Becoming Adam Podcast – Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ

Easter 2020. The churches are empty, and the shadow of death hangs over our land. Have we, as a society, lost something that we’ll never recover?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

Easter

2020. The churches are empty, and the shadow of death hangs over our land. As

Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve

got till it’s gone….” Have we, as a society, lost something that we’ll never recover?

I hope not, but trauma changes people. None of us will emerge from this

experience the same. It’s my prayer that this enforced time apart makes everyone

realize the value of time spent together. Our God brings life from death. Evil

shall not have the last word. So, for Easter 2020, I offer a selection from my forthcoming

e-book, The Anointed. This episode merges the resurrection narratives from all

four gospels into one story. I pray that Christ, the risen Lord, might breath

his Spirit onto this valley of dry bones and grant us revival. Amen.

Chapter 31

The Death of Death

As

dawn broke on the first day of the week, an angel of the Lord appeared at the

tomb. The ground shook as violently as the guards themselves, and the angel

rolled away the stone and sat upon it. His face was radiant like lightning, and

his clothes were white like snow. The guards, for their part, were so paralyzed

by fear that they appeared to be dead.

About

this time, the Galilean women – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James,

Salome, and Joanna – had set off for the tomb with the spices they had prepared

for anointing the body of Jesus. As they neared the spot, they began to wonder

aloud, “Who will move the stone for us?” Although the sun had crept above the

horizon, the hillside tomb was enveloped in shadowy gloom when they saw that

the stone already had been moved, although it was extremely large. They stepped

inside and saw that the body of the Lord Jesus was gone.[i]

Mary

Magdalene ran to find Simon Peter and John. “They’ve taken the Lord out of the

tomb,” she reported to them breathlessly, “and we don’t know where they’ve laid

him.”[ii]

While

the other women waited in confusion, suddenly two young men appeared in clothes

that gleamed like lightning! The women were terrified and bowed down to the

ground in awe.

“Don’t

be afraid,” one of the angels said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene,

who has been crucified. Why do you seek the Living One among the dead? Remember

what he told you while he was still in Galilee? He said the Son of Man must be

handed over to sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

He isn’t here. He has risen just as he said. Look! Here’s the place where they

laid him.”

While Jesus’ words flooded back to

the women, the angel continued, “Go quickly and tell his

disciples and Peter: ‘He has risen from the dead, and he will precede you into

Galilee and see you there, just as he said to you.’ Observe what I have told

you.”

The

women practically fled from the scene, trembling in astonishment and joy. Yet

they were gripped by fear, as well, and said nothing to anyone because of it.[iii]

After

receiving Mary Magdalene’s report, Peter and John rushed to investigate. The

two ran together, but John was faster and arrived first.

Like any human enterprise, culture can serve as a vehicle for good or evil. What of our culture? The values modeled by those in power give us a clue.... In Part 3 of Adam’s Evolutionary Journey, I said, “Human beings are indoctrinated into sin at the same time and in the same way that we learn language … and music, and art, and conformity to social norms, all of which are aspects of human culture. Mimesis and enculturation explain how ‘original sin’ arose and continues to be propagated.”

Culture, in my view, serves as the vehicle for sin, but that doesn’t mean culture is sinful and nothing but sinful. Like any human enterprise, culture can be good or evil. Literature, music, and art aren’t evil, but people can use them to propagate evil.

Was Adam directly created from dust and placed in a sinless, deathless paradise? If so, how does he represent me before God? What does a perfect man in a perfect environment have in common with anyone?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

Our focus in this

episode is original sin and the Fall, which we’ll view through the eyes of an

often-neglected source, Soren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard is

most famous for his concept of the “leap of faith.” The phrase is often taken

to mean that Christians believe in God without evidence, but that’s a

misunderstanding. In Kierkegaard’s thought, “the leap is the category of decision.”

Faith, for Kierkegaard, is much more than intellectual agreement with Christian

doctrine. He regards faith as a passionate commitment to follow Christ, despite

the paradox of the incarnation and the affront of the crucifixion. Only from

that lived experience do we discover true knowledge of God. In the language of

common sense, the proof is in the pudding.

What’s less well

known about Kierkegaard is that he also viewed original sin as a “leap,” for it

too belongs to the category of decision. In The Concept of Anxiety, he

explored the question of whether original sin is identical to “the first sin,

Adam’s sin, the Fall.” [1]

His interest was not the bare fact that “sin came into existence, but how

it can come into existence.” In other words, why would Adam and Eve sin?

