Adam and Eve did not exist. Done.


One of the things I failed to mention when I discussed the Bergman-Enyart dialogue was that the spent some time talking about whether Adam had a navel or not, and the general historicity of Adam and Eve. I did not mention it because it was stupid, and that discussion already had a surfeit of stupid.

But now I discover that BioLogos is also carrying on about the historicity of Adam and Eve, with their usual load of waffle and metaphor and vague ways of trying to say it was really true, and God made us really, really special anyway.

There are such things as stupid questions. Stupid questions are questions that have no reasonable or rational referent, that out of the blue ask us to rationalize and reconcile, on the one hand, a patently silly fable with trivial content, to, on the other hand, the whole of known science. Just by asking, it’s an effort to equate the neglible to the substantial, to the benefit of the fluff and to the detriment of the serious.

There was no Adam. There was no Eve. We are the product of populations and pools of genes that are briefly instantiated in individuals, and it’s a great conceptual error to even fuss over finding “the” many-times-great grandparents of us all. It’s an even greater error to try to use poorly understood genetics to justify believing in a goofy myth created by people who hadn’t even imagined genetics yet.

I am amused to see both a couple of crazy young earth creationists and the pompous apologists at BioLogos have something so clearly in common, though.