Four Views on Adam and Eve Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: We’re excited about today’s podcast.^[1] We have a special guest joining us – Dr. Ken Keathley, whom Dr. Craig will introduce in a moment. Dr. Keathley is the editor of a new book about to be released – Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve: Four Views. Bill, you are one of those four contributors; introduce Dr. Keathley for us, please.

DR. CRAIG: Ken, I want to say welcome. We’re glad you could be on this Reasonable Faith podcast with Kevin and me. For our listeners, Ken is the Research Professor of Theology and the Chair of Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina where he’s been teaching since 2006. He also directed the Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture, a center that seeks to engage culture, present and defend the Christian faith, and explore its implications for all areas of life. Ken is the author of Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (which certainly caused some ripples, I’m sure, in his denominational circles), and the co-author of 40 Questions About Creation and Evolution. He is also the co-editor of Old Earth or Evolutionary Creation? Ken, why don’t you tell us a little bit about this new book and your involvement as the editor.

DR. KEATHLEY: Bill, thank you, and I'm glad to be a part of your program today. The book is the result of a colloquium that was held at the Bush Center here at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in April of 2022. There were about twenty participants in this colloquium: Old Testament scholars, theologians, apologists, philosophers. Just a great spectrum of evangelical believers who were all very interested in this topic of the historical Adam and Eve. The only person who was not able to attend the conference was you, Bill, because you gave us a scare. That morning you were not on the plane. We wondered what happened to you. I called Jan, and she says you're in the hospital because you had COVID. I'm sure you remember that very well.

KEVIN HARRIS: Oh, yes. COVID with pneumonia! So I remember that colloquium well for not being there.

DR. KEATHLEY: The nice thing about the colloquium, the way that it was structured, is that each of the essays had already been turned into all the participants. So everyone already had the opportunity to read the essays. The purpose of the colloquium was not just to hear the essays but to have the feedback. I presented a synopsis of your position in your absence, but we then were able to have the kind of conversation and dialogue that I think helped to improve the book. That kind of back and forth conversation, hearing a person express their support or reservations, I think that helped the arguments of the book as they were presented. The book has three parts. It has the essays, it has the responses, and then it has a rejoinder by the author. I think that that really helps the reader get a pretty good idea of what happened at the colloquium.

DR. CRAIG: You've been teaching and writing on creation and evolution, and in the introduction of the book you say that it's not evolution per se that is the issue. So what do you think is the main issue?

DR. KEATHLEY: Yeah. The idea of the mutability of species is something that there's a surprising amount of agreement among evangelicals. In fact, even Young Earth Creationists (such as Ken Ham and “Answers in Genesis”), they adopt a particular model of speciation to explain what happened after Noah's Ark. They argue that there were only about 1,500 species on Noah's Ark that operated sort of as a proto-canine, proto-bovine as the major carrier for the respective kinds and that after they stepped off of the Ark there was a rapid speciation that occurred that accounts for just the myriad of species that we see today. So the idea of the mutability of species is not the issue per se. No, it's really about the uniqueness of humanity and the doctrine of the Fall. The explanation and the understanding of how it is that the human condition is not the way that it ought to be and the way it's supposed to be. So I think that the doctrine of anthropology, Adam and Eve – that really is the point in which we have the greatest amount of disagreement, and for good reason. I think that really it is a more important issue than perhaps whether or not mutability of species is actually a thing.

DR. CRAIG: Let me press that point a little further, Ken. That's really interesting. You're suggesting that it is really the doctrine of the Fall that is critical here. Would you include in that mutability of species the mutability of the human species? That is to say, that even if Homo sapiens and other Homo forms share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and gorillas and other apes that that's not really a big stumbling block for the biblical Christian?

DR. KEATHLEY: Well, that is one of the issues of the book, is it not? I mean, that is one of the points of disagreement that perhaps Marcus Ross or Andrew Lok might have with other positions such as Kenton [Sparks]’s. So I think that we who would hold to the uniqueness of the human race, of Adam and Eve, that there has to be some type of way that we understand them to be the special creation of God – that there is something unique about this couple that cannot be reduced down to mere natural explanations. I think there's something about us that is a step above. Whether one wants to understand this to be a special creation (as some Old Earth Creationists would argue) or some would argue that God used hominids and then endowed them with an eternal soul, if one wants to take that approach, there are a variety of approaches that are either accepted or rejected by evangelicals. But, yes, I think that the thing that is the crucial point is the historicity of the original couple.

