Witherington and Swamidass React to Adam Book

KEVIN HARRIS: It's always good to have you for the podcast. This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I'm Kevin Harris. A couple of things to keep you updated on. First of all, from time to time we're going to interact with some of the reviews and reactions to Dr. Craig's book, In Quest of the Historical Adam. More and more people are reading the book and more and more people are talking about it, and today we're going to be looking at an interview between Ben Witherington and a man that's been right smack dab in the middle of this whole thing if you've been following it, Dr. Josh Swamidass. I want to remind you that we're coming up on the end of the year and a matching grant has been put in place again this year. This is our annual matching grant. Some generous donors will double whatever you give to Reasonable Faith up to $300,000. How about that? So double your impact! Do it before the end of the year. You can give online at ReasonableFaith.org, and we thank you so much for taking part in the blessing. Give online at ReasonableFaith.org. Let’s go to the podcast with Dr. Craig.

Bill, Ben Witherington is a respected scholar. He's been interviewing Josh Swamidass, and on his blog, “The Bible and Culture”^[1] he's been talking about your book. By the way, I want to invite everyone to go to ReasonableFaith.org and get a copy of In Quest of the Historical Adam. Ben Witherington talks about it here in this interview series with Josh. He says,

One of the issues I have with Bill Craig’s fine book The Quest for the Historical Adam is the willingness to take a text like Gen. 2 as basically myth, with the exception of there being a real historical Adam and Eve at some point in antiquity. He’s willing to basically dismiss the social ethos of the text which suggests a rather recent Adam and Eve during an era where religious sacrifices were offered and crops were grown, in order to place Adam and Eve with Heidelberg man some hundreds of thousands of years B.C. It seems to me that this basically doesn’t work with either Gen. 2-3 or what follows it. I gather you also favor an Adam and Eve who are not from hundreds of thousands of years B.C. Why do you see this as the more viable view?

Now, Bill, he asked Josh that. Before we get to Josh's answer, what's your response to what Ben Witherington just wrote?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think it's important that our listeners understand the different models that Josh and I are offering. According to the traditional view of Adam and Eve, they were a human couple who lived just a few thousand years ago. As Ben says, during a time when there were already crops being grown, there was modern agriculture, there was music, and even smelting of metals that you find in the early chapters of Genesis. So the whole human race is supposed to have descended from this couple that existed only a few thousand years ago. Well, that traditional picture is now impossible to defend scientifically. It is massively at odds with the archaeological, historical, and scientific evidence. So those like Josh and me who want to defend the historicity of Adam and Eve have proposed different models for how to understand these early chapters of Genesis. Josh's view, we called the recent genealogical Adam. He postulates that Adam and Eve did in fact live just a few thousand years ago but what he denies is that they are the universal progenitors of mankind. He thinks that Adam and Eve were just selected out of a wider population of thousands of people that had already evolved from common ancestors with the great apes and that eventually Adam's descendants replaced all of those people on Earth. So in order to maintain the consistency of the recency of Adam and Eve, Josh has to give up their universal progenitorship. By contrast, on my view, I give up the recency of Adam and Eve in order to defend their universal progenitorship of mankind. To me, theologically speaking, the fact that Adam and Eve are the universal parents of mankind is far more important than their recent date, and so it's hard for me to understand the theological priorities of persons who would say it's more important to preserve the recency of their date at the expense of giving up their universal progenitorship. So you've got these two different models: the recent genealogical Adam of Josh Swamidass which sacrifices universal progenitorship in order to maintain recency, and then you've got my model – the ancient genealogical Adam – which gives up recency in order to preserve universal progenitorship.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's what Josh says. He says,

The good news is that both an ancient and a recent Adam and Eve, can be consistent with mainstream science. So, which one makes more sense?  That’s the debate we are rejoining anew. Craig’s book makes the best case he can for an ancient Adam and Eve. For him, and other scholars like C. John Collins, placing Adam and Eve at the ancient headwaters of “humanness” is worth the cost of reading much of Genesis 1-11 as mythology.

My book, however, gravitates to a recent Adam and Eve.

Josh mentions other scholars like C. John Collins who are really in your corner on the book. Even J. I. Packer.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah.

KEVIN HARRIS: So I suppose you're not a lone ranger in your views expressed in the book.

DR. CRAIG: Not at all. I first heard the idea that Genesis chapters 1 to 11 belongs to this type of literature called mytho-history (that is to say, a record of historical events but retold in the pictorial and figurative language of myth) from the Old Testament scholar Bill Arnold who, ironically enough, is a colleague of Ben Witherington. Gordon Wenham in his commentary on Genesis 1 to 15 takes pretty much the same view. So this is a view that is actually very widespread, I think, among Old Testament commentators and evangelicals. But lay people, I think, are largely unaware of what these Old Testament scholars are saying.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, Josh says,

. . . in light of what we know now, I suspect most Evangelical scholars will end up with some version of a recent Adam and Eve. There are several reasons I expect this will be the case.

First, most evangelicals think a “maximal” reading of the Genesis tradition makes much more sense. In this, we are aligned with the “literalist” tradition. Of course, I do not mean a naïve and rigid reading of an English translation. Instead, I mean the sensibilities and values of B.B. Warfield, Cyrus Scofield, and even Reasons to Believe and the Chicago Statements on Hermeneutics and Inerrancy.

In contrast, and aligned with the common Catholic understanding, Craig is proposing a “minimal” reading of Genesis. He discards most of early Genesis as myth, perhaps with theological meaning, but not any physical reality. But he is also sifting through to find what is the one or two things that must be true of the physical world. Then, with a great deal of flexibility, he is able to engage with science to see if there is a model that can allow him to hold those truths alongside natural history. For Craig, placing Adam and Eve at the headwaters of “humanness” is worth the price of reading most of Genesis 1-11 as myth.