What could possibly motivate them to transgress?

A friend recently related a story about reading a picture Bible to his 6-year-old daughter, and after Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden for eating the fruit, she blurted out, “I just wish Adam and Eve hadn’t done that.” Kierkegaard refused to accept her verdict. It minimizes our own guilt, and it divorces Adam and Eve from the rest of humanity.

In the first paragraph of his treatise, Kierkegaard complains that traditional conceptions of original sin introduce “a fantastic assumption, a state which by its loss involved the Fall.” What was that state? Most of us have heard it from childhood: Adam and Eve were created perfect and lived in a sinless, deathless paradise. Everyone agrees that such a situation doesn’t exist today, but as Kierkegaard pointed out, the theologians “forgot that the doubt was a different one, namely, whether it ever had existed — and that was pretty clearly necessary if one were to lose it. The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside. Pious sentiment and fantasy got what it desired — a godly prelude — but thought got nothing.”

The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside. Pious sentiment and fantasy got what it desired — a godly prelude — but thought got nothing. Soren Kierkegaard

Consider the fantastic

ways literal Adam has been portrayed. The prominent Young-Earth Creationist Ken

Ham says the garden was perfect, without thorns or thistles, and Adam’s work

there was “pure joy.” Moreover, Adam didn’t have to learn to speak, and he had

no trouble remembering all the names he gave the animals, since he was “much more

intelligent than we are.” Ham claims Adam possessed every talent possible

rolled into one person. Adam was a brilliant artist, a musical prodigy, and a mathematical

genius with a photographic memory. [2]

From the other end

of the spectrum, Catholic theologians have heaped even greater superlatives on

Adam’s head. Writing on the

Are there any parallels between the political context 2,000 years ago and our own sad situation today?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

Since everyone is

obsessed with politics this week, the time seemed right for another episode of

Becoming Christ. As I mentioned in the first episode, to understand Jesus, we must enter his

story and view him through the eyes of his first-century audience. Seeing Jesus

as they saw him requires historical context – the political, economic, social,

and cultural factors that shaped Christ’s world. Today, I’ll examine the

political context.

Under normal

circumstances, I would follow this essay with a bit of commentary on how it

affects our understanding of the life of Christ. But the times aren’t normal,

are they? So, instead, I’ll reverse the order and note a few parallels between

the political climate 2,000 years ago and our present sad situation.

First, Israel was firmly in the grip

of messianic fever in the first century. Popular beliefs about the Messiah ran

the gamut, but they primarily centered on earthly and political hopes for a

king who would defeat Israel’s enemies and rule the world. When Pilate asked

Jesus if he was king of the Jews, Jesus replied that his kingdom was not of

this world (John 18:33-36). Christ rejected the people’s desire for political,

earthly power, and the false messiahs who promised those things ultimately led

their followers to death and destruction.

Christian, where do you place your hope? Is it an earthly, political deliverance you seek?

Second, notice how often the “divine

king” threatens the existence of God’s people, from Antiochus Epiphanes to

Caesar Augustus to Nero. The gospels present the “good news” of Jesus Christ,

the Son of God, as an alternative to the cult of emperor worship. The charge

above the cross was “King of the Jews,” and the crowd taunted Jesus to “come

down from there, if you’re the Son of God.” Two of Christ’s temptations in the

desert were earthly power and the abuse of his authority as God’s Son.

Christian, which king do you worship?

Finally, pay attention to the severe

factionalism between the Pharisees and Sadducees. More than once, their

political rivalry and theological disagreements resulted in bloodshed and civil

war. The Zealots appeared in the first century, preaching that paying taxes to

the emperor was a form of slavery. Tax collectors stood at the opposite end of

the social and political spectrum. They were collaborators with Rome, and their

regular contact with Gentiles made them “untouchable” for observant Jews. A

regular charge against Jesus was that he was a “friend of tax collectors and

sinners.” The fact that Jesus names Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax

collector among his apostles negates politics.

Christian, your primary allegiance is

not to faction or nation, but to Christ and his kingdom. Never let yourself

become confused on that question.

By

the time of Jesus’ birth, his homeland of Palestine had been bandied about for

eight centuries by successive empires: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia

(Alexander the Great), and Rome.