DR. CRAIG: OK. Now, a few years ago there was a Four Views book on Adam and Eve that I recall John Walton and Jack Collins and several others participated in about ten years ago or so. What would be some of the distinctions or differences in this new book?

DR. KEATHLEY: At the time the book came out, just about that very same time, Carl Trueman made a comment in an article that the question of the history of Adam and Eve was going to be the theological issue of the next decade. And I think that the plethora of books that have come out on the issue shows that he's onto something. Along with that Four Views books, like I said, there's a number of books (including yours and Joshua Swamidass’, who is also a part of our book; he’s one of the authors of our present book). The original Four Views book – Matthew Barrett was the editor – it’s a very good book. But as you know, a lot has happened in the last ten years both in biblical studies and in the scientific knowledge that we have. So two of the views that are presented in our book (the mytho-historical view that you advocate, and the genealogical position of Adam and Eve advocated by Andrew Lok and Joshua Swamidass), these are two positions that have been advocated within the last ten years. So I think it is time for an update on the various views that are being offered within the evangelical spectrum.

DR. CRAIG: It's interesting that in the new book there's no trace of John Walton's functional interpretation of the creation narratives which I think is good that it's gone by the board.

DR. KEATHLEY: The closest to John's position would probably be Kenton's view. I suspect that there's a great deal of agreement between those two, but you're right. We probably could have had eight views or ten views, there's so many, but I think that these four representative positions do a good job of covering the waterfront.

DR. CRAIG: OK. In one of your lectures, Ken, you tell the story of sitting next to Walter Kaiser (Old Testament scholar who was my Dean at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), and you were traveling to the Evangelical Theological Society conference a few years ago, and you reported that on the plane he predicted that 50% of the ETS members would soon be theistic evolutionists. I wonder if you have any data on the accuracy of Walt's prediction?

DR. KEATHLEY: I don't know about members of ETS. There are studies by Pew Research saying that it is at least 50%. In fact, I think the latest study shows that it's somewhere around almost two-thirds of all evangelicals are open to the idea that evolution played a role in the bringing about of the world as we see it today. Yes, I do remember that plane ride with Dr. Kaiser. This was in the mid-2000s (something like 2005 or 2006; somewhere along in there), and he said the book by Francis Collins is going to generate a lot of conversation. And I said, “What book is that?” That's how long ago this was. I had not read The Language of God by Francis Collins. And at that time, BioLogos as an organization hadn't started. So I think that the last twenty years shows that Dr. Kaiser knew what he was talking about and that, like I said, I may not have data about the members of ETS but I think that there's pretty good at least anecdotal evidence. And, like I said, the broader evangelical community there's research that indicates that, yes, he turned out to be right.

DR. CRAIG: In the introduction to this book, you chronicle some of the history of the challenges to a traditional view of Adam and Eve. Can you talk about some of the modern challenges?

DR. KEATHLEY: Yes. Well, to your point, this is actually a 500-year-old conversation. The first time there was truly a crisis about the historicity of Adam and Eve is whenever Columbus discovered North and South America. You read The City of God by Augustine, he knows the Earth is round. The ancient world understood the world to be round. What they didn't believe is that there were antipodes – that there were people on the other side of the world. And the reason for this, Augustine said, is because, well, how would they get there? It's too far away. And the Bible does not deceive us. It's without error. He argues the authority of Scripture. As we all know, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and he thought he was going to go to India. He would never have made it. He thought the world was only about 12,000 miles around. The Catholic scholars warned him it's more like 24- 25,000 miles around, and they were right. It was his good fortune to run into North and South America. In fact, he called them “Indians.” That's how the term was coined. There was a theological crisis at that time. There were colloquia and debates and discussions: Who are these people? Where did they come from? And if they descended from Adam and Eve, how did they get there? And if they didn't descend from Adam and Eve, are they human beings? What are we supposed to think of this? So the Pope actually issued an edict called Sublimis Deus in which he said we may not know how they got there but they are descendants of Adam and Eve. They are human beings, and we need to evangelize them. And this birthed the modern missionary movement. The Jesuits go out, and the Protestant missionaries follow not long after. So what you and I associate with how we think of missionaries, that was actually spurred on by the first theological crisis about Adam and Eve. And so through the centuries there were other conversations as the taxonomy of the various species become an issue. There is the discovery of Neanderthal bones and other hominins. Then in the 20th century, the issue (and we've already talked about it with mentioning Walter Kaiser), Dr. Francis Collins, who is a wonderful evangelical Christian, was leading the Human Genome Project. And of course that resulted at the end of the 20th century with the mapping of the human DNA for the very first time. It cost billions of dollars to be done the very first time and now if you want to you can have 23 And Me map your DNA for a few hundred dollars. It's amazing the progress that's been made in just twenty-five years. There are some genetic challenges that the Human Genome Project presented us with. It seems, according to their studies, that the human population never came to a bottleneck smaller than maybe a thousand people. There are those who debate that and push back on that, and that's a conversation that's going on even as we speak among the various scientists. But this presented a set of problems, or challenges, to our understanding of the origin of the human race. So this created the atmosphere for the conversation that we're having right now.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Very good. You also mentioned a book written in 1961, The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. What kind of impact did that book have?

