Four Views on Adam and Eve Part Two

[A video of this discussion can be found on YouTube.^[1]]

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's do our best to look at some of the highlights of each view. We're going to try to synopsize each of these views quickly. Ken, let's start with Kenton Sparks. Give us a synopsis of his view.

DR. KEATHLEY: Yes. I think one of the strong points of the book is that it really does have positions that address the ends of the spectrum. In other words, you're going to find one end of evangelicalism to the other. There are two mediating positions. Kenton's position, I think that he will not be offended by me saying, that he would probably be representative of the most progressive or left-leaning view of evangelicalism in that he does not view the historicity of Adam and Eve as essential. In other words, he would understand the first chapters of Genesis to be theological fiction. He would agree with the Young Earth Creationist, like Marcus Ross, in that he would say that a straightforward reading of the text requires that we understand Genesis to be teaching that the world is less than 10,000 years old. He just thinks that it's wrong, and that he would understand the empirical evidence to require us to approach Genesis not just from a non-literal approach but a non-historical approach. Now, I want to hasten to say that Kenton identifies as an evangelical. I know that some would understand someone to deny the historicity of Adam and Eve to be someone who is beyond the pale of evangelicalism. But Kenton affirms the Nicene Creed, he affirms the Apostles Creed, he holds to a very orthodox view of Christ – who he is and what he's done. He would argue that his understanding of the New Testament and of the person of Christ is not threatened by having a non-historical Adam and Eve. So that would be the first argument that is presented which is the non-historical Adam and Eve position.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, some thoughts on Kenton Sparks’ essay?

DR. CRAIG: Well, it's a very curious essay because you would expect someone who doesn't believe in the historicity of Adam and Eve to say that these stories are just ancient mythology. But that's not in fact Sparks' view. He apparently thinks that these Hebrew narratives of the primeval history were intended to be realistic accounts. In fact, in some ways he's more of a literalist than Marcus Ross. He thinks that Genesis 1 means to teach, for example, that there is a hard dome over the Earth in which the stars are embedded and that this was intended literally. Now, if that is what Sparks' view is, it's striking that he gives almost no argument in the essay in support of that view. You look in vain for any argument to think that the narrative is intended to be read in that sort of literalistic wooden way. When it comes to the science, he has even less justification for saying that modern science rules out a historical Adam. Notice that Ken distinguished between the literalness of the narrative and the historicity of the narrative. What Kenton argues against is a literal interpretation of the story of God's creation of Adam – that that's incompatible with modern science – but he doesn't have anything to say to show that modern science is incompatible with the historicity of Adam and Eve.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's talk about Andrew Lok's essay. Ken, what are his main points?

