Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve
Let's go back to the beginning - all the way to Adam and Eve, and to the question: Did they exist, and did all of humanity descend from that single pair?
According to the Bible (Genesis 2:7), this is how humanity began: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." God then called the man Adam, and later created Eve from Adam's rib.
Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe this account. It's a central tenet for much of conservative Christianity, from evangelicals to confessional churches such as the Christian Reformed Church.
But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."
Researching The Human Genome
Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population - long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.
To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."
Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.
And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.
"Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost," Schneider says. "So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings."
Fundamental Doctrines Of The Christian Faith
To many evangelicals, this is heresy.
"From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," says Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. Rana, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio University, readily admits that small details of Scripture could be wrong.
"But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you've got a problem," Rana says.
Rana and others believe in a literal, historical Adam and Eve for many reasons. One is that the Genesis account makes man unique, created in the image of God - not a descendant of lower primates. Second, it tells a story of how evil came into the world, and it's not a story in which God introduced evil through the process of evolution, but one in which Adam and Eve decided to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, says that rebellious choice infected all of humankind.
"When Adam sinned, he sinned for us," Mohler says. "And it's that very sinfulness that sets up our understanding of our need for a savior.
Mohler says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam's original sin.
"Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," Mohler says.
Intellectual Rift
That's only true if you read the Bible literally, says Dennis Venema at Trinity Western University. But if you read the Bible as poetry and allegory as well as history, you can see God's hand in nature - and in evolution.
"There's nothing to be scared of here," Venema says. "There is nothing to be alarmed about. It's actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world - and from a Christian perspective, that's an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence."
This debate over a historical Adam and Eve is not just another heady squabble. It's ripping apart the evangelical intelligentsia.
"Evangelicalism has a tendency to devour its young," says Daniel Harlow, a religion professor at Calvin College, a Christian Reformed school that subscribes to the fall of Adam and Eve as a central part of its faith. "You get evangelicals who push the envelope, maybe; they get the courage to work in sensitive, difficult areas," Harlow says. "And they get slapped down. They get fired or dismissed or pressured out."
Harlow should know: Calvin College investigated him after he wrote an article questioning the historical Adam. His colleague and fellow theologian, John Schneider, wrote a similar article and was pressured to resign after 25 years at the college. Schneider is now beginning a research fellowship at Notre Dame.
"It's actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world - and from a Christian perspective, that's an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence." - Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University
A Galileo Moment
Several other well known theologians at Christian universities have been forced out; some see a parallel to a previous time when science conflicted with religious doctrine.
"The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins.
Giberson, who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College until his views became too uncomfortable in Christian academia, says Protestants who question Adam and Eve are akin to Galileo in the 1600s, who defied Catholic Church doctrine by stating that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was condemned by the church, and it took more than three centuries for the Vatican to express regret at its error.
"When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face," Giberson says. "The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it."
Abandoning Theology?
Fuzale Rana isn't so sure this is a Galileo moment: That would imply the scientists are correct. But he does believe the stakes are even higher in today's battle over evolution. It is not just about the movement of the earth, but about the nature of God and man, of sin and redemption.
"I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history," he says. "Because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not."
But others say Christians can no longer afford to ignore the evidence from the human genome and fossils just to maintain a literal view of Genesis. "This stuff is unavoidable," says Dan Harlow at Calvin College. "Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have."
"If so, that's simply the price we'll have to pay," says Southern Baptist seminary's Albert Mohler. "The moment you say 'We have to abandon this theology in order to have the respect of the world,' you end up with neither biblical orthodoxy nor the respect of the world."
Mohler and others say if other Protestants want to accommodate science, fine. But they shouldn't be surprised if their faith unravels.
LT Article 1 Sept 2011
Evangelical Christians are facing a "Galileo moment" over the literal truth of the Bible.
A professor of theology who had eaten of the tree of knowledge - in this case knowledge of evolutionary science - has been thrust out of the sanctuary of Calvin College, a Christian university in Michigan.
