Listener Questions About New Book on Adam

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, come on in! This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig – the podcast. I’m Kevin Harris. At this recording we are in the holiday season. I hope that you and your family and friends are having a great holiday season. The end of the year is always a good reminder if you’d like to contribute to Reasonable Faith, do so now while we have our matching grant in place. You may have heard about this. Some very generous donors have agreed to match whatever you give – they will double whatever you give up to $300,000. So you can literally double your impact in your giving right now in our matching grant campaign. So go to ReasonableFaith.org and do that now. A great podcast today. Some of the questions about Dr. Craig’s new book on Adam have been popping up on Facebook. We are going to take a look at some of those right now with Dr. Craig.

Bill, the whole world is still having a whole lot of fun with your book In Quest of the Historical Adam. We have some questions from a Facebook page that pertain to the book. Owen Anderson asks on Facebook,

Have you heard this view recently presented as new?

1. Adam was created mortal and needed the fruit of the Tree of Life to be immortal

DR. CRAIG: This was one of the major shifts of opinion that I experienced as a result of my study of the historical Adam. Up until this point I had always taken physical death to be the consequence of man's fall into sin. But as a result of my study of the historical Adam I came to rethink this. First of all, in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says that the reason that we have this soma psychikon (or natural body; that is to say our mortal, corruptible body) is because that's how the first man, Adam, was created. Now, that was so striking when I saw that. Adam was not mortal in virtue of his fall; he was mortal in virtue of his creation. And then when I looked back into Genesis 3 and the story of the Fall, you notice that Adam and Eve just don't fall over dead when they eat the fruit of the Tree even though God told them, “The day you eat of it you will die.” They didn't die physically on that day. What happened to them? They experienced a spiritual death. They were alienated from God and now estranged from him. So the consequences of eating the fruit was spiritual not physical. Moreover, why have a Tree of Life in the Garden if they were naturally immortal? You’ll remember the reason God expels them from the Garden is lest they eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal. God didn't want them to eat the Tree of Life now that they had fallen into sin. But if they hadn't fallen into sin, why would they need the Tree of Life if they were naturally immortal? So it struck me that really what both Paul and Genesis 3 is teaching is that Adam and Eve were created mortal. They are ordinary biological organisms that would eventually die unless they ate of the Tree of Life. And so in 1 Corinthians 15 again, what is the solution to the death to which our mortal bodies are subject? Well, it's the resurrection. God will raise us from the dead. So you have physical death and physical resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. Now when you turn over to Romans 5 where Paul talks about the first Adam and then Christ is the second Adam, what do you have there? You have spiritual death of Adam. And what's the counterpoint to spiritual death? It's not resurrection. It's justification. So the answer to spiritual death is justification by Christ's atoning death. So there's a striking dissimilarity between 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5 – both New Testament passages on Adam. One is how the resurrection cures the blight of physical mortality that we have as a result of our creation, and the other is on how justification in Christ heals our spiritual death that we experience as a result of sin.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is so important. We've got to get this straight. He says,

2. Because of Adam's sin, he and all humanity were kept from that Tree of Life and so stayed mortal.

DR. CRAIG: Right. In a sense, the Fall did rob Adam and Eve of immortality in the sense that they no longer had access to the Tree of Life. In virtue of being expelled from the Garden they gave up the opportunity of immortality because they would no longer have access to the Tree.

KEVIN HARRIS:

3. This whole story is presented in myth fashion because trees don't actually have fruit that makes you immortal.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly. I think it's so evident that this is a word picture. You have the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you have the Tree of Life that confers immortality. And notice – this is so important – these fruits are not miraculous. It's not as though by eating the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil God miraculously gives you the knowledge of good and evil, or that by eating the fruit of the Tree of Life God makes you immortal. No! God didn't want Adam and Eve to become immortal after they had fallen into sin. He didn't want them to disobey and have the knowledge of good and evil. So these trees are trees that have the natural property of conferring moral knowledge and physical immortality just by ingesting them. And that, I think, is very plausibly a figurative image. This is a symbol or a sort of metaphor for moral knowledge and for eternal life. And so it seems to me that's just a very plausible way of interpreting the story.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally, it says,

4. Christ came to restore us to paradise so we can each eat of that Tree and be immortal.

DR. CRAIG: I think what he's referring to here is that the Tree of Life reappears in the heavenly Jerusalem that John sees in the book of Revelation. It's growing by the bank of the river. But in no way does it suggest that by eating from the Tree of Life we gain immortality. On the contrary, our bodies will be immortal, glorious, physical, powerful bodies that rise from the grave just as Jesus rose with an immortal, powerful, spiritual body when he rose on Easter morning from the tomb.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question, Jason on Facebook asked,

Is it possible that God actually did some kind of surgery on Adam's side, made a few million variations to the rib or whatever tissue, and made a woman? Or is it best to view this as metaphorical?