Assyria

wiped the northern kingdom of Israel off the map in 722 BC, as Babylon did to

the southern kingdom of Judah almost 150 years later.

Where is God in the evolutionary process? Did he just start the universe with the Big Bang and then step back?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

Before my unexpected “vacation” due to flu, one of my podcast listeners had asked for clarity on my series, Adam’s Evolutionary Journey. “After listening to Episode 3,” she wrote, “I was left feeling a little empty. Where is God in the evolutionary process? Did he just start the universe with the Big Bang and then step back?”

Good question! My short answer is that God guided evolution

at every step along the way. Now for the long answer …

A couple of years ago, the Discovery Institute mined its

scholarly depths to put together a 1,000-page book called Theistic Evolution.

For those of you who may be new to the origins discussion, Discovery is the

self-described hub of the Intelligent Design movement, and Theistic Evolution is

the belief that God used the process of evolution to create all living things, including

us. These days, most who hold that belief prefer the term “Evolutionary Creation,”

which Denis Lamoureux coined in his 2008 book of the same name. According to Lamoureux,

the noun “creation” should receive more emphasis than the adjective

“evolutionary,” and I agree. Unlike Theistic Evolution, the emphasis in

Evolutionary Creation is upon the Creator, not upon the process.

I also prefer Evolutionary Creation for another reason – one

that comes out clearly in the Discovery Institute book. Like any general term, Theistic

Evolution has been used to describe a range of positions, but in Discovery’s

book Wayne Grudem gives it a definition that few Christians would accept.

Namely, he says,

“God created matter and after that

did not guide or intervene or act directly to cause any empirically detectable

change in the natural behavior of matter until all living things had evolved by

purely natural processes” (Grudem, 67).

Strictly speaking, this “hands-off” description of God has

more in common with 17th-18th century deism than with Christianity.

A deist would agree that a supreme being exists, but after setting everything

in motion, the creator then allowed the universe to run its course without

interference. God is a disinterested observer, in other words. Creation thus

becomes an infinitely complex course of dominoes that God set up “in the

beginning,” and once he tipped over the first, nothing else was necessary to

achieve his ultimate end. To be fair, a few Christians do believe that God “front-loaded”

everything into his initial act of creation, and afterward didn’t need to be

involved. But in my experience, I’ve found them so few and far between as to be

negligible. Grudem’s “hands-off” definition of Theistic Evolution certainly

doesn’t describe the vast majority of Evolutionary Creationists. And since the

rest of Theistic Evolution bases its critique on Grudem’s flawed

foundation, the result is a 1000-page doorstop.

God could have pressed an infinite number of levers to influence the direction of evolution, and almost all of them would be indiscernible or unprovable.

The Discovery Institute’s main problem is that its pet

theory – Intelligent Design – attempts to prove that evolution exhibits signs

of design, which implies a designer. Of course, all thinking Christians agree

that God had a plan and purpose for creating, but can that fact be proven? To

do so, one would have to find evidence of God’s intervention, which explains

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

Last week, I introduced the Becoming Christ aspect of the

website, which draws from my forthcoming e-book The Anointed. In this episode, the time seemed right to share a bit

of my personal journey. I hope it will shed some light on the book and the

direction I’m headed. Since this essay is mostly personal, I’ll forego the

usual footnotes and references.

My formative years were spent in ultra-conservative

Amarillo, Texas, during the 1970s. My family faithfully attended a Methodist

church down the street from our house, and this being the ’70s, we piled into

the car and drove to the end of the block to get there, rain or shine.

I had a children’s storybook Bible as a child, but my

interest was confined to the pictures. Even then, I couldn’t wrap my mind

around the story of Noah. I’d been to the San Diego Zoo and watched nature

shows on PBS. How did Noah get elephants, lions, rhinos, and giraffes onto the

Ark? It made no sense to me, so I mentally checked out whenever the subject of

the flood came up in Sunday School.

Around the age of 12, I was snooping in my parents’ bedroom

and discovered a book in my dad’s nightstand – Good News for Modern Man. This was one of the first “everyday

English” translations of the Bible, and at that time it was New Testament only.

I snuck the book out every morning and put it back every afternoon until I’d

read the entire thing on the sly. Afterward, to the shock of everyone in our small

congregation (including my parents), I grabbed my little sister’s hand at the

end of a service and said, “Let’s get baptized.”

