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Contrasting Responses to Dr. Craig's Book

October 26, 2021

Summary

Dr. Craig responds to two scientists on In Quest of the Historical Adam.

KEVIN HARRIS: It’s always great to have you here for the podcast of Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. As expected, reaction to Dr. Craig’s latest book, In Quest of the Historical Adam, is blowing up blogs and short circuiting the Internet. What we are facing is: how much to talk about it? How many articles and videos do we get Dr. Craig’s response to as the repercussions of the book continue? We have two articles today that Dr. Craig will address. Going forward, we will do our best to choose the most pertinent responses to the book in the days ahead. Dr. Craig will give his response. By the way, if you’d like to get a copy of the book, go to ReasonableFaith.org. You can order it there. You’ll get a lot out of it, and we encourage you to read it. One more thing. It is that time of year again – our annual matching grant campaign is going on right now. Your gift will have twice the impact as a group of very generous donors have offered to match every dollar from now to the end of the year up to $300,000. This enables you to double your support to go twice as far to impact others for the Kingdom of God. Please give whatever you can. Donate online at ReasonableFaith.org and remember whatever you give will be doubled between now and the end of the year. Thank you for blessing Reasonable Faith with your prayers and your support. And now let’s go to the studio and talk to Dr. Craig.

Bill, we are going to be talking a lot about In Quest of the Historical Adam. It seems like it, not only on today’s podcast, but in the weeks and months and maybe perhaps years to come. We are going to look at a couple of articles here about the book that has been released: In Quest of the Historical Adam. I need to ask you what you think about the reaction so far. Before we get into Schaffner and Coyne here, what do you think about the reaction so far that you’ve seen just on the initial releasing of the book?

DR. CRAIG: Well, just as I expected, people on both the right and the left are very upset, and I fully anticipated this kind of pushback. But I have to tell you that I was very naive because what I did not anticipate is that people would denounce the book without ever reading it. That really did surprise me. Over and over again we've seen people misrepresent or misunderstand what I say in the book because they're reacting to it without ever having read it.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, here is one man who has read the book. He's Stephen Schaffner. He's senior computational biologist in the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at MIT. He’s with the Broad Institute. What's your overall impression of this article?[1] I know that you've had a chance to read it. Schaffner certainly compliments you at the end of the article. He says,

I can only hope that others who work at the intersection of science with philosophy or religion emulate his efforts.

DR. CRAIG: I was very pleased with the review overall. I think to have a review in a magazine like Science by a top biologist was really a privilege, and I thank Professor Schaffner for reading the book carefully and interacting with it. I do think, however, he gets a couple of things wrong and that will probably come out in the course of this podcast.

KEVIN HARRIS: First of all, he says,

[Craig] seeks to answer two questions: whether his theological commitments as a Christian necessitate believing in a historical Adam and Eve and, if so, what science can tell us about the couple.

The conclusions to the first part of the book: the Genesis account is mytho-history and yet some of Paul's statements in the New Testament require a real historical Adam who was the first human. So there is his nutshell outline of the book. Do you think he got that right as well?

DR. CRAIG: I think he understood correctly the questions I'm asking, but he didn't accurately portray my answers. He says that I treat the Genesis account as mythological and that my reason for believing in the historicity of Adam and Eve is Paul's statements in the New Testament. That's a misrepresentation. I argue that Genesis is not pure myth, but it is mytho-history. It has an interest in historical persons and events and this is shown by the genealogies that structure the primeval narratives and turn those narratives into a primeval history. So already on the basis of Genesis 1-11 I'm committed to the historicity of these events described not simply on the basis of Paul's teachings in the New Testament.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says that not taking this portion of Genesis in a literalistic way “will not endear him to creationists.” I'm sure by that he means Young Earth Creationists.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I'm sure that's true. And I think that Young Earthers have generally not understood the thrust of the book as Schaffner has, namely this is an attempt to defend the historicity of Adam and Eve, that this is a literal human couple from whom all humanity has descended. So the fundamental thesis of the book is really quite conservative. It's just that I don't think you have to read the narratives in a sort of wooden literalistic way. I think that the narratives are clothed with the figurative and often fantastic language of myth.

KEVIN HARRIS: Schaffner says that your conclusions on Paul's teaching on Adam is “the crux of the book.” That's how he puts it.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, and that's a mistake because he doesn't understand that I already argue for the historicity of Adam and Eve based on Genesis 1-11 alone. Paul's teaching is not the crux of the book. It simply confirms the conclusion I already came to through my exegesis of Genesis 1-11.

KEVIN HARRIS: Then he complains that you don't spend enough time developing Paul and at the same treatment that you did Genesis. But that's because, from what you're saying, that's not the crux.

