Evolution and the Fall

William T. Cavanaugh, James K. A. Smith, William T. Cavanaugh, James K. A. Smith

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467446860
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion et sciences

What does it mean for the Christian doctrine of the Fall if there was no historical Adam? If humanity emerged from nonhuman primates—as genetic, biological, and archaeological evidence seems to suggest—then what are the implications for a Christian understanding of human origins, including the origin of sin? Evolution and the Fall gathers a multidisciplinary, ecumenical team of scholars to address these difficult questions and others like them from the perspectives of biology, theology, history, Scripture, philosophy, and politics CONTRIBUTORS: William T. Cavanaugh
Celia Deane-Drummond
Darrel R. Falk
Joel B. Green
Michael Gulker
Peter Harrison
J. Richard Middleton
Aaron Riches
James K. A. Smith
Brent Waters
Norman Wirzba

PART II

Biblical Studies and Theological Implications

4Reading Genesis 3 Attentive to Human Evolution

Beyond Concordism and Non-Overlapping Magisteria

J. RICHARD MIDDLETON

Let us begin by reimagining the scripture/science conversation. Although there are divergences of opinion on details (since the science is always being refined), most paleo-anthropologists date the first hominin remains to some six or seven million years ago, with the Australopithecines appearing about four million years ago and the genus Homo about two million years ago (Homo habilis).¹ The most likely current hypothesis for the evolution of anatomically modern Homo sapiens places their origin some 200,000 years ago, with a minimum population of anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000.²

Many skeptics and committed Christians alike have judged this scientific account incompatible with the biblical version of the origin of the humanity recounted in the early chapters of Genesis. From the skeptical side, the Bible has often been dismissed because its mythical or prescientific account of origins (both cosmic and human) is thought to contradict what we know from modern science. This skeptical approach is most evident in the “warfare” model of science and religion made famous by John W. Draper and Andrew Dickson White in the nineteenth century, and perpetuated by the new atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.³

Many Christians (especially evangelicals and fundamentalists in North America) have bought into the warfare model, with the difference that they assume the “literal” truth of the biblical account—taking “literal” in the sense of necessitating a one-to-one correspondence between details of this account and events and actualities in the empirical world.⁴ This approach, which often goes by the name “scientific creationism” or “creation science” (or, more recently, “origin science”) assumes that the Bible intends to teach a true scientific account of cosmic origins—including a young earth and the discontinuity of species (particularly the discontinuity of humans from other primates).⁵

Since this way of reading biblical creation accounts clearly contradicts the understanding of origins provided by modern science (both in cosmology and in evolutionary biology), proponents of “creation science” typically dismiss the putative claims of modern science (at least in the case of cosmic and biological origins) as ideologically tainted. The result is a concordist attempt to force science to fit what the Bible is thought to say about these topics.⁶

One of the most problematic dimensions of affirming both biblical origins and biological evolution is the doctrine of the “Fall,” since the Bible seems to teach (in Genesis 3) a punctiliar event in which an original couple transgressed God’s commandment after an initial paradisiacal period. Whether the classical doctrine of “original sin” is required (in all its specificity) for creedal orthodoxy is an open question. Nevertheless, the Bible itself certainly seems, at first blush, to tie the origin of evil to an understanding of human beginnings that is quite different from what we find in evolutionary biology.

Given the putative contradiction between biblical-theological claims and evolutionary science, what’s an honest Christian to do? Suppose someone wants to do justice both to biological evolution and to the historic Christian faith (“that was once for all entrusted to the saints”; Jude 3), how might one go about affirming both with integrity?⁷

The most common approach has been to utilize some version of Stephen Jay Gould’s proposal of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA), which would separate biblical and theological truth from scientific truth as belonging to distinct conceptual domains, which therefore guarantees no contradiction between them.⁸

Variants of NOMA can be found, with or without the explicit terminology, among many writers on the subject of Christianity and evolution, since it provides a helpful methodological alternative to the warfare model.⁹ In contrast to the assumption of many evangelical or fundamentalist Christians that an evolutionary account of human origins is incompatible with the biblical account of “Adam,” increasing numbers of scientists and theologians today are attempting positively to affirm an orthodox Christian faith along with scientific findings about biological evolution. Whether described as “theistic evolution” (the older term) or “evolutionary creation” (the more recent term, used, for example, by BioLogos), this attempt to honor both the non-negotiable authority of scripture and the cumulative research of more than a century of paleontology, along with the recent contribution of genetics, is commendable.

As an alternative to a naïvely concordist attempt at reconciling scripture with science, the embrace of NOMA by contemporary Christians is fully understandable. It allows evolutionary scientists to get on with their work, without having to compromise their findings with the putative truths of theology. And theologians can likewise reflect on God’s role in the biological processes of life’s development, without being proscribed by science.

But is that all there is to be said? As a biblical scholar, am I to simply bracket the scientific account of human origins (and ignore what I know of hominin evolution) when I interpret Genesis 3? Certainly, the assumptions and presuppositions of the interpreter must affect—in some way—what he sees (and doesn’t see) in scripture. And does the Bible not have any relevance for thinking about evolution? In what follows I intend to think evolution together with the biblical account of the origin of evil in Genesis 3.

