Three Views on the Historical Adam

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, he’s been called the William Lane Craig of Asia. Andrew Loke. He’s got a new book out on the historical Adam. You, Josh Swamidass, and Andrew Loke had a chance to get together and talk about your perspectives and your views on the historical Adam at the American Academy of Religion in Denver. I know that people are saying, “Oh, I'd like to have been a fly on the wall for that.” Well, you can be. It will eventually be on YouTube. So keep an eye on our YouTube channel. These were three perspectives – some in common, some not in common (some of the views). Talk about this event, and then let's see if we can do a thumbnail of all three views.

DR. CRAIG: All right. This was a session on new work on the question of the historical Adam. It is remarkable that there has appeared at least three new major studies on the question of the historical Adam in recent years. Each of us offers a different model for how to understand the historicity of Adam and Eve. The first of these books was The Genealogical Adam and Eve published by Joshua Swamidass, who is an information biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Josh distinguishes, importantly, between the genealogical Adam and Eve and the genetic Adam and Eve. Our genetic ancestors would be everyone who has contributed to our genome – to our personal genetic profile. But we have many more ancestors genealogically from whom we are descended than those who have a genetic imprint that we bear. Most of our ancestors in the past will be what Josh calls genetic ghosts; namely, their genetic contribution has simply gotten washed out over time so that they're not genetic ancestors but they are nevertheless genealogical ancestors. We are descended from them by birth lines. Josh is looking for the genealogical Adam from whom we are all today descended. The centerpiece of his view is the claim that everyone alive today could have descended from a universal ancestor who lived relatively recently – just a few thousand years in the past. He shows how this is possible biologically because as you go back in time even though the number of your ancestors multiplies the overall population gets smaller and smaller so we wind up having a lot of common ancestors. And within just a few thousand years you can arrive at a common ancestor for everybody. That doesn't mean that he was the first human being or that there were not human beings contemporary with him. There were others. But what Josh postulates is that God created a special couple, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden in the Middle East even though outside the Garden there was a large population of hominins who had arisen by the ordinary processes of biological evolution from pre-human life forms. These humans outside the Garden were the traditional products of biological evolution, and when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden their descendants began to interbreed with these people outside the Garden. As a result we bear the genetic imprint of people outside the Garden as well as their pre-human past. Genes that are held in common with chimpanzees, for example. Not because Adam and Eve evolved from pre-human life forms – they were specially created in the Garden of Eden – but because those with whom their descendants interbred were descended from pre-human life forms. Josh calls his view “the recent genealogical Adam.” It postulates Adam and Eve as historical persons who lived relatively recently – say 10,000 years ago or so –, were specially created by God, but who were just two people out of a much wider population of hominins with whom their descendants interbred. That's Josh's view. What Josh gives up in this view is the notion that Adam and Eve are the ancestors of all human beings. According to Josh's view, there are people outside the Garden who are not descended from Adam and Eve even though eventually Adam and Eve's descendants take over so that everyone today is descended from Adam and Eve. In order to maintain the recency of Adam and Eve, Josh is willing to give up on their universal progenitorship. That's the recent genealogical Adam view.

KEVIN HARRIS: There seems to be some pressure from some people writing on this to preserve this recent Adam view. They don't want to let that go simply because, well, it is what you were taught in Sunday School since you were a child. That it was only six thousand years ago or so. So there seems to be kind of a motivation or a pressure to preserve that even though it's biblically and scientifically not that necessary.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think it's theologically necessary. I think it's an odd weighting of theological priorities. It seems to me that the recency of Adam is not as theologically important as his universal human progenitorship. In the second of these three books (namely, my book In Quest of the Historical Adam) I defend what I call “the ancient genealogical Adam view” in contrast to Josh's recent genealogical Adam view. I'm willing to give up on the recency of Adam and Eve and to push them deep into the primordial past in order to maintain that they are the founding pair of the entire human race – that every human being is descended from Adam and Eve, which I take to be an important theological emphasis of the Bible. So my proposal is that when we look at the scientific evidence for human origins we discover that Homo sapiens are not the only species of human being that have ever lived on this planet. Neanderthals were also modern human beings with a cognitive capacity similar to Homo sapiens. In my book I go through a wealth of archaeological evidence to show that Neanderthals, like Homo sapiens, possessed abstract symbolic thinking, planning depth of the future, and other indications of modern cognitive capacity. Since Adam and Eve are the founding pair of the entire human race, that means that we need to locate them prior to the fork between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. That fork occurs with a human species called Homo heidelbergensis who was ancestral to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. My suggestion is that Adam and Eve belong to the species Homo heidelbergensis who lived somewhere more than 750,000 years ago.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andrew Loke – his new book and his view. Bill, let's review it.

