William Lane Craig & Joshua Swamidass • Was there a historical Adam & Eve?

[Music] hello and welcome along to today's edition of the program and if you're watching here on youtube do make sure to like today's video and subscribe to the channel to get more from the show and you can find more also with the info from today's show you can get hold of our newsletter and our regular podcast as well today on the program we're asking what can we know about the historical adam and eve the story of the creation of adam and eve in genesis is the first human couple is perhaps the foundational origin story of the bible but what sort of a story are we dealing with should christians treat the story purely figuratively or is it scientifically and historically plausible that humanity can be traced back to a first couple and if so how do we map that onto the genesis account well christian philosopher william lane craig's new book in quest of the historical adam is a biblical and scientific exploration of precisely these kinds of questions and today he joins me along with computational biologist joshua swamidas whose own book the genealogical adam and eve has sought to build a bridge of sorts between the creation account of the first couple and the genetic evidence for such an idea so i'm really pleased to have both joshua and bill joining me on the show today you've both been on the show many times before now but we'll um we'll introduce bill first of all bill tell us about this book and um what got you into the whole area of wanting to research the origins of adam and eve and the biblical and scientific aspect of all of this for years people have been urging me to write a systematic philosophical theology based upon my life's work and i realized that if i were to undertake such an ambitious project i would need to bone up in certain areas of systematic theology where i felt weak and one of those areas was theological anthropology for years i had basically been sweeping the question of the historical adam and eve and the whole primeval history of genesis 1 to 11 under the rug and not really dealing with it and i finally decided i needed to tackle this project head on and come to some sort of a resolution in my thinking with regard to the historical adam and so that was why for the last few years i've devoted myself intensively to this study and and we are the recipients of the you know the fruits of that now but well what what did you discover under the rug as it were did you come to any firm conclusions did you make any discoveries that shocked you in any way tell us tell us about that for me justin it was personally very rewarding with revelations of insight that came both biblically and scientifically biblically i came to see the first 11 chapters of genesis including the stories of adam and eve in the fall as belonging to a particular literary genre that has been called mytho history by eminent uh ancient assyriologists like torquil diakovson scientifically i came to appreciate the full humanity of neanderthal man he exhibited modern cognitive behaviors that are evident in the archaeological record which makes me unwilling to write neanderthals out of the human race and that meant that if adam and eve is to be the ancestral pair of all humanity we need to locate them in the most recent common ancestor of both neanderthals and homo sapiens not just homo sapiens and so those were insights that were brand new for me that were fresh uh and very meaningful as a result of this study and and would you say that your theology had to accommodate these new insights in some way did that have to to change in the process well i didn't know where i was going to wind up when i started this so this has been a very agonizing personal search wondering what i might have to give up theologically and in the introduction of the book i actually imagine a worst case scenario i say suppose it turns out that genesis teaches that there was a historical adam and eve and there really wasn't what does that imply for the inspiration of scripture what does that imply for the deity of jesus christ and his omniscience uh it it was frightening to contemplate the sort of theological revisions that might be necessary fortunately uh such revisions i believe do not need to be made yeah i want to add too that i mean the title of the book the title of the book is the quest for historical adam and i think quest is a great way to describe it it was it was a journey that i had i had a small privilege of being part of that conversation with you but i got to say i have a great deal of respect um for the courage that i think that bill really demonstrated in you know taking up this super controversial question where you know he he set out on a path and didn't know where it would lead um that that that that takes courage from leaders and and i saw that in him and and i think we need more of that type of courageous that type of courageous work well josh was a great guide to me especially in the early days as we were both attending conferences together on the historical adam and i got to know him personally and had such tremendous respect for his work in genetics that was another revelation that came out of this study a few years ago i visited trinity western university where my friend michael horner introduced me to dennis venema and venema argued that there could not have possibly been an original human pair from whom the human race descended that this was as certain as the fact that the sun is at the center of the solar system and that shook me i i wondered how am i going to deal with this and in the course of the study uh with josh's guidance i came to realize that in fact locating adam and eve where i wanted to as ancestral to neanderthals and homo sapiens the problem posed by population genetics just evaporates it just goes away there is no problem in having a primordial human pair who are the universal ancestors of mankind so that was an area where josh was of tremendous help to me i i wonder joshua if you could sketch that out for us then because that would be really helpful and this is obviously one of the key aspects of your own book which came out several people had um raised scientific uh questions about dennis work dennis fenima is an important scholar in particular because of his book adam and the genome and he really had biologos as stamp of approval they really promote his work right and his book was really summarizing biologosis position over the last decade but several people had raised uh scientific concerns about his work um but were being really um neglected i i i'm probably distinct for being the only one who at the time was connected to biologos and i found myself in a little bit of a whistleblower situation there um which was complex and that's another story but for those who aren't familiar