Professor John Schneider is the latest Christian scholar to leave his post amid a controversy that is gripping America's evangelical community. In a country where surveys suggest that four in ten people believe in the biblical account of the origins of Man, some are calling this a 'Galileo moment', akin to the agonies suffered by the Catholic Church over the suggestion in the 17th century that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
Professor Schneider and a colleague, Professor Daniel Harlow, had published papers noting that it was becoming ever harder to maintain that all humans were descended from Adam and Eve. He suggested that Christians needed to abandon the idea that the Fall was an historical event.
Uproar ensued. Readers and influential evangelicals all over America called for both men to be fired. Professor Schneider left his job. The college said that he had sought early retirement but Professor Harlow, in an interview with a Christian newspaper, said: "John was pressured to leave."
Professor Harlow then announced that he would be taking a sabbatical and would no longer write on so controversial a subject. "At this point in Calvin College's history, it cannot handle that," he said. "I cannot handle that. It's taken a heavy physical and emotional toll on me."
Professor Harlow had noted in his paper that recent research in molecular biology could not support the idea of a "single couple living in Mesopotamia a few thousand years ago". "The best mathematical models suggest, rather, that the ancestors of all modern Homo sapiens were a population of about 10,000 interbreeding individuals . . . members of a much larger population living in Africa about 150,000 years ago," he wrote.
Professor Schneider had noted previous attempts to maintain that the first three chapters of Genesis contained a true historical account of the beginnings of the world. He wrote that palaeoscience "overwhelm-ingly proves that labour pains, the locomotion of snakes, predation, deadly diseases, mass extinction, thorn plants and weeds, and violent natural events existed for millennia before the existence of the first humans".
This was far more radical than the idea that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe. It called into question the teachings of the Apostle Paul who referred to Adam as an historical figure, the belief that evil and suffering were caused not by God but by human sin, and the belief that Christ arrived as a 'second Adam' to redeem mankind.
Karl Giberson, 54, who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College in Boston but eventually felt pressured to leave, said: "It's clear to more thoughtful Christian scholars that Adam and Eve simply can't be historical figures and we have to deal with it. The donors who fund Christian colleges are not always very intellectual. Of course every biological department teaches evolution, and every religion department teaches a literary interpretation of the Bible. They just can't own up to it."
He wrote several books on the subject and became a "lightning rod for criticism", he said. One of his fiercest critics was Ken Ham, 59, a co-founder of Answers in Genesis, which provides creationist educational materials for schools and colleges and has built a Creation Museum in Kentucky.
Mr Ham agrees with Dr Giberson's assessment of attitudes in Christian colleges. "We published a book called Already Compromised, which looked at what's being taught. The majority were teaching evolution," Mr Ham said. He describes scholars such as Dr Giberson as "wolves in sheep's clothing". He said: "They are undermining the gospel. If Adam and Eve aren't literal, Christianity is totally meaningless. You might as well throw the Bible away."
Other conservative evangelicals allow that the Earth may be older than four or ten thousand years, but insist on the historical existence of Adam and Eve. Fazale Rana, a biochemist who is vice-president of the think-tank Reasons to Believe, said that the controversy was greater than that caused by Galileo.
"This is dealing with a core doctrine that relates to how we explain original sin, what did Jesus do when he died on the Cross; the implications are pretty far-ranging," he said. He supports an open debate and added: "I'm uncomfortable with the idea that some of the people advocating this are persecuted. They are asking reasonable questions. I recognise that evolution is the mainstream idea even if I'm sceptical about some aspects."
BioLogos, another Christian foundation, is trying to broker a compromise. "There is no necessary conflict," Darrel Falk, its president, said. One way to reconcile each side would be to say that "Adam and Eve were in some way singled out; they entered into a relationship with God. There were other people on Earth at the time. That totally fits with the scientific data."
However, this has not yet caught on. "It gets nasty pretty quick," said Peter Enns, 50, another professor of theology forced out of a Christian college. "This has been brewing for 150 years. In 100 years people will say 'I can't believe people were defending a literal Adam'."
Dr Giberson fears that evangelicals will become ever more isolationist. His latest book, The Anointed Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, looks at "how anti-intellectuals and popular leaders are shaping American evangelical thought".
"I've written book after book, there is no evidence that we are making progress. We are lonely voices in the wilderness," he said.