My baptismal picture with my little sister, LeeAnn, in 1974. Wide white belt and big cuffs. ’70s rule, baby!

The next book I stole from my dad set the tone for my teens

and twenties. The Late, Great Planet

Earth was published in 1970 and went on to become “the No. 1 non-fiction

bestseller of the decade,” according to The

New York Times. I found it in ’74 or

so and was immediately “caught up” (forgive the pun) in its vision of rapture,

tribulation, Armageddon, and Christ’s return to a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.

It took years for me to outgrow this warped take on the “end times,” but one principle

from the book stuck with me: Interpret

literally unless you’re forced to interpret symbolically.

Armed with that litmus test, the now-disgraced duo of Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler launched their conservative takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries.

Soon, another book cemented that same thought in the

evangelical consciousness. In 1976 the editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell, authored his infamous Battle for the Bible. Lindsell claimed

liberal theology was undermining the Scripture and would destroy the church.

While inerrancy had previously been a matter of opinion rather than a doctrine,

even among evangelicals, Lindsell argued that the Bible “does not contain error

of any kind,” even (or especially!) in its references to history, cosmology, and

science. Furthermore, any Christian who didn’t agree with this fundamentalist

definition of inerrancy was not a “true Christian.”

Lindsell named names and took no prisoners in his crusade to

expose “liberal theology” in evangelical seminaries and denominations. The next

year, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy was formed, and in 1978

it brought together 200 evangelical scholars, theologians, and pastors to draft

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

We’re starting the New Year with a new subject – Jesus the Anointed. I hope everyone noticed that the website’s full name is “Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ.” The first half of that equation describes how God used evolution to create humanity, but when we chose evil rather than good, we were alienated from him. “Becoming Christ” is the Lord’s answer to our predicament. Jesus offers a second chance to everyone, a “new birth” into the life of the Spirit. We can choose to remain spiritually dead, or we can choose to follow Jesus and become like him.

In

the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my

disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Intellectual

certainty doesn’t come first. The “abiding” – or “living out” – of Christ’s

word as a disciple comes first, and from that lived experience comes confidence

in Jesus and the truth of his teaching. Follow, and you will know. The proof is

in the pudding, not in reading the recipe.

With that, I hope you enjoy this audio sneak preview of my forthcoming e-book, The Anointed. The introduction follows, but the story itself is podcast only for now.

Living

in a predominantly Christian culture, all of us – even those of us who don’t

identify as Christian – think we know who Jesus is. We grew up decorating Christmas

trees, singing carols, and watching Charlie Brown specials. Many of us attended

church as children; others were dragged there as adults by well-meaning friends

or relatives. People knock on our doors to “witness” to us, promise us on TV

that Jesus will solve our financial problems, and accost us on the street with

invitations to “accept” Jesus into our hearts. Our politicians vie for Jesus’

endorsement, our athletes credit him with their victories, and, of course, we

suffer the daily parade of social media posts purporting to inform us of Christ’s

opinion on every political issue of the day. We are so saturated with God-talk

and Jesus-speak that it obscures our vision like a fog.

Consider

this my small contribution toward dissipating that fog. Christianity can’t be

understood apart from Jesus, but few of us seem inclined to dust off the Bible,

if we own one, and discover him for ourselves. In any case, why should we? We

already know the story. We’ve absorbed it by osmosis.

We are so saturated with God-talk and Jesus-speak that it obscures our vision like a fog.

Such

vague, second-hand knowledge of Jesus is not confined to the atheist, the

agnostic, the skeptic, or the seeker; it extends across vast swaths of those

who say they are his followers. Exacerbating the problem is that when people do

attempt to read the gospels, they encounter numerous barriers. Should they make

it past the uninviting “Bible format,” they still must grapple with a foreign

culture 2,000 years removed.

My

intent, then, is twofold: to present the story of Jesus in a new context, and to

remove barriers that prevent people from understanding that story. To that end,

I’ve paraphrased the four gospel accounts into one narrative that sounds and

feels like a modern biography, making it more accessible to present-day readers.

