Are Adam and Eve Incompatible with Evolution?

Left Coast said:

Wouldn't establishing that there was a literal Fall require us to establish that there was a literal Adam and Eve?

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Nothing has been "established" - there is no evidence for my belief in the Redemption given us by the Lord Jesus Christ.

I believe it is possible to come to know the truth of all things through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Fallen Prophet said:

Nothing has been "established" - there is no evidence for my belief in the Redemption given us by the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Oh. Okay!

Brian2 said:

The scientists are the ones guessing, based on the scientific evidence and the naturalistic methodology of science

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When one arrives at statements based on evidence and rational inquiry, then those statements are called conclusions, not "guesses".

The methodological presumption of no God input has imo led science astray at times.

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There is no such thing as that presumption.
Instead, there is only the idea of "let's only include things / keep into account things for which we actually have a shred of evidence instead of whatever we can imagine and can't be falsified".

It's called "being rational".

Fallen Prophet said:

All kinds of reasons - but it mainly boils down to my views concerning the Lord Jesus Christ.

If He has literally redeemed us from a literal Fall - then there would have needed to be a literal Adam and Eve.

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So your reason for believing it, is the "I already also believe other things which require me to believe these things also".


Not a very good reason, now is it?

Left Coast said:

... Especially those of you with more knowledge of evolution, biology, genetics, etc.

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How about those with 'more knowledge' about Genesis?

Genesis 4:14 : "Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

Who the hell is he worried about, if it was just him, his parents, & Able?

When the story of Adam and Eve was first told, no one knew about evolution.
Or it would have been told differently.

Wandering Monk said:

Problem is, most laymen don't understand the difference between a scientific theory and a hypothesis.

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Agreed. The crucial role of reproducible evidence is often not appreciated.

Brian2 said:

The scientists are the ones guessing, based on the scientific evidence and the naturalistic methodology of science.
The methodological presumption of no God input has imo led science astray at times.

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Nevertheless, the fact that it works so well, might indicate that the naturalistic premise might be right.

Try to post the same without using the products of science, but just by prayer alone, to see what I mean.

Ciao

- viole

9-10ths_Penguin said:

The Y chromosomal bottleneck in the Genesis story would be at Noah, not Adam... though from what I understand, it's "Y chromosome Adam" who lived earlier, so that doesn't really help the creationists.

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Y chromosome Adam lived somewhere between 20,000 amd 150,000 years before mDNS Eve. The lower number is as close as bible literalists can get using real science. It allows them to say Adam and Eve didn't live far apart.

PureX said:

I suppose, depending on how one defines a human being, there had to have been a first pair of us, somewhere.

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Nope.
There never was a "first human", just like there never was a "first spanish speaker".

Or I suppose a first one of us with some dominant genetic mutation that defined him/her as a human being apart from his/her's parents, and that then spread through procreation.

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Nope. No non-human has ever given birth to a human. Or more generically: no individual was ever born which didn't belong to the same species as its direct parents.

In the same way, no latin speaking parents have ever raised a spanish speaking child.
Instead, every child grew up speaking the same language as its parents / peers.

The thing is, though, that it's a collection of traits that define us as human beings, and those will likely have developed separately over time. So that there would not likely have been any one individual source to name "Adam" or "Eve".

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Indeed. Evolution is a gradual process. No one mutation defines a species. No individual defines a species.
And while mutations are introduced through individuals, it's populations that evolve.

Just like no single person came up with spanish or italian.
Instead, it's a slow and gradual process of accumulation of micro-changes which gradually spread in the population. So every new generation is 99.999% like the previous one.

After many generations though, that 0.001% difference adds up through accumulation.
The difference between generation 1 and 2 is almost nihil.
But the difference between generation 1 and 2000 is potentially very large.

PureX said:

Mutations in one individual's genetic code can cause a "first" characteristic that if beneficial to the individual's ability to procreate, and if genetically dominant, will then be transferred to more and more individuals within the species.

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Yes. And you know what this implies? That that individual is of the same species as the population in which that mutation is spreading.

So the one mutation, while significant enough for natural selection to do its thing, is by far not significant enough to account for a new species.

Mutation is, in fact, a significant means of generating the changes responsible for species "evolving" over time. But as usual, you felt the need to protested before thinking. I guess I have that affect on people.

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He protested because what you said was incorrect, as I pointed out as well.

There's no such thing as "the first human". Or even "the first human generation".
Just like there is no "first spanish speaker" or even a "first spanish speaking generation".

In things that are subject to gradual change, there is no "first", aside from, at best, a very arbitrary one.

Audie said:

Overguessing is the core of religions.

Rigorous application of evidence is not guessing.

But it is anathema to revealed religions

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I don't think that rigorous application of evidence is anathema to revealed religions. It is just that what is seen as evidence expands when it comes to theology.

Audie said:

We can cite plenty of times religion led science
astray or forced it to halt.
I doubt you can give any example of 'presumption of no God" ever being hindrance
to science.

