Adam’s Evolutionary Journey, Pt. 3: Genesis & Evolution in Dialogue

Can the ‘fall’ be an actual event in human history? Is ‘original sin’ something real, or just a Christian fairytale?

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Listen or Read. Your Choice.

This is the third of three episodes giving a broad overview of the concepts behind Becoming Adam. In the first installment, we identified two controlling metaphors and three “points of contact” in Genesis for scientific exploration. The controlling metaphors were “the man,” ha’adam, as an archetype, and the human journey from childhood to maturity, while our themes were language, morality, and relationship. The second episode outlined the scientific narrative, which showed that the human brain evolved along a path similar to what we see in childhood development, and the same held true for language and morality. What’s more, both language and morality rest upon a foundation of empathy and cooperation, not individual competition. From an evolutionary perspective, this seems odd, to say the least.

Now, we’ll place Genesis and evolution in dialogue and see what results from the conversation. Remember, the goal of this quest is not to allow science to dictate the interpretation of the Bible, nor is it to naively overlay the ancient text onto contemporary science. As William Brown cautioned, the connections are “virtual parallels” between the scientific and biblical narratives. Although these parallels include some historical as well as conceptual “points of contact” between science and Genesis, I assume the ancient author was ignorant of current science. Thus, in addition to these harmonies I’ll also note a few of the discords between science and Scripture.

With those guardrails in place, let’s get started.

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The structural metaphor that MORAL KNOWLEDGE = COMING OF AGE is immediately grasped by every human being in every culture, and in Genesis 2–3 it’s applied to the “the man” and “the woman” to create literary archetypes in a figurative text. The same conceptual journey from childhood to maturity resurfaces throughout Scripture, but it becomes especially prominent in the New Testament. There, the Greek τέλειος (teleios) does double duty. It can describe the final state of consummation as “perfect” or “complete,” but it also can describe the partial realization of that goal in “mature” Christian life here and now. [1] By his choice of metaphor in the garden narrative, has the author primed us for an evolutionary understanding of human origins?

Considering the “fall,” our ancestors 300,000 years ago certainly weren’t sinless. When we realize that the “innocence” of the immature human race was ignorance instead of perfection, it’s easy to understand how early humans, like children, could commit sins of ignorance, yet God could overlook those offenses without violating his own justice. Even human societies—imperfect as they are—don’t hold toddlers accountable for breaking the law. Just like the rest of us, “the man” was never perfect. That explains why the serpent appears in the garden without warning in Gen. 3:1. It’s described as “more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” Notice that the serpent is “one of God’s animals,” not a supernatural being. This implies a “natural” origin of sin. It wasn’t introduced from the outside by Satan. Sin has been present with us from the beginning, even in Eden. Evil wove its way into the warp and woof of human culture long before we learned to give it a name.

The “fall” transpired at a literal time and place: somewhere between humanity’s migration to Ethiopia 75,000 years ago and the departure from the Levant and across the globe 10,000 years later.

Such a scenario does not make God the origin of evil. If we keep in mind the metaphor of maturity that forms the backbone of Genesis 2-3, we already have a framework for understanding the connection between moral maturity and moral decision-making. Jim Stump, Vice President of BioLogos, explains,

“Perhaps the evolutionary struggle is the only way to develop moral beings like us. I’d suggest that moral maturity is a quality that can be developed only by making moral decisions. God can no more create morally mature creatures than he could create free persons who are incapable of sin. So to achieve moral maturity, agents must be involved in their own moral formation by making decisions with moral implications…. It seems that evolution may be the only way to create beings with the capacity to know good and evil.” [2]

Between 65-75,000 years ago, humanity acquired the capacity for abstract moral reasoning—the knowledge of good and evil. We had reached maturity. In biblical terms, humanity finally was capable of representing God’s goodness, justice, and mercy as his image in his earthly temple. At this point, God spoke his blessing upon us: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28, NRSV).