DR. CRAIG: It’s not the crux, and moreover I was really surprised by Schaffner's overlooking my discussion of Jewish treatments of Adam during the inter-testamental period and what is known as Second Temple Judaism. In Venema and McKnight's book, McKnight already has done a very thorough job of surveying that Jewish treatment of Adam, and I review that evidence. What I point out is that all of those extra-biblical treatments of Adam (in Jewish apocrypha and pseudepigrapha) treat Adam as a historical person. So despite the different theological uses to which they put Adam, they all concur in representing him as a historical person that actually lived. And that provides background for Paul's own treatment of Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. So I plead not guilty to Schaffner’s claim that I have overlooked the extra-biblical Jewish inter-testamental literature related to Adam and Eve.

KEVIN HARRIS: Schaffner says that you do a “more than credible job” of synthesizing the conclusions and uncertainties of the scientific literature as to when hominins acquired cognitive capacity. That's another compliment, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I appreciated that. I certainly tried to do a credible job of summarizing the paleontological and archaeological evidence for the earliest appearance of modern human cognitive behaviors, and I do think that for readers who are interested in that the book will be a very good resource for summarizing that evidence.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he talks about the genetic bottleneck that one can avoid by placing Adam beyond 700,000 years ago, and yet he says you allow for “an unspecified amount of admixture from other hominin lineages into the descendants of Adam.” Elaborate on that. Explain this.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. This was another peculiar, I think, misunderstanding of the book on Schaffner’s part. People like our friend Joshua Swamidass who believe in a very recent Adam, say just 10,000 years ago, explain how the great genetic divergence that our contemporary population exhibits could have come from just two people by saying that the descendants of Adam and Eve interbred with people outside the Garden. There was this wider population of people – thousands and thousands of them – who had evolved from lower primates according to the normal evolutionary biological scenario and that therefore our genome was filled with information from these people outside the Garden. And that's how Josh explains the genetic divergence in our population. But as I explained in the book at some length, if you postulate that Adam and Eve lived more than 500,000 years ago there's no need to appeal to interbreeding in order to explain the genetic divergence in the contemporary population. When they're that far in the past there is plenty of time for the observed genetic divergence to arise from an original primordial pair of human beings. And so Schaffner’s quite mistaken about my appealing to admixture with other lineages. On the contrary, I actually argue against that. I suggest that interbreeding would not have been common because I think Adam and Eve were fully human persons with rationality, moral agency, and so forth, and so would naturally shun sexual relations with beasts and their community would tend to self-isolate. So eventually these non-human hominins would just die off and Adam and Eve's lineage would then go on to become our contemporary population without significant interbreeding with these non-human hominins. So I think Schaffner here just missed the boat.

KEVIN HARRIS: Again, he really compliments you and he says he welcomes the book even though he's skeptical of the idea that “humanness is a binary condition that could be induced by a change in a single pair of ancestors – declaring the change to be miraculous and to incorporate an immaterial soul.”

DR. CRAIG: What does he mean here? What does he mean by binary – that humanness is not a binary condition? Well, I think what he is saying here is that it's not as though an organism can come from non-human parents and be human in the next generation; that it's not like turning on the light so to speak. Rather, populations evolve across a broad front with slow incremental accretion of characteristics of humanness and that it's impossible to say at any certain point that the human race began and before that point it was non-human. Now, I simply disagree with him about that. There's absolutely no scientific evidence that that could not have happened. On the contrary, as I show in the book, we can imagine genetic regulatory mutation that would radically affect the cognitive capacity of a hominin and lift it to human status, and moreover if God infuses a rational soul into that hominin at that point you would have something radically new. I defend body-soul dualism in the book. So I don't see anything about the scenario I suggest that is ruled out by the scientific evidence. The fact is we just don't know exactly when humanity originated on this planet and therefore the scenario I propose is fully consonant with the scientific evidence. In fact, I was talking with an evolutionary biologist a couple years ago where he said, “I don't see how there could not have been a first human being.” He said, “Think of it. At one time there were zero human beings and so at some point somebody had to cross that threshold to humanity, and there had to be a first such person to do so.” I think that the problem is these evolutionary biologists are thinking of evolutionary change as being continuous, that is to say, between any two points there's always another point like on a geometrical line. But while evolutionary change may be continual (that is, ongoing), it's not continuous. It's not true that between any two points there's always another midway point. It is discrete. Therefore, since it is discrete, there could very well have arisen through a genetic regulatory mutation a first human being, and science simply doesn't rule that out.

KEVIN HARRIS: Schaffner indicates in this article that there's not a lot of scientific data due to a lack of interest by scientists in the subject of Adam and Eve and that you had to, well, he just kind of indicated you had to do your best with what we have. And then of course you've got the ability to bring in some philosophy and theology like the immaterial soul and that's what the book is all about. It brings the scientific data, the philosophical and theological data that you're dealing with, but wouldn't it be great if your book sparked an interest and knocked down some of these barriers and maybe some more scientists would say, “Maybe we ought to look into Adam and Eve?”

