What about Adam and Eve?

As a young Catholic child, I remember hearing about the creation story and Adam and Eve. But shortly after, even as a very young child, I was told in school that it wasn’t literally true. What was important was the spiritual lessons based on it. I was aware that some older people were sceptical of the modern view, but we were all for making Christianity credible for the modern generation. Then, in my late teens, on one occasion, I was watching the Late Late Show on RTE, and this Baptist man was arguing for creationism. He remarked that 1,000s of scientists hold to the literal account of creation. It seemed a little odd, but I was curious how they would justify it.

Then, when I started moving in evangelical circles, I found that most people accepted creationism and took the Genesis account literally. Some people say that this only started in the latter part of the 20th century, when the creationist movement gained ground in the US. Before that, evangelical churches were happy to accept many aspects of the modern scientific outlook, just like other churches. I read some creationist books, and I found them quite convincing. In the 1990s, I bought a few books on intelligent design, which again, were convincing. The intelligent design people didn’t argue from the biblical account. It was more a case of demonstrating that the universe, the biological dimension in particular, showed signs of some sort of a plan. Not all of its exponents were necessarily Christian, or even theists.

The scientists on all sides were way beyond me in knowledge. You could argue that the creationists were biased, but you could also say that the evolutionists were prone to keep God out of the picture completely.

But you also got evangelicals who were theistic evolutionists. In fact, there was quite a range of views. What I liked about creationism is that it was simple, and it appeared to neatly align with the Scriptures. And that was very much my world. At the same time, I saw no difficulty in familiarizing myself with the current scientific outlook. I could enjoy watching TV shows, such as Life on Earth, about evolution without getting agitated every time it spoke in terms of millions or billions of years 😀.

It’s often said that the Bible isn’t a scientific book. God might be presenting a simplified account of creation in the way that a teacher might present a simplified picture of the proton, neutron and electron.

Anyway, I believe that it’s still true that most evangelicals in Ireland have a preference for the creationist view. However, I don’t believe that churches insist on members holding to it. And I wouldn’t want a person to be put off committing their life to Christ just because they might be reluctant to take the literal view.

Now I am quite happy to believe that things might be more complicated, but when I look at the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles do appear to treat Genesis as literally true. Here are some examples:

In a discussion about marriage, Jesus refers to Genesis:

Matthew 19:4-6 
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

Here, Jesus makes reference to Abel, Adam and Eve’s second son.

Matt 23:35
“And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.

Here, Jesus refers to Noah’s ark

Matt 24:38
For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 

This is from Luke’s geneaology of Jesus, which, despite gaps, goes all the way back to Adam:

Luke 3:38
…..the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. 

In Paul’s speech in Athens, he mentions that all nations came from one man:

Acts 17:26
“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands”

In Romans, Paul speaks of sin coming into the world through one man:

Rom 5:12
^“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned”

Here Paul mentions Adam by name and contrasts him with the last Adam (the new head of the human race, Jesus Christ)

1 Cor 15:45
So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.

And going back to the Old Testament, and the 10 commandments:

Ex 12:11
^“For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

In my experience, most people that we evangelize have little interest in the subject. If they are interested in science, they’re more interested in medical and technological developments than in fossils etc. You do get the Richard Dawkins fans who will want to engage in debate. However, you probably won’t win them over, however much you compromise 😀.

I think, what makes evangelicals prone to take a more literal view is that once you start reinventing Christianity to fit current scientific or ethical views etc. you eventually might end up with an entirely different religion. It’s like those trendy celebrity vicars you see on TV. They’re very nice, but you get the impression that they find the Bible embarrassing, so they hold on to the trappings of religion without really believing any of it. At most, Jesus is seen as merely an inspirational figure to them, or so it seems. But you do get staunch evangelicals who accept evolution. They’re not necessarily on a trajectory into unbelief.

Another issue is the question of suffering. From a creationist perspective, the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3) brought sin, suffering and death into the world. God initially created a perfect world. So, if you dismiss the historicity of the fall, you have God creating a world with sin, suffering and death built into it. Some are OK with this, believing that our lives in this world are a sort of a boot camp, to prepare us for eternity. When we get to heaven, which will be like paradise, what we experienced in this life will be part of the dim and distant past. And either way, if God foreknew and planned creation, then he was always going to allow things to go wrong, for his own purposes. So even from a creationist perspective, the question of suffering is a difficult issue to handle. You can’t just blame it on Adam and Eve.

Anyway, to conclude, I think most of us see the account presented in Scripture as either literally true, or it’s the model that God presents to us, or even something in between. Either way, in practice, we treat it as being literally true.

But that shouldn’t stop us from being interested in the various scientific theories on the origin of the earth and humanity. I sometimes compare it with light showing up as waves in some scientific experiments and as particles in other experiments. That shouldn’t happen, but sometime, we might discover its true nature. Why should we be surprised if the world is puzzling to us? It certainly shouldn’t distract us from the core message of the gospel.