with with all of this already so just give us a sense of what this position is that venoma and biologos yeah so he argues that um that and biologos position for a very long time has been that you know any idea of monogenesis the idea that we all descend from adam and eve um and also de novo creation that's not important to bill but for other people any idea of that is really in conflict with with the scientific evidence that they actually were claiming that you know the mainstream consensus actually has evidence that says this and i think that's part of what made their argument so so forceful is that they were claiming that this is just established science but the issue was that they actually uh were really misrepresenting the consensus a lot you know it's hard to quantify exactly but perhaps even most of the things that they said in population genetics were real you know frank misrepresentations of the mainstream consensus so the critique that bill actually offers and explains in his book it is a critique of the science of biologos it's a critique of dennis venema but what's surprising about it is it's not an intelligent design id or creationist critique it's a mainstream science critique of of the position um and i think that's a really critical thing to understand here uh the the science here is not is actually aligned with mainstream science even though it is really a pushback against dennis venema and evolutionary creationists of biologos and okay since we're on this track already bill why don't you just explain why how you know you found obviously joshua's work and others um what it was exactly that gave you this insight that actually the population genetic kind of view was not necessarily the only game in town and actually there is a way of reconciling the first human couple with the genetics involved there were a series of conferences held at the carl henry center at trinity evangelical divinity school on creation and part of these were devoted to the question of the historicity of adam and eve and it was at these conferences that i first got to know josh and he gave a paper at the conference that um previewed his book the genealogical adam and eve and it stirred a lot of discussion and uh provoked a lot of interest yeah so to get to give a sense of how this is placing so my book is one critique of um of biologos's argument and it's really parsing out and saying you know actually genealogical ancestry is more important than genetics and if you do that adam name could have been very recent now bill his view is that maybe there were people outside the garden but they wouldn't have had full humanness like the way how he sees the theology is that humanness is full is like really exclusive to adam and eve's lineage where i'm not as convinced of that but that's neither here nor there um so he came with a different sort of questions about a more ancient time of about maybe 500 000 years ago to 700 000 years ago about how large did our the population of humans like what is genetics is telling us about that and the surprising thing is is that um although he was being told that population genetics tells us that the population of humans was never less than ten thousand that's just not true population genetics just talks about our ancestral population it doesn't talk about about uh about which of those ancestors are human that's the first thing but the other issue too is when you get back about you know five hundred thousand years ago seven hundred thousand years ago we don't really have good evidence to tell us how large our ancestral population size was um i mean bill so in the end you you felt i mean obviously we we don't have necessarily you know proof that there was a first human couple but in principle there's no barrier to there having been a first human couple that and did that help you bill in that sense to to start to reconcile the science and the the the genesis account oh it's very important to understand justin that for me as a christian theologian is the teaching of scripture that takes priority so you'll notice in this book in contrast to the venom mcknight book that i deal first not with the science but with scripture i want to read the scripture responsibly according to the literary genre to which it belongs apart from the input of modern science and it is only after determining whether or not scripture commits a faithful bible-believing christian to a historical adam that then when asked the question not is there evidence for such a person but rather is the existence of such a person incompatible with what the modern scientific evidence says and so that's why as josh says i just assume the current scientific paradigm um and ask is there anything in that paradigm that would be incompatible with thinking that adam and eve were members of the ancient hominin species homo heidelbergensis the last or most recent common ancestor of neanderthals homo sapiens and denisovans and there isn't any such evidence that would exclude that scientifically so one isn't appealing to science to try to prove the existence of the historical adam one is simply asking whether or not the biblical teaching that there was such a person is compatible with what contemporary science tells us so i think there's a good analogy here too about the relationship between theology and scripture and science right we all believe at least in this conversation that jesus rose from the dead physically right we believe that but do i have um genetic evidence to demonstrate this well no and it's almost a category error to think that i should um you know there's you know science just doesn't give us all the information it tells us some things and if i trust scripture and if i trust the historical record by other means outside of scripture even i can come to believe that jesus really rose from the dead even though genetics fundamentally just doesn't tell us either way and that's how it turns out to be with adam and eve that it's very very interesting i mean since we've got here now why didn't we talk about the particular way that you came to understand afresh the nature of the first chapters of genesis bill you know a lot of people you know go through this without necessarily investigating the science as well but but they're asking is it history is it poetry is it some sort of myth now you obviously spend some time sort of developing what we mean by myth anyway because it can cover a whole range of things um so so yeah to what what did you come to in the end just just elaborate on this this particular category that you described it as at the beginning of the show and and how you came to that conclusion i first became familiar with this through the old testament scholar and genesis commentator bill arnold who also spoke at these conferences where josh and i met and i had never heard this