The Genealogical Adam and Eve

by S. Joshua Swamidass

  A COMMON STORY

  Evolutionary science splintered the traditional account of Adam and Eve, fracturing our common narrative. The splintering can be undone. A larger narrative contains the origin story of evolutionary science, and it also contains the traditional account of Adam and Eve.

  In the wasteland of origins, virtue can arise. If we make space for one another, with tolerance, humility, and patience, I wonder if new sorts of beauty might arise. Some are convinced evolution is a myth. Others are convinced that Adam and Eve are a myth. One person’s fact might be another’s fiction, but they both can enter the same narrative, at a crossroads of many questions. Meeting grounds like this are rare, and they have value.

  ■ How do we understand the human condition in an age of edited genomes and a rapidly changing human experience?

  ■ What is the meaning of our distant past, and how does it shape who we are in this moment? As ancient genomes are sequenced, what are the hidden histories we will find?

  ■ What is a good dominion over the environment, and how might we have corrupted nature? Is there a moral meaning to scientific questions like climate change?

  ■ What is a good dominion with each other? What is the corruption? How do we live together, through differences, without abusing power?

  ■ Will we remember our shared history of polygenesis in science and in theology? How do we truthfully receive this inheritance?

  ■ How do we think about justice in a world with inheritance? We inherit different starting points, and the generations before us were not perfect. What could justice be in the reality of our conflicted world?

  These questions are important to all of us, no matter what we believe about evolution or Adam and Eve. They are difficult questions and resist simple answers. These are questions of society, best understood when we engage them together. This is the societal value of common narratives. They are meeting grounds from which to engage larger questions together.

  The novel My Ishmael meets us in this common narrative.15 A man answers an ad in a newspaper, “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” Answering the ad, the man finds himself in a room with a live gorilla, Ishmael. He is the Teacher. The gorilla is sentient, communicating telepathically with the pupil of Abel and Cain, the Leavers and the Takers. The benevolent Leavers of Abel were hunters and gathers in the ancient past, who leave what they do not need for others. The malicious Takers of Cain are totalitarian agriculturalists, who took all the land for themselves, whether they needed it or not. The gorilla infers that the story of Adam and Eve was written by the Leavers to explain the Takers’ evil civilization. If the myth were written by the Takers, the gorilla reasons, Adam would not have fallen. The Takers, however, misunderstood the myth. They lionize Adam as the hero, thereby enacting his villainy into the world. We are the Takers.

  Deeper the story goes, exploring our complex anxieties about civilization, progress, and our effect on the world around us. Into this story all of us enter, whatever we think about Adam and Eve and evolution. Some might understand this, possibly, as a real history. Others enjoy a mere myth, spun by a fictional gorilla, speaking to larger questions. This is the beauty of common stories. They are meeting grounds, even if we disagree on which parts of the narrative are fact or fiction.

  THE STORIED QUESTION

  This is a conversation among scholars, but it is also a conversation in the Church and in society. Origins is not merely a technical topic of academic curiosity alone. It, instead, brings us to one of the grand questions: What does it mean to be human?

  A recent science fiction series, Altered Carbon, envisions immortality in a fallen world. Technology stolen from angels severs the soul; the wealthy live forever by jumping from body to body. These fallen immortals rule over the rest of humanity in a truly evil system, the sort of evil that death prevents. Hundreds of bodies later, are they even human? Is death a gift or a curse in a fallen world?

  Quellcrist warns us, “Death was the ultimate safeguard against the darkest angels of our nature. Now the monsters among us will own everything, consume everything, control everything.” Hundreds of bodies later, are they even human?

  Then there is Battlestar Galactica, a futuristic exploration of our past. Commander Adama foreshadows adam of the adamah. The odyssey ends in a providential fall from heaven, into the speculative narrative of this book. Origins is timeless, a living part of our inheritance, continually inviting us into the questions of the human condition.

  A distinctive feature of the human condition is to be lost in contemplation of what it means to be human. This contemplation motivates all great art, literature, and philosophy. As far as we know, neither chimpanzees nor gorillas are in contemplation of “what it means to be chimpanzee” or “what it means to be gorilla.” This feature of humans is . . . very peculiar.16

  Awareness of ancestry might be unique to humans too. Killer whales and elephants form maternal multigenerational communities, in which grandmothers recognize their grandchildren. The connection between grandfathers and grandchildren, however, might be uniquely human. My two-year-old son spent Thanksgiving with my father months before he died last year. My son may one day share photos of their time together with his children, my grandchildren. We are aware of the long chain of ancestry that gives rise to us, a chain that might continue on long after us. This is what it means to be human . . . but only just in part.

  The grandness of the question unsettles simple answers. Origins, nonetheless, brings us here. Let us wonder together who Adam and Eve could have been. What might it mean to be human?

  I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

  C. S. LEWIS, “BLUSPELS AND FLALANSFERES”

  APPENDIX

  EVIDENCE AND THE RESURRECTION

  This article was first published Easter of 2017, on the website of the Veritas Forums, then again on Easter of 2018. I am often asked by my colleagues about evidence I see for the Resurrection. This is how I explain it to them. I am grateful to Sean McDowell for generously offering his expertise and advice on the content of this article.

  SCIENCE IS FULL OF TRUST-LIKE FAITH. We believe grand, counterintuitive things because we trust the accounts of trustworthy sources.

