Leanings: Adam and Eve

Posted by Michael Glawson on August. 10. 2010 · 7 Comments 

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Belief in a literal couple of people created by God who are the original parents of all other humans is a belief I somehow grew up with without going to church or having any real religious education. It probably snuck in in kindergarten or first grade, when I attended a private school that had no restrictions on what teachers could teach children. I remember praying before lunch every day and reciting Psalm 23 every morning for an entire year. God only knows what they taught us. However and whenever the belief in Adam and Eve was passed on to me, it stuck, and I don’t remember even questioning it before high school.

When I did begin thinking critically about my religious beliefs, this was one of the first to go under the microscope. How did the first several generations of Adam and Eve’s children avoid terrible mental and physical deformaties from inbreeding? How did they reproduce with God’s approval? (After all, he expressly forbids sex between siblings and children and parents later on (Deuteronomy and Leviticus 18)). And what about evolution?

Eventually I saved my belief in Adam and Eve by assuming that 1. They had a miraculously diverse genetic code so that their offspring wouldn’t have suffered the normal effects of incest, 2. God’s disapproval of incest was put on hold for the beginning of humanity, and 3. Evolution was simply false – some sort of trick of the devil or atheists who hated religion.

But these assumptions haven’t survived. I no longer believe in a literal Adam and Eve today, and there are two broad reasons why. First, there’s not extra-biblical reason to think they existed. That is, their existence has no evidence in its favor and has tons of evidence against it. Secondly, I no longer even think the Bible means to teach that an original human couple named Adam and Eve literally existed. The story is intended to mean something else entirely. I want to spend the rest of this post explaining these two broad reasons why I no longer believe in a literal A&E, and why you shouldn’t either.

Let’s back up to the first reason – the lack of evidence for, and the abundance of evidence against, Adam and Eve’s literal existence. Lots of times, when you bring up the question of what evidence there is outside the Bible to validate some religious claim Christians get flustered. ‘You just have to have faith’ is a common response. This sounds nice and pious, but it’s problematic. When people say that you should just have faith they normally mean that one ought to just believe. But that’s plain terrible advice. It’s intellectually lazy, and it’s dangerous.

First off, if one ought to just believe how do they know which of the nearly infinite beliefs to just believe? Of course, when someone says to just have faith, they mean you should just believe their religious claims, not just anything. But which religious beliefs should one adopt? Islam? Christianity? Hinduism? And why do religious beliefs not allow examination any way? Why can’t one ask why they should believe, or whether or not the belief is true? Beliefs should be held because we think they’re true, and we should think they’re true for good reasons. If you don’t examine your important beliefs and hold them because they seem better than competing beliefs, your beliefs aren’t reasonable, admirable or warranted. They’re just thoughtless intellectual inheritance, or mental medication we grab onto because they make us feel good. This isn’t holy, it’s foolish, because even if our beliefs turn out to be true, it’s just pure luck on our part. And lazy, random belief can’t amount to a profound faith.

What we must do then, rather than believing blindly, is look for truth, and truth leaves a trail through the world. Its footprints are the evidence and reason that undergird belief in it – that make belief in it reasonable. And this search for truth by rigorous examination and investigation isn’t in any way irreligious. God is supremely intelligent and rational, and exercising this very rationality is what the Church has often thought of as part of bearing His image.

This search for truth using reason and evidence is also what makes up the modern discipline of science. Since Galileo’s time, the Church has had a rocky relationship with the discipline of science, but this is a tragedy. Science developed as a natural consequence of certain Christian doctrines. Whereas primitive religions before Judeo-Christianity saw the world as ultimately chaotic and unpredictable, Christianity teaches that the universe is governed by a powerful, rational God who brings order out of chaos and rules it according to his unchanging will. If the universe operates in this regular, rational way, rather than chaotically, then certainly we can discover the laws according to which it works, and understand its design. This is the fundamental assumption of all science, which never would have emerged apart from this initially religious view of the world.

So what do our rational, orderly investigations show us? Well, they don’t leave room for an Adam or an Eve. Genetics tells us it’s impossible. Cosmology tells us that other parts of the story are untrue. Biology shows that the evidence paints a totally different picture of our beginnings. And the list goes on.

The would-be-literal interpreter of Genesis 1-3 is then stuck between three options. One can take the story as literally true, but that means holding that the thorough, honest (i.e., scientific) investigations of the world that that humanity has performed have turned up false results. But there’s no good reason to think that.

One could hold that the story is false, then. But that means one of  our most precious religious authorities is totally wrong in the story it tells.

