One should also note that just because it is a myth, metaphor or allegory does not make it meaningless. Some of our greatest national stories on who we are as a people are centered around myths, metaphors and allegories.
Christianity Today recently had an article on Adam and Eve The Search for the Historical Adam NPR (National Public Radio) picked up the story and it went viral. Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve
NPR had this to say:
Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe this account. It's a central tenet for much of conservative Christianity, from evangelicals to confessional churches such as the Christian Reformed Church.
But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."
The OOZE (Evolving Spirituality) has an article up on this subject The Debate About Adam and Eve Has Nothing to do With Adam and Eve!
The NPR article, rightly calling this a Galileo moment, cites professor Karl Giberson: “When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face… The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it.”
The article goes on: “Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: ‘That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.’”
Evolution isn’t the issue. Adam and Eve are not the issue. The science on origins is only becoming more solid- although there is an interestingly powerful myth that circulates in Christian subculture that there are tons of credible scientists that dispute the issue. Biblical scholarship isn’t the issue either- very few (any?) well-respected Biblical scholars take Genesis 1 and 2 as history (you can find creationists among biblical scholars at plenty of schools- but they have virtually no contribution to the field and trade credibility for tenure… it’s all about the money). The issue isn’t inerrancy or infallibility. Evolution is so contentious that most of my professors at seminary hesitate to admit to the class that they, along with pretty much everyone in the field of academic theology, believe in evolution (and it creates a firestorm when they occasionally do!). You won’t hear that in the pulpit either- because the study of the text is not the issue either. You also don’t generally hear that Genesis 1 and 2 are two different stories, written several hundred years apart in different parts of the world. You don’t hear that, even if you desperately want to take Genesis 1 and 2 literally, you cannot because of internal contradictions. That’s just a matter of reading the text, and when pointing that out is considered controversial and gets professors nervous about job security, we are reminded that the study of the text isn’t actually the issue.
So what is the issue that gets so many Christians wrapped up in such a tizzy? The OOZE article continues:
So what is the issue?
Fazale Rana, vice president of apologetics group Reason to Believe, opines: “From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith…But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you’ve got a problem,”
Exactly. She gets credit for honesty. What undergirds this controversy is not a disagreement about the text or science; instead, it’s the belief that faith crumbles once you admit that the text has an error, isn’t historically accurate, or else it says correctly exactly what it means to say and you’ve simply misunderstood it all this time.
Philosophers Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn described this phenomenon as epistemological webs and paradigm shifts. Lakatos described all our knowledge as interconnecting in a web, with more important, reinforced ideas consisting an epistemic core. Experiences hit the boundary of this web and force you to decide whether to incorporate new data or reject it. The knowledge within the web need not all cohere- it is only most important that the core ideas cohere well. When the web’s integrity breaks down due to dissonant data points, it becomes more parsimonious to think with a different core set of beliefs. This results in what Kuhn calls a paradigm shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The text of scripture is very, very rarely the issue in theological debates.
The real issue is that we’ve decided to believe something and are desperately grasping for any way we can use the text to backward-engineer justification for our beliefs. This isn’t controversial. It’s just how we are wired…by evolution.
These concepts above are totally foreign to many hardliner evangelicals and to most in the Church of God. To dare to question, to really examine scripture and tradition in depth is NOT something that is ever done. To do so is heretical in the the eyes of most.
What does faith mean to you? Can faith be destroyed by questioning? Does not believing in a literal Adam and Eve undermine all the rest of the teaching in scriptures?