DR. KEATHLEY: I think we're all old enough to remember Monty Python, the TV show. If you remember, they would be in the middle of one of their skits and right in the middle of the skit they would stop and say, “And now for something completely different.” I think that we need to understand the genealogical approach is that Monty Python moment in which they do a hard stop and they'll say, hey, wait a minute – the whole debate about genetics is misguided because the Bible doesn't deal with genetics. The biblical authors didn't know anything about genetics. The biblical emphasis is on genealogy. I don't know. I mean, they're right, I think, that Andrew and Joshua are definitely right about that. So they argue then that most of our direct ancestors are genetic ghosts. Now, you say what does that mean? Well, there's been so much success with genetic research today to find out who your relatives are or where your place of origin is that we fail to realize that that only works for a few generations. Whenever you hear the arithmetic, it makes a great deal of sense. I mean, you have two parents. And that means approximately half of your DNA comes from each parent. You have four grandparents which means about a fourth of your DNA is from each of your grandparents give or take a little bit. You have eight great-grandparents 1/8. 16. 32. 64. The numbers grow exponentially so that in only about three or four hundred years you have 1 million direct ancestors from which you directly descended from them. So the vast majority of that million direct ancestors – we can't find, it's not possible to find, any genetic evidence that you descended from that particular ancestor. So this means most of our ancestors are genetic ghosts. So they say the idea of trying to find Mitochondrial Eve or Y-Chromosome Adam – all of that is misguided. There's also something else that it does. By the time we get back to the time of Christ, mathematically we should have a billion direct ancestors. Well, there were only about 150 to 200 million people in all of the world at the time of Jesus. You go back to the time of David – 50 million. The time of Abraham – there were more people in metro New York City than all of the world at the time of Abraham. So their point is this. Someone says, “I descended from the Pharaohs.” Big deal. We all did! If anyone lived in the ancient world and they had children we can safely assume that they are the ancestors of everyone. So this means that anyone – think of any couple – living about 6,000 years ago in the Middle East could have been in this kind of setting described in Genesis. And they would be the common ancestors of everyone in the world. Here's where the math gets a little interesting. That would include the people in the far away places like Australia and Tasmania and New Zealand. I'll leave that to the mathematicians to work out. But they argue that that's true even for the out-of-the-way people groups. So what the genealogical Adam position argues is that God could have created a couple de novo, put them in a Garden, tested them, they failed, they were expelled. They were intended to expand Eden throughout the whole world but they failed. They're expelled from the Garden. And here's where the genealogical Adam position will be very different from what most conservative evangelicals are comfortable with, and that is there were already humans outside of the Garden. In other words, Andrew and Joshua would accept the evolutionary account of how the human race arrived. So what you have is a position that scientifically speaking is innocuous. There's nothing about that position that could be demonstrated to be . . . in other words, science has nothing to say about it. So that's the advantage of the genealogical position. I set it up to where Andrew and Joshua have an Adam and Eve 6,000 years ago. I think that they would say, well, that's really an open question. They say they could be 50,000 years ago or even farther back. But the point is that the question is now irrelevant from a genealogical perspective. So that would be the genealogical Adam and Eve position. Bill, would you have a different spin on it? That's basically the way I understand the position.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that the difficulty that I have with Andrew's position is these people outside the Garden. I take it that one of the theologically non-negotiable points of the primeval history is that all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve and that therefore there were no human beings outside the Garden of Eden. Now, to avoid this problem, what Andrew Lok says is that these people outside the Garden were anatomically human (just like us in their behavior and their appearance, in their intelligence, and so forth) but they were not truly human because they weren't in the image of God. I think that this is extremely problematic because it is predicated upon a view of the image of God which distinguishes between human beings who are in God's image and human beings who are not in God's image. And as I read Genesis 1, every human being is created in the image of God. On Andrew's view, there could be people who look and act exactly like us and yet they are not truly human beings. I take that to be morally and theologically objectionable. I also think that it's unscientific to say that people who exhibit these kind of modern cognitive capacities that I described (like symbolic behavior, abstract thinking, planning depth) are not truly human. Anyone who exhibits that kind of cognitive capacity is exhibiting traits of humanity. As much as I appreciate Andrew, I just can't bring myself to embrace the position that he advocates.

KEVIN HARRIS: And Marcus Ross represents the recent Adam and Eve view. Ken, what are his main points?

DR. KEATHLEY: Marcus argues pretty close to what we would understand to be the position of Ken Ham or of Whitcomb and Morris. And that is that the world itself was created around 10,000 years ago, and that Adam and Eve were the sole human beings – the sole progenitors – who were in a Garden about 6,000 years ago and then they were tempted and they fell. He argues very strongly from the New Testament. The various passages from 1 Peter, from Romans 5, Matthew 19. The various places that talk about the original creation. It's very much a New Testament argument. He then will understand the geological column to be compressed. That is, rather than being over a period . . . the geological column is an interesting thing. You almost have to think of a number two pencil to understand the geological column. You think of a number two pencil – most of it is just lead. Just the pencil. And then at the top you have the eraser. The pencil itself actually covers most of Earth's history. For about 3 billion years plus, there were only single cell life on Earth. We're talking just bacteria. That which we associate with the geological column – that actually is only of the last 650 to 750 million years. So whenever we see the geological column we think of it as being Earth's history, but it's actually just a brief portion of it. Well, that's helpful to understand. Marcus takes that and goes much, much further in his argument. He compresses the geological column literally into less than 12 months and that he argues that all of that happened at Noah's Flood. I think he does a very effective job of presenting his viewpoint. He does so in a very winsome way. But that would be in a nutshell how he would understand how it is that we are to understand Genesis and how we're to understand Earth's history.

KEVIN HARRIS: And Bill, you offered a rejoinder to Marcus Ross. What are some of your reservations about it?