approach to genesis 1 to 11 before and it launched me into a study of these first 11 chapters and old testament literature on this genre as well as reading in the literature of folklore studies with respect to understanding what myth is in the folklorist sense a myth in the sense of that the folklorist uses the word does not mean a falsehood like the myth of a low-calorie diet or the myth of the self-made man the way we often use that word today for a folklorist a myth is a traditional sacred narrative told in a culture which attempts to ground that culture and its values in events in the deep primordial past and these myths will typically involve grand themes like the origin of the world the origin of humanity the flood and so forth and so the same sorts of grand themes that you find in genesis 1 to 11 are characteristic of other ancient mesopotamian myths now this does not i argue show borrowing on the part of ancient hebrews but what it does show is that it's the same kind of literature it it belongs to the genre of myth in the folklorist sense but it is also coupled with these genealogies that structure the primeval history and that shows a historical interest it tries to locate these events in ordinary causally connected human history and it was that feature that led this a syriologist talking diocletian to say that this is a unique kind of literature that he dubbed mytho history and i give around nine characteristics that one can use to identify um myth in ancient literature and genesis really fits the bill for those first 11 chapters and so i think that a very plausible case can be made that this is the correct literary analysis interestingly enough for your listeners i think this was an insight that c.s lewis had long ago lewis was a scholar of folklore and mythology and he recognized this genre in the first 11 chapters of genesis and i think he was quite right about that and a good number of old testament scholars recognize this as well and what's significant about this the bottom line is that this type of literature shouldn't be pressed for literalistic precision it uses figurative language and metaphor and images to communicate the deep theological truths so bill to reiterate and to clarify for leader readers so a lot of people have heard this before and then it ends with saying so adam and eve were just mythical people who were disfigured didn't exist in the past but you actually think there's a historical kernel yes you would even say that they are the genealogical ancestors of all of us in that sense it's a type of genealogical adam and eve and that's the difference between pure myth and what jakobson called mytho history we are dealing here with people that were real and actually lived see this is i think part of like the larger conversation around um bill's book that's going to grow up because i think that um i mean it's going to be really interesting and exciting to see how other scholars are engaged with it and how people church in the in the church do too because it's undeniable that there's aspects that kind of fit this mythical view in genesis or poetic some people have called it or um another way i think about it is it's almost kind of like a non-fiction comic book where we tend to think comic books are uh are have like fiction in them but this is a non-fiction common book so how do you figure out what is the part that's a figurative only versus the part that is figurative but also actually has a historical referent and there's going to be interesting debate about that and i think people are going to be really surprised about where bill lands on this but but i think that there's that's gonna be part of the fun of kind of hashing that out now bill you've probably already had push back anyway from a young earth creation sort of approach because you you obviously don't believe in an old age of the universe and everything else this in a sense though may well bring some criticism out from others who want a more kind of literalistic approach to those first 11 chapters of genesis they want to say no there really was a tower of babel and it really did happen in the way it did and there really was a global flood and there really was a uh you know and and that there was a garden and there was a snake and everything now are you saying that by and large we can assume that the majority of those kinds of details are are in that sense figurative they're they're there to tell us um something not necessarily of his historical fact but but but more about as some people say the the why god's you know ultimate purposes for humanity and that kind of thing yes that that's exactly correct that i don't think you should press the details to say that there was this literal tree with bark and leaves and branches that had magical fruit hanging from it that if you ate the fruit you would become immortal and to be clear that's you're saying that based on you're saying that based on hermeneutics not because of science right so it's not because science tells you that right right right yeah this is nothing to do with science uh this is to do with the hermeneutical question yeah exactly okay and and but but then if you like the you you do get these you know as you say genealogies that sort of evidently they want to place it in a kind of historical sense and that even though there is quite a difference between the kind of story you get from genesis 12 onwards of abraham and the people of israel nonetheless i think that it is very different but nonetheless you know there are genealogies that do sort of take it back to adam so what do you do with those what what how do you kind of understand that kind of a way of framing things these structure the primeval history they have been i think aptly compared to the the backbone of a vertebrate um the narrative is structured from beginning to end along these genealogies and i think that they show a historical interest on the part of the author that this isn't just pure mythology but that this is meant to be about real people and events um but it's important to understand that this is the genealogy of a mytho history a little mytho history that's less than two thousand years long between the creation of the world and the call of abraham just two thousand years even by ancient standards that would have been regarded as uh tiny as a blink of an eye and so again one doesn't want to press these for literality or to try to ask well are there gaps in the genealogies and how large of the gaps these are meant to be genealogies of this little tiny mytho history that is less than 2 000 years in length we're going to go to a quick break and um we'll come back on this and hear what joshua has to say as well um we're talking about the historical adam and eve and we'll sort of talk i think at some level as well as we go on about what can we assume