Genealogical Adam & Eve Makes God a Monster Becoming Adam Podcast – Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ

Biologist Joshua Swamidass claims the ‘fall’ took place as recently as 4000 BC. Are murder, cannibalism, magic, and idolatry not sinful?















Listen or Read. Your Choice.







In my previous

review of Genealogical Adam & Eve,

I focused mainly on the scientific problems with the book. Specifically, the isolation

of Tasmania adds at least 10,000 years to the scenario, so if author Joshua

Swamidass wants to be honest with the science, he should quit proclaiming 6,000

years ago as a “likely” date for his genealogical Adam & Eve. The earliest “likely”

point they could be inserted into history is about 14,000 BC, and even that

date is fraught with unknowns.







I also

complained that Swamidass qualifies almost every claim into oblivion. After

spending an entire chapter arguing strenuously against the fact of Tasmanian

isolation, he informs us that it really doesn’t matter, since “nearly universal

ancestry by AD 1 may be sufficient” (78). What?! Does this mean Aboriginal

Tasmanians weren’t affected by the “fall”? Were they without sin until the

Europeans arrived, bringing Adam’s sin on board like a stowaway?







I’ll

return to those questions later, but they highlight the biggest problems with Genealogical Adam & Eve, which are

the “fall” and original sin. In the final chapters of the book, Swamidass

attempts to “synthesize the discussion in the first two parts of the book into

a theological experiment” (172) that will dramatize the “fall” and original sin.

But true to form, by the time the reader arrives at the end of the discussion,

Swamidass qualifies everything. He says his “proposal is only tentative and can

be replaced or adjusted” (199). That doesn’t undo the damage. The proposal as

it stands suffers from special pleading on Tasmania, selective evidence on

pre-fall humanity, and circular logic overall. The only option is to replace it,

preferably with something more historically credible and parsimonious.







Swamidass

introduces his theological experiment as “a recovery, not a revision, of the

traditional account of human origins.” This sentence stopped me in my tracks.

In the traditional understanding of the church, Adam and Eve are the first

humans. In fact, I’m not sure how anyone can read Genesis 1-2 and not recognize

those chapters as a description of God’s creation of humanity. Evangelical

theologian Jack Collins goes so far as to say that “to stay within the bounds

of sound thinking … (we) should see Adam and Eve at the headwaters of the human

race.” [1]

Genealogical Adam and Eve arrive about 200,000 years too late to fit that bill.









Before

Young-Earth Creationism experienced a resurgence in the 1970s, the “Gap Theory”

was the primary way that literal interpreters tried to square the creation

account with deep time and the vastness of space. The Gap Theory posited that

Gen. 1:1 describes God’s creation of the universe over billions of years, but that creation was destroyed in some sort

of catastrophe. Starting with verse 2, the rest of the Genesis 1 tells of God’s

re-creation of the universe, which he

accomplishes in six literal days. The Gap Theory fell into disfavor for obvious

reasons, but Genealogical Adam and Eve represents the same idea. This time, the

gap falls between Gen. 2:4 and 2:5, and the time span is hundreds of thousands

of years instead of billions. Genesis 1 relates how God created all of humanitybr /...