Adam and Eve - Where's Christianity Without The Fall?

While the professional Christian crowd continues to endeavor to whip up anti-LGBT hate and other types of hatred - of course, lining their pockets with money in the process - they seem to be ignoring the biggest threat of all to their house of cards belief system: the fact that the literal story of Adam and Eve in the Bible is false. As noted before, science now tells us that they never existed and that, therefore, there was no "Fall" and exile from the Garden of Eden. And if this is the case, there was no need for a messiah to die and secure forgiveness for Adam and Eve's descendants. Bob Felton at Civil Commotion describes the quandary for the inerrant Bible crowd as follows:

The problem is straightforward:

1. No Adam and Eve, then …

2. No Fall, then …

3. No Original Sin, so …

4. Jesus doesn’t ‘save’ and Christianity has nothing on offer but a not-very-special ethical system.

So far, most of the Bible beaters seem to want to merely ignore the clear import of this problem. One such is Albert Mohler at the Southern Baptist Convention. But the Catholic Church isn't immune from the huge problem that the central salvation story of the Bible and Christianity has a foundation less secure than a house built upon sand. A piece in Commonweal looks at the dilemma before the Catholic Church. Ignoring this threat to the bedrock of Catholic dogma doesn't make the problem go away. Here are some article highlights:

For the past few months, many evangelicals and Baptists and other conservative Christians in the Protestant stream have been debating — and generally pushing back against — the science showing that the human race could not literally have descended from two progenitors, Adam and Eve.

The Catholic Church indeed of all the Christian churches faces a particular quandary. The Council of Trent is quite explicit on the topic. Catholics are required to believe not only that Adam is the single father of the human race, but that Original Sin is passed on by physical generation from him to the entire human race. It’s not something symbolic or allegorical (although it is regarded as ultimately mysterious). The First Vatican Council reiterated the doctrine, as did Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis

Catholic apologists who point to Pope John Paul II’s 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as evidence of the Church’s acceptance of evolution often fail to notice that the late Pope completely passed over the question of monogenism, and indeed never did discuss the problem that genetics poses to the doctrine.

Indeed, evidence against a literal Adam and Eve is pretty conclusive. . . . while the Vatican maintains its silence on the challenge of genomics, Catholics in general are either encouraged to fall back on the denialism of Evangelical leaders like Albert Mohler, or to keep their mouths shut. Catholics tend not to keep their mouths shut, and shouldn’t, nor should they have to adopt views like Al Mohler’s.

With roughly one third of those raised as Catholics having left the Church in the USA alone, the hierarchy's refusal to address this huge problem will likely only hasten the exodus (that is, if the sex abuse scandal alone isn't reason enough).