jesus believed about adam and eve and does that sort of affect our theology as well and um and yeah and and how do we map this idea of this first couple you know first hominid couple that may well have existed uh and that we could all be descended from uh how do we sort of plug that into this figurative understanding of those early chapters of genesis so um we'll be back talking about this fascinating subject here on unbelievable very much a collegial discussion today you won't find any feisty uh debates uh there's it's it's more of a friendly discussion today on the show um but uh do stick with us we'll be back very shortly for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter welcome back to the second part of today's show really interesting one today uh the historical adam is what we're discussing it's the subject of william lane craig's new book in quest of the historical adam and today he joins me along with computational biologist joshua swamidas i'll make sure there are links to both of them from today's show so you can find their books um so so here's an interesting thing um the the question does it matter whether this first couple were if you like de novo created i.e literally made from the dust as the genesis account would say or they were you know essentially part of a ongoing evolutionary line of hominids and so on even if they were the first couple from which all humanity ultimately derives go ahead josh yeah i think i think this is one place where uh bill's book is going to be surprising from people and really interesting too to see how people respond to it uh bill uh you can clarify how you're thinking about it but you don't think that adam and eve had to have been born without parents de novo created before you explain that though i think what's going to be interesting is how biola university responds to this their their belief statement really is clear that they think that that's a critical belief the de novo christian of adam and eve you're on your own faculty there and i'm really curious to see how they respond uh to you basically coming out here saying that that you that you you don't you don't agree with them on this so can you explain why you don't agree and then also maybe uh kind of expose uh tell us what you think and once again i'd emphasize too that i think the reasons why i have nothing to do with science again this really just has to do with scripture right yes well let's understand the project that both josh and i are involved in because i think it's easily misunderstood josh has offered a hypothesis of a recent genealogical atom i've offered a hypothesis of an ancient genealogical atom now it would be incorrect say this is josh's view or this is craig's view we are offering these as hypotheses that we think are plausible given the scientific evidence but that's not to say that there aren't other hypotheses that are also plausible so as i indicated earlier with respect to adam and eve being descended from earlier hominin forms i accept that for the sake of seeing how an original human pair can be made to be compatible with the modern scientific paradigm but i don't defend that or propound that that's simply an assumption that is made for the sake of argument to then inquire given those assumptions is there anything that would be scientifically implausible about the existence of an original human pair from hume from whom all humanity is descended um and so that's the extent of my commitment to that uh thesis it's simply a working assumption so why would you take that assumption when there isn't actually evidence against god creating adam and eve de novo i mean there's no there's no there's no scientific evidence against god creating adam and eve de novo um without parents so why would you take that as an assumption well i agree josh that it it would be perfectly compatible with my hypothesis that adam and eve were created by god de novo but it's just not part of the hypothesis i want to adopt the standard scientific paradigm on evolutionary origins that would say that homo has other hominin ancestors and then work within that paradigm so i'm not committed to that i'm just working within these assumptions that are commonplace today yeah there is some nuance here about whether or not um whether or not the people outside the garden which you don't think we're fully human whether or not they actually interbred with adam and eve's lineage too right so well there's some complexity and nuance about whether or not the people outside the garden end up in a breathing with adam and eve's lineage in your model too i mean yeah i didn't correct you when you said this earlier but i wouldn't use the word people just yeah so okay yeah right when you use the word people you say in your book you just meet a wider breeding population that's not a matter and i use the word people to indicate human beings and i don't think there were any human beings otherwise you don't have a dog or a cat because dogs are people too right whether it's a de novo creation of an first human couple adam and eve or whether it's them coming out of a wider population if you like in your view bill that you have now adopted this this this view that that actually it it was part of the population yeah hypothesis if you like the hypothesis that you're you're teasing out here um is it the the the humanness of this first couple is because they genetically or what what is it that marks them out as the first humans as opposed to their parents or whatever you know that came before them yes well i think i talk about what it means to be human in the book and i think that they would have to have an anatomical similarity to ourselves we know that we are human beings and so using ourselves as paradigms we would look to see whether or not these ancient hominins were sufficiently similar to ourselves to count biologically as human but then what one would look for would be modern cognitive behaviors that would be indicative for example of self consciousness of symbolic thinking of the ability to plan for the future and think in abstract categories and that will be the tip-off that you're dealing there with a person and it would be a human person um because it would be uh in fleshed in an anatomically human body so to make a connection here this is pretty similar to like the catholic view of uh like a rational animal or um or the way how many catholics understand uh adam and like a rational soul to be unique to adam and eve's lineage is that right yes if we think theologically in order to have a human being i think you do have to have a rational soul infused into a hominin body and i i'm a dualist when it comes to my anthropology i think that man is a composite of soul and body so at some point i would say in the evolutionary process there was a kind of renovation or refurbishing