The Search for Adam Revisited: Evolution, Biblical Literalism, and the Question of Human Uniqueness

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 J.C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959). 2 See Richard N. Ostling, “The Search for the Historical Adam,” Christianity Today (June 2011). 3 Denis Alexander, http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/alexander_white_paper.pdf (last accessed Aug 12, 2011). 4 Denis Lamoureux. http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Lamoureux_Scholarly_Essay.pdf. 5 Ostling, “Search for the Historical Adam,” 24. 6 John R. Schneider, “Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An ‘Aesthetic Supralapsarianism,’” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62:3 (Sept 2010): 197. 7 Schneider, “Recent Genetic Science,” 198. 8 Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyon (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 70–71. 9 Philip Rousseau, “Human Nature and Its Material Setting in Basil of Caesarea's Sermons on the Creation,” The Heythrop Journal 49 (2008): 228. 10 Basil Hexaemeron 1895.9.2. Lactantius (c.240–c.320) likewise did not discount the possibility that some animals could be spontaneously generated. 11 Basil quoted in Rousseau, 229. 12 David N. Livingstone and Mark A. Noll, “B.B. Warfield (1851–1921): A Biblical Inerrantist as Evolutionist,” Isis 91:2 (June 2000): 283. 13 David N. Livingstone, “B.B. Warfield, The Theory of Evolution and Early Fundamentalism,” Evangelical Quarterly 58:1 (Jan 1986): 69. 14 Mark Noll, “Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield on Science, the Bible, Evolution, and Darwinism,” Modern Reformation (May–June 1998): 7. 15 Joseph E. Illick, “The Reception of Darwinism at the Theological Seminary and the College at Princeton, New Jersey: Part II. The College,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 38 (Dec 1960): 115. 16 David N. Livingstone, “The Idea of Design: Vicissitudes of a Key Concept in the Princeton Response to Darwin,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37 (1984): 347. 17 Ibid. 18 Noll, “Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield on Science,” 6–7. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 David N. Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Vancouver: Regent University Press, 1997), 119. 21 Ibid., 118. 22 Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2. 23 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 74. 24 Numbers, The Creationists, 74. 25 Ibid., 200 ff. 26 For a brief overview of the narrative approach to scripture see David K. Clark, “Narrative Theology and Apologetics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 36:4 (1993). For a more indepth discussion of the importance of Scripture as narrative see Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 27 Genesis 2:13. The Septuagint uniformly translates “Cush” as “Aθιoπíα” (Ethiopia). For a discussion of the geography of Eden see John H. Sailhamer, Genesis, Vol. 2, in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990), 42. 28 Gordon Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” in I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11 (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study, Vol. 4), ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 399. 29 See James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). 30 Old Testament exegete John Sailhamer explains that “it should not be overlooked that the serpent is said to be one of the ‘wild animals’ (hayyat hassadeh) that the Lord God had made (cf. 1:25; 2:19). The purpose of this statement is to exclude the notion that the serpent was a supernatural being (Procksch, p. 32). ‘The serpent is none other than a serpent’ (Jacob, p. 102).” The word for serpent (Nachash) comes from the root which means to learn by experience, or diligently observe the signs of the world. The serpent is called ('awram)—subtle, shrewd, clever, wise, sensible, prudent, practical. Awram is etymologically related to (awrar)—a curse which stems from the breaking of covenant. 31 Ironically, it is “literalists” such as young earth creationists who abandon biblical literalism to use traditions outside the normative Protestant Canon in order to equate the serpent with Satan. If one is to take a literalist approach to scripture, as defined above, one should resist reading back into the Genesis text the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Solomon's interpretation of the serpent as Satan. It is clear the Genesis author considered the serpent to be a clever representative from the animal world and not a fallen angel. 32 In Genesis 2, verse 15, where God “took man and put him in the Garden of Eden” an uncommon term for “put” (wayyannihehu) is used that is elsewhere reserved for two specific purposes: “God's ‘rest’ or ‘safety,’ which he gives to man in the land (e.g., Gen 19:16; Deut 3:20; 12:10; 25:19), and the ‘dedication’ of something in the presence of the Lord (Exod 16:33–34; Lev 16:23; Num 17:4; Deut 26:4, 10).” Both nuances of this term may be understood to lie behind the author's use in Gen 2:15—“Man was ‘put’ into the garden where he could ‘rest’ and be ‘safe,’ and man was ‘put’ into the garden ‘in God's presence’ where he could have fellowship with God (3:8).” Sailhamer, The Expositors Bible Commentary, 45. 33 This is much closer to Irenaeus' understanding of the Fall than Augustine's. See Robert F. Brown, “On the Necessary Imperfection of Creation: Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses IV, 38.” Scottish Journal of Theology 28:1 (1975): 17–25. This pre-human understanding of the Fall likewise has implications for “the problem of the Fall without the Fall” as detailed by Robert J. Russell. See Robert J. Russell, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 10–11. 