sargon the Great and the rise of the Kingdom of Akkad is to be paralleled in some way unclear to me yet, of the rise of the kingdom of Nimrod when he built, remember, Babel and Akkad, Calneh in China [Calneh in China?].  This, I think, is a revolutionary view that I am presenting, in the sense that it revolutionizes some of our ideas that have been in conflict with the traditional explanation of archeology and history, and we now are in much firmer control of that.”  [Dr. Hoeh was a very honest historian, and as you can read here, whenever he found himself to be in error, he corrected that, as he went on in life, teaching and researching at the Worldwide Church of God’s Ambassador Colleges.] 

After the Flood, All Humanity Is Basically Descended from the Sons of Adam

“Furthermore, we then have a greater capacity to see the remarkable world over which the angels ruled, and if I may interject one passing thought here, when God divided the sons of Adam, as we have in the Book of Deuteronomy, we are told about this event, that after the Flood, you remember, he scattered the children of men.  There is this statement in Deuteronomy, in chapter 32, verse 8, “for the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam.”  Not just man, but Adam.  That’s the original Hebrew.  He set the bounds of the people according to the ultimate purpose that he would have in the number of the children of Israel.  That is, he purposed ultimately to make a people that would inherit so much, and that the rest of the family were given a territory that was to be their’s.  And this is the story of the division of the world in the days of the pre-Flood world [he says pre-Flood world, but I think that is a mistranscription, I think Dr. Hoeh actually said “post-Flood world”], in the days of the sons of Adam, and when they were divided, they must also have been divided on the basis of having some separate languages [that’s reference to the confusing of tongues at Babel, so I do think the above “pre-Flood” is a mistranscription, an error in transcribing].” 

Language:  Pre-Flood, After-Flood

“We have assumed that all languages arose at the Tower of Babel.  All languages after the Flood arose at the Tower of Babel.  We have read the account only in a backward fashion.  We have read it in terms of the 20^th Century, and looking back.  If you had in fact read it from the point of view of having lived in the pre-Flood world, and looking forward, you would have read it with another thought in mind altogether.  That whereas the pre-Flood world had several languages separating the sons of Adam [and might I add, separating the sons of Adam from the homo sapiens bio-engineered from antiquity by the angels, homo sapiens such as the Neanderthals, Denisovians, who at that time lived outside of the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were created by God himself], which is the way to keep people apart.  Now after the Flood, the world was of one speech and one tongue.  You see, the evidence is that there were languages in the pre-Flood world, in the early bronze, in the written records of Egypt and Mesopotamia.  And we’re just going to have to face all the evidence that is becoming overwhelming.  And I think we can say that the picture is clearer now.”  [As we can see, the Flood basically separated the sons of Adam, from those who had been outside of the Garden of Eden, the Neanderthals and Denisovians, whose traces of DNA are still in modern homo sapiens of today.]     

Wrapping Things Up

“This may come as a shock, you know, where you have to relearn some things, but clearer in terms of the total purpose, the picture of the world as it was, and that we are going to see with further study, the remarkable characteristics of the world over which the angels ruled.  And that God was testing the physical creation in terms of what he could ultimately do through it to put his Spirit in a creature that could ultimately become independent, could be judged, could have conscience, and could become his own Sons, and be transformed into immortal spirit [beings.  i.e. God’s Plan of Salvation].  And that there was a long history of physical events leading up to this period in which angels were tested in character, and God was introducing one after another new idea of creation [handing those angels the divine schematics to carry out those new creations, via bio-engineering what was into what it became, from one period of time to the next, Ediacaran, Cambrian, etc., right up through early man]—and that the angels themselves were divided, some following the devil who was in charge, and therefore controlled it, and Christ let it happen, and two thirds remained faithful and loyal when the ultimate crisis blew up, little more than 6,000 years ago.”  [Dr. Hoeh, at the top of this paragraph, is basically stating that you are always going to have to re-learn history as new evidence arises--until the Kingdom Age comes, when all things will be made manifest.  This makes him a very honest man, intellectually speaking.] 

10 Year Re-Evaluation

“Now, on this basis I shall be happy to say that if any of you have questions, I will try to answer them by letter when I get back to Pasadena if they are too elaborate for here, because I have letters on my desk, and that I’ll be happy to discuss anything as time permits, tomorrow and a little this evening.  I appreciate the length of time in which you have listened to a subject matter where I’ve had to go back and forth to think of thoughts, because this has been a ten-year re-evaluation, let’s say.  A ten-year re-evaluation of where the problems lie, and first you evaluate it here and there and suddenly after one and another thing falls into place, there is no way then to retain some of the thoughts that seemed so apparent when the information was inadequate, and portions of the Bible, though they were clear, were not fully supported by external evidence until it was recovered.  This is not a subject, mind you, that is a requirement in terms of any official belief.  I am explaining it only in terms of one, being in the ministry dealing with the Bible, two, dealing with these other subjects [geology, paleontology, archeology, anthropology and history etc.], three, having been a teacher in archeology and history and of Mr. McNair.” 

end