O frabjous day! Just when I thought I had nothing to say today—and these days happen—Ceiling Cat (praise be unto Him) sent me something interesting in an email from reader Brian. Brian called my attention to the latest “Reasonable Faith” podcast by theologian William Lane Craig, a broadcast called “The historical Adam and Eve.” It’s 14.5 minutes long, and has a free download and iTunes connection at the link, so it’s not too onerous timewise—though it is brain-wise. The best part is that it’s devoted to attacking me, or rather my views on the historicity of Adam and Eve. When someone like Craig or Chopra goes after me, I know I’m in for some chuckles.
I didn’t find my exact post about the Primal Couple that Craig is attacking, but I’ve posted quite a bit about the issue, and so you can just search for “Adam and Eve” on this site. I have a section about this problem in the Albatross (soon available at fine bookstores everywhere).
The problem, as you’ll know if you’re a regular here, is that genetic data show clearly that the genes of modern humans do not descend from only two people (or eight, if you believe the Noah story) in the last few thousand years. Back-calculating from the genetic diversity seen in modern humans, and making conservative assumptions, evolutionary geneticists have shown that the human population could not have been smaller than about 12,250 individuals: 10,000 in Africa and 2,250 in the group of individuals that left Africa and whose descendants colonized the rest of the world. There was a population “bottleneck,” but it was nowhere near two or eight people.
This shows that Adam and Eve were not the historical ancestors of all humanity. And of course that gives theology a problem: if the Primal Couple didn’t give rise to everyone, then whence our affliction with Adam and Eve’s Original Sin? That sin, which the pair incurred by disobeying God, is supposed to have been passed on to the descendants of Adam and Eve, i.e., all of us. And it’s that sin that Jesus supposedly came to Earth to expiate. But if Original Sin didn’t exist, and Adam and Eve were simply fictional metaphors, then Jesus died for a metaphor. That’s not good!
That doesn’t sit well with theologians, of course, who, if they accept the science (and most of the smarter ones have), must then explain the significance of Adam and Eve, and whether they really existed. I discuss this in the Albatross as well; suffice it to say here that there are several interpretations of Adam and Eve as both historical and metaphorical, many of them funny and none of them coming close to solving the problem of Original Sin and the coming of Jesus.
William Lane Craig, though, still buys the Genesis view that Adam and Eve were not only real people, but that all humans are their actual descendants. He believes not just in a bottleneck of two people, but that Adam and Eve were the first two people, presumably created de novo by God.
Craig defends that view in his podcast, which you can hear in about a quarter of the time it takes me to write this. But let me reiterate a few of his claims:
- He first denies that the historicity of Adam and Eve is critical for Original Sin. What? Well, says Craig, the Eastern Orthodox Church accepts the reality of Adam and Eve, but doesn’t believe in Original Sin. So, concludes Craig, the dependence of Original Sin on Adam and Eve “is not inherent to Christianity.” Case closed.
The big problem, of course, is that Craig is not a member of the Eastern Orthodox church, and doesn’t hold that view! (He’s an evangelical Christian.) So what is he on about? I’m baffled. And even if he did deny that there was such a thing as Original Sin, he’d still face the problem of Adam and Eve not being the ancestors of every living human.
- Craig gets around the genetic data by saying that the population-size estimates by geneticists are based on mathematical models, and “It could well be the case that these mathematical models are simply incorrect.” Well, maybe, but they use conservative assumptions, and there are two different models giving pretty much the same results. If the models are wrong, let Craig present some cogent criticisms and, perhaps, make his own model, or have a Christian geneticist do it. In the interim, on one side we have two sets of decent scientific estimates of historical population size, and on the other we have Craig’s bluster. I’ll go with the science.
- Craig does level one criticism of the models: they assume a constant mutation rate in humans. That’s not a bad assumption, actually, for we have no reason to think that the rate of errors in DNA replication changed drastically in the last ten thousand years. But Craig says that the mutation rate could have been much higher in the past than we see now. That would then give us a misleadingly high population sizes if we use the lower present mutation rates. If they were much higher in the past, then maybe there could have been just two people in H. sapiens, and the huge mutation rates in their immediate descendants would give us the genetic diversity present today.