This is the first of our virtual parallels. The explosion of the Toba super-volcano 75,000 years ago was a near-extinction event for humanity. [3] The population was reduced to 10-20,000 people, and the survivors gravitated toward East Africa in search of food. Within a few thousand years, a band of intrepid explorers continued north and most likely crossed Yemen into Sinai, where they followed the Great Rift Valley into the Levant. From there, with God’s blessing, the human population exploded and began to spread across the globe in the “Out of Africa” migration.

Genesis 2 says a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided into four rivers: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates. No “natural” river divides and becomes the source of multiple rivers, which is one clue that Eden is figurative. Moreover, the Hebrew literally says the Pishon and Gihon flowed around the lands of Havilah and Cush, not that the rivers flowed through them, which would be the expected form in both Hebrew and English. [4] This hints at a region, not a small, localized garden. Although both Pishon and Gihon have eluded identification, the name Gihon recalls Gihon Spring, which fed the Pool of Siloam in old Jerusalem, and the biblical Cush has been associated with Ethiopia and southern Sudan (Nubia) at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers. Here, we encounter another virtual parallel. Just before the human population boom and global expansion, the remnants of humanity lay stretched along a line of migration from East Africa to the Fertile Crescent, a region roughly circumscribed by the rivers of Eden.

Returning to our thought experiment, humanity acquired the knowledge of good and evil just before the “Out of Africa” migration. For the first time, ha’adam faced a morally responsible choice. Finally knowing the difference, would people choose the good, or would they do as they always had done, and willfully choose evil? While God previously overlooked humanity’s sins of ignorance, somewhere we had crossed a line—the same fuzzy line that each of us crosses in our own lives—and become morally responsible for our actions. We had acquired the “divine wisdom” of good and evil, and with it—a conscience.

Human beings are indoctrinated into sin at the same time and in the same way that we learn language … and music, and art, and conformity to social norms, all of which are aspects of human culture.

Since ha’adam, as an archetype, embodies the entire human race, the conclusion is that everyone continued to do what they were accustomed to do—choose evil, even though they now understood those actions as morally wrong. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10), but the fear of the Lord is to hate evil (Prov. 8:13). Humanity did not exercise its newfound moral knowledge as God intended, by choosing the good; instead, we chose evil even after we finally saw it for what it was, when we should have hated and spurned it.

The “fall” transpired at a literal time and place: somewhere between humanity’s migration to Ethiopia 75,000 years ago and the departure from the Levant and across the globe 10,000 years later. Humanity’s “innocence” was lost virtually as soon as abstract moral reasoning began. We fall short of the ideal as soon as we conceptualize it, hence ha’dam’s feelings of guilt. Additionally, our ideas of right and wrong are formed by observing and imitating those around us—their way of living, their form of life. Without doubt, human morality and conscience were not implanted in our minds by God before birth; they were born in the murky waters of human culture. And just as language could not be invented by one person, the historical condition of “sinfulness” could not be invented by one person. Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Evil is not to be traced back to the individual, but to the collective behavior of humanity.” [5] Human beings are indoctrinated into sin at the same time and in the same way that we learn language … and music, and art, and conformity to social norms, all of which are aspects of human culture. Mimesis and enculturation explain how “original sin” arose and was/is propagated. There never was an original sinner who invented sin, any more than one individual could invent a language, or one breeding pair could start a species. Speciation, language, sinfulness: All require a population.

Paul and the Fall

For many, the Reformation principle that “Scripture interprets Scripture” is a guiding light of interpretation, with Paul’s teaching in Romans 5 usually cited as “Exhibit A” in defense of a literal Adam. What most fail to realize, though, is that Paul begins his defense of the gospel with his own inspired interpretation of Genesis 3—a version of the “fall” that not only supports an archetypal understanding of ha’adam, but does so in a way that virtually parallels the historical record.