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. That would be fantastic. I have to say I was a little indignant when Schaffner said that because the scientific literature on this is so scarce that “Craig [had to abandon] formal scientific literature” and to look at informal studies. I thought, “Well, that's not fair. If the literature isn't there, how can you be said to abandon it?” You can't abandon something that's not there! I read all the formal literature that I could get my hands on, and this informal literature that he's talking about is the work of people like Josh Swamidass which is available on the Internet. Simply because it's informally available in that venue doesn't mean that it's not scientifically credible work. He says nothing to undermine Swamidass’ genetic modeling that shows that the challenge of population genetics simply evaporates if you go back 500,000 years into the past. So I think he was being rather unfair there, but it would be wonderful if this were to spark greater interest in the study of the first human beings on this planet.

KEVIN HARRIS: Now we need to figure out why Jerry Coyne got things so wrong at this point. Let's discuss this article[2] which is a response to the Schaffner article.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: I don't think Jerry has read the book.

DR. CRAIG: I don’t either. I couldn't believe the way he presumes to correct Schaffner, a fellow scientist, who has read the book and reviewed it even though Coyne obviously hasn't read the book.

KEVIN HARRIS: Coyne is well-known as an atheist or agnostic – a staunch secularist I believe is the way that you put it. Absolutely. We've discussed him before on this podcast. He says a couple of things here. He says,

Apparently Craig believes that the story of the First Couple in Genesis is mythology, written as a parable, so he doesn’t buy a literal Adam and Eve. However, he believes in a literal Adam: a first human; and that is based on “some statements about Adam in the New Testament, specifically ones in Paul’s letter to the Romans.” 

He's talking about the book of Romans there.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. This is almost a ludicrous misunderstanding on Coyne’s part. He says Schaffner's got it wrong in saying that Craig believes in a literal Adam and Eve. Coyne says, “No, no he doesn't. What Craig believes in is just a literal Adam, all by himself with no Eve.” And then he goes on later in his blog to pour scorn upon that strawman that he's erected by saying, “Of course there would have to be a first human woman as well to be a mate with the first man.” It’s so silly because nobody is defending the view that God created the first man all by himself without a human companion. The position I defend in the book is a literal Adam and Eve – a primordial couple. So this just showed that Professor Coyne had not bothered to read the book, and that he would presume to contradict and correct Schaffner on this just speaks volumes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let me read what Jerry Coyne said. He said,

This is ridiculous for several reasons, the most obvious being the criteria for “humanness”, which, even if you accept them, must have evolved gradually, not appearing in one instant when Adam was born from a not-yet-human mother less cognitive than he. . . . Finally if there is an Adam who is the ancestor of us all, his mate must also have been the ancestor of us all. That is, there must have been an Eve. And if she was from the same population as Adam, she would be “human” too.

Strawman, but that's how he put it.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, exactly. It's so silly to set up the strawman and then knock it down. And then his point about the gradual evolution of these cognitive behaviors is really the same point that Schaffner was making where he says this is not a binary change. The assumption there is that evolutionary change is continuous rather than discrete and that therefore there couldn't have been someone who crossed that threshold from non-humanity to humanity first. And there's no scientific reason to think that that did not happen. The view I propose is fully consistent with saying that there was a long process of development running up to that point. But I'm simply saying that there was a threshold that was crossed then between non-human and human with Adam and Eve, and there's nothing unscientific about such a hypothesis.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. One more quote from Jerry Coyne. He says,

But . . . Craig then is forced to posit that the extra genetic diversity we have that disproves a one-man or a one-couple bottleneck came later—from “admixture from other hominin lineages” into “Adam’s” descendants. In other words, to save his thesis, Craig simply makes up stuff for which there is no evidence (indeed, there’s evidence against this admixture).

Go ahead and talk about the admixture there as well.

DR. CRAIG: Well, this is the point that we already made in responding to Schaffner. Coyne thinks that I try to appeal to interbreeding between the descendants of Adam and Eve and these non-human hominins that had evolved, and that's not at all my hypothesis. It shows once again that Coyne hasn't read the book. I argue against that kind of interbreeding, as I have already explained. I think that Adam and Eve and their descendants being fully human would naturally be revolted at the idea of sexual relationships with beasts. If this did occasionally take place it would be the result of man's fall into sin. But I see no reason to think this was extensive, and I certainly don't appeal to it to explain the genetic divergence of the contemporary population. I don't need to because I have an Adam and Eve that are located far enough into the past that genetic divergence that we observe today could have evolved from a primordial human pair. So this is just amazing to me. Here is a man who is an esteemed professor of biology as a scholar, and yet look at how irresponsibly this man interacts with material. He doesn't read the book. He sets up strawmen. And then he completely misunderstands the proposal that I'm offering. It's really quite remarkable.

KEVIN HARRIS: In conclusion today, there's study in contrast in these two articles here. Schaffner says if you want to study a scientific subject that has theological implications, he says this is the way you do it (referring to your book). And then Coyne says theologians have no business coming in with the science and a little bit of science is a dangerous thing and this is what it looks like, this kind of train wreck whenever science and theology or philosophy meet together.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Schaffner writes in a dignified, scholarly, irenic manner. Coyne is a polemicist; angry, lashing out, vituperative. He does not write in the language of scholarly discourse. He is like an angry blogger on the Internet.[3]

 

[3] Total Running Time: 25:53 (Copyright © 2021 William Lane Craig)