DR. CRAIG: I would say that it's tendentious when Josh says that I discard most of early Genesis as myth. That's like saying you discard much of the book of Revelation because it's apocalyptic symbol or that you discard much of the Psalms because it's poetic imagery. To say that a narrative genre includes figurative or pictorial language is not in any way to discard or depreciate it. And I think that Josh might be right that his view will be more well received by evangelicals because of their obsession with literalism. I think that it is hard for many evangelicals to recognize a literary analysis of Genesis 1 to 11 that appeals to mytho-history and so a non-literal reading of much of the narratives. But one of the real weaknesses of Josh's view is that it does not have a genre analysis of Genesis 1 to 11 in order to justify its hermeneutical approach, and I think that's one of the real superiorities of my view even though he might well be right that evangelicals will prefer to stick with the recent genealogical Adam and thereby to sacrifice the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve which I think is a bad bargain theologically. That's to sell your inheritance for a mess of porridge.

KEVIN HARRIS: Did you see what he said there about the views in the book tending to align with the traditional Catholic view? Have you found that to be the case?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I do think that many Catholics have articulated a view like this. But I would really resist what Josh said about B. B. Warfield and Reasons to Believe and the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. On the contrary, B. B. Warfield was famous for his essays on the antiquity of man and saying that these genealogies can't just be added together. He was quite prepared to entertain a very ancient Adam, though certainly not as ancient as what I'm suggesting. But I think Warfield was moving in my direction. Reasons to Believe puts Adam about 150,000 years before Christ. So once you go that far back, I don't think there's any in-principle objection to going back to 750,000 years. Similarly, the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. I think that my genre analysis enables us to preserve biblical inspiration and inerrancy because it doesn't bring these narratives into conflict with modern science the way a literalistic reading will do.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. He continues,

. . . there is a price of reading most of Genesis 1-11 as myth. And there is a price.

I do not think this price will be worth it to most Evangelicals. With exceptions, perhaps, like C. John Collins, I don’t think most exegetes think these sorts of “minimal” readings are the right exegesis. For all the disagreements we have on the particulars (and disagreements are many) most Evangelicals see intrinsic value in understanding Genesis as playing out in the physical world. We want to avoid eisegesis and scientific concordism. All else being equal, Evangelicals usually see intrinsic value in historical readings of Scripture over mythological readings.

Bill, I'm sure that you agree with Josh on avoiding eisegesis and scientific concordism, but he also mentions how evangelicals will probably receive your book. Are you concerned about that? Or do you have a broader audience in mind?

DR. CRAIG: I think that what Josh says may be true of the evangelical church in general, but I know that it's not true of evangelical Old Testament scholars. Here I have done much more thorough study of this subject, and I can tell you that the number of evangelical Old Testament scholars who will say this is not just straightforward history to be interpreted literally is very large. So I think Josh is just mistaken about his reading of contemporary Old Testament scholarship in that regard. One of the difficulties for the recent genealogical Adam view is that it only treats Adam and Eve in isolation. It's still going to have to deal with these knotty questions of the universal flood, the Tower of Babel, the age of the Earth, and so forth. I think that those problems in the primeval history lend considerable inductive support to saying that what we're dealing with here is a mytho-historical genre of writing.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let me shorten what he says at the end of the article here. Josh says,

A recent Adam and Eve includes another big payoff here for scholars. My book moves questions about Adam and Eve from biology into archeology, where biblical scholars have been engaging productively with science for quite some time.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think that this is a bizarre claim, frankly, because what the recent genealogical Adam does is it moves your view of Adam and Eve into massive conflict with archaeology. A great deal of my book concerns paleo-anthropology and the archaeological signatures as they're called of modern cognitive behaviors that go back tens and even hundreds of thousands of years. So the archaeological evidence, I think, absolutely falsifies the suggestion that humanity has existed on this planet only since the the recent time of Adam and Eve. And that's why you have to deny the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve if you're going to defend this view, and I think that's a lot to give up. My view connects solidly with the findings of archaeology in tracing human origins back to their source.

KEVIN HARRIS: I just got this from a listener and I just want to throw it out to you real quick. This interview between Ben Witherington and Joshua Swamidass was concluded later after I was researching this topic and what they were talking about, but he says – I'll just read it to you:

Despite these real disagreements between us, Craig's work is important. He is pushing back on overreach by theological revisionist and BioLogos. As a scientist, I helped Craig. He had good faith questions about human origins and really wanted to understand. So both an ancient and a recent Adam and Eve are consistent with science. Which one makes most sense? The disagreement between us is about theology and Scripture, not science. In the end, this might be one of the most important contributions of Craig's book. He is inviting a conversation between two important traditions in the church. More than any individual argument he makes, this is how the impact of his book should be judged and understood.

That just came in.

DR. CRAIG: John Collins, who has been referenced several times in the podcast today, has said that we need to do a cost-benefit analysis of these various views of Adam, and I really like that metaphor. The benefit of the recent genealogical Adam proposal is that it preserves the recency of Adam and the events of the primeval history. The cost, though, is that it gives up the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve. By contrast, the benefit of the ancient genealogical Adam is that it preserves that theological truth of Adam and Eve's universal progenitorship of mankind but it does so at the cost of their recency. And so the question our listeners need to ask themselves is: which one of these costs is worth the benefits?

KEVIN HARRIS: Thank you, Bill. We’ll see you on the next podcast from Reasonable Faith.^[2]