Reactions Begin on Historical Adam Book

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, the book is just being released and already it is stirring up controversy even among people who have not yet read it. We are talking about In Quest of the Historical Adam. It hit shelves now and is available. We are anticipating a lot of people reading this book. I guess you are also prepared for pushback or questions as to what you are saying.

DR. CRAIG: Certainly. I open the book with a quotation from the Old Testament scholar Richard Averbeck who says, “Anybody who writes on the first few chapters of Genesis is going to be in a lot of trouble with a lot of people.”^[1] That is regardless of your views. So, yes, I am anticipating controversy and pushback, but my hope is that on balance folks will find this to be a very helpful book in giving them confidence in the truth of what the Bible says about human origins.

KEVIN HARRIS: You can get more information at ReasonableFaith.org in ordering the book. Here's an example. There is a website called Evidence for Christianity. Dr. John Oakes, who has his PhD in chemical physiology and also teaches apologetics, takes questions on this website. Here's a question that he got regarding your book.^[2] He says,

Hello I had a question regarding an interesting theory that I heard from Dr. William Lane Craig regarding the historicity of Adam and Eve. Dr. Craig stated that he has been studying the question of the historicity of Adam and Eve for around 2 years now. He has discussed information with scientists on a variety of studies and has seemingly formulated the hypothesis that Adam and Eve could have been members of the species homo heidelbergensis. Does this seem to be a reasonable theory? One answer that caught my attention was his argument that effective population size estimates are flawed because they do not detect the time for the most recent four alleles that could be passed on by a founding pair and instead focus on minimum population size. I found it interesting but I am unsure if this is something that I should point out to others.

Let's start there. What do you think about his question?

DR. CRAIG: Well, it seemed to me that he has a very informed knowledge of the book without having yet read it. The question that he's asking about specifically has to deal with the challenge of population genetics to humanity's descent from an original human couple. It has been said by some that population genetics rules this out – that the divergence of genetic traits in our contemporary population is too vast to have derived from an original single human couple and that therefore Adam and Eve could not have existed. In the book I show in some detail that this claim is, in fact, false if you locate Adam and Eve early enough in the historical process. I give, I think, very persuasive evidence to think that Adam and Eve were ancestral to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens; we should not write Neanderthals out of the human race as mere beasts, rather they were human beings just as much as Homo sapiens were human beings. Therefore, Adam and Eve, as universal human progenitors, have to be prior to the divergence of  Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. And that puts them back earlier than 500,000 years ago. And once you get that far back there's nothing in population genetics that rules out humanity's descent from an original human couple.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Here's Dr. Oakes’ answer. He says,

Here is a link to an article in which William Lane Craig explains and defends his proposal.  https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/could-adam-have-been-heidelberg-man/  I think it is a good idea for me to let Dr. Craig speak for himself.  You will see that in this article Craig admits that his idea is quite speculative, based on assumptions about artistic and language skills (which we do not know) as well as brain size (which we do know).

DR. CRAIG: Could I interrupt at that point? I'm surprised that he says that we do not know about artistic and language skills. I think that that's false. I think with regard to artistic skills, we have cave paintings – concrete evidence, drawings of animals – that go back 40,000 years ago. So we know that human beings existed at least by then. And the fact that you can have symbolism in art suggests language skills because the ability to represent things symbolically is in a sense at the essence of language where you use words to represent things. So I think that we have solid concrete evidence for artistic skills and good inferential evidence for linguistic ability in early man.

KEVIN HARRIS: And he agrees that we do have knowledge about brain size.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Which is very important. Homo heidelbergensis had a brain capacity that falls within the modern range and, in fact, Neanderthals had a larger cranial capacity – a larger brain size – than do contemporary human beings.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. He continues,

He makes it clear that he is not trying to find “the answer,” but instead to start some helpful discussion. You should bear in mind that Craig is not a scientist.  He is a philosopher.  My response to this is that this is an intriguing possibility and I would not outright dismiss it, but it is merely a hypothesis and a speculative one at that.  But, yes, I would say that it is a reasonable hypothesis (Note: Craig calls it a hypothesis, not a theory because of its tentative nature) I think it is good that Craig is engaging in this discussion.  To me it is more important to have an intelligent discussion about what the first persons created in the image of God would be like than to try to find “the answer” to this question, given that we simply cannot know.

DR. CRAIG: Let me interrupt at that point. I appreciate the tentative nature of Professor Oakes’ inquiry, and I share that as well. I'm offering this as a hypothesis, not as a dogmatic answer. There are other answers that could be given, but I think that this answer is, as he says, a reasonable one. Indeed, I think it's quite plausible in light of the paleontological and archaeological evidence that I marshal in great detail in the book.

KEVIN HARRIS: And he says,

Here is my suggestion.  If you are talking to someone who wants to know “the answer” to the question of human origins (rather than engage in a discussion and leave room for doubt), I would say to this person that we simply do not know for sure, and perhaps not present this fairly speculative theory.  But, if you are talking with a person willing to engage in an intelligent discussion, but not looking for “the answer,” then it would be a good idea to introduce them to this discussion and hypothesis from Dr. Craig.

