God and Nature Summer 2019
Practical Problems for Literal Adam
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By Jay D. Johnson
For most Christians, the age of the earth is non-controversial. Too many sciences point to the same conclusion. To deny it requires either a denial of all the physical sciences or an embrace of the “omphalos hypothesis,” which says God created everything with the appearance of age. Of course, once we are willing to take that step, we also cannot know for certain that God didn’t create the universe last Thursday, complete with our own false memories of the time prior to that event. Understandably, rational Christians don’t find Last Thursdayism an attractive option.
Yet the subject of human origins continues to divide us. For a host of theological reasons, many Christians can accept evolution for animals, but they balk at human beings. Most often, those who make this objection consider a literal “first couple” as theologically necessary.
Granted, among those who require Adam and Eve as literal individuals, some are attempting to grapple with the science. Since genetics has ruled out a recent original breeding pair as the origin of our species, the response among Adam and Eve preservationists has been divided. One possibility explored by Ann Gauger of the Discovery Institute is that Adam and Eve might have been H. erectus around 500,000 years ago. Others, whether because of the mention of agriculture (Gen. 3:17) or based on the various genealogies in the Bible, want to place Adam and Eve somewhere between 4000-10,000 B.C., at which point the apologists again divide: one camp insists upon the special creation of Adam and Eve, while the other allows that the first couple might have been “enlightened” or otherwise chosen by God from an existing population.
For most Christians, the age of the earth is non-controversial. Too many sciences point to the same conclusion. To deny it requires either a denial of all the physical sciences or an embrace of the “omphalos hypothesis,” which says God created everything with the appearance of age. Of course, once we are willing to take that step, we also cannot know for certain that God didn’t create the universe last Thursday, complete with our own false memories of the time prior to that event. Understandably, rational Christians don’t find Last Thursdayism an attractive option.
Yet the subject of human origins continues to divide us. For a host of theological reasons, many Christians can accept evolution for animals, but they balk at human beings. Most often, those who make this objection consider a literal “first couple” as theologically necessary.
Granted, among those who require Adam and Eve as literal individuals, some are attempting to grapple with the science. Since genetics has ruled out a recent original breeding pair as the origin of our species, the response among Adam and Eve preservationists has been divided. One possibility explored by Ann Gauger of the Discovery Institute is that Adam and Eve might have been H. erectus around 500,000 years ago. Others, whether because of the mention of agriculture (Gen. 3:17) or based on the various genealogies in the Bible, want to place Adam and Eve somewhere between 4000-10,000 B.C., at which point the apologists again divide: one camp insists upon the special creation of Adam and Eve, while the other allows that the first couple might have been “enlightened” or otherwise chosen by God from an existing population.
"Between birth and maturity, we literally learn how to be human, and the way we learn is by observation, inference, and imitation." |
What seems to be driving almost all of this debate is a preoccupation with genetics, or, in the case of one recent theory, genealogy. But in the rush to locate Adam and Eve somewhere in the historical timeline a great deal of other science, as well as theology and common human experience, has been neglected or forgotten.
Take Dr. Gauger’s proposal that Adam and Eve were erectus (or possibly H. antecessor?). Yes, such a couple might satisfy the conditions of being our sole genetic progenitors, but that’s a far cry from the Adam and Eve depicted in Genesis. Considering just the linguistic aspects, we encounter the problem that while erectus was likely the first speaker of words, humans were still hundreds of thousands of years away from fully modern language, let alone the symbolic capabilities required for true moral knowledge. Isn’t that the point of Genesis 3? Such an Adam might have been able to name all the animals (provided he lived a literal 930 years), but he wouldn’t have been able to do much of what we observe of him in Scripture.
Remarkably, the problems grow even worse when Adam and Eve parachute into history at a more recent point. First, consider the notion that God used evolution to produce all of life, including humanity, but sometime between 6-12,000 years ago, he decided to create a new male and female from scratch, indistinguishable from those he had already created by evolution, and place them in a garden he planted somewhere around the Tigris and Euphrates. In theological terms, this is the de novo (“of new”), special creation of Adam and Eve. Leaving aside the question of why God would arbitrarily choose to test humanity so long after creating them—not to mention creating them by an entirely separate process than the chosen pair—the concept raises a host of questions.