DR. CRAIG: With regard to the biblical question, I think he gives a good survey of the biblical accounts of creation, but what I don't see from him is a compelling argument for saying that these have to be interpreted literally rather than in many cases figuratively. Now, while I think the biblical interpretive position of Young Earth Creationism is not implausible, I don't think you can say that about the Young Earth Creationist scientific position. On Marcus’ interpretation of Genesis 1-11, the entire world is less than 2,000 years old at the time of Abraham's birth. He has to compress the entirety of geological time from the Cambrian through the Cretaceous Period into the 150 days of Noah’s Flood. I think that is simply scientifically unbelievable.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, let's get to your essay. Summarize it for us, and then, Ken, you may have some questions or comments on those chapters.

DR. CRAIG: OK. With regard to the interpretive question, I wanted to explore what kind of literature the stories of Adam and Eve are. And they belong to the so-called primeval history of Genesis 1-11. So what kind of literature is this? It's important that we understand that the Bible contains many different types, or genre, of literature. For example, the book of Acts is historical writing. The Gospels are ancient biography. Paul's letters are epistolary literature. The Book of Revelation is apocalyptic literature. The Psalms are poetry. These different types of literature are not meant to be all read in the same way. In particular, some of them, if read literally, would give you a terrible misinterpretation. If you read the Psalms or the Book of Revelation with a sort of wooden literality you would be really led astray. So when it comes to Genesis 1-11, what kind of literature is this? I argue on the basis of various family resemblances or earmarks that these belong to a genre of myth. And by “myth” I don't mean falsehood; rather, I'm speaking in the sense of the folklorist. Folklorists distinguish between myth, fables, and legends. And myths are stories that are told in a society that attempt to ground the institutions and values of that society in events deep in the primordial past. And this is exactly the purpose of Genesis 1-11. I think that these narratives are in some measure quasi-mythical. They belong to the literary genre of myth. Now, what's interesting about myth (when you look at myths in the world) is that they are not necessarily to be read literally. They very frequently employ figurative and metaphorical language. And I suggest that that's what you have in Genesis 1-11. That's not the whole story, however, because the stories of Genesis 1-11 are joined together by the genealogies of the principal characters in these stories which forms a sort of backbone that orders the narratives historically. So they have a historical interest in them. They are about people who actually lived and wrought, and real events that happened, but they are related in the figurative and metaphorical language of myth. Some ancient Assyriologists have referred to this type of literature as mytho-history. It's not pure mythology. It's not straightforward history. It's a mytho-history. I think that gives us the best genre analysis of these narratives which implies that they need not be read with a sort of literalness. Now, when I turn then to the scientific evidence and ask, “When did human beings first begin to walk the face of the Earth?”, the evidence indicates, I think, that humanity originated some time prior to the divergence of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens around 550,000 years ago or so. The last, or most recent, common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was Homo heidelbergensis, or Heidelberg man. Heidelberg man had a brain capacity comparable to modern human beings, and he exhibited those types of modern cognitive behaviors that I spoke of earlier in our interview. My suggestion is that Adam and Eve were members of the species Homo heidelbergensis, that they were the human pair from whom the entire human race is descended, and that this is fully consonant with not only the archaeological and paleontological evidence but also with the evidence of population genetics that Ken spoke about earlier.

KEVIN HARRIS: Ken, any comments or questions for Bill on his view?

DR. KEATHLEY: Yeah. I want to commend Bill for his bravery to use the label of myth as an evangelical. That’s a bit of a lightning rod as one could imagine. Bill, what kind of response did you get whenever you first published your work In Quest for the Historical Adam?

DR. CRAIG: I was really bracing for pushback. I actually went to the pastor of our local church here that we attend, told him the book was coming out, and said to him that there could be terrible controversy about this and that if he wanted me to step down from teaching as a Sunday school teacher I would do so in submission to his authority. Well, that controversy never arrived. I think that what you said earlier in our podcast Ken about the remarkable openness there is in the evangelical community to non-Young Earth views is very evident. I have been really pleased and surprised at the openness and the reception that the view has received. I was inspired in this view by a book by Miller and Soden, which you may know, a couple of professors at a bible college in Pennsylvania who wrote a book called In the Beginning... We Misunderstood. They argued for this sort of mythical genre of these narratives. I really commend them for being the ones that had the courage to talk about this rather than me. I later found out that this view was also propounded by people like C. S. Lewis, for example, who is highly revered among evangelicals. So I've found real openness to the position that I presented.