DR. CRAIG: I really appreciate that endorsement from Dr. Oakes, and I agree with him that this hypothesis is not for everyone. For some people, it may be very unsettling, very upsetting; but for people (especially students) who have struggled with these biblical narratives in Genesis and with the question of human origins I think they'll find this book to be very thought provoking and I think in some ways very reassuring.

KEVIN HARRIS: We'll take a look at another article that came out. This is from the Christian Post from September.^[3] He says,

Perhaps you have wondered: When did God create the earth, and when did God create Adam and Eve?

While the Bible does not reveal the mysterious age of the earth, it does lay out roughly how many years elapsed between the point God created Adam and Eve, and the point the Messiah was born in Bethlehem.

He goes on to say,

William Lane Craig has been on a quest to discover the historical Adam. Craig is a winsome ambassador for the Christian faith. He demonstrates tremendous kindness and grace as he engages believers and skeptics alike in a wide range of philosophical and theological discussions.

In discussing the book, he continues. He says,

Craig is convinced that the genre of Genesis 1-11 “can most plausibly be classified as mytho-history – a narrative with both literary and historical value.” Craig argues that "there are lots of clues in the text that Genesis 1-11 was not meant to be taken as a literalistic, historical account.”

For example, Craig says, “I think the creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib is almost undeniably figurative language….and God creating Adam out of dirt and then blowing into his nose seems to be figurative.”

He also says, "I would simply ask people to be open-minded about considering, whether or not, just as we take the last book in the Bible to be symbolic and imagistic, whether or not that might also be a way of plausibly interpreting the first 11 chapters of the first book of the Bible.”

At this point he criticizes this and says that Genesis and Revelation are not the same genre and so you can't compare.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, and I think he misunderstood my point. My point was not that Genesis 1-11 and the book of Revelation are of the same literary genre. That would be preposterous. The book of Revelation belongs to Jewish apocalyptic literature, and this type of literature is characterized by symbolism and figurative language and therefore not to be taken literally. My point was that Genesis 1-11 belongs to another genre of literature, namely mytho-history, that is also not to be read in a literalistic way. But I could have made the comparison with, say, the poetry of the Psalms or the wisdom literature of the Proverbs or even the parables of Jesus. The point is not to say these all belong to the same literary genre but simply to say that the Bible contains types of literature that are not properly read in a literalistic way in the way that, for example, historical literature or biographical literature is to be read. So I would invite him to look at the evidence that I marshalin the book for classifying Genesis 1-11 as mytho-history and then the evidence I give for suggesting that this shouldn't be interpreted in a literalistic way.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dan continues,

Genesis 5 and 11 reveal that there were about 2000 years between Adam and Abraham. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:1-17) begins with Abraham and culminates with Christ, which spanned another 2000 years. All of these descendants and events over roughly 4000 years from Adam to Christ are woven together in Scripture into a beautiful tapestry.

DR. CRAIG: Well, this makes it evident that the pastor is a Young Earth Creationist who thinks that the world was created by God around 4000 BC. And all I can say at this point is that we'd better hope that his biblical interpretation is wrong because if that is what the Bible is teaching (that the world is only 6,000 years old) then we as Christians are in deep trouble because that would put the Bible into massive conflict with contemporary history, science, and linguistics. It would be absurd to think that Noah took on board the ark dinosaurs which he then released upon disembarking and during the 350 years between the end of the flood and the disembarkation of Noah and the dinosaurs and the call of Abraham about 350 years later that the entire dinosaur era (of dinosaur evolution and extinction) took place as well as all the plate tectonics that formed the contemporary continents, the mountain building that formed the Himalayas and Mount Everest. It would be absurd to think that that happened in so short a time. So if the pastor is right about his hermeneutical claim that we are to read this literally then he's got some real explaining to do when it comes to how we handle the teaching of the Bible. I talk about this in the introduction to the book. What if the worst case scenario is true? What if the Young Earth Creationist is right in his hermeneutical claim that this is the way the Bible is to be read? Then what do we do? Fortunately, I argue that we're not forced onto that worst case scenario because I think the Young Earth hermeneutical claim is mistaken – that the literary genre of these chapters is mytho-history and therefore they are not to be read in a literalistic way.

KEVIN HARRIS: And that would include the genealogies. You and Josh Swamidass have talked about the genealogies and how there are gaps and other things. Are these to be read with the same genre considerations?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, although that is why I say it's mytho-history. These are not pure myths. These stories do have a historical interest as shown by the genealogies which ordered the principal characters and which meld seamlessly into the historical era of Abraham and the patriarchs. So it isn't pure myth. It's mytho-history. It's about real people and real events but these are described in the colorful and figurative and often fantastic language of myth.

KEVIN HARRIS: I do want to point out that Dan, as a pastor, goes on to say that this is not a salvation issue. He says we may disagree on the timing and things like that; what is important is that we have Christ as Savior.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. And I really appreciated that about both of these men, both John Oates as well as Pastor Dan. They interacted with my work in such an irenic and charitable and civil way even when, as in the case of Pastor Dan, there was disagreement. I think that is exactly the way this conversation needs to proceed. So I am grateful to both of these men for their irenic tone in interacting with my book.^[4]