34 See my discussion of animal morality in Chapter 7 in Joshua M. Moritz, Chosen From Among the Animals: The End of Human Uniqueness and the Election of the Image of God, PhD dissertation (Berkeley: GTU, 2011). For a discussion of animal morality and immorality within scripture see Joshua M. Moritz, “Animals and the Image of God in the Bible and Beyond,” Dialog 48:2 (2009). For the implications of this animal “Fall before the Fall” for the evolutionary theodicy problem see Joshua M. Moritz, “Evolutionary Evil and Dawkins' Black Box: Changing the Parameters of the Problem,” in The Evolution of Evil, ed. G. Bennett, M.J. Hewlett, T.Peters and R.J. Russell (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008), 143–188. 36 Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, revised ed. (Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1972), 70. 37 Phyllis A. Bird, “Theological Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo G. Perdue (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 264. 38 James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis: A Study of Terminology, ” Bulletin of the John. Rylands Library 51 (1968–1969), 13. 39 Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, trans. Leo G. Perdue (Edinburgh: T& T Clark, 1996), 115 40 Kathryn Tanner, “The Difference Theological Anthropology Makes,” Theology Today 50:4 (Jan 1994), 573. 41 Claus Westermann, Creation, trans. John H. Scullion, S.J. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 57–58. 42 Recently I have argued that the meaning of the imago Dei, is, in fact, best understood within the Hebrew framework of historical election. See Joshua M. Moritz, “Evolution, the End of Human Uniqueness, and the Election of the Imago Dei,” Theology and Science 9:3 (Aug 2011): 307–340. 43 The historicity of Adam is explicitly declared by Barth to be irrelevant. Tillich and Bultmann see only existential significance in the Genesis stories. Denis Lamoureux appears to arrive at a similar position. 44 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Contingency and Nature,” in Towards a Theology of Nature, ed. Ted Peters (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 74. 45 See John. H. Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary Ferngren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and see Joshua M. Moritz, “Rendering unto Science and God: Is NOMA Enough?” Theology and Science. 7:4 (2009): 363–378. 46 For instance, as I was writing article I came across an NPR Morning Edition story entitled “Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.” http://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/138957812/evangelicals-question-the-existence-of-adam-and-eve. The NPR piece quotes Dennis Venema, an Evangelical Christian biologist who says “it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population … And given the genetic variation of people today, scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.” While it is true that H.C. Harpending, M.A. Batzer, M. Gurven, L.B. Jorde, A.R. Rogers, and S.T. Sherry, “Genetic Traces of Ancient Demography,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95 (1998): 1961–1967, and others have argued for an ancestral population around 10,000 individuals, more recent estimates have found that 10,000 is the upper limit of the original human population size and that “the effective size of the ancestor population might have been as low as 700” (or even smaller). L.A. Zhivotovsky, N.A. Rosenberg and M.W. Feldman, “Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2003): 1171–1186. See also A.H. Bittles and M.L. Blacka, “Consanguinity, Human Evolution and Complex Diseases,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 1779–1786. Beyond this is the reality of lateral or horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in humans throughout their evolutionary history—a phenomenon which bypasses the normal processes of genetic mutation and which has dramatically impacted the human genome in ways that we are just now beginning to decipher. With HGT what is at stake is “a fundamental understanding of how life evolved and a deeper knowledge of the functioning of all genomes, including that of humans.” See J.R. Brown, “Ancient Horizontal Gene Transfer,” Nature Reviews Genetics 4:121 (2003): 121–132. This is not to mention the dramatic implications that current research in epigenetics has for our understanding and rethinking of the doctrine of original sin. Heritable non-Darwinian epigenetic processes have been critical in shaping mammalian brain evolution and behavior. See E.B. Keverne and J.P. Curley, “Epigenetics, Brain Evolution and Behaviour,” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 29:3 (2008): 398–412; and Tamara B. Franklin et. al., “Epigenetic Transmission of the Impact of Early Stress Across Generations,” Biological Psychiatry 68:5 (2010): 408–415. The point here is not that the current data of science establish the existence of Adam and Eve or thereality of biologically inherited original sin, but rather, that because the details ofscience often change quite rapidly, theology must proceed in a philosophically informed manner and keep a discerning eye on the whole of science, while not too quickly embracing or condemning the current state or details of any given theory.

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