@BradKramer, not to be argumentative, but this is a separable issue entirely from the notion of a historical Adam and Eve. This statement says that BioLogos does not believe that Adam and Eve were the Sole Progenitors of humanity, but it does not preclude the possibility that they were the common ancestors of us all. This last possibility leaves essentially all of orthodox theology intact, might have been as recent as just 6,000 years ago, and is even considered in the primary scientific literatureâŚ
I think these distinctions are very important. Just because genetic evidence strongly indicates (as far as we can tell) a founding population of around 10,000 individuals, does not deny a historical Adam and Eve.
I, for one, always put out early on that I believe that Jesus rose from the dead, that the Bible is inerrant and infallible in all that it affirms (echoing the Luassanne Covenant), and that I believe in a historical Adam and Eve (like John Walton and many others).
Of course, there are nuances to all these statements, but that is the critical headline that most Christians need to hear first.
I was under the impression that these maps were lower resolution and could not have detected recombination at smaller scales. This applies to essentially all marker data too. You cannot distinguish recombination events of the same even/oddness between markers, so then the rate is underestimated. I am missing something here? I thought that data was not definitive.
Sequencing (like PacBio) should 100% resolve the ambiguity, and by now it should be known, so I am not questioning the final conclusion, just trying to make sense of this area.
Except that itâs incompatible with original sin and the idea that death only entered the world as a result of Adamâs sin. There are domino effects on theology after that.
Once again, not to be argumentative, but this does not seem correct to me.
Original sin (in the traditional sense) depends just on common ancestry, not sole progenitorship. Longmanâs idea of infectivity is also a doctrine of original sin (less traditional), but it would work even if we were not common ancestors. There are other models. Original sin appears entirely seperable. Unless we rule out all these options, it seems very premature to say that the BioLogos position is âincompatibleâ with original sin, especially when so many of us (including myself) hold that doctrine fixed.
Death before the fall is is another example like this. I take the position that Augustine does. There is no death before the fall, but here Genesis is speaking literally about spiritual death. Spiritual death is more literal to God than physical death, so I absolutely affirm the orthodox doctrine that there was no death before the fall. This is consistent with a large amount scripture that indicates there was physical death in the animal kingdom before the fall and that Adam was made mortal (from the dust).
Once again, it is premature (incorrect?) to say the BioLogos position is incompatible with âno-deathâ before the fall. I think it is just incompatible with âno-animal-physical-deathâ before the fall, but this is an extrabiblical doctrine that even early Church fathers disagreed with.
Yes, and itâs the idea that all humans are sinful as a product of Adamâs sin. It is not the belief that some humans are sinful as a product of Adamâs sin but most of them arenât.
Thatâs fine, but youâre not going to placate people who believe the Biologos position isnât compatible with physical death before the fall, by saying âWell at least it works if we throw out your idea and change Adamâs death to spiritual deathâ. That still telling them that their personal belief is incompatible with evolution and theyâre just going to have to drop it. So it doesnât actually reassure them that they can continue to hold their current belief and still accept evolution.
Some of the early Church Fathers. But itâs the dominant Christian view and has been for centuries, and thatâs one of the reasons why so many Christians are freaking out about evolution. You canât tell them âYeah well you can believe that there was no physical death before the fall and still accept evolution, absolutely no problem thereâ. Youâre actually telling them âSorry that physical death thing has to go, I donât care how many people believed it over the centuries or signed up to itâ. Thereâs a serious change management challenge here.
I didnât realize what a âcheckeredâ history the Immortal Soul had in the history of the church:
Rejection of the immortality of the soul âThis brings us to Martin Luther, who emphatically rejected belief in the immortality of the soul, and held that death is a sound, sweet sleep, rejecting quoting Matt. 9:24, and John11:21. Had it not been for John Calvin, it is possible that Conditional Immortality would have become the predominant view in the Protestant churches.â
Much of English-speaking Freemasonry doesnât even quibble over the matter - - the Immortal Soul is a universal tenet!
To me, it is a question of semantics ⌠not ultimately affecting our fate⌠not if you are a Unitarian UniversalistâŚ
You know, you donât need to go the âspiritual deathâ route to harmonize BioLogosâs position and orthodoxy, imo. For many years, my position was this: Somewhere along the development of the Homo line, God introduced the ability to relate to Him, and created the soul, supernaturally in one âAdam.â In this moment when man became fully humanâable to relate to God, able to reason morally and be held accountable, etc.âthe possibility of eternal life was also opened to him. When he sinned, though, God kicked him out of the garden and shut off the possibility that he would partake of the tree of life, thereby closing the door to that possibility of eternal life.