I noted in the previous episode that evangelical scholars long ago noticed the connections between Romans 1 and Genesis 3. As Morna Hooker observed 60 years ago, idolatry springs from the confusion between God and the things he has made. [6] Some commentators, such as Thomas Schreiner, dismiss any reference to Adam in Romans 1 since “he did not commit idolatry in the specific sense mentioned here, nor is there any evidence of his fall into sexual sin.” [7] But this begs the question. Douglas Moo, a commonly cited dissenter, offers a more sophisticated take. [8] Although the summary statement of v. 18 is in present tense, Paul switches to the Greek aorist in verses 19-31, which usually is rendered in English by the past tense. This suggests Paul has in mind a specific event, such as the “fall.” On the other hand, Moo says the aorist tense does not always indicate a single past event, and more importantly, “this foolish and culpable rejection of the knowledge of God is repeated in every generation, by every individual.” While Moo is clearly correct, we already have seen that “the man” in the garden is an archetype capable of representing both humanity and every individual. Rather than distancing Paul from Genesis 3, Moo’s exegesis fits perfectly with understanding ha’adam as an archetype, for the apostle has carefully crafted his words in Romans 1 to communicate something true of both humanity in general and every individual, just like the author of the Eden narrative.

Returning to the historical record, humanity’s acquisition of symbolic language about 100,000 years ago was preceded by a nascent spiritual sense, shown by the appearance of beads and other symbolic items in burial sites. As Paul said, humanity from the beginning possessed an intuition of God. Following that, between 65-75,000 years ago humans acquired the lexicon of abstract ideas, which endowed us with the capacity to relate to God and to one another in love and mature moral understanding. This was accompanied by God’s blessing to “be fruitful and multiply.” [9]

Claiming to be wise, we became fools and were granted the very thing we desired, which was independence from our Father. (Shades of the Prodigal Son.)

Before I delve into Paul’s text, let’s pause for a moment to imagine the giddiness of those first generations of people who developed the vocabulary of abstract concepts. Suddenly, they could begin to talk about things they had always felt, but never been able to express. Beauty. Love. Hope. Justice. They had discovered a whole new way to think about things and share their thoughts with one another. What a heady, joyful experience that must have been! But soon enough, the flipside of this advance bared its teeth.

Previously, I argued that the “fall” was occasioned by actual sins people committed—the only difference being that now they recognized those acts as morally evil. Whereas God intended for humanity to reject evil and choose good, we continued to do the opposite. Paul enters here, because he is concerned to explain not just the fact of human sin, but the spiritual root and consequences of it. In Paul’s inspired interpretation, humanity became so intoxicated by its newfound “divine wisdom” that we lapsed into pride, which is the source of idolatry and the temptation represented by the serpent. Proverbs 8:13 says “the fear of the Lord” is to hate evil. The next lines of the poem provide examples of what that means: “I hate arrogant pride and the evil way and perverse speech.” In Proverbs, pride is “a self-confident attitude that throws off God’s rule to pursue selfish interests.” [10] Arrogant pride seeks its own way, independently of God, and the result is lives of habitual evil and deception, so that “their thoughts became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” This is Paul’s description of the “fall,” whereupon God spoke his curse—hardship, pain, toil, broken relationships, strife, death—and banished us from his immediate presence.

From there, the apostle traces out the consequences of human arrogance. Claiming to be wise, we became fools and were granted the very thing we desired, which was independence from our Father. (Shades of the Prodigal Son.) Left to our own devices, humanity invented idolatry and turned decisively away from the Lord, exchanging “the glory of the immortal God for an image.”

The historical record provides a virtual parallel to Paul’s account. Once humans acquired symbolic language, we gradually applied it to every domain of our existence, so that over time everything became infused with symbolic meaning. The sun. The moon. The forest. The sea. Animals. Birds. Hot on the heels of the language breakthrough that made moral knowledge possible, the “cognitive revolution” reached full bloom, and the archaeological record exploded with figurative art, musical instruments, and a host of new technologies—as well as totemism, animism, shamanism, magic, and idolatry. [11] After the “fall,” humanity immediately exhibited its desire to be “like God” in controlling the weather, ensuring success in the hunt, and living beyond the grave.

