What I’m Reading: First, Man. Then, Adam!

“Clearly a theory with dozens of assumptions is probably not likely to stand the test of time.  In this case only one major assumption was made, i.e., that the Garden of Eden was a space ship.”  (pg 65) [i]

I love books like this.  Give me Immanuel Velikovsky, the Knights Templar, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Loch Ness Monster.  I like tales of the weird and of the crack-pot conspiracy.  Irwin Ginsburgh’s 1975 book, First, Man. Then Adam! is right there among the weirdest and most severely cracked.  I found it at my local public library; what a treasure.

The book’s jacket says that Ginsburgh holds a B.S. and Ph.D. degree in physics, and that “he has been a physicist with the research department of a major oil company” for over 25 years - but that doesn’t mean he knows anything about theology, or ancient near east languages, or anthropology, or history, or cosmology, or biology, or genetics, or evolution, or…..

But that lack of understanding didn’t stop him from developing one of the most interesting “theories” I’ve ever read.  Ginsburgh posits that Adam and Eve were “superior” space people who crash landed their space ship on the planet Earth, that these two extra-planetary refugees were forced to mate with the indigenous stone age inhabitants of the Earth, and that the “Tree of Knowledge” at the center of the garden (which was their space ship) was in fact a central computer.

It’s one part Erich Von Daniken, one part Immanuel  Velikovsky, and one part Ed Wood Jr.  It’s the Urantia book meets armchair astrophysics.  It’s crazy fun.

Q.  Where did the space ship come from?
A.  Since God “planted the Garden of Eden,” he obviously made the space ship, and so the space ship

    came from God.  (pg 88-9)

Excuse me… I’d just like to ask a question.  What does God need with a starship?

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[i] Ginsburgh, Irwin First, Man. Then, Adam!, Simon and Schuster, New York NY, 1975.