Cool! Trivia: There are others, in addition to the Calvinists, who subscribe to determinism and reject free will. I’m a monergistic Christian, and a fan of Martin Luther, who exchanged views on free will with Erasmus. Unlike Sam Harris though, I think his claim that Luck plays a role in why he’s not vile Mr. X is ludicrous. . What is luck that all our swains commend her?
I won’t speak for others around here but in my case, reconciliation is easy/easier when I view Genesis 1 through 3 as an allegory for something like “Catastrophe Theory”. If the eventual death of humans in the Garden was not a possibility before the Fall, the placement of “the Tree of Life” in the Garden seems silly to me. There’s no need for it.
How many heterosexual couples does a 2nd-1st millennium Near Eastern author need to come up with a nonscientific version of human origins, written in a society that is resistant to the possibility that the Cosmos is infinite and eternal? That theoretical resistance would suggest to me that the author figured his story needed to start somewhere, so he picked Earth, and he figured all of humanity must have had a beginning on Earth, and two Most Recent Ancestors in Common is easier to describe than a bunch of couples spread over the known earth at the time.
In other words, I think the hypothetical skeptical evolution experts are surprisingly demanding of Genesis’ author. More so, since paleoanthropology is still trying to figure out when and where the earliest humans began to breed.