What transpired afterward, according to Paul and the remainder of Genesis 1-11, was a cycle of ever-increasing violence and bloodshed, the fruit of hearts made hard by the deceptiveness of sin (Heb. 3:13). The early church father Chrysostom characterized this as the inevitable result of God withdrawing his influence, which is certainly true, but when Paul says that God “gave them over,” the sense is more like a judicial verdict—a judge actively handing over a prisoner to begin his sentence. The consequence, as the apostle explains elsewhere, was that humanity was rendered “dead in transgressions and sins, in which we lived according to this world’s present path …” (Eph. 2:1-3). Sin seized the opportunity and killed us, just as God warned in Genesis. Not only are we unable to represent him or do his will, but because of humanity’s “original” sin and our own personal sins, we are unwilling to do it and even hostile to it (Rom. 8:5-8). Rather than imitating and reflecting God, our Creator, we imitate and reflect the people and culture around us.

This is the prison into which all of us were born. Thanks to humanity’s foolish pride, God removed his presence, and spiritual darkness descended upon us. We have no one to blame but ourselves, though, since we repeat the mistake of our ancient forefathers in our own individual lives. Or, as Moo put it, “At the very center of every person, where the knowledge of God, if it is to have any positive effects, must be embraced, there has settled a darkness …”

Conceptual Connections

With so many points of contact between Genesis 1-3 and history, the natural inclination is to ask: What about Cain and Abel, the genealogies, the flood? Are they historical? I’m afraid the answer is “no.” Oral traditions could not have been passed down for 60,000 years, and most of the names in early Genesis are wordplay in Hebrew, which did not exist even as a spoken language until the Bronze Age. We’ll explore these issues in future episodes, but we must take note of the discords between science and Scripture as well as the harmonies. The ancient author had no knowledge of current science. In Genesis 2, animals and birds are created after the man, and the creation of the woman must wait until he has named all the creatures. In Genesis 3, God’s curse upon the woman is pain in childbirth. Thanks to bigger brains and narrower hips, such pain has been part of the human condition for more than a million years. Needless to say, it’s impossible to align these events with history, so we can’t consider Genesis a literal, blow-by-blow account of human origins.

But is that all that can be said in the dialogue between science and the Bible? No, in fact there’s more. Besides the harmonies and “discords” just noted, let’s consider some conceptual connections between Genesis and science.

Upon his creation, the man’s first act is linguistic—naming the animals. Proto-language began with one-word utterances, just as it does with infants. And just as the line between child and adult is “fuzzy” for moral responsibility, the same can be said for the line between human and animal in evolution. While the exact location of that line may remain a secret hidden in God, Christians nevertheless will continue to speculate and debate whether Neanderthal, Denisovan, erectus, or only sapiens should be considered “human.”

Without claiming a definitive answer, I offer my own educated guess. On the analogy of “the man” naming the animals, I suggest the first speaker of words is ha’adam—the first member of the human family. The hyoid bone anchors the tongue and is required for almost all vowel sounds. Since the Neanderthal hyoid is identical to our own, we can infer that they also possessed speech, probably an advanced form of protolanguage. [12] Erectus had the physical capacity for speech, but its hyoid appears intermediate between ours and Australopithicus. [13] Judging by the fact that trade networks appeared around a million years ago, erectus is the logical candidate for the first speaker of words. By analogy to ha’adam naming the animals, I nominate Homo erectus as the first member of the human family, although, like children, these early humans were immature and still developing.

From a scientific perspective, the appearance of these traits was not the result of a “red in tooth and claw” contest for individual survival, much less the byproduct of a “selfish gene” in our DNA. Instead, the “purely natural” explanation involved a counterintuitive turn toward sharing, empathy, and truthful communication.

Michael Tomasello identified the human instinct to share our psychological states with others as providing the evolutionary motivation for humans to speak. Such sharing also undergirds the Christian understanding of love. All of us seek to be understood “for who we really are,” and to understand who the other truly is. We need that empathy. We crave it. In this life, marriage is the closest bond between two people. Within the confines of the spousal relationship, we communicate ourselves most fully with another person—physically, emotionally, intellectually. But even the marriage relationship ultimately cannot satisfy. Our inbuilt need to communicate ourselves can be met only in Christ, the God-man who alone fully knows us. As Paul beautifully put it:

“For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness (τέλειον) comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:10-13).

