Adam and Eve Didn't Exist. Get Over It!

Michael Ruse
HuffPost
Posted: 06/10/11

The cover article of this month's Christianity Today is on the subject of Adam and Eve. Could humans be descended from one single pair or not? Really, Christians should be over this one by now. They should have been over it by Christmas of 1859, a month after Charles Darwin published his "Origin of Species." As he said there, "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

It sure was! Organisms evolved from simple forms by natural selection. This includes humans. We are the end result of a long, slow, natural process of development. Moreover, there never was an original pair. It may be that at some point in our past -- a hundred thousand years or so ago -- humans went through some kind of bottleneck, but we are still looking at a population of 10,000 or so. Moreover, even if all humans are descended from one woman -- "Mitochondrial Eve" -- no one thinks that we are descended only from one woman. Or that that woman and her mate were in any significant sense different from their parents or their contemporaries.

In other words, science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong. This is not to say that they were stupid or careless. Two thousand years ago, for a Jew to believe in Adam and Eve was perfectly sensible. But time moves on and with it our understanding of the world around us, and old beliefs have to give way to new ones. Aristotle thought that some people were born to be slaves. He was wrong. St. Paul thought we are descended from Adam and Eve. He was wrong.

(More here.)