Was Your Quest for Adam an Honest Struggle?

Dr. Sean McDowell asks Dr. Craig about his process for studying the historical Adam and the challenges it presented.

QUESTION: Tell us how you started your quest. I love that you call the book In Quest of the Historical Adam because this feels like a very personal journey for you that involved some challenges and maybe some fears at times and wrestling with the evidence. You've even been public on some of this. So it really made this journey interesting to watch you process this. But tell us how you start your quest logically.

DR. CRAIG: It really has been a struggle for me personally as I've wrestled deeply and honestly with this question. I begin my quest of the historical Adam with an analysis of what our biblical commitments are as Bible-believing Christians. What does the Bible commit us to about the historical Adam? I think this is very important because it avoids the error of concordism. Concordism is trying to read modern science into the Bible, trying to read it in between the lines. That distorts the teaching of the Bible. It makes every generation able to read their contemporary science back into these narratives. So I begin by just bracketing science all together, just laying it aside and saying, “Let's look at these narratives and ask ourselves: How would they have been understood by the author and audience at the time that they were written?” It's only after trying to determine what our biblical commitments are that I then turn to the question – all right, are those biblical commitments compatible with the deliverances of modern science, history, and linguistics?