Back when I held this view, I wasnât hip to all the population bottleneck data, but as several others have mentioned, one can easily adopt the view that this Adam was one of those 10,000, and all living humans are descendants of him. This preserves the traditional notion (traditional to our Western church, anyway) of genetic transmission of original sin.
This approach about the door to possible eternal life being opened at Adamâs creation and then closed off forever through the Fall strikes me as reasonably Biblically supported from within the text of Genesis, without doing too much violence to orthodox Protestantism, and reconcilable to the big picture of human evolutionary history.
@Eddie, this is subtle distinction and an error that is no commonly appreciated in this conversations.
MRCA is not the same thing as mitochondrial Eve and Y-Adam. Mitochondrial Eve is almost certainly not the MRCA, who is likely much more recent. Moreover, MRCA need not be a singular person, there are likely several MRCA (it is likely a set of individuals that equally satisfy that requirement), and it very well could have included a couple that is the historical Adam and Eve.
Also, from a scientific point of view, all three of these concepts are âmoving targetsâ because they are defined in relation to the current human population, which continually has lineages dying out. This simultaneously shifts all three groups forward in time every time it happens. In this sense, we will NEVER precisely pin this down. It is a moving target defined by a continually changing standard.
Of course, I am not at all saying that a recent MRCA has been âprovenâ by science. There is a lot of uncertainty here when we get down to precise statements about the distant past. The more precise and distant, the less certainty there is. All I am saying is that science is not foreclosed that possibility. The evidence is not clear. However, I am saying that genetics, even following the rules of mainstream science and not invoking Godâs action, has not ruled out a human common ancestor for all of us. In fact, this ancestor could have been extremely recent.
Discussion of this is plagued by confusion and imprecise terminology and thinking on all sides.
In theology, âhistorical Adamâ is conflated with several concepts, including sole progenitorship, that are not equally wrapped up in the theological concerns Evolution does not call the whole idea into question, just a few narrow points.
In science, there is a very big difference between MRCA and Mito/Y Adam/Eve. The science actually seems to point ot a very recent MRCA, that many evolutionary biologists think could have been as recent as 100,000 to 30,000 years ago, with this paper being somewhat of an outlier at 6,000 years, but not wildly inconsistent.
The key thing that pushes MRCA back is not genetics, mind you, but our understanding of population flow over the last 100,000 years. While we have a handle (even though it is debated) on some of the large population movements, Iâm not sure if we can rule out the movements of a small number of people across the whole globe. I do not think we get that from genetics.
While there may be debate about this in the scientific literature and among scientists, I would be very surprised by knowledgeable scientists confidently ruling out a MRCA within the last 100,000 years. The evidence does not counter this possibility.
I should also add there is no reasonâŚ
Because this is exactly the conversations I have had with leading human geneticists over the last year and what the tell me. They do not need to be corrected. Rather, this point just needs to be publicized.
I need to start by qualifying my expertise in this area. Though I am informed about human evolutionary genetics, this is not my area of expertise. To a large extent, I have to rely on the expertise of others here, and I am relaying what I have found out from talking to and reading what many of them have written. So, it is possible that someone more knowledgeable than me could offer a corrective to my understanding.
At this point, I do not think we can be sure of this. I could be wrong here, and I do stand to be corrected. Perhaps I will be corrected too.
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinnedâ 13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyoneâs account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
Even if I am wrong about common ancestry of Adam, this does not mean that Paul was in error. This passage does not make a statement about the ancestry of all humans to Adam. Rather, literally speaking, it seems to claim that Adam (1) existed in time and space and (2) his actions brought death into the world for all who sin (with emphasis on everyone alive today).
I certainly agree that the historical intepretation of this passage is that Adam is the common ancestor of us all (and the sole progenitor with Eve), and we acquire a sinful nature through our ancestral relationship to him. However, this is not exactly what Paul himself says. The historic interpretation is just that, an interpretation.
So if any scenario that allows for a historical figure (in place and time) that is Adam, whose actions somehow have an effect on all of us, then this scenario is not contradicting Paul here. So if any of these scenarios turn out to be true, then Paul would not be in error. Most importantly, some of these models are entirely outside the ability of population genetics to ever falsify.
