Does Science Reveal Adam and Eve?

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, it always gets our attention when a major news outlet mentions your name. In this case, The Daily Mail in the UK has a report from their science editor, William Hunter, on the evidence for Adam and Eve.^[1] It seems to have some characteristics of popular press sensationalism, but maybe this provides some teaching moments from you on today's podcast.

DR. CRAIG: I think you're right that the article does involve some sensationalism. It was noteworthy to me that Hunter did not bother to interview either Josh Swamidass or me even though he apparently knows of our published work on the topic. So we had no input into this article at all.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go through the main points of this report. The first line says,

It's a story that almost any Christian would be instantly familiar with.

According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman on Earth.

Most of his readers would probably agree with that.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, they would. I think that's what makes the challenge of Josh Swamidass' model so interesting. On Swamidass’ view, Adam and Eve are the progenitors of everyone alive on Earth today but they are not the ancestors of every person who has ever lived on Earth. So one of the challenging things about Swamidass’ position is that he denies this traditional belief.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to the next line. Hunter writes,

Said to be made out of dust and to have lived in the Garden of Eden, the two figures are central to the belief that everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors.

I cringed at that line a little because I've heard so many skeptics poke fun at the notion that God scooped up a handful of dirt and made a human. Of course, they also deride the belief that everyone descended from a single pair.

DR. CRAIG: I think it's clearly figurative language when it describes God's creating Adam out of the dust of the earth and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. But you're right. They also do deride the belief that there is a founding pair from whom the human race is descended. The surprising thing to me is that that second belief, I think, is quite defensible.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article continues,

While this might seem far-fetched, there is now a growing body of evidence which suggests that at least some parts of the story could be true.

Archaeologists have found surprising signs that Eden was not only a real place but could have been the birthplace of civilisation as we know it.

He's talking about the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia. You devote a few pages in your book on the rivers and the Genesis location of Eden. What's the bottom line?

DR. CRAIG: I think the bottom line is that it remains ambiguous where the Garden of Eden was conceived to be located. A provocative possibility is that the Persian Gulf Basin was once an oasis into which the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers flowed, and it only became the Persian Gulf that we know today when the ocean broke through the Straits of Hormuz to flood that Persian Gulf Basin as a result of the rise in the sea levels when the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age. As a result of the melting of the glacial ice, sea levels rose and the ocean spilled through the Straits of Hormuz and formed the Persian Gulf so that the original location of the Garden of Eden would today be sub-marine.

KEVIN HARRIS: The crux of the article is the genetic evidence for Adam and Eve, and this is where Hunter brings in you and Josh Swamidass. He begins by saying,

It might come as a surprise to learn that scientists really do believe that all living humans are descended from a single woman.

The so-called 'Mitochondrial Eve' is the common female ancestor to which the DNA of all modern human beings can be traced.

This common ancestor exists because, no matter how big your initial population is, the chances are that most female lineages will eventually come to an end.

The article goes on to include ‘Y-chromosome Adam’ saying that they lived about 200,000 years ago but that scientists don't think humans descended from a single pair. What do we need to know about Mitochondrial Eve?

DR. CRAIG: It's really an irrelevancy. It has nothing to do with an original human pair. One of Josh Swamidass’ most important emphases is that biblical ancestry is genealogical – not genetic. Ancient authors knew nothing about genes. What they understood was genealogical ancestry. So that is really the focus of our inquiry – is whether or not all human beings are descended from a common genealogical ancestor.

KEVIN HARRIS: Josh Swamidass' work comes up next. The article quotes Josh saying,

Many individuals are each individually ancestors of “all the living”. All humans alive descend from each of these universal ancestors. The same can be said for all alive in AD 1, or all alive when recorded history begins. Two of them could be a particular couple, named Adam and Eve in scripture, from whom we all descend.

Then further down,

It is important to note that Dr Swamidass is not offering a positive case for the existence of Adam and Eve.

Rather, he is merely showing that there is nothing in our understanding of evolutionary biology that prohibits the existence of an Adam and Eve couple.

Is Josh accurately represented here?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, he is. The point he's making is that at different times in history there will be different universal common ancestors of everyone. So these different universal common ancestors are far from unique. They're not truly universal in the sense of being ancestors of everyone who has ever lived. So there is a universal common ancestor for everybody who is alive today, but that same couple or person is not the universal common ancestor for everyone that was alive, say, in the first century AD. The universal common ancestors that Josh is talking about are plural, and they are not the ancestors of everybody who has ever lived.