To focus on just one discipline: special creation ignores what we know of childhood development. Human beings primarily learn by a process variously called “mimesis,” “social learning,” or “enculturation.” As philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have observed, we watch as others play the game, we infer the rules, and we attempt to imitate what the others are doing. The same process accounts for how children learn language, the norms of social behavior, and the numerous traditions and social rituals that collectively we call “culture.”
Now, imagine two people deprived of all that information and suddenly thrust into existence. How did Adam and Eve learn to walk and talk? How did they learn socially appropriate behavior? How did they learn to obey a rule? When God warned them not to eat the fruit, how did they know what “death” was? Between birth and maturity, we literally learn how to be human, and the way we learn is by observation, inference, and imitation. The de novo, special creation of Adam requires all of that basic knowledge be implanted in Adam’s and Eve’s minds directly by God in the form of false memories. It’s the omphalos hypothesis again.
Second, once we postulate that a literal Adam and Eve were not the first humans, we have opened a whole new can of worms. Whether they were freshly created or “adopted,” whether they were adolescents or infants, if Adam and Eve had to speak an existing language and fit into an existing culture after their expulsion from the Garden, then the obvious questions are how they learned that language (any language!) and the norms of that culture. Once again, children learn by observation and imitation. God himself could not provide Adam and Eve with enculturation, since children learn that by observing and imitating how human beings actually speak and behave in society. It’s possible that the Lord drilled them to memorize an extensive list of rules to observe once outside the Garden (which assumes their failure in the upcoming test). Or possibly he implanted social knowledge in their minds, on top of everything else—but the special pleadings are piling quite high now.
The Adam and Eve of special creation bear almost no resemblance to actual human beings. After being expelled from the Garden, with no prior socialization besides an occasional stroll in the garden with God, how do they suddenly and seamlessly integrate into society? How would Adam and Eve know how to conduct themselves? People who’ve been raised in another culture may have different customs, but that’s a far cry from two people with zero experience of human customs or group behavior. Try to imagine such an Adam unleashed upon society. It’s not hard to picture him urinating in public, taking other people’s things, inappropriately touching his neighbor’s wife—and winding up dead of stupidity in short order.
For a recent Adam and Eve, the problem doesn’t simply evaporate if they are “enlightened” or “adopted” from an existing population; it’s still a Catch-22 with no escape. An adolescent Adam and Eve already would have the knowledge of good and evil even before laying eyes on the apple, since they were taken from pre-existing human society, and an “innocent” pair of toddlers would require full-time tutoring by God just to learn to speak, a la Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. Actually, the Lord might face a bigger challenge than Miss Sullivan. Children learn as much from the conversations around them as they do from direct, one-on-one conversation with a parent. If the only dialogue Adam and Eve ever heard was what God said to them, they would be more deprived than Helen Keller, since Anne Sullivan signed every word of every conversation around them into Helen’s hand.
Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” was based on his observation that children are not exposed to enough conversational examples to acquire all the grammatical features of their native language. This is called the “poverty of the stimulus” argument. Chomsky might have underestimated the number of examples that children passively observe under normal circumstances, but he wouldn’t be wrong in any of the “recent Adam” scenarios. If Adam and Eve’s only conversational partner is God, then the Lord had better be in a talkative mood for at least a decade to make up the deficit that normal human company provides.
In the above discussion I have considered only a handful of the sciences, all outside the realm of genetics, that are relevant to the question of a literal Adam and Eve. The myopic focus on DNA in the quest for a historical first pair has disguised myriad other problems. When it comes to wrestling with this difficult topic, we need the social sciences as much as the physical sciences.
After 15 years as a journalist and publishing executive, Jay D. Johnson chucked it all and spent the next decade teaching English in the juvenile justice system. He presently lives in New Mexico, where he taught special education.
Take Dr. Gauger’s proposal that Adam and Eve were erectus (or possibly H. antecessor?). Yes, such a couple might satisfy the conditions of being our sole genetic progenitors, but that’s a far cry from the Adam and Eve depicted in Genesis. Considering just the linguistic aspects, we encounter the problem that while erectus was likely the first speaker of words, humans were still hundreds of thousands of years away from fully modern language, let alone the symbolic capabilities required for true moral knowledge. Isn’t that the point of Genesis 3? Such an Adam might have been able to name all the animals (provided he lived a literal 930 years), but he wouldn’t have been able to do much of what we observe of him in Scripture.
