First let me preface this by saying that this post will be wildly speculative; I will just be throwing alot of stuff out there and seeing if any of it sticks. Second, let me say that I feel there are ways in which this post is completely unneccessary. The main point is man was created somehow (through evolutionary processes or not) and suffered some kind of fall by choosing the knowledge of good and evil rather than the knowledge of God and life with Him. All that said, time to jump in. Let the controversy begin.
Before going in to the theology of all this, let me first speak to the science- and the limits of science. A confession here is in order first though, I haven't taken biology since my sophomore year in college- and then I napped in class on occassion and borrowed a textbook that I have yet to return; so I am not by any means up to date on the science behind all this. But as far as I can tell, and based on what some smart fellow Christians have said on the subject, the science points to evolution as the cause for the diversity of life on Earth. Otherwise, God has placed a lot of fairly compelling evidence for evolution, presumably in an attempt to dupe a bunch of scientists into atheism. So our options seem to be either accepting the theory of evolution as the best explanation of the available data, critique the science behind it (which many try to do, with little success), or accuse God of acting against His character by tricking us into belief in an evolutionary explanation (by hiding fossil remains in the earth for instance, so that when we found them we would interpret them as signs of man's predecessors and so be fooled). Maybe I making strawmen out of the other two options, but anyway looks like evolution is the most likely to me. So what does that give us, if anything? A means of Creation. Science cannot say anything positive or negative about the existence of God or the truth of the Resurrection. It is an approach to truth, it however cannot acknowledge something as true or not; the scientific method only rejects or fails to reject hypotheses, it is by nature (fancy theological word) apophatic. This however is not sufficient, it is not how men live their lives. An example that will perhaps help segue into the theology behind all this is our use of images in describing God. In Christian thought there have been two main ways of approach to the Truth of God in Himself which, as Paul says, we now only see "through a mirror darkly" (little explanatory aside here- back in the day they had different mirrors, made out of shiny metal rather than glass; in Paul's day it would be more like checking yourself out in whatever kitchen appliance is handy rather than walking all the way to a bathroom - you get the general idea of what's going on, but you can't pick out all the details). The two ways of approaching this truth have been through the use of images (the way of affirmation as Charles Williams used to call it)- God is a Father, Christ is a Husband, ect. and through the way of negation (apophatic theology)- God is not a Father as we conceive of fathers, not husband like we think of husbands, ect. Both ways are neccessary however, the way of affirmation so that we can think of God in human terms and the way of negation so that we do not make an idol out of our conception. As C.S. Lewis said once, "We must desire God more than we desire our conception of God."
Well it seems I have continued my habit of ballooning introductory paragraphs into such lengthy affairs. Good to be consistent I suppose. So then question becomes, "Given evolution as the most probable explanation for the origins of life on earth, what do we do with Genesis 1-3?" First let me say we should not on the one hand throw it out, or on the other be scared that it does not speak of evolution. The latter is more briefly addressed, so I'll turn to it first. The Bible is, primarily, a record of God's revelation of Himself to man and is itself a part of that revelation. He must either speak in terms sensible to man (as our Jewish friends like to say "The Torah speaks in human language") or reveal centuries of scientific knowledge and terminology to the Israelites as a preface to the Genesis account to satisfy our conceptions of what the Bible should be (which would make for an even longer introduction than the one accompanying this post). So instead the Bible uses sensible terms for its original audience (Joshua commanding the sun to "stop" being the most famous example), regardless of our satisfaction with those terms. But still the question, "What to do with Genesis?"
Two major implications are how do we tie what seems to be the narrative of a historical event, The Fall, involving two people to a species that arose and presumably arose as a species rather as two individuals and secondly how do we account for death and its existence before the Fall. Again let me reitirate that this is going to involve some speculation and is in the end, I think, unimportant; that is to say the theological importance of the fall and the explanation it provides for the human condition are vastly more important than tying the Fall to a historical event involving two historical individuals named Adam and Eve. It is much easier to for instance turn the story of Noah into an adventure on a boat or to argue the architectural viability of a boat that large made without modern materials, it is much harder to grapple with God being so distressed by humanity that he wished to destroy the creation (you could in fact translate the verb in Gen 6:6 I think it is as God repented of having created man).
The Eastern Orthodox (or at least our old friend Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov) have this idea of the universal culpability of man; that is, that as far as I am guilty of sin, I am responsible for all the sin in the world. I hear that they interpret Paul's talk of Adam in Romans 5 as being representative of all mankind. Since I am guilty of sin, I can no more blame Adam for the Fall than myself; we are all responsible and we are responsible for each other. Now let me say two things about this before relating it back to our main topic. First, that I like this idea very much. It explains things, shows our interconnectedness- a guy struggles with lust, a girl with body issues or eating disorders and we think these things are unrelated. It puts us in a position of responsibilty and shows how damaging sin it to the world and the impossibility of it being truly private. Second, this does not sit easily with the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin. It shifts the blame from an inherited propensity to sinfulness to the personal sinful act. But I find it impossible to judge between the two. Human memory functions in such a way that we seem to begin life in media res, the story is already in progress by the time we get to it; that is to say, I can't remember myself not being or my entering into conciousness, neither can I remember my first beginning to sin. So whether we sin because we inherit the taint of Original Sin or we just start sinning early on, on our own steam so to speak, the result is the same- a loss of fellowship with God.
Now if I remember right, in the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam is referred to as "the adam"- the man or the dirt-guy (adamah the Hebrew word for earth is where we get adam from) and Eve is called the woman, they don't have proper names. So then perhaps the story becomes instead of a historical account of specific people, a general account of what man and woman always choose to do- desire to be God and fall out of fellowship. This then is where our idea about universal culpability comes into play, we all are Adam choosing to fall. After the Fall is when they receive their proper names I think, after that we can talk of historical people in what we can recognize as historical settings. The first chapters of Genesis are unique in that they portray a mode of being that is different from what we experience. As far a part as my life is from say, Abraham, I can imagine myself in his setting, dealing with the same problems; I can not imagine life in the Garden. This is why I don't see the point in tying Adam and Eve to individual people in a recognizable setting, we could not relate to them before the Fall anyway. The theological truth, that we are fallen and that we carry some sort of guilt over are exile is what is important.
The other big question is death before the Fall, a big subject. But I have written for far too long by now anyway and will leave that, for now, to a later post.
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