Given my theological training and study and my background in science and teaching science, I have developed a real interest in human origins. One of the major sticking points in holding both science and the Bible to be true has been the historicity of Adam and Eve. Traditional understandings of them claim that they must have lived in the Middle East around five to ten thousand years ago and that they, and they alone, were the first humans and that all of us descend from them and only them originally. Furthermore, Adam and Eve were directly created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden. The entire Earth was idyllic.
Scientific understanding, however, is rather different. At no time in the last several hundred thousand years has the human population fallen to less than about ten thousand individuals. There is no way that we are all descended from only two individuals, especially two people who lived less than fifteen thousand years ago! Furthermore, rather than being a direct creation by God, humans and great apes share a common descent from ancestors who lived several million years ago. The Earth has always been pretty much as we know it today as far as weather, climate systems, biological and geological processes.
So how should we deal with these conflicting claims? Some will jettison the understanding in my first paragraph above, and others will jettison the second. There are other solutions which involve God picking a pair of evolved people and dealing with them in a special way. But all of these solutions run into the problem that humans today are not descended from only two people at any point in time.
So along comes a book, The Genealogical Adam & Eve by S. Joshua Swamidass. Dr. Swamidass proposes that both the ideas of science and the traditional understandings of the Bible are true. How?
The first thing that we need to realize is that we are descended from people that we have no DNA from. That is, they are genealogical ancestors, but not genetic ancestors. The amount of DNA that is passed along is cut in half every generation, until finally a given DNA piece that you have will vanish from nearly all of your descendants. That is what makes doing DNA tests interesting, but frustrating. You are related to people that you share no genes with.
Now, given this fact (which the author explains in detail), we can be descended from people that we have no genes from. When, though, could these people have lived? The author explains mathematical models that show that all people alive in the first century AD could very well (and almost certainly are) descended from a pair of people alive a few thousand years before, and that if they lived in the Middle East, it is even more likely. He deals with objections such as genetic isolation in the Americas, and in Australia and Tasmania, showing that it is likely that even these people are not as isolated as one might think and that these people too are likely descended from a pair of people who lived a few thousand years ago. The rest of humanity at Adam and Eve's time would have been descended from animals.
Now, there is no scientific way of proving that this pair existed and who they were, but there is no scientific way of proving that they did not, and in fact it is likely that they did exist.
Dr. Swamidass has thus shown that both positions could very well be true. This has a lot of interesting ramifications.
First, Adam and Eve are now a theological "problem" rather than a scientific one.
Second, what are the theological questions that follow?
There are a lot of them, and the author answers some of them in more details, but for most of them, he lays out the questions in the hope that others will fill in the questions or add to the discussions that will hopefully follow. (See his website here)
What is the relationship between Adam's contemporaries and God? The author differentiates between biological humans and "textual" humans.
What is the nature of the "Fall"? How does sin affect biological humans who are not textual humans? How is sin transmitted?
How do we deal with texts that appear to teach that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of all people of all time?
How does this affect the Atonement and our understanding of what Jesus did and why he came?
Not everyone thinks that this approach solves the problems; see this review for example. But I think that Dr. Swamidass' approach opens many doors for fruitful discussion and thought. Has he solved the questions that are raised, theologically and textually? No. But I think that he has shown that one can hold to both a traditional understanding of Adam and Eve and to a scientific understanding of the origins of humanity.
Hans Madueme, the author of the review I linked to in the paragraph above, holds to the traditional understanding of the Genesis text. I don't think that he deals with the scientific problems in his review. He critiques Swamadass on the basis of Biblical texts that appear to indicate that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of all humans everywhere, every when. Madueme is unwilling to re-examine his traditional understanding of the text in the light of genetic and evolutionary evidence that points against it.
Is it time to re-examine our understanding of the text, just as our spiritual ancestors did in a shift away from a geo-centric model of the solar system and universe?