To

see Jesus afresh, we must enter his story and view him through the eyes of those

who first encountered him; we must attempt to see as they saw and hear as they

heard. We gain such access through the door of “historical context” – the

political,

Biologist Joshua Swamidass claims the ‘fall’ took place as recently as 4000 BC. Are murder, cannibalism, magic, and idolatry not sinful?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

In my previous

review of Genealogical Adam & Eve,

I focused mainly on the scientific problems with the book. Specifically, the isolation

of Tasmania adds at least 10,000 years to the scenario, so if author Joshua

Swamidass wants to be honest with the science, he should quit proclaiming 6,000

years ago as a “likely” date for his genealogical Adam & Eve. The earliest “likely”

point they could be inserted into history is about 14,000 BC, and even that

date is fraught with unknowns.

I also

complained that Swamidass qualifies almost every claim into oblivion. After

spending an entire chapter arguing strenuously against the fact of Tasmanian

isolation, he informs us that it really doesn’t matter, since “nearly universal

ancestry by AD 1 may be sufficient” (78). What?! Does this mean Aboriginal

Tasmanians weren’t affected by the “fall”? Were they without sin until the

Europeans arrived, bringing Adam’s sin on board like a stowaway?

I’ll

return to those questions later, but they highlight the biggest problems with Genealogical Adam & Eve, which are

the “fall” and original sin. In the final chapters of the book, Swamidass

attempts to “synthesize the discussion in the first two parts of the book into

a theological experiment” (172) that will dramatize the “fall” and original sin.

But true to form, by the time the reader arrives at the end of the discussion,

Swamidass qualifies everything. He says his “proposal is only tentative and can

be replaced or adjusted” (199). That doesn’t undo the damage. The proposal as

it stands suffers from special pleading on Tasmania, selective evidence on

pre-fall humanity, and circular logic overall. The only option is to replace it,

preferably with something more historically credible and parsimonious.

Swamidass

introduces his theological experiment as “a recovery, not a revision, of the

traditional account of human origins.” This sentence stopped me in my tracks.

In the traditional understanding of the church, Adam and Eve are the first

humans. In fact, I’m not sure how anyone can read Genesis 1-2 and not recognize

those chapters as a description of God’s creation of humanity. Evangelical

theologian Jack Collins goes so far as to say that “to stay within the bounds

of sound thinking … (we) should see Adam and Eve at the headwaters of the human

race.” [1]

Genealogical Adam and Eve arrive about 200,000 years too late to fit that bill.

Before

Young-Earth Creationism experienced a resurgence in the 1970s, the “Gap Theory”

was the primary way that literal interpreters tried to square the creation

account with deep time and the vastness of space. The Gap Theory posited that

Gen. 1:1 describes God’s creation of the universe over billions of years, but that creation was destroyed in some sort

of catastrophe. Starting with verse 2, the rest of the Genesis 1 tells of God’s

re-creation of the universe, which he

accomplishes in six literal days. The Gap Theory fell into disfavor for obvious

reasons, but Genealogical Adam and Eve represents the same idea. This time, the

gap falls between Gen. 2:4 and 2:5, and the time span is hundreds of thousands

of years instead of billions. Genesis 1 relates how God created all of humanity

Can the ‘fall’ be an actual event in human history? Is ‘original sin’ something real, or just a Christian fairytale?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

This is the third of three episodes giving a broad overview of the concepts behind Becoming Adam. In the first installment, we identified two controlling metaphors and three “points of contact” in Genesis for scientific exploration. The controlling metaphors were “the man,” ha’adam, as an archetype, and the human journey from childhood to maturity, while our themes were language, morality, and relationship. The second episode outlined the scientific narrative, which showed that the human brain evolved along a path similar to what we see in childhood development, and the same held true for language and morality. What’s more, both language and morality rest upon a foundation of empathy and cooperation, not individual competition. From an evolutionary perspective, this seems odd, to say the least.

Now, we’ll place Genesis and evolution in dialogue and see what results from the conversation. Remember, the goal of this quest is not to allow science to dictate the interpretation of the Bible, nor is it to naively overlay the ancient text onto contemporary science. As William Brown cautioned, the connections are “virtual parallels” between the scientific and biblical narratives. Although these parallels include some historical as well as conceptual “points of contact” between science and Genesis, I assume the ancient author was ignorant of current science. Thus, in addition to these harmonies I’ll also note a few of the discords between science and Scripture.

With those guardrails in place, let’s get started.

