Dueling Reviews on Historical Adam Book Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, there are two reviews of your book on the historical Adam that we’ve been affectionately (or maybe not so affectionately) calling the dueling reviews. They are on the Modern Reformation blog. Here's the introduction to that blog.^[1]

In his most recent monograph, William Lane Craig takes up one of the most pressing issues in contemporary apologetics: the question of the origins of humanity and the historicity of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve. Because of Dr. Craig’s eminent reputation and the topic of this book, MR wished to provide two different perspectives on it, and so we invited both Dr. Hojin Ahn and Dr. Chad McIntosh to review Dr. Craig’s book.

Are you familiar with either of these gentlemen?

DR. CRAIG: I don't know Hojin Ahn but I do know Chad McIntosh. He is a fine Christian philosopher and is editing a book on Four Views on the Trinity to which I'm contributing. I thought Modern Reformation was very clever in having these dueling reviews from very different perspectives on this controversial book. It gives the reader a chance to see it from both angles.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Ahn’s review is titled, “William Lane Craig's Inconsistent Hermeneutic.” So you can guess that this is the more negative one. He begins,

William Lane Craig, a prominent scholar of evangelical apologetics, published In Quest of the Historical Adam to open a new channel for hermeneutical communication between evolutionary theory and a Christian doctrine of creation. Instead of a “traditional” (literal) reading of Genesis, he suggests a scientifically “revisionist” one (xii).

We might stop there. What about the description “scientifically revisionist”?

DR. CRAIG: Right. This is inaccurate right from the beginning. What this implies is that my reading of Genesis is motivated by modern science and attempt to make the interpretation of Genesis 1 conform to modern scientific theories. I am adamant in the book that that is a bad hermeneutic. That's called concordism where you read modern science back into the text. So the first half of In Quest of the Historical Adam completely brackets the deliverances of the sciences about the origins of humanity, and it focuses entirely on the hermeneutical question of what is the most plausible way of interpreting Genesis 1 to 11 – the so-called primeval history – and in particular the narratives about Adam and Eve. So this is not an attempt to use science to revise the traditional reading of Genesis 1.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing,

Craig considers the biblical accounts of creation primarily in relation to scientific evidence supporting atheistic evolution theory. Arguably, the position he defends in this book stands in contrast to his career as a courageous defender of evangelical truth. This is because the biblical interpretation of the historical Adam he offers through the lens of evolutionary theory is inconsistent with the biblical hermeneutic he uses to defend the evangelical truth of God’s salvation through Christ.

We will get into the hermeneutic issue in a moment, but what do you think about his statement of the book's relationship with atheistic evolution?

DR. CRAIG: To repeat, the book is not an attempt to look at the interpretation of the historical Adam through the lens of evolutionary theory. That is a misunderstanding of the entire first half of the book. Moreover, it's improper to characterize evolutionary theory as inherently atheistic. There is no reason to think that if God exists that he could not have structured the universe in such a way as to use evolutionary development to bring about the complexity in the biosphere. So this is just a pejorative use of language that isn't reflective of what evolutionary theory holds.

KEVIN HARRIS: Ahn continues,

Above all, we have to pay attention to Craig’s hermeneutical censorship of God’s divine word through the lens of evolution theory. Although Craig seems to justify the plausibility of his prehistoric-anthropological understanding of Genesis, he seems to disregard the critical point that Adam and Eve were created perfectly by a “transcendent God” before the Fall. I am deeply concerned with Craig’s biblical interpretation that must correspond to paleontological evidence supporting evolutionary theory. If Craig simply pursued a common grounding and hermeneutical continuity between the ancient sagas and the biblical accounts, then his “mytho-historical” approach would not be a problem. Considering that his book is written for people who struggle with reconciling evolution theory with their Christian faith, I would find this entirely acceptable. I am not criticizing his abandonment of any literal understanding of the creation accounts. The trouble for me is that Craig bases his entire interpretation of the biblical accounts on scientific evidence by radically minimizing the Bible’s divine content and purpose. It seems that as paleontologists find new evidence—hold on, give me time to shoehorn my biblical interpretation into it!

