Preston
I’ve usually avoided launching into the debates here on A&E because the nuances are soon lost in a fog - and in my view, more often through an absolutisation from “science” than a refusal to negotiate from “theology” (though that, I grant, is subjective as there are plenty of comments saying we must retain A&E without accounting for scientific evidence).
I start from asking what the Bible actually affirms: Gen 1 is about the creation of mankind, but it doesn’t define man except in terms of being in the image and likeness of God. It therefore mainly speaks to all humanity now, and gives no grounds whatsoever for deciding whether a particular hominin fossil or genome is “human” - nor even whether a biologically H. sapiens fossil is.
But Gen 1 clearly says that man-in-God’s-image is the act of basic human creation, not merely of subsequent designation. Being like Christ, and being equipped to rule earth on behalf of God, are not biological functions: ergo, the creation of mankind required more than biological evolution, even if it included it. It was also intrinsically teleological, so ones science-faith synthesis must include a theory of teleology or fail to account for creation.
So a model of a bottleneck of 10K “humans” fails to address Gen 1 at the most basic level - what does Genesis mean by human? Numbers of individuals is irrelevant to the creation account of Genesis 1 anyway, which implies simply a population.
Then in Genesis 2 we have a separate account of a single couple - in a clearcut historical, cultural and geographical stting - who are placed in a sacred space in communion with and service of God, and are given access to eternal life. Adam is treated as an archetype for “man” generically - though nothing in the text equates his formation with the Genesis 1 account or states that the “image” originates in him. Nor does Gen 2 define “man” in biological terms. Once again population genetics bottlenecks are simply irrelevant to the text.
But this couple initiates sin by breaking that communion (seeking wisdom outside the intimate tutelage of the Father, as I suggested to Al). Scripture thereafter uniformly attributes our present universal human death and sinfulness to that one fateful act. Furthermore it grounds our salvation in our deliverance from solidarity with Adam (not Eve note, who sinned first - therefore federal headship must be taken into account) to solidarity with Christ, born of Adam (Luke genealogy) but as the God-man a new archetype for all men.
What Adam gave to the race, therefore, was a specific (covenant?) relation with Yahweh - the One true, triune, God - associated with the knowledge of, and desire for, eternal life, but marred by the reality of death and the depravity of sin. How that occurred is not treated, except in making the subsequent account both genealogical and culturally-geographic in nature. What it means to be human in this spiritual sense spreads across the world, and down generations.
A theory like Augustine’s is a reasonable speculation - but another thing that it’s tedious to keep explaining is that his theory is not genetic (again sidelining pop genetics objections) but generic: read Augustine to see the difference: sin spread by intercourse, not inheritance. But absence of a complete theory doesn’t alter the fact that the human race as it is, understood in Genesis 2 terms of eternal life, communion with God and sin, is monogenic (though not necessarily monogenetic).
A parallel would be that all Israel are sons of Israel through the covenant at Sinai and circumcision - yet both the text and archaeology show that non-descendants of Jacob both partook of the Exodus and became Israel, and were assimilated into Israel during the occupation of Canaan. If you could per impossibile show that some Jewish Y chromosomes were definitively Canaanite and not Hebrew, you’d have shown nothing of any relevance to the theology of Israel.
Being brief, the above is full of loopholes. But the key is that the current biological definition of “human” does not map to the Bible’s theological treatment of “human”, though the latter is all that matters to Christianity and - let’s face it - to our self understanding as people. As I’ve corresponded with you privately before, it’s practically of little importance to my life that I’m a 6th generation Irish emigrant, let alone that some genetic forbear came out of Africa. But it matters a lot to me every day that the archetypal head and fount of my humanity disobeyed God.