There are two points against this. First, human mutation rates are not estimated by direct observation, but from population-genetic estimates, with some estimates based on data from many generations. So if mutation rates were higher in the past, much of that would already have been accounted for.
Second, if mutation rates did change over time, you’d expect them to be higher not in ancient times, but recently, since now we’re exposed to all kinds of mutagens (like chemicals and X-rays) that we didn’t have in the past.
Craig’s desperate invocation of the nonuniformity of mutation rates reminds me of those theologians who, seeing a contradiction between their beliefs in a young Earth and the fact that we can see light from stars millions of light-years away, invoke either a non-uniformity of the speed of light (“it was higher in the past”) or God’s creation of light in transit from the stars along with the stars (after all, what good would stars be to humans unless we could see their light as soon as God made them?). This isn’t science, but apologetics—an attempt to save an a priori emotional commitment.
- Craig gloats about the fact that the “Y-chromosome Adam” (the single male from which all our Y chromosomes come) and the “mitochondrial Eve” (the single female from which all our mitochondria descend) lived about the same time, in contrast to what I said in my post. So they could have been Adam and Eve! Indeed, a few years ago estimates based on a limited number of Y chromosomes showed that these ancestors did live at non-overlapping times. But more recent analyses show that there could have been some overlap.
This, however, hardly supports the idea that the genomes of all modern humans came from a couple who lived at the same time and mated with each other. There are huge error bars around these times. So, for example, the Y chromosome Adam could have lived any time between 120,000 and 160,000 years ago, while “mitochondrial Eve” could have lived any time between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago. While there’s overlap, there’s also 32,000 years when they don’t overlap. This is not good support for the claim that the two individuals lived at exactly at the same time.
But there’s a bigger problem. As I note in the Albatross, “although all the Y chromosomes of modern humans descend from this one individual, the rest of our genome descends from a multitude of different ancestors who lived at various times ranging from 100,000 to about 4 million years ago. Our genome testifies to literally hundreds of ‘Adams and Eves’ who lived at different times—a result of the fact that different parts of our DNA were inherited differently based on the vagaries of reproduction and the random division of genes at when sperm and eggs are formed.” It’s not just mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA we have to consider, but the entire human genome. And that shows clearly that parts of the genome go way back before the DNA on the Y and on the mitochondrion. Indeed, parts of our genome originated even before our divergence from the ancestors of chimps! We have some variable genes, for example, with variants that are more closely related to gene forms in chimps than to other genes in humans. That shows that the variability was hanging around in our common ancestor, and that the variability has persisted over more than five million years.
But none of this so-called “contemporary” DNA data refutes the data showing that the human species was never as small as two individuals. It’s a separate issue.
- Near the end of the podcast, Craig gives his own take, and that’s a literal view of Genesis: Adam and Eve were real people and the ancestors of all humanity. As he says,”I’m inclined to stick to the literal Adam and Eve until I’m actually forced by the evidence to abandon that view, and I’m far from that point.” Surprise! He also claims (at the beginning) that there is good evidence for the historical resurrection of Jesus, though I’m not quite sure what that “good evidence” is. Is it simply what the Bible says?—because that’s the only evidence I know of. He does raise the point that perhaps a historical Adam and Eve were part of Paul and Jesus’s “incidental beliefs,” but not part of their “teaching.” This is theobabble. If Jesus and Paul believed in a literal Adam and Eve, as the Bible says they did, what does it matter whether they just believed it or taught it? For Craig, after all, Jesus is part of God, and if God thought Adam and Eve were real, it must have been true.
- One of the most amusing parts of the podcast is when Craig’s pal on the podcast (I don’t know who he is) tells Craig that I deliberately misspelled “Jesus” as “Jebus” in my post. (I plead guilty.) Craig is flummoxed, for he can’t believe that anybody could actually make fun of the Lord in that way. You can hear the horror when Craig realizes that “Jebus” was not a typo, but a deliberate misspelling. I’m then told not only that I’m immature, but that I should “get a life, and become a Christian while I’m at it.”
No thanks, Dr. Craig: I’m not drinking your Kool-Aid. It’s clear (and you’ve said this about Jesus’s Resurrection) that there are no data that could possibly dispel your idea that the Bible is historically true. You are not open to any findings of science if they go against your faith.