Here I am emboldened by the work of Old Testament scholar William Brown, especially in his attempt to move beyond both concordism and NOMA to an exploration of possible “resonances” that might arise from a “cross-disciplinary conversation” between the Bible and science.¹⁰

In his brilliant and inspiring work The Seven Pillars of Creation, Brown explores the major creation texts in the Old Testament (including Genesis 2–3) in connection with contemporary science, utilizing a three-step method. Beginning with an elucidation of each text, Brown then associates the theological themes of the text in question with what he discerns might be relevant aspects of the world we know from science, which he then explores. Finally, he then returns to the biblical text with the insights gained from science in order to appropriate the text for its wisdom and relevance for life today. Brown conceives this process as “a hermeneutical feedback loop”¹¹ between the biblical text and contemporary science whereby a variety of “consonances,” “correlations,” “connections,” “points of contact,” or “parallels” between the text and our scientific knowledge may be explored.¹²

What prevents this from simply being a new attempt at concordism or harmonization?¹³ First, Brown is clear that these connections are “virtual parallels,” “analogous points of contact or imaginative associations”—in other words, there is an ineluctable element of interpretive subjectivity here.¹⁴ Second, Brown treats scripture as an ancient text, with no knowledge of contemporary science, and acknowledges that we therefore need to be aware of “claims made by the biblical text about the world that conflict with the findings of science”; he thus suggests that we attend to the “disjunctions” and “collisions” as much as to the resonances.¹⁵ That this is different also from NOMA is clear, since on that model neither discourse, the biblical-theological nor the scientific, is allowed to inform the other. Thus Brown suggests (tongue in cheek) that we might think of his approach as “TOMA or ‘tangentially overlapping magisteria.’”¹⁶

Is Brown then suggesting that contemporary science should shape our theology or our interpretation of scripture? Not quite. His suggestion is that while science should not dictate the direction of biblical interpretation, it may “nudge the work of biblical theology in directions it has not yet ventured and, in so doing, may add another layer to Scripture’s interpretive ‘thickness’ . . . or wondrous depth.”¹⁷

My approach to the relationship of scripture and science in this chapter is similar to that of Brown, with three caveats or differences. First, whereas Brown focuses on the relationship between creation texts and contemporary science, I will attempt to read the narrative of the “Fall” in Genesis 2–3 in relation to what we know of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Second, whereas there are many dimensions of the scientific understanding of the world that Brown is able to draw upon in his interpretation of biblical creation accounts, there is very little that scientists understand about the origin of religion, morality, and ethics among Homo sapiens. Finally, whereas Brown is able to move in the scope of his lengthy book from the biblical text to contemporary science, and then back to the biblical text, the space limitations of this chapter preclude any such lengthy three-part exposition.

My approach will be to range over a number of prominent themes or motifs in the garden story of Genesis 2–3, exploring the significance of these themes for human evolution and, alternatively, how an understanding of evolution might help us interpret the themes or motifs in the texts (although sometimes I may simply raise questions to which I don’t have clear answers at the moment). I thus conceive of this chapter as an experimental probe in two directions—to see if the biblical text might help us think about the origin of moral consciousness among Homo sapiens and whether our current knowledge of the evolution of Homo sapiens might illuminate aspects of the text that readers have previously missed. Along the way, my reading of the biblical text and the evolution of Homo sapiens will draw upon a virtue-ethics approach to the development of moral consciousness. My hunch is that a close reading of Genesis 2–3 in connection with human evolution might shed light on conceptualizing the origin of moral evil, including the notion of a “historical” or “eventful” Fall.¹⁸

The ’ādām–’ădāmâ Connection

Although my focus in what follows will be on Genesis 3, this chapter is part of a larger, coherent literary unit that begins with Genesis 2:4b. It is, therefore, not inappropriate to begin with the origin of humanity as portrayed in Genesis 2.¹⁹

Let us start with the name Adam. Is it significant that this name (like many of the names in the early chapters of Genesis) is clearly symbolic? Adam (’ādām) means “human.” Indeed, Adam becomes a proper name only in Genesis 4 and 5; prior to that he is hā’ādām (the human).²⁰ So we seem to be justified in viewing him both as the first human and archetypally as everyman or everyone.

We should also note that the word for the first human (’ādām) functions as part of a Hebrew pun or wordplay throughout Genesis 2 and 3, where it sounds like (or resonates aurally with) the word for soil or ground (’ădāmâ). Biblical scholars have suggested various equivalent English puns, such as the earth creature from the earth, the groundling from the ground, the human from the humus.²¹ The point is that the aural resonance of ’ādām and ’ădāmâ suggests a primal ontological resonance between the human and his earthly context. Not only is the human taken from the ground (a matter of derivation or origin), the human purpose is to work the ground (a matter of calling or vocation). Due to human sin, the ground is cursed, in the sense that the human’s relationship with the ground becomes difficult (work becomes toil); primal resonance becomes dissonance. And death is described as returning to the ground from which the human was taken.²²

Throughout this entire storyline, the aural resonance of human and ground (’ādām and ’ădāmâ), along with the narrated contours of their interdependence, suggests that humans are fundamentally earth creatures or groundlings. This—together with the fact that the animals are also...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword, by Michael Gulker
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Beyond Galileo to Chalcedon
• I. Mapping the Questions
• II. Biblical Studies and Theological Implications
• III. Beyond “Origins”: Cultural Implications
• IV. Reimagining the Conversation: Faithful Ways Forward
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects