It is always interesting to see religious people trying to find ways to reconcile modern science with their religious texts. For people who have a literal interpretation of the Bible, the task is much harder, with the Genesis story being a nightmare. This is not because the Genesis story is particularly crazier than the other miraculous stories in the Bible but because it is the most familiar and you cannot easily finesse it away. Everyone knows the general outlines of it, even if they are unaware that there are two partially contradictory versions of it that require fairly strenuous efforts to explain away.
I suspect that readers of this blog do not believe in the literal truth of the story of Adam and Eve and are also bemused as to why so many Christians insist on its historicity. Why tie your faith to such a preposterous story? For that matter, why not dispense with pretty much the entire Old Testament and stick with the New? After all, isn’t it Jesus that is important?
For some Christians, they stick with the story because they think that the Bible is the word of god and hence must be inerrant. In this they are just like Muslims and the Koran. If the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden goes, then a literal view of the Bible as history has to be abandoned and it thus cannot be god’s word. More sophisticated believers may think the story is implausible but fear (correctly) that as soon as one concedes that some parts of the Bible are not literally true, they have no basis for justifying which parts must be taken literally and which as myth or metaphor. If you allow that Adam and Eve were mythical then how can you insist that Christ’s resurrection is historical? So they bite the bullet and insist on the truth of the story though probably wishing it were not there.
The most sophisticated fear the theological implications because you can draw a straight doctrinal line from Adam and Eve to Jesus. The doctrinal reason why Jesus had to die was to absolve us from the state of sin we are born into because of the original sin of Adam and Eve. No Adam and Eve means no original sin and Christ’s death becomes pointless. The ‘original sin’ idea makes little sense but let’s consider it for the moment.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, says that rebellious choice infected all of humankind.
“When Adam sinned, he sinned for us,” Mohler says. “And it’s that very sinfulness that sets up our understanding of our need for a savior.
Mohler says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam’s original sin.
“Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul’s description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament,” Mohler says.
The problem is that almost all of Christian and other religious doctrines were created in the ages before the advent of modern science, which we can mark as the arrival of Copernicus and Galileo, and hence are the product of times when a small and young geocentric universe seemed eminently plausible. As science has developed, either the Bible has to be re-interpreted or doctrines have had to be revised. There is usually a lag time for this process with only those scientific facts that have been absorbed into popular culture and thus cannot be denied without being ridiculed being used for this revisionist process. So, for example, the idea that the universe is not geocentric is now undeniable as is the fact that the universe is vast. Biblical reinterpretation has accommodated those changes to persuade believers that there is no contradiction of these facts with a literal reading of the Bible, though the arguments are strained, to put it mildly. But the main point is that the scientific fact is accepted. You can see why the Big Bang theory was such a relief to religious people because at least this idea that the universe was created at some instant of time had parallels with the Bible story, and required no major revision.
Another big problem is the theory of evolution and that the age of the Earth and the universe run into the billions of years. These facts are now becoming so widely believed that biblical literalists are feeling the pressure because of the problems it causes for the Genesis story. This results in some truly bizarre attempts at reconciliation of it with modern scientific developments, especially by intelligent design advocates who crave scientific acceptance while not wishing to alienate their fundamentalist allies. They know that wholesale denial of the theory of evolution and a young Earth are both nonstarters scientifically.
I wrote some time ago in a post titled How Adam and Eve killed the dinosaurs about William Dembski’s attempts to reconcile the Genesis story of the fall of creation in the Garden of Eden with an old Earth model. He invoked time-reversal of cause and effect, where things that happened later could have effects earlier. His theory was not only laughable from a scientific viewpoint, he was attacked by his seminary bosses and colleagues for even considering the possibility of an old Earth and had to backtrack.
Another attempt is to use the scientific research from evolutionary DNA studies that suggest that the human population went through a small bottleneck at some time. If the size of that bottleneck was two, then voila! Adam and Eve. Alas, that is also not to be. A 2011 study published in Nature says that the smallest size of the bottleneck is of the order of 10,000. Jerry Coyne explains in more detail the conclusions of the paper. For most of the readers of this blog, there will be nothing Earth-shattering about this study. But it is a big deal in fundamentalist circles and has caused some theologians at some seminaries to give up on the Adam and Eve story altogether, and stand accused of heresy.
The old age of the Earth and evolution of life are scientific facts that are becoming universally accepted. The story of Adam and Eve simply cannot survive for long and religious people will be forced to abandon it. The only question of interest is how they will do so.
Yes, I think the peculiarly strong nature of Christian resistance to evolution can be summed up by two points: Adam and Eve, and theodicy.
The Problem of Evil was hard enough already, now you throw in billions of years of “red in tooth and claw” evolution via natural selection, countless eons of untold suffering… and it’s just all that much worse.
And while I think the vast majority of Bible stories can be tossed off as metaphorical without doing serious violence to the core doctrines, The Fall is a rather crucial plot point in the Christian narrative. We atheists like to complain that progressive believers give absolutely no indication of how they determine what is literal vs. metaphorical (except the obvious criterion that “Whatever conflicts with known science is metaphorical; whatever is not (yet) in conflict with science is literal”) but Adam-and-Eve-as-metaphor poses an even deeper dilemma.