The structural metaphor that MORAL KNOWLEDGE = COMING OF AGE is immediately grasped by every human being in every culture, and in Genesis 2–3 it’s applied to the “the man” and “the woman” to create literary archetypes in a figurative text. The same conceptual journey from childhood to maturity resurfaces throughout Scripture, but it becomes especially prominent in the New Testament. There, the Greek τέλειος (teleios) does double duty. It can describe the final state of consummation as “perfect” or “complete,” but it also can describe the partial realization of that goal in “mature” Christian life here and now. [1] By his choice of metaphor in the garden narrative, has the author primed us for an evolutionary understanding of human origins?

Considering the “fall,” our ancestors 300,000 years ago certainly weren’t sinless. When we realize that the “innocence” of the immature human race was ignorance instead of perfection, it’s easy to understand how early humans, like children, could commit sins of ignorance, yet God could overlook those offenses without violating his own justice. Even human societies—imperfect as they are—don’t hold toddlers accountable for breaking the law. Just like the rest of us, “the man” was never perfect. That explains why the serpent appears in the garden without warning in Gen. 3:1. It’s described as “more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” Notice that the serpent is “one of God’s animals,” not a supernatural being. This implies a “natural” origin of sin. It wasn’t introduced from the outside by Satan. Sin has been present with us from the beginning, even in Eden. Evil wove its way into the warp and woof of human culture long before we learned to give it a name.

The “fall” transpired at a literal time and place: somewhere between humanity’s migration to Ethiopia 75,000 years ago and the departure from the Levant and across the globe 10,000 years later.

Such a

scenario does not make God the origin of evil.

Computational biologist Joshua Swamidass says a literal Adam & Eve could have lived as recently as 6,000 years ago. Tasmania says otherwise.

Listen or Read. Your Choice

Today, I’ll hit “pause” on Adam’s Evolutionary Journey to review a new book by computational biologist S. Joshua Swamidass, The Genealogical Adam and Eve.

What does genealogy have to do with Adam and Eve? Simply, it

allowed them to become everyone’s “parents” without requiring them to be the

first humans. In the “genealogical Adam” scenario, God created Adam from dust

and Eve from his rib and placed them in the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia 6,000

years ago. After being expelled from the garden, Adam and Eve then had children

who interbred with the already existing population, and eventually they became

related to everyone on Earth by lines on a family tree, rather than by Eve – “the

mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20) – giving birth to the human race.

If that sounds needlessly complicated, it is. “It’s a neat

parlour mathematical trick,” population geneticist Graham Coop said on Twitter,

but “saying that this reconciles science with the idea of Adam and Eve sweeps a

lot of stuff under a very patchy, ugly carpet.” Coop is correct. Genealogical Adam and Eve solves none of

the actual problems posed by a literal Adam and Eve.

Since this is a book review, I suppose I should start by mentioning

something about the author’s style before we dive into the substance. His prose

is serviceable, but reading the book felt more like a chore than a pleasure.

Swamidass repeats himself frequently, and he seems determined not to make a

claim without qualifying it six ways from Sunday. On page 10, for example, he

states his “precise and testable hypothesis, consistent with Scripture,” but

immediately we discover that “the details are flexible.” Maybe Adam was directly

created by God, maybe not. Maybe he lived in the Middle East, maybe somewhere

else. Maybe the garden was a supernatural, perfect environment, maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe those “outside the garden” are made in God’s image, maybe they’re not. To

this reviewer, the hypothesis seems designed to make a literal Adam and Eve

unfalsifiable, not “precise and testable.” In science, I believe that’s called

an ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis.

On to the substance. The foundations of Genealogical Adam and Eve rest on a single paper from 2004, “Modelling the Recent Common Ancestry of All Living Humans.”[1] The authors used the genealogical phenomenon of pedigree collapse to estimate the most recent common ancestor for everyone alive today. Since formulas can’t simulate real-world human mating and migration patterns, the authors constructed a simulation program to model the historical world population from 20,000 B.C. to the present. (Think The Sims on steroids.) After running the program countless times and analyzing the “lives” of 1.2 billion sims, the authors concluded that the most recent common ancestor likely lived around 1400 B.C, and by 5400 B.C. everyone alive was either a common ancestor to us all or had no descendants alive today. For religious reasons, Swamidass adds roughly 2,000 years to these dates to arrive at his estimate for Genealogical Adam and Eve, whom he places 6,000 years ago, magically fitting the timetable required by Young-Earth Creationism.

Baptist theologian Kenneth Keathley has said he considers

“genealogical Adam” one of just two available options for Old-Earth Creationists.

He also specified a scientific challenge to the hypothesis – th...