of a hominin form that catapulted it to full humanity and this involved both the infusion of a rational soul and the equipment of the body to have the sort of central nervous system that could be the seat of irrational soul self-consciousness abstract and symbolic thinking and so forth i've just got one question before before you come back on this joshua which is in a way your your view there bill sounds like you know what i have heard from organizations like biologos which is that you've got a sort of general population and then one couple is plausible is is sort of infused so the distinction is biologos would argue that if that if that that you could have um atomy in a population but but adam and eve um would could not be the first humans right and that we would not all descend from them right so so it's a genetic issue at that point yeah but yeah they would say that the traditional view is that adam and eve are genetic soul progenitors but that's not true uh because there's really no tradition that talks about dna because dna is very reasonable yeah and and it just turns out also that adam and eve we all descend from and and in that sense bill when you're when you're envisioning this first couple i mean as far as i can see it's perfectly plausible that there's plenty of other hominids that are very similar to them at that moment in time you know in in the wider population is is it that so is it more about the the fact that they're suddenly given this sort of moral god consciousness if you like than that they're physically very different from their their counterparts at the time yes absolutely uh uh in order to be a moral agent who is culpable and capable of moral choices you need to have the rational soul that we've talked about and so yes uh moral agency and accountability would come along with that catapulting as i described it to full humanity okay i i i it's really helpful to kind of get that all those sort of pieces put together and and now i want to kind of you know take that scientific account of the first couple and say how does that map then on to the genesis account because at one level obviously the writers of the genus account had no idea of anything we've just talked about in terms of the you know the scientific and genealogical aspect of all of this so what are what are they pointing to are they are they just happily coincidentally you know not in conflict with with you know a genetic understanding of of things or or it was it god ordained that this that they would strike upon this idea of a first couple and and that that you know i just want to know kind of how it how it fits if that makes sense bill like your theory of inspiration of how did they get that right and how did it work genesis doesn't really describe uh in genesis 1 how god created man and woman but in genesis 2 you have this very figurative account about how god fashions this man out of dirt and blows into his nose the breath of life and he the the figurine comes to life and then later he opens up this man and takes out one of his ribs and fashions a woman out of it you know once you look at this through the lenses of mytho history it's hard to see it any other way you think how could i possibly have understood this to be a literal account involving this anthropomorphic deity uh molding things out of the dirt and doing surgery on on the man to make a woman it seems to me that it's so plausible that this is a figurative account of god's creation of this original human pair i suppose my next question is why then be concerned with there being a first couple in that sense that that does map on at least adam and eve is could could we as joshua said earlier just be happy with it all being figurative and and so on is there any need to to establish this first couple scientifically if you like at that level well no no no no not trying to establish it scientifically i i want to resist that but you're asking is the existence of a historical primeval couple theologically significant or is it something that's dispensable why not regard the whole thing as myth uh rather than say that there actually was such a pair and i will have a couple of things to say in that regard one would be is that if you believe in the doctrine of original sin then you've got to have a historical atom because otherwise the doctrine of original sin goes down the drain we cannot be held culpable for the sins of a fictitious person who never existed nor can we be said to have a corrupted nature inherited from a fictional person that never existed so if you believe in the doctrine of original sin i think you are committed to historical adam now i myself have severe doubts about the doctrine of original sin i i don't find it in genesis 3 or romans 5. but what i do find in romans 5 is the view that adam was the gateway through which sin entered the human race he opened the floodgates to sin which then spread throughout the entire human race because as paul says all men sinned so i do think that paul's doctrine and the new testament commits you to the existence of a historical adam through whom sin entered the human race would you agree with that joshua um yeah i i agree i mean i think the part where i think um well well first of all i do think that bill's account is plausible scientifically i think that's a key part and that's my main contribution now um i'm i'm like just a mere scientist i think about theological things right and i've also been observing the conversation so you can discount everything i say here if you like um but i do think the weak point in bill's argument um is how he rules out humanness for the uh for the broader population i i don't i don't see the clear logic there and why that's necessary because you can still affirm everything that he just said there which i i agree that's historical traditional christianity that's actually what a lot of people were arguing against but turns out isn't in conflict with with the evidence but um but how does that rule out then the idea of those human-like qualities outside the garden now um we've gone back and forth about this we don't have to go back and forth about it now in the end it'll be really interesting to see i think how the larger community of scholars and how the church really think through these sorts of questions because we're really actually approaching this really grand question honestly about what it means to be human and who god is and who were we in relationship to him i mean this this is the grand conversation and it's it's gonna be fun yes josh reminded me of a point that i had wanted to make but i forgot um and i'll not go into the uh tit-for-tat on this but simply say that i argue that the purpose of the primeval history at the beginning of the pentateuch is meant to express the author's universalizing interest in showing that all of