DR. KEATHLEY: It's hard to exaggerate the impact that Whitcomb and Morris had with their book The Genesis Flood. It's hard for us today as evangelicals to grasp, but prior to 1961 the majority position – the overwhelming consensus – among not just evangelicals but actually fundamentalists was that the world was ancient. The overwhelming majority of evangelical Christians were Old Earth Creationists. If we were going to use a label like we use today, they held to either the Gap Theory. Bill, I'm old enough to remember the Scofield Bible and how it just seemed like if you were a Bible-believing Christian, you had to have a Scofield Bible in your hand. And when you read the Scofield notes, it argued for the Gap theory – that there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 and that Genesis 1 is actually the recreation of the Earth. It left room for an ancient world. The other position was the Day-Age view. That today is argued by perhaps the strongest proponent of that position would be Hugh Ross. Along comes The Genesis Flood written by Whitcomb and Morris in which they argue very strongly that all of the geological evidence that we see – the geological column – can be explained by the Flood of Noah. It had a profound impact upon evangelicalism. One thing they didn't address is the starlight and time problem. I mean, I think they gave like five to ten pages to it which is remarkable whenever you consider what a remarkable challenge just the fact that we are in this enormous universe. I mean, how is it that the Earth is only 10,000 years old when I can see starlight from the other side of the Milky Way which is supposedly 120,000 light years away. So that means it took over 100,000 years to get here. Well, they don't really address that problem at all. They focus on geology. The book sold over 300,000 copies within a decade. Whenever I attended Bible College in the 1970s, it was the book that all of us were reading. I dog-eared my copy and came out of Bible College an adamant Young Earth Creationist because I believed that they had made a compelling case for the Young Earth position. So that had a profound impact upon how we as evangelicals approach the conversation today, which is why I think that we have to give Whitcomb and Morris credit that the reason why up until recently I think most conservative evangelicals identified as Young Earth Creationists. I know that's undoubtedly true in my denomination. I teach at a Southern Baptist Seminary and I'm a member of a Southern Baptist Church, as are you. I think that the vast majority of Southern Baptists are Young Earth Creationists, and I think that this is a direct result of the impact of Whitcomb and Morris's book.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Keathley, one of the theological issues that you bring up in the introduction is the scandal of particularity. Define that for us, and how it relates to the book.

DR. KEATHLEY: The expression – I didn't coin the term “scandal of particularity” but I think it really does describe the situation well. As Bible-believing Christians, we believe that one man got us all into this mess. So we have a universal problem, and it is the fact that we are fallen and that we are sinful. We argue that this universal malady was caused by one person – “by one man sin entered into the world” is the way the apostle Paul describes it in Romans chapter 5. We also believe that one man is the answer to this universal problem, and that man is Jesus Christ, and that there is no other name given among men whereby we must be saved. So this is a scandal. It always has been a scandal. It's been a scandal since the earliest days of the church – that we hold to the scandal of particularity; that God has chosen to redeem the world through a particular man. He calls a particular man in Genesis (Abraham) and makes a covenant with him and promises that through his seed (singular) all the nations of the world will be blessed. This is very much a scandalous thing. When the early church evangelized, the pagan skeptics threw this into our faces. So it's always been a stumbling block. I think that the present conversation that we're having about the historical Adam just highlights that, but we need to recognize there's nothing new about this scandal.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, is there anything about the scandal that came up?