OK, Bill. A lot to comment on.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, too much! This is such a serious misrepresentation of the hermeneutical portion of the book. He recognizes early in the quotation that you read that “Craig seems to justify the plausibility of his prehistoric anthropological understanding of Genesis.” That's exactly right. What I do is argue that when you look at the literary genre of myth you discover certain family resemblances among myths. I list about ten of them. Then I showed that the primeval history of Genesis 1 to 11 has multiple instances of eight out of the ten of these family resemblances and that that goes to argue very powerfully that in fact these narratives are at least quasi-mythical. But they're not pure myth because they also have a historical interest, and this is manifested in the genealogies that ordered the primeval narratives chronologically and turn them into a primeval history. The fact that these genealogies meld seamlessly into the patriarchal narratives beginning in Genesis 12 (of Abraham and his descendants, who are indisputably regarded by the author as historical persons) that the people earlier in the genealogies are likewise regarded as historical persons. So I argue on the basis of these family resemblances of myth and these genealogical notices that the best genre analysis of Genesis 1 to 11 is mytho-history – a kind of fusion of history with the figurative language of myth. Now, what's funny about Ahn’s critique is, he says, “I'm not criticizing Craig for abandoning a literal understanding of the creation account.” So he's fine with that. He says the trouble is that I base the interpretation of the biblical accounts on scientific evidence, and I think that it's evident from what I've just said that that is completely a misreading of my text. My interpretation of Genesis 1 to 11 is based upon an analysis of the literary genre of these chapters. Anyone who disputes that is going to have to give a better explanation of those family resemblances and those genealogies than the one that I offer. But it is just a misrepresentation to say that this interpretation is driven by the deliverances of modern science.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more quick point on that. Is it problematic to say that God created Adam and Eve perfectly – that they were perfect? I know what people mean when they say that.

DR. CRAIG: As you said, there’s a lot there to comment on. That's actually obviously incorrect because Adam and Eve were not morally perfect. They were morally innocent, but they were not morally perfect. Only God is morally perfect. So while Adam and Eve were created morally innocent and then fell into sin, it's a mistake to say that they were created perfectly.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he says,

With his hermeneutical premises in evolutionary theory, Craig finally posits his main statement about the quest for the historical Adam and Eve. He is sure of discovering the hidden scientific fact of their existence in the mythological and figurative language in the passage about how God created the first human beings according to his own image (Gen. 1:26–27). Craig presumes that among numerous Neanderthals, God specially chose Adam and Eve and endowed them with human-intellectual ability and “rational souls” that are completely distinct from primates and animals (378). Here, Craig has the full assurance of his assumption that God’s sovereign election is compatible with natural selection by an extremely random process of evolution.

Bill?

DR. CRAIG: I am not trying in this book to show the compatibility of God's sovereign election with evolution according to random mutation and natural selection. Rather, what I'm trying to show is that the existence of a founding couple at the headwaters of the human race is entirely consistent with modern science. There's nothing in the deliverances of modern science that would rule out there being a primordial human pair from whom all humanity is descended. I give two arguments in the book why we are biblically committed to a historical Adam. I've already shared the first based on the genealogies that order the primeval history. The second argument would be from the New Testament witness to the historical Adam. Paul describes Adam as a figure who has real world effects, and no purely fictional character can have effects causally outside the world of the fiction. So Ahn has simply, again, inaccurately characterized the book, and he's just assuming that divine sovereignty cannot encompass a process of random mutation and natural selection which he hasn't shown but is, in any case, not the subject of the book.

KEVIN HARRIS: Ahn continues,

At first glance, Craig’s argument is logically persuasive because of his synthesis of evolutionary biology and biblical revelation. It is, however, ironic that although Craig seems so assured that paleontological evidence matches up with the mythohistorical reading of the creation accounts, he never offers any scientific evidence for the existence of the historical Adam. Consequently, among mainstream scientific circles, Craig’s opinion is indeed considered to be quasi-scientific on the grounds that there are no statistical data or objective evidence that modern humanity biologically descends from single male and female progenitors like Adam and Eve.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I'm not trying to show that the scientific evidence requires that all humanity descended from an original human pair. Rather, I'm simply trying to show the compatibility of my biblical commitments to such a founding pair with contemporary science. It is not a claim that scientific evidence proves the existence of Adam and Eve; rather it is that the existence of a founding human pair, Adam and Eve, is entirely compatible with the deliverances of modern science. And that’s a very modest and, I think, quite defensible claim.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. There’s the first review in our dueling reviews. We’ll pick up the second review on the next podcast. I want to remind you that you can contribute to the ongoing work and ministry of Reasonable Faith. When you go to ReasonableFaith.org, you can donate right there from the website. We’ll see you on the next podcast, Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[2]