These are the two options most see, but neither is the right one I think. Science got us to the moon. It cured Polio and Leprosy. It makes your tv work, along with the computer you’re using to read this. Accepting its results in these areas but rejecting the results of its other investigations without a reasonable explanation of why they’re wrong isn’t acceptable. But foisting one of the world’s greatest religious traditions without investigating further is cavalier.

I think there’s a third option – taking scientific discoveries seriously doesn’t necessarily mean taking religious texts less seriously. Rather, it may mean investigating the text further to see if our current interpretation is the right one. We do this reevaluation of our interpretations all the time. If I tell you the crackers are in the pantry above the bowls, but you don’t find them there, you don’t necessarily think I was wrong or lying. You reassess your interpretation of what I meant. Are there other bowls? Are the crackers in the same pantry as the bowls, sitting above them, or in the pantry that is above the pantry the bowls are in?

This is what we do with scientific evidence and the Bible. We don’t throw Adam and Eve out. We reassess what the story means. As it turns out, I think there is great reason to think we’ve gotten it wrong all along. That is, I don’t think the Bible even ‘means’ to teach a literal Adam and Eve. Here’s why.

First, an issue with names. Adam and Eve sound like normal, proper names to us today, but it’s not so in the original language. Adam is not a proper name, but simply the Hebrew word for ‘man(kind)’. The character in Gen. 1-3 that we think of as “Adam” is never actually named. He’s simply referred to as ” (the) Man” throughout the story. We got the name by simply transliterating the Hebrew word. The female character her name, Eve , in the same way. Since the characters remain, for the most part, nameless in the original story, it seems unlikely to me that original readers would have taken it so literally. It’s not a story about Adam and Eve, but about Man and Woman (who is only once called Eve – “the living one” – in the story).

The second, most important reason not to interpret the story literally is that such an interpretation is inappropriate to the whole purpose of the story itself. To interpret the story literally is to interpret it as an explanation of where humans came from and why they’re so different from all the other animals. That’s not a question that was on the minds of the original audience of the story. That’s a 18th century scientific question. These are ancient, prescientific humans. They have different concerns and interests in the world than we now have. What were these interests, then?

The story was probably originally written and told during the initial formation of Israel (i.e. the Jews of the Exodus). That means the original audience was a group of people who did not yet know their God. They were a people wandering through the wilderness, following some new god toward who-knows-where. They needed to know who this God was, what His character was like, where they were going, and what it would be like when they got there, and that’s exactly what the Adam and Eve story tells them.

Genesis 1-3 is a totally unique story for it’s time. It’s about a God who forms the world not through sex, by killing giant sea monsters, or by fighting with other gods (as pagan myths of the times had it) but by simply speaking the world into existence. This story paints a picture of  a god more powerful than those of the Egyptian mythology that the Israelites were familiar with, and more powerful than the gods of the Caananites, whom they are about to battle. And how does this God interact with humans? He creates Mankind, giving us His own authority (notice when man is created, God no longer gives names to the parts of the world, Man does). They are not slaves under this God, like they had been in Egypt. They are authorities over the world. And God sets them in an idyllic Land where we are to live freely and abundantly, not as slaves, but as free men. (Just as he is about to do with the Israelites by setting them in Caanan). And what does He require of them for all this? Very little. His Law is simple. Do whatever you like. You are free. Just don’t do one small thing and all will be well. (The Israelites hearing this are soon to receive the Law at Sinai).

This is a story told to inspire confidence, love, excitement, joy, and reverence in and for this new God. It is also told to inspire fear. For, in the story, things don’t go so well for Man. Man disobeys the simple law of his loving God. And what happens? They lose everything. They are exiled from the garden to toil the land (a life familiar to these newly free slaves). They will ‘return to dust’ for their disobedience.

This story hits home. God forms us out of the dirt (the stuff Jews had lived in, making bricks of it in Egypt). Gives us a beautiful land which we are to tend, and a simple law. But if the law is broken, all will be lost. The message is to have faith in your God and obey him, for He is loving and trustworthy, and his Law is light, but not to be taken lightly.

This interpretation is a far cry from a literal understanding of the story. But it is a better one. It gives serious answers to the real life questions and concerns of the original hearers who had embarked on a journey with an unknown God to a new land, rather than giving untenable  answers to the scientifically-oriented questions of people thousands of years later. It sees the text as a theological rather than a scientific one, and allows us to take it seriously and still investigate the world around us sensibly. It seems to me that this interpretation is hands-down the best one, if we can get over the idea that taking the Bible seriously must mean always taking it literally.

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