Finding plausible answers to The Problem of Adam and Eve

@aleo

We all have friends and colleagues who adopt a different view, have a different background, differ in beliefs, and so on. During my lengthy career in science. no-one has as yet, sat down with me to examine their beliefs or mine. I am surprised that accomplished scientists would not have a basic understanding of most of the major belief systems - the majority do and in one way or another, and are happy to leave matters with each other, as they are. So you embarrassment is an odd experience to me - but you desire to “evangelize” others to your unique take on scripture is, to my experience, a very odd outlook - as I said, those scientists who take an interest in any faith (or none) seem to have taken the trouble to understand/ comprehend their own outlook (which inevitably will include some “home grown” metaphysical considerations).

The negative experiences that I refer to in my discussions with you, could include personal angst at what the Bible may “say” to some, but mainly the politics of aggressive people who conflate and misuse almost anything they can. I think all of us have experienced to varying degrees this type of hype - in my experience, the Faith is a great asset to us in dealing with such nonsense - and never an embarrassment.

I don’t think it matters exactly what they thought about Adam, as long as they got the spiritual/functional message. Same thing for Paul, except, as a writer ‘inspired’ by God, it seems like we have to trust that God would not let him mangle a important point of Christian theology.

I do think there’s evidence that at least a certain amount of it may be true and consistent with history, but not likely all of the pre-history part. Also mistakes could have been made in the history part at some point or another. (Additional information - The more I study, the more I believe that “fathers” (“ab”) and “sons” (“ben”) have been mistranslated and should be “ancestors” and “descendants.” Luke, Paul, and Jesus would have likely known that.)

Considering the fact that souls, good and evil, sin, death, and a need for a savior came to humanity, introducing it through interacting with 2 individuals is a pretty good way of doing it (that happens also to match up with what Paul believes - per Pete Enns - is an actual ‘Adam’).

Another point, God clearly interacted with humans at key points. Certainly when he caused Jesus virgin birth, Jesus’ miracles and messages, his resurrection, etc. Also, with the disciples, especially with the sending the Holy Spirit. I certainly think that he interacted with key biblical characters and to one extent or another, with the Jewish people. Considering that, it seems to me to be hard to believe that when it comes to giving the first humans souls and free will, with all its consequences, He wouldn’t do it through some direct interaction with some humans and/OR ultimately inspire a writer to preserve the basic highlights of how it was done and more importantly, the spiritual message. To be sure, it almost certainly had a significant amount of allegorical aspects plus the incidental cultural aspects of the writer and original readers.

I don’t know for sure how He did it. I’m sure that there are other plausible scenario’s. I would like to hear them. And Adam doesn’t have to be literal in them, but I still think that the story needs to include how souls, good and evil, sin, death, and a need for a savior came to humanity.

If I understand Peter Enns correctly that’s pretty much what he says. But it matters to a lot of people exactly what Jesus and Paul thought about Adam. Enns is arguing it shouldn’t and he hasn’t exactly been warmly embraced for suggesting that. People don’t want to focus on the theological point, they want to focus on biblical inerrancy.

Why does God have to give a moral law and spiritual accountability to the very first humans with souls 50,000-100,000 years ago? (Does having a soul equate with an eternal destiny, or is it something different?) Many Christians today would say that children, the mentally unstable, or those in places where the gospel is not preached are not held to the same standard of moral accountability for their sin, but they still have souls/are fully human.

I think it might be a mistake to equate “having a soul” with “morally accountable” and maybe even “having an immortal soul.” People weren’t morally accountable to God until he revealed himself to them, communicated his standard to them, and they rebelled against it. Couldn’t generations of people pre-Adam be “given a pass” on their immorality because they weren’t lawbreakers/sinners until the law was given? (Not the Mosaic law, law in the general “God gave a command” sense) Maybe they were “fully human” for generations, but an eternal soul or the “breath of life” was something that was given to humanity much later on when God decided to make a covenant with them and reveal himself more personally. I don’t think the Bible has definitive answers on this kind of thing, no matter how much fun it may be to speculate about.