humanity is descended from this human pair that they are not just a select couple elected out of a wider human population but that they are the origins of all humanity uh and that the call to abraham and to israel is ultimately aimed at restoring the blessings promised universally to mankind by being bestowed upon adam and eve and as josh says we've gone back and forth on this uh um and that will be part of the conversation but maybe we should consider a written exchange on that bill because i actually addressed it a little bit in my book i think that might be one w might be fun to hash out if you want to later we'll see one question from me and that you do addresses in the book as well bill is is the question of well what did jesus think about adam and eve and that there's a sense in which you know so first of all what do you anticipate do i mean did jesus believe in this his you know mytho-historical genre or was he taking a more kind of face value approach you know as many of his contemporaries would have to these stories of genesis and and on that level does should that impact the way we think about it because i can imagine a lot of christians saying well we should just believe the same things jesus did about adam and eve what's what's yours we got into trouble with this when we talked to ken ham just like okay justify like are you talking like preen like pre-resurrection in his incarnate state or uh well there's all those questions as well but i suppose the jesus if you like who's walking and talking teaching in the gospels what did he believe about about adam and eve bill and and and does that matter for our purposes today i i mentioned earlier justin the agonizing that i went through in struggling with these questions and this i think was the most agonizing i wouldn't want to do anything that would undermine the deity of the lord jesus christ and yet it is very difficult to see how jesus could be omniscient if he held false beliefs because omniscience is defined as believing every truth and believing no falsehood and so if jesus had false beliefs he wouldn't be omniscient and therefore would not be god uh and so this was um a real issue for me how do you deal with this if there was no historical atom what does that imply for jesus and i make some really interesting suggestions i think in the introductory chapter of the book about how one can defend the deity of christ um even if there was no historical atom and i hope people will look at that and think about it but in fact i think that what jesus says about the historical adam is basically talking about the literary figure that you read about in genesis 2 and 3. um and he isn't teaching or committing himself to the historicity of these people it would be as if i were to say just as robinson crusoe had his man friday to help him in his endeavors uh so i have people who help me in my ministry and and you're not committing yourself to the historicity of robinson crusoe in saying that and really that's about all jesus says about the historical adam now i think it's likely that he probably did believe in the historical adam um that when he talks about how in the beginning god made them male and female and uh said that a man should leave his mother and father and be cleaved to his wife and the two should become one i think he believed that there was a historical adam and eve but that's the position i defend in the book i i too believe that and so in no way am i calling into question the accuracy of jesus beliefs about the existence of adam and eve i guess the question so for me then is is it a problem if in principle jesus also believed that the rest of the you know details of the creation story were also literally true so if he he did have a belief in seven literal days over which god created earth and oh no well he doesn't even no no i think it's hard to start it's hard it's hard to i mean we can talk about those sorts of thought experiments but i think um i think we have to be very cautious about that because we don't know what he thought about things if he didn't say it so there's no point where he says this i mean the closest to this and i'd be curious to hear bill's response to this is some young earth creationists argue that jesus believed in the earth creationism because it says that god made them man and feel in the beginning and um and so of course in actually genesis 1 many weren't created in the beginning um and male and female actually existed long before adam and eve but they take that as a reference to adam and eve and they're saying that it's closer to the beginning young earth creationism than for example you're talking about like you accept uh you know big bang cosmology that has an ancient earth so it's like billions of years that have gone by uh the earth is about you know four billion four and a half billion years old before um adam and eve were created so that's they would argue that's not the beginning yeah i i think that's a fatuous argument that young earthers are trying to impose on the text i mean if you'd interpret the text that literalistically adam and eve weren't created in the beginning because there wasn't until day six that they were created and so if you're going to be that literalistic the argument backfires i think when jesus says from the beginning he just means that there weren't any people before adam and eve they were the first ones and so from the very beginning this is the way god created man and woman and and he's not thinking of the time span between uh god saying let there be light and the creation of adam and eve on day six so just before we go any further i'd like to know exactly where you both do approximately date this first couple just to be clear now a young earth creationist will of course say about 6 000 years ago but joshua i know you have a kind of particular perspective on where you would you know guess that this first couple came from and bill it sounds from from what josh has been saying you go a bit further back so so joshua where where do you place them and why well i mean i think i'm talking about a range where i'm really thinking through what's plausible scientifically and as a scientist i just want to be you know truthful with the church about that and i think that that range can be as recent as 6 000 years ago going back to probably about two and uh 2.2 million years ago and the big distinguisher about you know between picking a recent date like 6 000 years ago 10 000 years ago or 15 000 years ago is going to be really this core question about whether or not we think that there was humanness outside the garden and bill doesn't think that there was humanness and so there's a ton of evidence in anthropology that humanness goes back you know at least you know 70 000 years ago but he's made a case for 700 000 years ago other people made a case for