Genealogical Adam & Eve Makes God a Monster

Biologist Joshua Swamidass claims the ‘fall’ took place as recently as 4000 BC. Are murder, cannibalism, magic, and idolatry not sinful?

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Listen or Read. Your Choice.

In my previous review of Genealogical Adam & Eve, I focused mainly on the scientific problems with the book. Specifically, the isolation of Tasmania adds at least 10,000 years to the scenario, so if author Joshua Swamidass wants to be honest with the science, he should quit proclaiming 6,000 years ago as a “likely” date for his genealogical Adam & Eve. The earliest “likely” point they could be inserted into history is about 14,000 BC, and even that date is fraught with unknowns.

I also complained that Swamidass qualifies almost every claim into oblivion. After spending an entire chapter arguing strenuously against the fact of Tasmanian isolation, he informs us that it really doesn’t matter, since “nearly universal ancestry by AD 1 may be sufficient” (78). What?! Does this mean Aboriginal Tasmanians weren’t affected by the “fall”? Were they without sin until the Europeans arrived, bringing Adam’s sin on board like a stowaway?

I’ll return to those questions later, but they highlight the biggest problems with Genealogical Adam & Eve, which are the “fall” and original sin. In the final chapters of the book, Swamidass attempts to “synthesize the discussion in the first two parts of the book into a theological experiment” (172) that will dramatize the “fall” and original sin. But true to form, by the time the reader arrives at the end of the discussion, Swamidass qualifies everything. He says his “proposal is only tentative and can be replaced or adjusted” (199). That doesn’t undo the damage. The proposal as it stands suffers from special pleading on Tasmania, selective evidence on pre-fall humanity, and circular logic overall. The only option is to replace it, preferably with something more historically credible and parsimonious.

Swamidass introduces his theological experiment as “a recovery, not a revision, of the traditional account of human origins.” This sentence stopped me in my tracks. In the traditional understanding of the church, Adam and Eve are the first humans. In fact, I’m not sure how anyone can read Genesis 1-2 and not recognize those chapters as a description of God’s creation of humanity. Evangelical theologian Jack Collins goes so far as to say that “to stay within the bounds of sound thinking … (we) should see Adam and Eve at the headwaters of the human race.” [1] Genealogical Adam and Eve arrive about 200,000 years too late to fit that bill.

Before Young-Earth Creationism experienced a resurgence in the 1970s, the “Gap Theory” was the primary way that literal interpreters tried to square the creation account with deep time and the vastness of space. The Gap Theory posited that Gen. 1:1 describes God’s creation of the universe over billions of years, but that creation was destroyed in some sort of catastrophe. Starting with verse 2, the rest of the Genesis 1 tells of God’s re-creation of the universe, which he accomplishes in six literal days. The Gap Theory fell into disfavor for obvious reasons, but Genealogical Adam and Eve represents the same idea. This time, the gap falls between Gen. 2:4 and 2:5, and the time span is hundreds of thousands of years instead of billions. Genesis 1 relates how God created all of humanity through evolution, while Genesis 2 tells of the special creation of Adam from the ground and Eve from his rib. Like the Gap Theory, Genealogical Adam and Eve proposes that God’s first attempt at creation was somehow deficient, so he re-created humanity in the form of two people. I find no scriptural warrant for this fanciful notion. It raises far more questions than it answers.

The first that comes to mind is “Why?” Was God dissatisfied with his first effort – the “biological humans,” as Swamidass calls them?  Before presenting the book’s answer in a “Speculative History of Humankind,” Swamidass lays down his ground rules for questions and objections (174-5). First, we must use his definition of “human.” Second, the parts of the narrative that don’t comport with Scripture are off limits to objections. “There is mystery outside the garden,” he says. Third, the parts of the narrative that lack scientific evidence also aren’t fair game. “Adam and Eve are outside the streetlight,” he explains. Fourth, parts of the narrative may lack support from Scripture and from science, but those are just details. Fifth, the details don’t matter anyway, because they’re easily adjustable. Sixth, questions that also apply to other origins narratives “need not be answered.” What’s left? Every conceivable ground for objection has been ruled out before the questions have been asked. Genealogical Adam and Eve are safely hidden from view. Nevertheless, I’ll play a little hide-and-seek and see what I can find.

The “Speculative History of Humankind” begins with the “biological humans” who are the result of evolution. As Swamidass describes them, they are created in the image of God with free will, minds, and souls, but “they are not yet affected by Adam’s fall.” Okay. So far, so good. But what does it mean to say they aren’t affected by the “fall”? Are they without sin? In Swamidass’ version, it means they already “have a sense of right and wrong” and a conscience, as Paul says of the Gentiles in Romans 2:15, and “they do wrong at times.”

Now, this throws up a giant red flag. The “biological humans” are created in the image of God and endowed with a soul. They know right from wrong, have a conscience, and occasionally violate it by choosing evil. I fail to see the difference between the “biological humans” Swamidass describes, and the Gentiles Paul describes. The whole point of Rom. 2:12-16 is to demonstrate that “all who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law” (Rom. 2:12). God judges the Gentiles by the standards of their own conscience. These pre-fall “biological humans” seem indistinguishable from Paul’s post-fall Gentiles, whom God judges. What’s the difference? Swamidass attempts to explain. From “archaeological and anthropological data,” he claims that “war is unknown to them. Slavery and racism are unknown to them. Their world is not defined by dominion of humans over one another” (176).

That crash you just heard was a proposal running off the rails.