DR. CRAIG: Now this would be one of those cases where you would have to say of course it's possible that God can do this. God can do anything. But is that the most plausible interpretation of the narrative? I used to think that what this imagined is that Adam would fall asleep and then some sort of an incision would be made in his side as though by an invisible scalpel and then one of his ribs would be snapped off and then this bloody rib would be up floating in the air and it would kind of grow into a woman. And it just seemed to me fantastic to think that that's what the author is asking us to envision. Since then, however, reading Genesis 2 and 3 more closely, what you find in Genesis 3 is that God is described as a humanoid deity walking in the Garden in the cool of the day calling out to Adam who is in his hideout. It has this anthropomorphic description of God. And you read Genesis 2 in light of that and I think what you've got in the creation of Adam is this same anthropomorphic deity fashioning a statue out of the dirt and then blowing into its nose and the statue comes alive and then it's this humanoid deity that does the surgery on Adam and makes a woman out of his rib. It's not like the rib is being fashioned by some invisible deity. It's this humanoid deity. So what you've got here, I think, is clearly anthropomorphic language about God. We know from Genesis 1 that God is the transcendent creator of the universe. He doesn't have a physical body. And so I think, while it's possible to construe the narrative or interpret it as Jason did, it is far more plausible to think here that we have a figurative or metaphorical story of the creation of Eve told in these anthropomorphic terms.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question from Jennifer. She says,

Can Jesus be the second Adam if Adam didn't actually exist? Is this biblical evidence that Adam was historical even if it was hundreds of thousands of years ago?

DR. CRAIG: I think that Jesus could be the second Adam even if Adam were just a literary figure in the book of Genesis. I think it's quite possible to make comparisons between a real person and a literary person. For example, some people will say of Hillary Clinton that she was a Lady Macbeth referring to the figure in Shakespeare's play. But what you cannot do, I think, is say that Christ as the second Adam rectified the consequences of the first Adam’s fall into sin because then you're talking about consequences that are outside the narrative in the real world. And a merely literary figure cannot have real consequences which Christ then rectified. So I would take that to be biblical evidence that Paul thought that Adam was a historical person who had real world consequences that were rectified by Christ's atoning death.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Stacy on Facebook asked,

If original sin is not the best interpretation of the Scripture concerning the fall of Adam and Eve, then how did sin infect the world or how did we acquire a sin nature?

That's a big question.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. And let's be very clear about what the traditional doctrine of original sin says. The doctrine of original sin is not just that there was a first sin – an original sin in that sense. Rather the doctrine says that I am guilty for what Adam did, that I am punishable, I am liable to punishment because of what Adam did. His guilt is imputed to all of his posterity. I've argued that that's not the best interpretation of either Genesis 3 – none of the curses on Adam and Eve is about such imputation of guilt or sin – nor does Paul describe that in Romans 5. Rather what Paul says in Romans 5 is that death spread to all men because all men sinned. So how then did sin infect the world, Stacey asks? Well, I would say that sin affects every human being that lives. It infects our societal institutions. We live in a corrupt and evil world so that people naturally born into such a world adopt the behavior patterns of this corrupted world and they become sinful themselves. So we don't need to think that little infants are stained with the guilt of Adam in order to believe that children as they grow older do become sinful in virtue of the influences upon them.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question is from Brandon. He says,

What are the main differences between you and Josh Swamidass on the historical Adam?

It's a two-part question. He says,

What does Alvin Plantinga say about the historicity of Adam?

Which I thought was kind of funny: “What does Alvin Plantinga think about it?”

DR. CRAIG: I've never talked to Al about this so I can't answer that. But the main difference between Josh and me is easily summarized. Josh believes in a very recent Adam. I believe in an ancient Adam. In order to defend a recent Adam, Josh has to give up that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of every human being that has lived on this planet. He says they were only the ancestors of some of them. On my view, Adam and Eve are, in fact, the ancestors of every person, every human being, who has lived on this planet. But in order to defend that universal progenitorship I have to give up the recency of Adam and Eve. So the one proposal gives up their universal progenitorship; the other proposal gives up their recency. And I think you need to decide which one has the greater benefits for the cost that it incurs.

KEVIN HARRIS: Final question today. Rick says,

I've always heard that our resurrection bodies would probably look and function like Adam and Eve looked and functioned. Is there anything to this? I'm not sure I want to look like the guy on the cover of the book!

DR. CRAIG: [laughter]Well, you know what my wife said? She thought that guy looked like a pretty handsome dude.

KEVIN HARRIS: Me, too! I wouldn't mind looking like him at all.

DR. CRAIG: No. I wouldn’t either. The idea that we would look like Adam and Eve is just absolutely nonsense. Can you imagine that God would undo all of our racial identities so that we all become a single race? I see absolutely no reason to think that in the afterlife there will not be aboriginals from Australia and Inuit from the Arctic and San from Africa or Indians from South America. In fact, doesn't the book of Revelation say this? It says before the throne and before the lamb will be people from every tribe and tongue and nation and people. So certainly we shouldn't think that we're all going to be somehow transformed to look like how Adam and Eve looked.

KEVIN HARRIS: Get the book In Quest of the Historical Adam when you go to ReasonableFaith.org. Bill, we’ll see you in the next podcast.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you, Kevin.^[1]