Remarkably, the problems grow even worse when Adam and Eve parachute into history at a more recent point. First, consider the notion that God used evolution to produce all of life, including humanity, but sometime between 6-12,000 years ago, he decided to create a new male and female from scratch, indistinguishable from those he had already created by evolution, and place them in a garden he planted somewhere around the Tigris and Euphrates. In theological terms, this is the de novo (“of new”), special creation of Adam and Eve. Leaving aside the question of why God would arbitrarily choose to test humanity so long after creating them—not to mention creating them by an entirely separate process than the chosen pair—the concept raises a host of questions.
To focus on just one discipline: special creation ignores what we know of childhood development. Human beings primarily learn by a process variously called “mimesis,” “social learning,” or “enculturation.” As philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have observed, we watch as others play the game, we infer the rules, and we attempt to imitate what the others are doing. The same process accounts for how children learn language, the norms of social behavior, and the numerous traditions and social rituals that collectively we call “culture.”
Now, imagine two people deprived of all that information and suddenly thrust into existence. How did Adam and Eve learn to walk and talk? How did they learn socially appropriate behavior? How did they learn to obey a rule? When God warned them not to eat the fruit, how did they know what “death” was? Between birth and maturity, we literally learn how to be human, and the way we learn is by observation, inference, and imitation. The de novo, special creation of Adam requires all of that basic knowledge be implanted in Adam’s and Eve’s minds directly by God in the form of false memories. It’s the omphalos hypothesis again.
Second, once we postulate that a literal Adam and Eve were not the first humans, we have opened a whole new can of worms. Whether they were freshly created or “adopted,” whether they were adolescents or infants, if Adam and Eve had to speak an existing language and fit into an existing culture after their expulsion from the Garden, then the obvious questions are how they learned that language (any language!) and the norms of that culture. Once again, children learn by observation and imitation. God himself could not provide Adam and Eve with enculturation, since children learn that by observing and imitating how human beings actually speak and behave in society. It’s possible that the Lord drilled them to memorize an extensive list of rules to observe once outside the Garden (which assumes their failure in the upcoming test). Or possibly he implanted social knowledge in their minds, on top of everything else—but the special pleadings are piling quite high now.
The Adam and Eve of special creation bear almost no resemblance to actual human beings. After being expelled from the Garden, with no prior socialization besides an occasional stroll in the garden with God, how do they suddenly and seamlessly integrate into society? How would Adam and Eve know how to conduct themselves? People who’ve been raised in another culture may have different customs, but that’s a far cry from two people with zero experience of human customs or group behavior. Try to imagine such an Adam unleashed upon society. It’s not hard to picture him urinating in public, taking other people’s things, inappropriately touching his neighbor’s wife—and winding up dead of stupidity in short order.
For a recent Adam and Eve, the problem doesn’t simply evaporate if they are “enlightened” or “adopted” from an existing population; it’s still a Catch-22 with no escape. An adolescent Adam and Eve already would have the knowledge of good and evil even before laying eyes on the apple, since they were taken from pre-existing human society, and an “innocent” pair of toddlers would require full-time tutoring by God just to learn to speak, a la Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. Actually, the Lord might face a bigger challenge than Miss Sullivan. Children learn as much from the conversations around them as they do from direct, one-on-one conversation with a parent. If the only dialogue Adam and Eve ever heard was what God said to them, they would be more deprived than Helen Keller, since Anne Sullivan signed every word of every conversation around them into Helen’s hand.
Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” was based on his observation that children are not exposed to enough conversational examples to acquire all the grammatical features of their native language. This is called the “poverty of the stimulus” argument. Chomsky might have underestimated the number of examples that children passively observe under normal circumstances, but he wouldn’t be wrong in any of the “recent Adam” scenarios. If Adam and Eve’s only conversational partner is God, then the Lord had better be in a talkative mood for at least a decade to make up the deficit that normal human company provides.
In the above discussion I have considered only a handful of the sciences, all outside the realm of genetics, that are relevant to the question of a literal Adam and Eve. The myopic focus on DNA in the quest for a historical first pair has disguised myriad other problems. When it comes to wrestling with this difficult topic, we need the social sciences as much as the physical sciences.
After 15 years as a journalist and publishing executive, Jay D. Johnson chucked it all and spent the next decade teaching English in the juvenile justice system. He presently lives in New Mexico, where he taught special education.