Our Creator has instilled within us an instinct to share ourselves—our complete selves—with others and more importantly with himself. The spark set within us a million years ago is still making its way to the powder keg.

Besides language, I previously noted two other unique features of human sociality that rely on cooperation. These were morality and “intersubjectivity”—an umbrella term that covers joint action, joint frames of reference, and empathy. From a scientific perspective, the appearance of these traits was not the result of a “red in tooth and claw” contest for individual survival, much less the byproduct of a “selfish gene” in our DNA. Instead, the “purely natural” explanation involved a counterintuitive turn toward sharing, empathy, and truthful communication. When we consider this triad of traits from a Christian perspective, they surely reflect the loving heart of the Triune God—a community of infinite sharing between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Primate society is based on deception, manipulation, and social status/power. We did not suddenly outgrow these things. The evolutionary journey to a society that could be described as “human” was not accomplished overnight. It began with Australopithicus 4 million years ago, and according to Christian theology, it will not end until the consummation.

More than 350 years ago, the great scientist, mathematician, inventor, and philosopher Blaise Pascal asked, “What, then, will man become? Will he be equal to God or the brutes? What a frightful difference!” Here lies the crux of the human condition, buried deep within our evolutionary past: Do we move in a Godward direction and join the community of infinite sharing, or do we remain rooted in the blood-soaked soil from which we sprang?

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[1] Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2019).

[2] Jim Stump, “Death, Predation, and Suffering,” in Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?: Discussing Origins with Reasons to Believe and BioLogos, eds. Kenneth Keathley, J.B. Stump, and Joe Aguirre (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), 71-73.

[3] Lucie Gattepaille, Torsten Gunther, Mattias Jakobsson, “Inferring Past Effective Population Size from Distributions of Coalescent Times,” Genetics 204, no. 3 (2016): 1191-1206. See also W. Amos and J. I. Hoffman, “Evidence That Two Main Bottleneck Events Shaped Modern Human Genetic Diversity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277, no. 1678 (2009): 131-137. Revising the human mutation rate pushed previous estimates of the population bottleneck back about 12,000 years, from ~63 Kya to ~75 Kya. See Alwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, “Revising the Human Mutation Rate: Implications for Understanding Human Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 13 (2012): 745-753.

[4] The Hebrew has·sō·ḇêḇ also is used in 2 Chron. 21:9 to refer to the Edomites who were surrounding Jehoram and his commanders.

[5] A quote found seemingly everywhere, but one that I have been unable to source reliably.

[6] Morna D. Hooker, “Adam in Romans I,” New Testament Studies 300 (1959-60). Recall that Mithen explained totemism and anthropomorphism as a “mixing up” of the natural and social domains. See also James D.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM, 1980), 101-102; D.J.W. Milne, “Genesis 3 in the Letter to the Romans,” Reformed Theological Review 39 (1980): 10-18; Donald Garlington, “The obedience of faith in the letter to the Romans: Part II The obedience of faith and judgment by works,” Westminster Theological Journal 53 (1991): 47-72.

[7] Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998), 82.

[8] Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, New International Commentary on the New Testament(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996).

[9] A blessing that God did not rescind after humanity’s fall.

[10] Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

[11] Even early geometric patterns etched on cave walls may have had spiritual significance. See Genevieve Von Petzinger, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols (New York: Atria Paperback, 2017).

[12] Ruggero D’Anastasio, et al, “Micro-Biomechanics of the Kebara 2 Hyoid and Its Implications for Speech in Neanderthals,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 12 (2013). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0082261.

[13] Luigi Capasso et al., “Homo Erectus Hyoid Bone and the Origin of Speech,” Coll. Antropol. 32 (2008) 4: 1007–1011. See also Bruce Bower, “Evolutionary Back Story: Thoroughly modern spine supported human ancestor,” Science News 169, No. 15, May 6, 2006, p. 275.

Tagged as: The "Fall", Original Sin.