  Mass is energy. Time slows with gravity and acceleration. The earth moves around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Two black holes merged 1.3 billion years ago, sending gravitational waves through space that arrived last year at LIGO. In principle, this is all reproducible, but just in principle. If we personally verified and reproduced every experiment ourselves, science would grind to a complete halt. Yes, we emphasize evidence. But we usually trust the scientific consensus. Yes, we are skeptical and regularly challenge accepted theories. But we usually trust other scientists’ reports of what they have seen.

  I am a scientist. Still, on Easter, I celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead about two thousand years ago. This event, in first-century Palestine, is the cornerstone of everything. In the same way that trust-like faith in science is connected to evidence, so is the faith I have in the Resurrection.

  What is the evidence from which grew my trust? A brief and incomplete outline is included here.1 This evidence is not an answer, but it raises the question. All we need is curiosity.

  1. Without the physical resurrection, two thousand years of history are left begging for explanation, like a movie missing a key scene. No other event in all recorded history has reached so far across national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, political, and geographic borders. The message spread with unreasonable success across the world. During just the first few centuries, it spread without political or military power, prevailing against the ruthless efforts of dedicated, organized, and violent opposition. How did a small band of disempowered Jews in an occupied and insignificant territory of ancien
t Rome accomplish this unequaled act?2 What happened so many years ago that reframed all human history?

  2. With dates established by radiometric analysis, prophecies from centuries before Jesus’ birth predict his life, death, and resurrection.3 The great scientist Blaise Pascal identifies this as the tangible proof for people who want evidence that God exists. These prophecies include specific details that Jesus and his followers could not control. For example, before the Romans invented crucifixion, Psalm 22:16 described the piercing of Jesus’ hands and feet. Isaiah 53 is a particularly important prophecy that lays out the story of Jesus and the meaning of the Resurrection (Is 52:13–53:12). Is this evidence of an Intelligence outside our time confirming Jesus’ authority?

  3. Jesus was a real person in history who died by crucifixion. A range of sources, including Jewish and Roman writers, describe a man named Jesus who lived and was executed.4 Specific details reported about his execution confirm “blood and water” spilled from a spear wound in his side. He really died and was not merely unconscious.5

  4. The early accounts of the Resurrection and prophecies predicting it were reliably transmitted through history. As of 2017, more than 66,000 early biblical manuscripts and scrolls can be documented, orders of magnitude more than other ancient texts. Many are carbon dated to before Jesus’ time on earth and the first few centuries after. We see accounts nearly unaltered in the earliest manuscripts.6 A pattern of consistency emerges. There are variations in the manuscripts, but nothing invalidates the reliability of the Resurrection accounts.

  5. Accounts of the Resurrection include inconvenient and unflattering details, which make most sense as attempts to reliably record what had happened, free from embellishment. They do not fit expectations of a fabricated account. For example, women are the first witnesses of the Resurrection. In a patriarchal culture that considered the testimony of a man far more valuable than that of a woman, this detail is surprising. Likewise, all the disciples, the leaders of the early Church, flee in fear and confusion when Jesus is arrested.

  6. After Jesus’ violent death, his followers were frightened and scattered. Then, something happened that grew a strong, bold, and confident belief that resisted sustained, murderous opposition. Unlike other movements with executed leaders, once the disciples came back together, they did not replace Jesus with one of his family members. Their resistance was entirely nonviolent and devoid of political power. Yet they were all suddenly willing to die for their belief that they had seen the risen Jesus. What changed them? Why was there not evidence at the time to undermine their belief?7 What convinced them that Jesus was inconceivably greater than his family?

  7. More than just a fact about our past, the Resurrection creates a connection to God that is perceived by people from all times, cultures, socioeconomic statuses, personalities, and metal capacities, across the last two thousand years of history. Its reach includes some of the most famous scientists: Blaise Pascal, Johann Kepler, Robert Boyle, Gregor Mendel, Asa Gray, Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and Francis Collins. Is this unmatched reach and influence a sign of a living God working his purpose in history?8

  Some of the evidence here is established by scientific methods. For example, radiocarbon dating demonstrates that Isaiah 53’s prediction that Jesus “see the light of life” after dying was written at least one hundred years before his birth. However, the question of Jesus gently beckons us out from science’s limits, into a reality where love, beauty, goodness, and relationships are real. In the question of the empty tomb, science itself reaches its hard limit. It points to something beyond itself.

  1. The Resurrection is God’s direct, supernatural action in a specific physical event in history. The obvious finality of physical death (both in modern science and to the ancient world) serves to highlight the role of God in this moment. We never consider God’s action in science, so we cannot even ask the question without opening our minds to things beyond science.9

  2. The entire Christian faith hinges on the physical resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor 15:14, 17), but no “resurrection mechanism” for science to study is proposed. As a mechanism-free singular event that defies all natural laws, we are well outside science’s ability to adjudicate facts and understand evidence.

  3. The question of the Resurrection is more like an opportunity to fall in love than a scientific inquiry. There is evidence, but the Resurrection cannot be studied dispassionately.10 If Jesus really rose from the dead, it reorders everything. Just like falling in love, it changes our view of the world.

  The final verdict, for me, is that the Resurrection makes sense through the lens of history. I find the Creator of all that science studies comes to us in this way. The evidence is compelling, but not definitive. Faith in Jesus is reasonable and is certainly not without evidence.

  So, we are left with an invitation. Will we too believe? Will we be curious? Will we respond with trust?

  Appendixes 2–5 are available at ivpress.com/the-genealogical-adam-and-eve.

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