about 2 million years ago but um but that's going to push you farther back it's not anything to do with genetics it's purely about the archaeological record and other people are going to say hey you know we don't actually see that there's a problem with humanness outside the garden i mean you know angels have are human-like in some ways if we saw intelligent aliens they'd be intelligent i mean they'd be human in some way too um so the idea of there being people outside the garden is a problem and in that case uh i think people are gonna very strongly tend to have a far more recent adam any name and i think that's just a distinction but as far as what i've done is really try to argue that both bill's point of view or what his preferred view in that range is is plausible and then um what my preferred view is plausible too that's really uh there's just a huge range there's a huge amount of possibility where people said it was entirely ruled out bill what what's your perspective on that i know this brings us into the territory that you didn't want to dig too much into of of your differences with joshua on this this humanness aspect of the other you know hominids and so on um but but what yeah i mean for you the the place where you place yourself is it because you have to kind of go that far back to where you're seeing the evidence in the archaeological history of this humanness kind of developing in a very obvious way it's partly because of my universalizing interest i'm not willing to allow there to be human beings on this planet that are not descended from adam and eve and so for that reason i've got to push back in time to the most recent common ancestor from whom all humanity has descended and so if you're convinced as i am that neanderthals are fully human you've got to go back at least to the last or most recent common ancestor of both neanderthals and homo sapiens and this is a mysterious species known as homo heidelbergensis or heidelberg man who lives somewhere around 750 000 years ago and as i said earlier placing adam and eve at that juncture is is very convenient because by then the threat of population genetics evaporates when you get that far back it's perfectly possible to have a primordial human pair from whom all humanity descended so the difference between josh's proposal and mine the recent genealogical atom and the ancient genealogical atom is going to be whether or not you allow there to be human beings who are not descended from adam and eve uh or as josh puts it people outside the garden yeah yeah and in the distant past because when it comes pretty quickly everyone would descend from adam and eve um and i think it's i think what i understand what's going on justin because you're trying to kind of parse out well what's your view and what's his view but i think what's interesting about this actually is that we might have the same view with different emphases where um i think for that theological difference which i think bill would i mean i think that his point of view is entirely orthodox he's not a heretic for believing that bill might be a bit more pressed to say this but i think that he thinks that what i'm saying is also legitimate theologically maybe he doesn't disagree or favor it but if he got to heaven and talked to jesus in his post uh resurrection state and found out he was right he wouldn't he wouldn't be i'd be too shocked maybe a little bit and so but what we're doing is we're kind of working together i would say mark out a large range of possibilities for the church to work through and to think about these bigger questions that that's so right josh we want the church to have options and not to be put into a bird cage of one particular hypothesis that would be a real mistake i think the reality is that there's like something prophetic about the diversity of the church there's something beautiful about it we've been told that traditional christianity really has to change but actually it turns out there's so many ways to make sense of it it's it's it's very very interesting and i i got that sense of myself reading your book bill that you're you're laying out the options you're you're very open to saying here's what these this camp thinks and this camp thinks and and here's where i think you can actually have a range of views here and and not be outside of historic orthodox christianity but we'll we'll come back to this in just a moment our final part of the show coming up very soon we're talking about the historical adam and eve my guest today are bill craig and joshua swamidas in the united kingdom just today we passed a hundred thousand people who've been killed by the virus i'm not the one here who is claiming that this is being supervised that somebody is watching this somebody knows that this is occurring and somebody's allowing it to occur we're in no position to say definitively there is no morally justifiable reason for this particular evil because we need a god-like perspective on all of space in all of time in order to make that claim it's been a really interesting discussion today on the historical adam and that's the subject of william lane craig's new book it's called inquest of the historical adam you can find a link to it and to bill's website reasonablefaith.org from today's show you can also find out more about joshua swamidas peacefulscience.org is the place to go in his book the genealogical adam and eve and joshua's been on the show before to talk about that with others as well um there's lots of other questions i wish we had time for tonight but but we'll one of the ones that sort of been playing on my mind bill as you talk about this discovery you had and the way that you have embraced this mytho mytho-historical view of the early chapters of genesis but that do not preclude there being a historical if you like first couple in history um is is the question of you know how as i've said before how do we map that historical scenario onto the mytho-historical story if you like of adam and eve particularly obviously at the center of that is this story of humans turning away from god and in this in the genesis story it's through the actions of the snake and the tree and the apple and and so on um what is there a kind of analogy scenario something that that happened in the historical world of these early hominid couple that you think would have to have in some sense reflected that or at least given uh there have been some kind of event in which they did rebel against god what and what would that be if you don't mind i think that you put it exactly right some kind of event of rebellion against god i think paul's teaching in romans 5 commits us to that he says therefore his sin came into the world through one man and death through sin so death spread to all men because all men sinned adam opened the floodgates