DR. CRAIG: Andrew's book is called The Origin of Humanity and Evolution. It is a version of the recent genealogical Adam view. But Andrew is, I think, like me, quite constrained to want to preserve the universal human progenitorship of Adam and Eve. I think that Andrew rightly understands that theologically it is much more important to maintain that Adam and Eve are the universal human progenitors than to maintain their relative recency, but he wants to have his cake and eat it, too, so to speak. He wants to have Adam and Eve be relatively recent, but nevertheless to be the progenitors of all truly human persons. So he regards the people outside the Garden as not truly human even though they are indistinguishable cognitively and anatomically from us. They look and act and talk and think just like us, but Andrew says they're not created in the image of God. They do not have this God-given function or role of being God's royal representatives on this planet. So even though there were these hominins that are anatomically and cognitively human outside the Garden with whom the descendants of Adam and Eve then interbred, they are not truly human because they really weren't in the image of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: You really don't like that view. You find it morally repugnant. Why do you feel that way?

DR. CRAIG: I find the view unbiblical, unscientific, and morally unconscionable. The implication of Andrew's view is that there could be people today – our spouses and friends – who look and act just like us and are in every respect (cognitively) modern people, and yet they're not human beings because they're not in the image of God. I think this is morally abhorrent. It is the worst form of racism or discrimination to say that there are people that are cognitively indistinguishable from us but that they're not really human beings. I do think this view is deeply flawed morally. I also think that it's unscientific because it proposes an understanding of what it is to be a human being that is at odds with modern science. There is, I think, absolutely no doubt that people who produce the beautiful cave art in places like Lascaux and Chauvet in France were human beings that possessed an aesthetic impulse, symbolic thinking. They are in every sense of the word scientifically human beings. It would be unscientific to adopt a definition of human that would exclude them from being human. I think it's also unbiblical because biblically there's no basis for saying that there are these sorts of creatures or persons outside the Garden who are not human. So I do disagree fundamentally with Andrew's version of the model.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you know how he and perhaps even Josh treat the image of God – what that means to be made in “the image of God”?

DR. CRAIG: I think both of them have a proclivity toward a sort of functional view of the image of God – that the image of God means that mankind plays a certain role; namely, being God's royal representatives on this planet. Therefore, those who don't have that role are not in God's image. Andrew will be quick to add that in order to carry out that function you need to have certain personal qualities like rationality, self-consciousness, freedom of the will, and so forth. In which case I would say those qualities describe what it is to be in the image of God. That's what it is to be in the image and likeness of God, and that enables us then to fulfill the function that God has assigned to us. Josh is more open on this. As a scientist rather than theologian he doesn't come down hard and fast on one side, but I do think he is inclined toward a more relational or functional view of the image of God than I am.

KEVIN HARRIS: Again, we're just sketching out the views and what was discussed between the three of you because it will be on YouTube and we want to encourage everyone to go and check out that video. If I'm reading the signs right here, there seems to be a snowball effect going on with more material and writing and interests coming out on the historical Adam.

DR. CRAIG: I do definitely think that there is a snowball effect happening. I know of at least one other book on the historical Adam that has also appeared recently which I haven't mentioned. I fully expect that more will be forthcoming. These books have generated a good deal of interest in this old question and especially in light of recent scientific findings. So this is a lively discussion going on among evangelical theologians today.^[1]