DR. CRAIG: I think that the scandal of particularity that Ken is talking about is that the atonement wrought by Christ is unique in providing the way of salvation; that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to God the Father except through him. So that's a subsequent issue to how the atonement wrought our redemption, but it certainly goes against the grain of our relativistic society in which we live today which says that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere. This scandal of particularity denies that. It says you can be sincerely wrong; there is one and only one way of salvation, and that is through Christ's substitutionary atoning death.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more issue before we get to the essays, and that is the definition of human being. Ken, what are some of the complexities of that question?

DR. KEATHLEY: As we entered into this conversation, that became one of the questions because scientists don't agree among themselves as to the definition of human being. That's one challenge. Theologians and biblical scholars are using a different definition. They're approaching it from a different starting point. So the fact that we're using multiple definitions for human being – do we use an ontological definition? Do we use an observational definition? In other words, there are certain things that humans do and therefore we define if someone checks these boxes – intelligence, the various things that we'd say are the criteria. Do we use that definition? So this is one of the challenges that we have in talking about the origin of humanity – just what is the criteria and definition that we use in order to say, “This is how we say, ‘Yes, that's a human being.’” How do we identify a human being? That was one of the things that ended up being a very vigorous debate. Some of the things that Bill, whenever he argues his position, he's going to say we'll see these markers are there. So that is one of the central questions that we are having to address. From a theological perspective, we start with the notion of the imago dei; we start with the very notion that humans are persons because we're reflectors of God, and God is one being who is three persons. So using the biblical definitions of the image of God and personhood and the fact that we are composite entities (that we have both a material and immaterial aspect to our persons), that we have that which is spiritual about us that survives death. Those are the kinds of markers that theologians are going to use. So it makes for a very interesting conversation.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, were these some of the complexities – the markers – you encountered when researching your book on the historical Adam?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Since I wanted to explore when humanity first originated on this planet, I needed to know what we were talking about in looking for the first human beings. And it seemed to me that one could circumvent this problem of providing a definition by using what is called an ostensive definition. That is to say, you point to a typical member of the kind that you're talking about and say, “That's what we're looking for.” Now, we all know that we are human beings, and so we simply say we're looking for something that is like that. Someone like us. And there are markers, as Ken indicated, that anthropologists accept for modern cognitive human behaviors. These would include things like abstract thinking, planning depth, to be able to anticipate the future and formulate strategies for that. There is behavioral, economic, and technological innovativeness. And then symbolic behavior – the ability to represent things with arbitrary symbols whether visual or vocal. So by looking for archaeological signatures, or traces, of these kind of modern cognitive behaviors we can get an idea of when people like us first originated on this planet.

KEVIN HARRIS: Ken, each contributor was asked to include the answers to three questions in their essays. What are those three questions?

DR. KEATHLEY: Paraphrasing, the three questions basically was asking:

1. How does your view fit with the testimony of Scripture?

2. How does your view fit with the current understanding of science?

3. How does your view impact the church today?

Those were the three questions that we asked them to address at some point in their essays.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, how did you incorporate those three questions in your chapter?

DR. CRAIG: With respect to the biblical question, I attempted to give a genre analysis of the stories of Adam and Eve and of the primordial or primeval history in general in Genesis 1-11 as a key to its proper interpretation. Then, with regard to the scientific evidence, I did a very thorough survey of what the discipline called paleoanthropology teaches us about ancient hominins when they first originated and what their modern cognitive behavioral capacities were. As for the third question about how this would impact the message and ministry of the church, I just ignored that question. I didn't feel qualified to say anything about it and space was limited so I hope Ken excuses me for simply ignoring the third question in my essay.

DR. KEATHLEY: I gave him grace!

KEVIN HARRIS: Hold it right there. We are going to continue this conversation with Dr. Keathley next time. It is ramping up into some very interesting stuff. In the meantime, please consider a financial gift to Reasonable Faith. We appreciate it so much. And, as always, please keep us in your prayers. Go to ReasonableFaith.org for more. We’ll see you next time for part two of this interview.^[2]