I am curious. As I study Scripture of Genesis, I see the possibility that God used evolution in creating, as a baker I can put together several different types of bread, cakes, donuts with the same ingredients, with slight variations of the ingredients, so I can accept that God made all the different species from the same ingredients, earth & water adding or subtracting a few molecules here & there, and or starting with a 1 cell amoeba, & adding to it for form the different species. I can also accept the possibility that what Science thinks they see as a link, might not be an accurate assessment. However, can someone give me a plausible answer to what I’ve read,(Christianity Today; What if we don’t have to choice between Evolution and Adam & Eve) dealing with the idea that God created Adam & Eve, as recorded in Genesis, but when they sinned, & were sent of the garden, they intermarried with apes or some type of Hominins, creating Homosapiens, but wouldn’t they have created a hybrid, unable to reproduce? Or do Apes, Hominin’s & Humans share the same amount of Chromosomes? Has anyone else questioned this?
The article you’re referencing is talking about the book Genealogical Adam and Eve by Swanidass. He posits that Adam and Eve could have been specially created but were biologically the same as the existing evolved human population. So you wouldn’t have interbreeding with different species.
If you want to take Genesis as literal history it is too soon to allow for this. You can read Genesis as saying other humans were around.
About 2% of human DNA came from the Neanderthals and 0.2% from Denisovans so we contain a mixture from other Hominins. That is pretty much a given.
Thank you for your response.
Thank you for your response
As a baker, would you say that your confections fall into a nested hierarchy? What points to evolution and common ancestry instead of independent creations is the pattern of shared features, and that pattern is a tree-like pattern called a nested hierarchy:
We can use birds and mammals as an example. Mammals have tidal lungs, fur, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands, all of which are not found in birds. Birds have feathers, flow through lungs, and single middle ear bone. All of these features follow a tree-like strucutre. So what was to stop God from mixing and matching these features if life were separately created? Nothing. God could make a species with fur and flow through lungs, or feathers and teats. However, we don’t see that. We see a tree-like structure, a nested hierarchy. This is the pattern we should see if evolution is true.
That also relates to transitional species. These are species which have a mixture of features from two other branches. For example, Tiktaalik roseae had a mixture of features from lobe finned fish and terrestrial vertebrates which is evidence for terrestrial tetrapods evolving from fish. Australopithecus afarensis had a mixture of modern human and ape features as we would expect to see if humans evolved from ape-like ancestors. This is why these are evidence for evolution, because they are exactly the mixture of features that should have existed in the past if evolution is true.
The idea is that God specially created Adam and Eve with a genome compatible with other humans so that their offspring could blend in with the already existing human population. Over time, different lineages link up and have children to the point that everyone has Adam and Eve as one of their ancestors. Because of this, sin can originate with Adam and Even and be passed on to the human population today.
As an example, almost everyone of European descent has Charlemagne as one of their ancestors, so this process can happen in a thousand years. In fact, everyone who left descendants in the 9th century AD is an ancestor of Europeans today.
These are shared genealogical ancestors, not genetic ancestors. It is entirely possible for someone to be your direct ancestor even though you don’t carry any of their DNA. For this reason, Joshua Swamidass does mention the concept of Original Sin being passed on through genealogy, not genetics. It is also worth mentioning that Genealogical Adam and Eve is more of a possibility to consider, and is not meant as the ultimate answer to anything, or a well supported and inescapable theological pillar. It is simply an idea worth considering.
Why is that?
Could you be more specific?
Your last two sentences.
Original sin is a big part of some peoples’ theological worldview, and because of this they may put science and theology into conflict with one another. A Genealogical Adam and Eve may give these people a way to reconcile science and theology.
You can also interact with Dr Swamidass directly on his Forum:
Hi Jay,
Does your interpretation of the scriptures include the concept of Original Sin?
Since your description of creation sounds like alchemy, I guess it is no wonder you would like the idea of creating Adam and Eve golems by necromancy.
I read Genesis differently. God created our bodies from the stuff of the Earth according to its laws (evolution) and then spoke to Adam & Eve giving them the inspiration (divine breath) which have birth to the human mind. Thus we are the brethren of all life on this planet by our biology & genetics (as science can demonstrate), but by this other memetic inheritance from God we are the children of the creator.
I would remind you that the Bible says nothing whatsoever of genetics or biological species and thus it is you who are reading such things into the Bible – and so your obsession with these things are a modern aberration having nothing to do with the Biblical narrative. I certainly would not say that the children of Adam and Eve intermarried with apes, but rather that the inspiration of God spread rapidly to the rest of the homo sapiens species.
Absolutely! Ha’adam, “the man,” as an archetype solves the problem. An archetype is a universal pattern in human experience. The “original sin” coincided with the birth of conscience and, thereby, moral responsibility. We see it in children just as it occurred in humanity. Both reach an “age of accountability” when ignorance becomes knowledge and responsibility before God. Sin is both corporate and individual. We repeat the sin of ha’adam in our own lives, so the “fall” was occasioned by actual sins committed by actual people, just as our own guilt before God comes by actual sins committed by us, as individuals. “Original sin” involves both corporate and individual aspects, as Isaiah exclaimed when he received a vision of God in his temple:
“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
Yes, many people have asked the question: From where did the wives of Cain and Seth come?
Here TE has a more reasonable answer than YEC.
For me I don’t believe in original sin what so ever. I don’t see evidence of it in the Bible. Original sin was a concept originally created to promote infant baptism to save the from hell or purgatory. That’s not scripturally sound. They say OS is passed through the flesh generation to generation making people automatically unholy. There are a few issues with that.
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Before “original sin” entered the world Adam and Eve chose to sin. Their flesh, thought the fruit looked good. Their flesh was just like ours.
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The Bible mentions that little kids can’t yet choose good or evil.
Isaiah 7:16
16 For before the boy will know enough to refuse evil and choose good, the land whose two kings you dread will be forsaken.
- here it makes it clear at a young age kids can’t choose evil. Kids can’t sin.
- Jesus was born from a woman. Jesus was a man. He was even cut off from all the wisdom of God tje father ( such as not knowing when the end was). Hebrews makes it clear God became fully human. Yet Jesus was not born automatically guilty. He never chose to sin despite having the same flesh as us.
So believing that Adam and Eve were real is not a issue. All of mankind falls short because all of us except Jesus have failed. Not because we are automatically a failure.
Geneticism is a school of thought that holds that genetics determines all human characteristics, particularly psychological characteristics. (from definitions.net)
This type of thinking is apparently more pervasive than materialism or naturalism, since I see so many Christians doing it. But why? There is nothing like this in the Bible?
I find the idea that original sin is a genetic inheritance to be bizarre in the extreme for it would follow that for salvation we should look to science and medicine rather than God or the Bible.
As a metaphor on the way to deconstructing all that, I suppose so… but as Sportin’ Life sang in the Gershwins’ 1935 Porgy and Bess, It Ain’t Necessarily So.
“They” may say that, but not everyone subscribes to Augustine’s version of original sin. Personally, I think the idea that sin is passed from generation to generation by the flesh (or by lines on a family tree) is wrong. I have a different take on the origin and transmission of sin. Sinfulness has always been a part of the human condition, but no one is born guilty of sin. Just like children, early humans were ignorant of sin because they lacked the knowledge of good and evil. And just as children mature and become morally responsible for their actions, the human race matured and became morally responsible for its evil choices. Humanity transmits sinfulness from generation to generation by the process of enculturation, not by the flesh.