And personally I think creation has always stood in need of redemption to reach its full teleological potential, and Christ would have come to earth and become incarnate and united with his creation in order to bring that redemption and eschatological purpose about, independent of humanity’s rebellion and need for a savior.

It’s certainly a possibility.

I am asking this question of anyone who hasn’t already answered it, how do you think souls, good and evil, sin, death, and a need for a savior came to humanity?

Obviously its not. Obviously, neither is an allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1 or 2 satisfying on every level. But that is not the point, is it? You asked,

My point is that this does not seem relevant when you are reading a book that explains why we are the way we are. Whether it matters or not is something you might ask if you were writing a novel and trying to decide whether you would explain it in your novel, or if you were critiquing a student’s novel, and asked the question, or asked the author the question, so they might decide to provide such an airtight explanation. But I think it is hubris to critique the scriptures in this way. Such critique misses the point of scripture, in my view.

@DougK
"I am asking this question of anyone who hasn’t already answered it, how do you think souls, good and evil, sin, death, and a need for a savior came to humanity?"
Tough question, Doug. For me the answer will involve God’s invitation for humanity to become co-creators with Him, using our free will to overcome the innate selfishness imposed by evolution.
Al Leo

Doug,
The 50,000 to 100,000 year dates are being pushed earlier. See attached:

Very interesting. Thanks for that information!

I was thinking about widening the range a bit anyway, but I’m reluctant to change things too quickly. The reason is, that I read about hear isolated claims that come out but,

  1. Sometimes they turn out to be more smoke than fire. In this case, AAAS.org’s Science Mag says regarding this find “If the dating is accurate, the discovery pushes back the appearance of our species in Asia by at least 30,000 years, wiping out a long-standing picture in which modern humans swept out of Africa in a single wave 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. But some question whether the dates are accurate.” ( Science | AAAS ) I think there needs to be time for some peer review and corroboration of this.
  2. This claim is for 80,000 to 120,000 years ago, so it is not necessarily greater than100,000 years ago, even allowing for a few thousands years of travel.
  3. This could be like the evidence in Israel of a migration about 90,000 to100,000 years ago, but then nothing. The consensus is that they died out or returned to Africa. This situation in China could be a situation where they died out there since there have been no archaeological finds of homo s. sapiens until 30,000 years later. And while they were ‘anatomically modern’ that does not mean they were ‘behaviorally modern’ if they weren’t around when behavioral modernity developed in Africa.

Yes, the results are provisional but it does put the claim of the 100,000 years Israel Humans as being unsuccessful in jeopardy.

None-the-less there was a lot of time for a lot of people all over Europe, Asia and Africa to do a lot of things that were completely unknown to the persons who wrote the A&E story about 2500 years ago.

@DougK

You asked this question:

In a theistic world view … almost all the answers we think apply in the usual Christian world view - - can STILL apply.

Souls: - You can surmise that God made them just as before.

Good & Evil - The issue of theodicy is still as knotty now as before. If God is truly omnipotent, then his tolerance
for suffering in the animal kingdom or with infants is STILL a mystery. Frankly, I think it is easier to view God
as limited by his own sense or Cosmic Order to answer the theodicy issue.

Sin - Sin doesn’t exist without moral agency. So, unless you are God yourself, then as soon as you gain moral
agency, you bear sin.

Death - Without death, how do you embrace the spirit of God?

Need for a Savior? - God imbues the cosmos with moral order. After that … there are a million solutions to the
salvation issue. Mormons are Universalists that believe in THREE (3) heavens. Jehovah’s Witnesses are
the opposite - - seeing a heavenly role for only 144,000 souls.

This is where denominationalism always steps in - - to provide specific answers for specific dilemmas
identified by the devoted.

Sincerely,

George Brooks

Good job, my friend. I need say no more here.

@DougK

I wish to thank you for responding, Doug. That was an extremely interesting answer. God bless and hope to hear from you again soon.

As a believing Catholic, I need to believe in monogenesis, that God created one pair of humans originally and they fell from grace in an act of original sin. As a scientist I have always found that hard to reconcile with what I know of evolution. However I ran across a fine article, “Science, Theology and Monogenesis” by Kenneth Kemp, which distinguishes between biological monogenesis and theological monogenesis. Given that God endows, at the moment of conception, the human with a soul and that the body is what the soul has (C.S. Lewis?), Kemp’s ideas make a lot of sense.