That crash you just heard was a proposal running off the rails. The data that Swamidass cites comes from The Creative Spark by Agustín Fuentes, [2] but Swamidass makes selective use of it. The book’s only mentions of race are to deny any biological basis to the concept, and it mentions slavery not once. Certainly, institutional racism and slavery could not exist until civilization arose, but who can say those things didn’t exist in human societies prior to that? Was no one discriminated against because they looked different? Was no one taken prisoner and forced to perform labor for the entire camp? The idea that slavery and racism were unknown sounds nice, but it’s a baseless claim.

Furthermore, Fuentes considers “war” to be “large-scale interpersonal violence” (152), which requires a level of political organization that humans lacked until states appeared. Fuentes’ limited definition of “war” conveniently fits the Swamidass timeline, but Fuentes was not arguing that human society was peaceful prior to the invention of agriculture and rise of cities. He simply meant to show that interpersonal violence always has been rare, not the norm, and large-scale slaughter is a recent human development.

Chimpanzees have a well-documented form of “war,” and Richard Wrangham proposes that the “warfare” waged by early humans followed the chimpanzee pattern.[3] Even Fuentes would agree that the archaeological record is filled with instances of violence, murder, and cannibalism,[4] and artifacts such as “Venus” fertility figurines and magical creatures appear simultaneously to the cognitive revolution more than 40,000 years ago. Were those things not sinful until Adam fell in 4000 BC? As for the assertion that humans didn’t dominate or exercise power over others until Adam’s sin, I’m frankly speechless. Primate social lives are a constant battle for supremacy and dominance. Those are our evolutionary roots. As I show in “Adam’s Evolutionary Journey,” human evolution took a turn toward cooperation and lessened aggression, but that’s a far cry from claiming that just 6,000 years ago “biological humans” didn’t exercise “dominion over one another.” What human society has ever exhibited that trait? Evidence, please. 

Returning to Swamidass’ speculative history, he says God created Adam and Eve because he desired “to make himself known in a new way and to influence the destiny of everyone” through them. That’s an understatement. At this point, I began to wonder how God viewed these “biological humans.” Apparently, they were created in his image, they have souls, they have knowledge of good and evil, and they sin against their consciences, and all of this has occurred before Adam has been created or fallen from grace. What happened to “biological humans” who died before Adam’s sin? Did they go to heaven? Were they sentenced to hell? As always, Swamidass scrupulously avoids an answer (183), but the problems are piling up quickly.

 Next, we learn that the Lord God creates Adam and Eve to offer everyone the opportunity for immortality. This seems odd, given that “biological humans” possess a soul, and traditional theology considers the soul to be immortal. In any case, Swamidass says Adam and Eve were offered a choice – the power of immortality, or knowledge. In actuality, the biblical text says nothing about a choice between the tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God simply says, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Gen. 2:16-17). The choice is not between immortality or knowledge, one or the other. The choice is between following God’s instruction or following their own desires.

Skipping ahead, Adam and Eve eat the literal fruit and become the first true sinners. Swamidass proposes that God mercifully exiled them from the garden rather than executing them for their crime. Therefore, “we owe our existence to God’s act of unjustified mercy toward them” (192). What a strange claim! The world population of “biological humans” was well into the millions at the proposed time of genealogical Adam’s creation and fall. Would all of them have dropped dead if God had executed Adam and Eve? How do the “biological humans” outside the garden owe their existence to Adam and Eve? In fact, it seems true on its face that the biological humans would have been better off if God had executed Adam and Eve. Instead, by showing them mercy God condemned everyone else – sin “spreading across the earth like an evil empire” (177).

I honestly have to stop here. The logic of Genealogical Adam and Eve is entirely circular and makes God a monster. If sin didn’t exist and “biological humans” lived in peace with one another, why introduce Adam and Eve into the equation? And once they failed the supposed test, why have mercy on those two people and thereby condemn millions of others to hell? Worse, now Jesus becomes the solution to a problem that God created, and that only a few thousand years ago. What sort of God is this? I would have a hard time calling such a God righteous or good, if the Genealogical Adam and Eve were true.

The logic of Genealogical Adam and Eve is entirely circular and makes God a monster. If sin didn’t exist and “biological humans” lived in peace with one another, why introduce Adam and Eve into the equation?

Swamidass is fond of thought experiments. Let’s return to the Tasmanians and conduct our own thought experiment. Suppose, as Swamidass grants is possible, that they are among “a few isolated populations (who) do not descend from Adam at AD 1” (66). The Tasmanians are “biological humans” not yet stained by Adam’s fall. They have minds, freedom, and souls; they live in peace with one another, and the men don’t at all seek to dominate the women or anyone else. Then the Europeans arrive, and since marriage to an Aboriginal native is out of the question, one of the sailors rapes a Tasmanian woman. She gives birth, and by the “magic” of genealogical ancestry, her second cousin on the other side of the island is suddenly fallen and guilty of Adam’s sin. Through no fault of their own, the woman who was raped, her second cousin, and everyone in Tasmania is now in need of Christ. Unfortunately, they still have to wait a few more decades for the missionaries to arrive, preach the gospel, and save a few of their souls.

I’m sorry, but that thought is not worthy of the God I worship, so I can’t recommend the book. Genealogical Adam and Eve does not advance the conversation between science and Scripture. Rather, it’s a detour onto a dead-end road.

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[1] C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? Who They Were and Why You Should Care (Crossway, 2011), 120.

[2] Agustín Fuentes, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (New York: Penguin, 2017).

[3] Richard W. Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, “Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers.” Human Nature 23 (2012): 5-29. See also Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1997).

[4] Palmira Saladie et al., “Intergroup cannibalism in the European Early Pleistocene: the range expansion and imbalance of power hypotheses,” Journal of Human Evolution 63, no. 5 (2012): 682-695. See also M. Mirazón Lahr et al., “Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya.” Nature 529, no. 7586 (2016): 394.

Tagged as: The "Fall", Genealogical Adam & Eve, Original Sin, Literal Adam.