through which sin and evil came into the human race with its disastrous consequences so there had to be a historical fall but we shouldn't press the narrative in genesis literalistically to try to discern the details of what this event was because it is cloaked in mythological imagery and figurative language i don't think we're at all committed to thinking that there was as i say a tree with magical fruit on it such that if you bit this fruit and ate it it would give you knowledge of good and evil notice that this is not anti-supernaturalism because this was not imparted by god this was a property of the fruit itself and then they've got this talking snake in the garden who's identified as just one of the beasts of the field it's not identified as satan so i think the whole narrative is cloaked in the imagery and figurative language of myth and therefore we can't really know exactly what the act of rebellion was whereby adam and eve turned against god and then found themselves estranged from him and alienated from god and that i think is to affirm the theological essentials of the teaching of the narrative you know it's interesting because i think there's a bit of a symmetry between how i thought about this too bill where i think you were really working hard to show the theological possibility and reasonableness of taking it more figuratively i've been arguing on the other harder case which is that it's also possible to take it literally scientifically and so i think but when it comes down to it i don't know epistemologically how we really determine uh you know kind of where to put the needle between you know what actually is figurative there versus what's literal i just don't know how we how we do that science doesn't really tell us because it could be extremely literal and science couldn't we can't rule it out and i think theology can't really tell us either because it's it seems like it could be quite figurative without uh so you can't really rule out the figurative from a theological point of view so it just seems like there's a lot of large range of possibilities i i can see the headlines now though bill bill craig's gone liberal on adam and eve oh i mean that that is that is inevitably the way some people will see this is is it yes you know and that that worried me a lot at the beginning but as i say this is a view that j.i packer was very comfortable with c.s lewis espoused contemporary commentators like gordon wenham and john collins without using the nomenclature terminology advocate similar views so i i feel quite in good company on this i mean if if an inerrantness like j.i packer finds this acceptable i i think that the church can be comfortable just a quick answer to those who would say well if you're going to take that that bit figuratively bill what about the rest of scripture maybe we should take jesus's resurrection figuratively as well that's a very naive response justin this is based upon a careful literary genre analysis of this work um i like to compare it to the book of revelation in the book of revelation you have jewish apocalyptic literature in which there are fantastic descriptions like a dragon whose tail sweeps away a third of the stars and the heavens and a beast that takes over the world everybody recognizes that these are symbols and figures that represent for example political alliances and earthly human rulers uh nobody thinks that animals and beasts are going to take over the world uh in this way and so it would be silly to say well if you interpret the book of revelation symbolically and figuratively then you've got to do this with the book of acts or [Music] the gospels as well they're not the same kind of literature you know i mentioned earlier c.s lewis who was a specialist in folklore and mythology and who saw this in genesis 1 to 11. but very famously lewis also said in response to rudolph bolton that he says i've been reading myth all my life and when i look at the gospels these are not myths this is not what mythological literature looks like this is historical literature in fact it's closest to the genre of ancient biography so lewis was careful and understood that you can't paint everything with the same brush i think i think there's something actually really beautiful about this um where i think one thing that i had a concern about that i found the beauty on is when i mean i was raised in very literalistic tradition and as i kind of start to get exposed to more of the cultural context of genesis i came to be more uncertain about exactly what was literal what wasn't in genesis even though it's not a conflict of science right but then you do worry about about genesis but then actually kind of encountered nt rights work where he kind of does um a real close look at what's going on in the culture and i encountered bill craig's work where he looks at the minimal facts argument and things like that and you start to see why she starts to take into account the cultural context of the gospels in the same way we might want to with genesis i do think that adam gets a little bit more blurry we're not as certain about what's going on with him but when it comes to jesus he becomes more clear it's just so clear that god made himself known to all people by raising this man from the dead and that is just so clear to think that by looking at the historical context that jesus would go away is to really misunderstand the immense evidence there is for that well i i certainly appreciate that answer and and uh it was was not posed by me but rather the the the listener who maybe that might be going through their mind but it's been just a real pleasure to be able to spend this time with you talking through these issues of course we've only scratched the surface of both of your books but uh if you want more on this then do check out inquest of the historical adam by bill craig it's available now and i just want to thank you bill for writing this book and publishing it i think it's a real gift to the church it's a landmark i think there's going to be a lot of conversation about it is important thank you for taking [Music] risky courageous approach of going down this path and i'm grateful for all your help and guidance josh and thank you to justin for uh the pleasure of being on the program today with josh well thank you both for being with me and don't forget you can find out more from the links with today's show to both bill and joshua for now uh bill and joshua thanks for being with me see you again soon for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and 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Channel: Unbelievable?

Views: 35,260

Rating: 4.7078447 out of 5

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible

Id: H2YBuypZfCY

Length: 64min 24sec (3864 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021