@Bob_Kurland
Bob, I’m having a little trouble understanding Kemp’s ideas in a short period of time. Could you summarize them?

My scenario doesn’t have a problem with original sin, because the Fall, like in Genesis, happened to the first animals who crossed over to having souls (when God interacted with some homo s. sapiens). Spirituality (including knowledge of good and evil and inevitably, sin), then spread to most or all other homo sapiens and all other hominids eventually died out.

Genesis says that death was the consequence of sin. I believe that could mean spiritual death. However, someone has noted that it could be that God’s design for spiritual humans was for a gentle passing from this world into the next because they were close to God. It’s possible that the death God was talking about with the Fall could mean the more difficult, fearful passing that humans began to experience.

Doug, I like your distinction between “gentle passing” (presumably with the knowledge of life hereafter) and “difficult, fearful passing”. You might be interested in reading C.S. Lewis’s "Out of the Silent Planet", where he makes the same distinction for the inhabitants of Mars, who have not fallen, and humans. It’s the first of the three books in his Space Trilogy.
With respect to a summary of Kemp’s work, I refer you to my blog-post, “Did Neanderthals have souls”. (department of shameless self-promotion), but if you don’t want to go there I’ll quote the quote from Kemp’s paper:

"The biological species is the population of interbreeding individuals.
The philosophical species is the rational animal, i.e., a natural kind characterized by the capacity for conceptual thought, judgment, reasoning, and free choice. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that a certain kind of body is necessary for rational activity, but is not sufficient for it. Rational activity requires, in addition the presence of a rational soul, something that is more than the power of any bodily organ, and that therefore can only come into being, in each individual case, through a creative act of God. [emphasis added] The theological species is, extensionally, the collection of individuals that have an eternal destiny. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says ‘God created man in his image and established him in his friendship.’ [CCC 396] Kenneth Kemp, Science, Theology and Monogenesis

Kemp argues that evidence of a rational soul is given by activities such as tool-making, (beyond the tool-making evidenced by animals) and that such evidence is present for early hominids as far back as Homo Erectus, so that Adam and Eve were very far back in pre-history.

Would they be considered ‘innocents’? Only after GLF (in Doug’s scenario) is there knowledge of good and evil, therefore all prior life would be incapable of knowingly rebelling against God, or doing something they know to be wrong, ie: Sin?

@Bob_Kurland
I appreciate your comments and your link, in which the following seems to me the most important phrase: “I won’t give Kemp’s arguments in detail, but only a summary–please go to the original paper for a complete story. He supposes that a small population, about 5000, existed with the necessary physical characteristics (“body”) for rational activity. God selected two of these, a man and woman to be endowed with a soul, the capacity for abstract thought: e.g. to know that one would die, to have knowledge of one-self as an individual (self-consciousness), etc.”

This is very similar to my ‘plausible scenario.’ However, it seems like you and he are talking about earlier in human/hominid history, while I suggest a latter period when homo s. sapiens already had developed some rudimentary tools, etc… Some apes/chimps have some rudimentary use of tools, but to be sure, the homo s. sapiens were more advanced. Still, I am inclined to think that they were not very far along in behavioral modernity, knowledge of right and wrong, language, abstract thinking, etc. until later. Then, at the time of the post-Lake Toba/Ice age population bottleneck (with a population between 1000 and 15,000), some dramatic changes started happening. It is during this time period - 50,000 to 100,000 years ago that I think ‘God selected two to be endowed with a soul.’ Nevertheless, the concept is basically the same. And personally, I think the concept is among the most reasonable ways of reconciling the science and faith relative to Adam and Eve.

By the way, @aleo, who also comes from a Catholic background has a similar theory, which you can read about early in this topic. You might be interested in seeing how he comes about it. I’m sure he would be happy to discuss it with you.

A post was split to a new topic: Could the proposed “population bottleneck” be linked to Noah’s Flood?

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