DR. KEATHLEY: There are some – I'm thinking now of someone like James Hoffmeier – who would use the expression proto-history. Would you be comfortable with that terminology, or how would you distinguish your position – mytho-history – from proto-history?

DR. CRAIG: I think that a number of Old Testament scholars who have been reluctant to embrace the term “myth” or “mytho” have adopted other terms that are the equivalent. Proto-history would be one. Another I've seen is worldview history. Another was theological history. John Walton talks about imagistic history. I think all of these are getting at exactly the same point so that the view that I'm arguing for, I think, is actually pretty widespread among evangelical Old Testament scholars under different names.

DR. KEATHLEY: I was glad to hear you say that there is a historical backbone and that the particulars are things that have a historical referent. I think that's crucial for any position that's going to take Genesis seriously. Moving over to the science side, I find what you had to say about heidelbergensis is very interesting – that Adam and Eve, you understood them to be of that species. So do you, in your way of thinking, understand that species and the Denisovans and the Neaderthals and modern man (what we'd call Homo sapiens), do you understand them to all be the same species?

DR. CRAIG: I think that's a biological question that needs to be settled by the scientists, Ken, not by someone like me. They did interbreed successfully – they sired children. And, as you know, we have Neanderthal DNA in our genome.

DR. KEATHLEY: The fact that we are caucasians, yeah.

DR. CRAIG: And people in the Philippines and Pacific Islands may have as much as 5% of their genome from Denisovans. So it could be that these are not really different species of human beings, but maybe more like different races of human beings that are all capable of interbreeding. So those kinds of classifications are not, I think, important in my thinking. What's important is that they were fully and truly human exhibiting that kind of modern cognitive behavior that we would recognize in our fellows whom we regard as human beings. I think we're going to see some of these people in heaven. I think some of them are covered by Christ's atoning death, and we're going to see them.

DR. KEATHLEY: If I was going to say one further thing that I would like to see you do perhaps in the future, and I'll close my comments on this, and that would be maybe to do some type of exposition of Genesis 1-11 in which you . . . in other words, applying your genre to the text itself, saying, “OK, now this is what that looks like.” Because I think going . . . now I am pushing you on question number three. If you remember the third question – not only what's the science, what is . . . the third one, how does that apply to the church? So the question I would have is – and this is Pastor Ken – how do I preach this? In other words, how would I preach Genesis 1 through 11 to my congregation in a way that embraces your genre critique (your genre evaluation) and ministers to a congregation in the 21st century? I'll just leave it on that – that may be something that might be helpful.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's wrap it up today with the afterward. Josh Swamidass. He's really been involved in this discussion. What are some of his thoughts in the afterward, Ken?

DR. KEATHLEY: I was glad to have Joshua there at the colloquium. I was glad to have him to do an afterwards. Basically, the afterwards was: OK, what do we do now? How do we take it from here? I appreciated the conciliatory tone that he took. He emphasized how this is not a battle among enemies. This is a conversation around the dinner table among family members. And we need to make sure that that is the way that we have this conversation. I do think that that is the way that all of the participants – that is the attitude and spirit they exhibited. I think that Joshua's afterward kind of highlights that. Whatever we do next, let's do it in such a way that magnifies Christ through our gentle spirit.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, thoughts on Josh's afterwards?

DR. CRAIG: Well, Josh is a real conciliator and, I think, wants to bring people together. He has a sweet spirit about him, and so I think that Ken is quite right in saying that Josh's message is one that we need to hear – that we're not enemies on this, but we're striving together to find the best view theologically and scientifically that can be held. So Josh's contribution is one that is very valued.

As we wrap up today, Ken, Kevin and I want to thank you both for your work and your ministry and for joining us today. What do you hope that this book will accomplish?

DR. KEATHLEY: I'm thinking of the next generation of Christians who perhaps will go into the STEM fields. I'm thinking the best way that we can advance the Kingdom of God in the arena of the academic world and the scientific arena is by having godly men and women who become biochemists, they become geneticists, they engage in the sciences. I think that they need to have a robust confidence in the doctrine of creation and confidence in the Bible as the Word of God, and I'm hoping that this book will help them to have that so that they can be believers in a field that desperately needs more Bible-believing Christians.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

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