For example,
Tremper Longman talks about an âinfectionâ model where Adam is a historical figure, but from his Fall a sinful nature spreads like leprosy across the globe (and of course this tracks well with Biblical teaching of uncleanliness and holiness).
One could also emphasize that the passage seems to say that everyone is sinning (and this also seems independent of Adam here) but it is through Adam that the consequences of sin (death) are manifest. In this model, Adamâs actions change the rules for all of us (by altering Godâs forebearance of our sin).
Likewise we could talk about Adam being our âfatherâ in the same way Abraham is our âfather.â Here, we say father to mean not ancestry but âfollowing in the way of.â Saying Adam of our father is equivalent to saying we are a sinful people. This, of course, does not deny or preclude that Adam could be a real historical figure, who could rightfully appear (for example) in Jesusâs genealogy in a literal sense. Moreover, Paul does not even call Adam our father here, so this model does not even require rethinking Paulâs literal statements.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive. And, frankly, these three options cannot be ruled, even in principle, by genetics, because they would not leave detectable signatures in our genome. They do not make claims about our population history.
So, as I see it, there are multiple solutions to this âtheologicalâ problem that do not impute error on to Paul. There are so many solutions that I have no idea how to choose which one is best. Many of them seem to work well, and would be 100% consistent with Paulâs statement.
The biggest puzzle to me in this whole debate has been why everyone else is so convinced that evolutionary theory proves that a historical Adam does not exist. These are are entirely separable concerns, and it is an entirely separate question from evolution whether the Bible requires a historical Adam. My best theory of the current situation is that some theologians with an agenda against a historical Adam have used evolution as the reason to bolster their position. Even if they are ultimately right about the theology, it is very counterproductive to enmesh their theology with evolutionary theory. Even if they are right, evolution itself does not demonstrate this so.
Nothing in evolution tells us if Adam and Eve were real people in space in time. Of course, this is why both John Walton and Tremper Longman would both say that there is a âreal historical referentâ in history to Adam. Once again, I emphasize there are many ways to envision this, and science does very little to narrow down the options. My guess is that prexisting theological biases will shape peopleâs preferences more than anything else.
I should also add that some estimates of MitoEve and YAdam areâŚ
Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam have been established by researchers using genealogical DNA tests. Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived about 200,000 years ago. A paper published in March 2013 determined that, with 95% confidence and that provided there are no systematic errors in the studyâs data, Y-chromosomal Adam lived between 237,000 and 581,000 years ago
This range means that even they could have been anatomically modern humans (which arose about 200,000 years ago. In fact, it is entirely possible, given our current understanding, that Adam and Eve were among the first modern humans.
In my opinion, and your mileage may (probably will) vary, itâs worth looking at how the Eastern Orthodox view Adam and Eve. Somehow, they have managed to reject Augustineâs interpretation without rejecting Paul for a good millennium and more. Granted, their positions on several key doctrines are at quite a bit of variance with traditional Protestantism. Nevertheless, it may be at least possible to consider elements of their position on Adam and reflect on how they might better integrate with an EC position than Augustineâs teaching has. Perhaps this direction is anathema to you, but I felt compelled to bring it up given the near-fusion in your discussions of Paul with Augustine.
Very good question. This cuts to the core of the confusion about this topic. It turns out that MitoEve and YAdam are in all likelihood are NOT our MRCA. This is a very subtle point that I will attempt to demonstrate an image that I will try and construct for everyone in the few days.
Do not feel bad about being confused about this point. It is very subtle, in a way that even experts get confused on this point. Essentially, it is entirely possible that we have a MRCA couple within 10,000 years ago, while at the same time MitoEve and YAdam were from >200,000 years ago, and never met each other. Both things can be true at the same time.
For everyoneâs handy reference, I dredged up a Forum comment from Dennis Venema about four months ago where he was going back and forth with GJDS over this very issue. (I was hoping to find a more elaborate blog post, but thisâll do. Itâs what Google brought me first when I searched for âDennis Venemaâ and âmost recent common ancestor.â) I thought itâd be easier than trying to wrangle Dr. Venema in by tagging him.
My comments at that time were aimed at showing there were more models than one, and each could account for a particular data set - my recollection is that some are so invested in trying to render Adam and Eve into a fictitious story, they refused to discuss the merits and de-merits of the various models discussed. I even mentioned Europeans descending (if you wish to use this notion) from royalty during the Middle ages - as an example of ways models may be used. The rest of the comments from various sources were not what I consider gracious dialogue and I have chosen to ignore them.