At yesterday’s meeting of the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix, we had the pleasure of a discussion with James Croft, a research associate and graduate student from the Harvard Chaplaincy. One question that came up was “how can humanism compete with offer of eternal life by religion?”
Mr. Croft offered two thoughts. The first is relevant to Adam and Eve. Humanism does not consider any person to be “broken” due to original sin, and hence in no need of being “fixed”. At a stroke, humanism removes both Adam and Eve, and Jesus from discussion.
Second, one might think that, upon approaching death, religious people would be more calm and peaceful. But research shows quite the opposite. And while the thought of eternal life may be attractive, the flip side of the coin is eternal damnation, and that produces a lot of anxiety.
The old age of the Earth and evolution of life are scientific facts that are becoming universally accepted. The story of Adam and Eve simply cannot survive for long and religious people will be forced to abandon it. The only question of interest is how they will do so.
I would suggest that Prof. Singham consider the conclusion that Richard Dawkins arrived at in contemplating the views of Kurt Wise. Religious fundamentalists, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, will never accept evolution and an old earth. Like Dr. Wise (BS, Un. of Chicago, PhD, Harvard, thesis student of Stephen Jay Gould), they will reject any scientific findings that disagree with their religious views.
Here is Dr. Dawkins reluctant conclusion:
Whatever the underlying explanation, this example suggests a fascinating, if pessimistic, conclusion about human psychology. It implies that there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence. Depending upon how many Kurt Wises are out there, it could mean that we are completely wasting our time arguing the case and presenting the evidence for evolution. We have it on the authority of a man who may well be creationism’s most highly qualified and most intelligent scientist that no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference.
Forgot the link.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_21_4.html
I don’t remember where I saw an attempt to somehow accommodate the lack of a population bottleneck with the Fall myth.
It’s based on a distinction between brains and souls, essentially.
According to that account, the Biblical literal story is allegorical, but there were two ‘first persons’, Adam and Eve, and the Fall is real.
It’s just that Adam and Eve coexisted with a number of other hominids of the same species, biologically speaking, but only Adam and Eve had human souls, created ‘Imago Dei’, etc.
Of course, that results in a lot of problems:
For instance, it would seem that Adam and Eve’s sons and daughters ended up having sex with non-persons -- since no other people were available -, and then there were persons who were born to non-persons, and had to learn (even how to behave) from their parents who were not even persons.
Moreover, that raises the issue of a deceitful creator -- since those people probably intuitively believe that their parents were also people -, and so on (there are other problems, of course involving the switch from non-moral beings to moral beings, what evolution shows, etc.)
Yes, I recall that theory being floated some time ago but not gaining much traction for all the reasons you give. Such bizarre theory creation is part of the process by which people slowly give up cherished beliefs. They rarely do so all at once but try workarounds until they quietly give up.
A similar theological problem exists for those who don’t believe that the story of Jonah is literally true (that he survived after being swallowed by a great fish):
This is Jesus himself talking, and (purportedly) predicting his own death and resurrection.
So any doubts about the far-fetched OT story of Jonah automatically get translated into doubts about the central tenant of Christianity (Jesus’ death and resurrection).
What might be exactly so attractive about the idea of eternity? As soon I gave it a serious thought I realized that leading an eternal live in heaven, which invariably is depicted as a perfect place, is not attractive at all. Perfection means that there is nothing left to do. So heaven essentially is a place of eternal boredom, which in the end is at least as terrifying and horrible as eternal torture in hell.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote a novel about eternal life and came to a similar conclusion.
I rather prefer Buddhist Nirvana.
Ask this an Abrahamist and I guarantee they will avoid an answer.
I agree that heaven sounds pretty awful. I had some fun with the idea of immortality and heaven in a post I wrote some years ago.
I am left wondering how he managed to cram three days and three nights in between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.
The thing with Genesis, and I think it is more obvious here than anywhere else in the Bible, is that it appears to have been made up by a child. Elements appear as they are needed, with barely any attempt at retconning an explanation.
God creates this man, decides he’d be bored by himself, so then he makes a woman. (This is Eve, we aren’t going to bother with Lilith or anything else unorthodox here.) They have two sons who are used to demonstrate some negative emotions, murder, and the relative merits of agriculture and animal husbandry with their attendant lifestyle implications.
Now Cain is marked so that other people won’t mess with him -- people who would apparently either know he was a murderer and hate him for it, or they were complete xenophobes. Unexplained people in one of several or many unexplained countries (Nod), where Cain has an inexplicable wife and commands an inexplicable labor force which he is directing to build a city.
He begets a litany of descendants, including ironworkers who, sometime later, lose their technology, apparently. Meanwhile, or perhaps after six generations, Eve has another son who marries another unexplained woman.
It’s like reading Axe Cop, only far less entertaining.
I think there’s a difference between individual views changing within a lifetime (which are very resistant to factual evidence), and institutional/consensus views changing over a longer time. Similarly to the idea that scientific models progress one funeral at a time; religions do change quite dramatically, often in areas seen as “core beliefs”, over the centuary time-scale.