I don’t mention this to attract converts to the idea. I’m not one myself. I just find such attempts to reconcile biology and theology interesting.

A woman I was seeing once proposed the idea to me that the soul was the thing that gave us, as humans, self awareness. That Adam and Eve were the first self aware humans. (I’ll add to this that I see that as a neat explanation for the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.) That before Adam and Eve we had been beasts, lacking consciousness and conscience. So the fall did not matter to the others around them, as they did not have the same sort of soul (if any) to worry about. It mattered only to those who had this knowledge brought to them- if not by descent, then by teaching.

A Roman Catholic friend of mine tried to explain the original sin to me this way: all of us, during birth or soon after discover pain and because of it, wish to deny our existence. We wish to stop existing, to fade to oblivion. This is a rejection of God’s gift of life, and our first sin. (His phrasing was much more eloquent.) The original sin thus became our original sin and not Adam’s.

Putting these two together gives a rather interesting view of the entire story of Genesis. And it certainly works better than the mock theory that Adam and Eve were created by God, but that the wives of Cain and Seth evolved from a common ancestor.

I’m not claiming to believe this, but this is how I have had friends who were incredibly proficient in science reconcile their faith and their observations.

They evolved, of course. That was the explanation of one joke book whose title I can’t remember. While Adam & Eve were going through all that Garden of Eden thing, these others were evolving on the outside.

The researchers are careful to point out that this does NOT necessarily mean descent from a single couple (apparently to head off the spin YECs would doubtlessly put on it); rather that these two individuals’ DNA spread throughout the population until all had some traces of it.

Such subtleties become opague to us through translational error and cultural bias. Our Greek mindset causes us to take everything literally and to look for detail when there is none intended and to impart authority to even casual references …which, of course, can ruffle a lot of feathers and/or lead us into some fascinating discussions!

Kenny: “Another thought….

Are all humans today descendants of Adam?”

The strong scientific consensus is no. Population genetics shows that, at no point in human history was the entire population bottlenecked at just two presumably Neolithic ANE people; there has always been a small population. Here’s why: http://biologos.org/blog/does-genetics-point-to-a-single-primal-couple/
How do we deal with this evidence? Debunk it? Or re-evaluate traditional assumptions on Genesis? How about a little of both, and in the meantime, trust that this conundrum isn’t taking God by surprise! I think the evidence is a slam-dunk, but hey, some people think the traditional view of A&E is an even bigger slam dunk. So, let’s just speculate as to why either side might be wrong until Jesus comes back and we can ask Adam in person, eh?

Stephen: “So where did the first humans come from? If you go with evolution, then when did God breathe his Spirit into us? When did we get souls? When did we transition from ‘ape’ to ‘God’s Image-bearers’?”

That’s a great question! There are several positions on that, and they all have neat sounding names like “punctiliar monogenism” or “gradual polygenism” so, to go with the non-technical illustration that has helped me most, I like to compare humans receiving God’s image to, well, humans receiving God’s image, only in the womb. When do embryos attain the full image of God? How does that work? At what point in God’s knitting process (“You wove me in my mother’s womb”) does that happen? Does it happen after fertilization, at the zygote stage? Maybe after gastrulation? When the brain begins to form? Does it happen all at once, or gradually over the course of development? The best answer is: I have no clue, but God’s at work knitting and he knows what he’s doing. So don’t interrupt (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQeOImZrrto). I suspect the mysterious process begins at fertilization and somehow culminates, in a way we don’t fully grasp, as the child develops. Now apply that to human evolution: How/when did we become image-bearers? No idea, but God was at work, knitting us providentially in the womb of the earth. At some point after our “fertilization” as a species, we got to the point of development that we were able to be both self and God-conscious and God could finally say of us “these are my most special creatures, since they alone are made in My image and after My likeness.” For me, our uniqueness is a self-evident reality; how God gave it to us is up to Him. I think He had options and science tells us, generally, which one He took, at least regarding our physical equipment. When exactly it happened, we cannot know for sure. C.S. Lewis put it best:

“For long centuries, God perfected the animal from which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all of the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated [. . .] Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say “I” and “me,” which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past”

I’ve pretty much become a conscientious objector to the wars over issues like this, but it’s discouraging to see so many continue to battle on. Jesus gets lost in the fray.

Kids still have mythic minds, until we teach them to strap the text to a chair and beat it with rubber hoses until it gives up its (literal) meanings.

Myths are funny things. They don’t tolerate you looking at them and saying, “Okay, this means literal truth X while this means literal truth Y.” I mean, you can do that, but the myth dies in your hands while you do it. If you say things like, “Bacchus represents the part of us that is wild and uncivilized,” you might be accounting for yourself, but you’re not living in the myth.

Paul has a mythic Jewish mind. For him, it isn’t a question of whether “Adam really lived.”

Adam _means_ something, and catches up in himself the meaning that he means. He is humankind. And all die in humankind.

Adam’s story is the myth that says so, and for him to say that death enters the world through one man is simply a necessity of not betraying the myth. And since his larger (symmetrical) point is that through one man (a new “son of Adam / humankind,” the famous “son of man” epithet) all shall be made alive, he performs a way of balancing images.

The story, the true myth that he tells, is that humanity dies.

But the Son of Adam is resurrected, and those who believe in him are made alive.

There is absolutely no reason why one must believe in the historicity of Adam to accept Paul’s argument hook, line, and sinker: to say one must believe in Adam to believe the argument is like saying one must believe that Romans is poetry because the Psalms are poetry.