KEVIN HARRIS: I don't think he's read your book, but he does quote your article in First Things. He begins by saying that you argue that Adam and Eve must have been the first people to truly be human. Comment on that if you would.

DR. CRAIG: The Bible says that Adam and Eve were the first human beings ever created. Therefore, if there is a historical Adam and Eve, it seems to me that they must have been the ancestors of everyone who has ever lived. This would be the most significant difference between Josh's view and my view. I am looking for a founding couple of the human race who are truly the universal common ancestors of everyone who has ever lived on this planet.

KEVIN HARRIS: Then he quotes you from the First Things article. Your quote,

Adam and Eve may plausibly be identified as belonging to the last common ancestor of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, usually denominated Homo heidelbergensis.

Adam plausibly lived sometime between around 1 million years ago to 750,000 years ago, a conclusion consistent with the evidence of population genetics.

Then Hunter rebuts this with about four things. He says,

Although there is nothing impossible about this claim, it doesn't put forward much positive evidence.

Even if Homo Heidelbergensis is the first human and humans could have descended from a single pair, there is still no reason to believe that this pair were the only humans on Earth.

Additionally, if Adam were a Homo Heidelbergensis then he wouldn't have lived in the proposed location for the Garden of Eden in Iraq.

Likewise, admitting that Adam and Eve weren't even Homo Sapiens is likely to rattle a few more conservative Christian thinkers.

Additionally, some scientists have criticised the idea that 'humanness' is a binary characteristic with a simple starting point.

Your response?

DR. CRAIG: Let's take these four objections one at a time. First, my ambition is not to prove that there was a founding pair. I mean, if you think about that, it would be scientifically impossible to prove such a thing. How could you ever prove that certain skeletal remains were those of the first person to ever exist? How do you know that there weren't other remains that have never been found of people who lived earlier? We'll never know exactly when and how humanity originated. We can at best give a window of time during which the human race first appeared on this planet, and that's what I tried to do in the book. Secondly, as for the geographical locale of the Garden of Eden, Homo heidelbergensis is what's called a cosmopolitan human species. Remains have been found in the Far East, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Europe. So he could have originated anywhere. Certainly could have originated in the Middle East and then migrated south into Africa and westward into Europe. Identifying Adam and Eve with Homo heidelbergensis is perfectly consistent with these traditional locations of the Garden of Eden. Thirdly, as for rattling conservative Christians, Hunter probably isn't aware that Young Earth Creationists are very open to the idea that Neanderthals were equally human as Homo sapiens – that they are not some sort of ape men or something of that sort. They, too, were human beings just like us. Well, not just like us, but similar to us. So this is not really a big deal to suggest that Adam and Eve were Homo heidelbergensis. That species of humans had a brain capacity which overlaps that of modern Homo sapiens, and he also had the cognitive abilities that contemporary Homo sapiens do, as well. So I think there's no problem with identifying Adam and Eve as members of the species Homo heidelbergensis. As for number four about humanness being a binary characteristic, I think the idea here is that an organism could have some human traits but not be fully human. That's certainly true. One thinks of Australopithecines which were bipedal apes that had some human characteristics. But they were certainly not fully human. So it's certainly true that an organism could have some human traits without being human. But from a theological perspective, you either have a human soul or you do not. If God has infused a rational soul into a hominin body then you have a true and fully human being. If that hominin lacks a rational soul then it is not truly human. So as long as we think in terms of soul-body dualism, I think there certainly can be a first fully human being. Indeed, I would say there would have to be. You can't be almost or partially pregnant, and similarly you either have a rational soul or you don't.

KEVIN HARRIS: The report wraps up with this line,

. . . it is still a striking fact that there is nothing in our current theories of human evolution that strictly prohibits the existence of an original Adam and Eve couple in at least some sense.

People really need to get your book In Quest of the Historical Adam. It deals with just about everything in this article. But, at any rate, wrap it up for us.

DR. CRAIG: I think that this is an accurate summary that Hunter gives of both my and Swamidass’ competing models. There's nothing in the evidence of paleoanthropology that precludes the existence of the founding human pair whom we call Adam and Eve.^[2]