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Religion has held up scientific progress in the past yes.
The "presumption of no God" has led science in the wrong directions, and it will not come back from these directions because the presumption remains.
Evidence for the existence of spirit and God is ignored because you first need evidence for those things in order to posit evidence for them.
I could mention OBEs in NDEs where people know of events in other rooms and scientists are wanting to explain it in terms of brain activity.
I could mention science saying that evidence points to life coming from dead matter when evidence shows life only coming from other life and the only thing that points to life coming from dead matter is the presumption of no pre existing life.
I could probably point to other things that science has said, not because of rigorous application of evidence, but because of the presumption.
The good part about all this for atheists, sceptics, is that they can point to science and say "see, science agrees with us" when in reality it is the presumption that agrees and the conclusions of science falling from the presumption. IOWs circular reasoning. I call it the Science of the Gaps. It's where science is insinuated into a situation because an answer is needed and the presumption says it can't be supernatural.

gnostic said:

Genesis 1 never mention "hour", but it does say "evening and morning" for each "day".

A cycle of evening and morning do equate with a "day", because the "evening and morning" do provide specific context as to what the Hebrew word "yom" mean.

So yom is not some unspecified period of time, because "evening and morning" do specified that yom is a day, and there are 6 instances when yom being mentioned connection with "evening and morning" in Genesis 1 (verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23 & 31).

It is rather poor scholarship, and quite dishonest, to read or interpret yom being unknown period of time, or being "a thousand years", which some Christians do from 2 Peter 3:8, a verse that was never meant to be taken as literal.

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I agree about the 1000 years but I see no reason why evening and morning mean a 24 hour day necessarily.
Day is used in Genesis 2 to cover the whole of the creation period, (6 days of Genesis 1)
Day 7 in Genesis 2:2,3 has no evening and morning and so it is still going, obviously longer than 24 hours.
Not all language people claim that "evening and morning" mean a 24 hour day.

Twilight Hue said:

It is by modern day science we know what such an outcome would be in the Genesis scenario.

It's not very good.

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Science agrees with much of the creation story.

AlexanderG said:

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that all by itself, although I doubt god would've followed an ethical framework like the Animal Welfare Act to ensure no undue harm came to them. In particular, withholding the ability from them to tell right from wrong, then punishing them for disobeying you when they didn't know it was wrong to disobey until the moment after they disobeyed, then cursing them with pain and death as the result of your own elaborate mind game that you pre-orchestrated, seems to be unethical.

And yes, as a critical thinker I don't believe any of this actually happened, because I don't believe things for which there is zero supporting evidence. Either way, none of the reinterpretation in this article really sheds light on the issue of original sin. I guess it's trying to make the surrounding claims of the story more plausible, so that the entirely unevidenced portions can be more easily accepted by people who want to believe them?

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Well yes I guess it would be trying to make the surrounding claims of the story more plausible so that the entirely unevidenced portions can be more easily accepted by people who want to believe them.
Attacking the credibility of the Bible in areas where there is evidence for it's truth seems to be a way to give people doubts about the unevidenced bits so showing that more of the Bible is evidenced may bring back credibility to the Bible,,,,,,,,,,,,but as you say, only for those who want to believe,,,,,,,,,,,,,as opposed to not wanting to believe.

Thirza Fallen said:

But that is our best hope of knowing. How else could we even try to find out?

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Science plus revelation can give us a good picture of what happened imo.
Actually I try to line up the Bible and science to get a better picture of what the Bible means and to show me where science is going wrong.

danieldemol said:

Until science discovers any reliable evidence of God input it is better for science to operate on the null hypothesis that there isn't any.

In my opinion.

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If evidence of spirit and even God is found it has to be ignored because of the naturalistic presumption.
I will mention OBEs in NDEs where people have known what went on in other rooms and science looks for answers in the workings of the brain and ignore the obvious.
I will mention the scientific finding that life only comes from other life and that is ignored when it comes to where life originated and it is presumed to have come from non life/chemistry.
In my opinion.

Evolution has been characterized by sudden mutations leaving no intermediate steps because those steps never existed.

gnostic said:

Wrong about what, exactly?

What did bible get right, in which science got wrong?

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Those things in which science and the Bible disagree. But that is a matter of opinion until all the evidence is in, and neither of us have all the evidence.

Harel13 said:

A certain rabbi whose classes I attend weekly once recounted to us that he had attended some kind of convention of clergymen from Judaism, Christianity and Islam that worked in university campuses. There was a group of Christian priests there who were trying to get clergymen to join their cause of fighting off the concept of Evolution which was taking up campuses by storm (evolution is no longer a new theory so I don't know what exactly made it more popular at the time). They were very surprised and dismayed to discover that he had no trouble with the concept of evolution because it doesn't really contradict anything within Judaism. Not only that, but there are sources, including ancient ones, that appear to allude to such a concept.

I myself am not troubled by this issue, even before I heard this story, but it's a nice anecdote. Whether there was evolution or not is not a topic that keeps me up at night.

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It used to keep me up at night but not now. The trouble I have now is knowing where to draw the line between science and the Bible, knowing they cannot both be correct if the Bible has a historical description of what God did. But of course not all Bible believers see the creation account that way.