Rational Evangelicals Question the Existence of Adam and Eve

News bulletin to NOM and the hate merchants at FRC, AFA and Mission America: rational and tethered to objective reality evangelicals are starting to question the historical existence of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Obviously, if the was no Adam and Eve, the hate groups' slogan of "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" goes to Hell in a hand basket in short order. And for the Roman Catholic Church too, if Adam and Eve did not really exist, the doctrine of original sin and the debased nature of human kind likewise takes a major hit. Bob Felton sums up the danger signals for far right, Bible beating Christians:

The difficulty is obvious:
■ No Adam and Eve, then …
■ No Fall, and …
■ No Original Sin, and …
■ No need for salvation; Christianity then becomes just one of many ethical systems — and no more.

NPR has an article that looks at this growing heresy, at least in the minds of the wingnut crazies, which truly does strike at the heart of the "Bible is inerrant" crowd. Here are some highlights:

[N]ow some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.

To many evangelicals, this is heresy. "From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," says Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. Rana, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio University, readily admits that small details of Scripture could be wrong.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, . . . . says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam's original sin. "Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," Mohler says.

This debate over a historical Adam and Eve is not just another heady squabble. It's ripping apart the evangelical intelligentsia. . . . "The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins.

Giberson — who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College until his views became too uncomfortable in Christian academia — says Protestants who question Adam and Eve are akin to Galileo in the 1600s, who defied Catholic Church doctrine by stating that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was condemned by the church, and it took more than three centuries for the Vatican to express regret at its error.

Fuzale Rana isn't so sure this is a Galileo moment: That would imply the scientists are correct. But he does believe the stakes are even higher in today's battle over evolution. It is not just about the movement of the earth, but about the nature of God and man, of sin and redemption.

"I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history," he says. "Because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not.",/blockquote>

For the record, I support the Gospel message of love of neighbor and not judging others. As for the institutional Church in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and other denominations which make hatred of others and judgment of others their hallmark - and in the process savage the Gospel message - I hope this is a growing trend that cuts these institutions and people off at the knee caps.