Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Can Evolution and Genesis Be Friends? A Guest Interview With Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

"I was putting my confidence and trust in the wrong sorts of things. For a long time, I would put my trust in human arguments against evolution. But that's not actually where God really wants us to really build our confidence." https://pathology.wustl.edu/people/joshua-swamidass-md-phd/ (Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass) is a professor at Washington University, founder of the platform https://peacefulscience.org/author/swamidass/ (Peaceful Science), and author of a new book, https://peacefulscience.org/genealogical-adam-eve/ (The Genealogical Adam and Eve). We are excited to feature him in our first guest interview. In this episode, https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) asks Dr. Swamidass about his faith, his research, and how he reconciles the two. They discuss a wide range of topics, including Genesis, genetics, evolution, AI, and aliens. Patrick asks questions for scientists and non-scientists, for skeptics and believers. Listen to their conversation as they navigate how Christianity and science work together. Be sure to check out Dr. Swamidass's book https://peacefulscience.org/genealogical-adam-eve/ (The Genealogical Adam and Eve). You can also read more of his writing through his platform https://peacefulscience.org/author/swamidass/ (Peaceful Science). Interested in more content like this? Check out our sermon series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/series/genesis/ (Genesis): The Strange But True Story of Everything. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're learning what it looks like to follow Jesus by working our way through the Gospel of Luke. On today's episode, we're going to be doing something a little bit different. It's our first interview. Today I'm going to be speaking with Dr. S. Joshua Swamidas. He is a scientist, physician, and associate professor of laboratory and genomic medicine at Washington University. in St. Louis, where he uses artificial intelligence to explore science at the intersection of medicine, biology, and chemistry. He's a Veritas Forum speaker, and he blogs at Peaceful Science. He's also a founder of peaceful science, which advocates for a civic practice of science that makes space for

differences. He's also the author of a new book, which I've recently read, called The Genealogical Adam and Eve, and that's going to be our main discussion for today's podcast. So welcome to the show. It's great to have you here, Josh. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here and to talk to you. So why don't we just start with a bit of your own background? Tell me what ended up leading you to write this book. So I'm a scientist. I love science. This is where I spend most of my time doing my work at Washington University. But I'm also a Christian. And I was raising a young earth creationist house.

And as I started to learn more and more about science, I saw two different origin stories. There was an origin story that I learned in Genesis about Adam and Eve created recently, the Nova out of the dust and of a rib, from whom, we all descend. And then the story of science, which tells us that we all share common ancestors with the great apes, meaning bonobos, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutansans. And it just really seemed that those things were in conflict. And as I learned more and more, though, I found out that maybe they weren't. Maybe both things could be true at the same time. And I became a skeptic of that conflict. Was that conflict for you in your personal story? Was it something that caused you a lot of distress or did you just look past it? Well, it definitely caused a lot of distress. And I think part of why

it was so hard is because I was putting my confidence, my trust, into the wrong sorts of things. For a long time, I really put my trust in human arguments against evolution. I mean, that was both through the intelligent design movement and also through scientific creationism. And I really took confidence in the idea that I knew the Bible is true because evolution was false. But that's not actually where God wants us to really build our confidence from. There's a point where I really had to really rework the foundation of my faith and come back to what my mother told me a long time before about really trusting that Jesus really had risen from the dead. It's a sign, which means a miracle with evidence that persists to this today, that there's a man named Jesus 2,000 years ago who bodily rose

from the dead. And it's really through coming to see that. There's a book I read, which I really recommend called More Than a Carpenter. I've also written about this at peaceful science, too, and several other scientists have, too. There's just an immense amount of evidence for this. And it's really through that event in history that I came to really believe and to trust and place my confidence that God exists, that he's good, and that he wants to be known. And once I found my confidence there on that solid rock, that cornerstone, that sign that Jesus speaks of and that Paul confesses. From there, I was able to really re-approach what I was seeing in science anew in a way that gave me the confidence to not know all the answers to my questions from the start, but to really understand it first, as Proverbs 4-7 talks about to see. seek understanding first, as I understood it, my sense of conflict kept on reducing because I couldn't actually find the evidence that demonstrated that the Genesis story was wrong. We're already talking a

little bit about the conflict that many people, whether it's scientists, Christians, non-Christians, believe exists between the Genesis account of human origin stories and what science is telling us. So let's start here. Can you just outline for us what that seeming conflict is for most people? I frame it in the book is a set of three false dilemmas. The first one, Seems pretty obvious. Either we share common ancestry with the Great Apes or Adam and Eve were DeNobo created from the dust. Let me define that really quick. De novo means brand new. Yeah, it means brand new and made out of stuff. The actual word in Genesis is a saw or to be formed. So either that story reading Genesis 2, not Genesis 1, is correct or evolution is correct.

And that's what people thought for 160 years. So it was a little bit over 160 years ago that Darwin wrote Origin of the Species. and Huxley then began arguing about a man's place in nature, arguing for common descent of man, people just thought that those two things you had to choose between one another. What I found is that that's actually a false choice. Both things could have happened at the same time. It turns out if you look back in historical theology, for a very long time, people have been wondering about people outside the garden that Adam and Eve's lineage eventually interbred with.

So the reason why they wondered about it is it just really seems that the text of Genesis itself suggests that. And so then if that's what happened, maybe Adam and Eve really were created out of the dust and out of a rib without parents, the Novo, even as recently 6,000 years ago. And then the people outside the garden just got created by a different way. And maybe it was through providentially guided process of common descent. And if that's true, that means that both these things could be happening at the same time. That's one example of a false dilemma. But there's other ones too. The other one that came up, which is pretty critical, which my book spends a lot of time explaining, is the idea that,

either Adam and Eve were recent, approximately matching the timeline of Genesis of being created somewhere less than 10,000 years ago. Or they were more ancient. So people in science talk about Y chromosome, Adam and mitochondrial Eve. They arise. Let's see here, at least it gets weird when you're talking about which direction you look at it from. More ancient than 100,000 years ago. That's when they arise in the past. So either you have to give up on the idea of monogenesis, the doctrine that we all descend from Adam and Eve and have Adam and Eve recent. Or you claim that doctrine of monogenesis, and now it's taken out of history,

moved back into the way, way, way distant past. And that was a really difficult dilemma for a lot of Christians. And it turns out that even if Adam and Eve are recent, approximately matching the Genesis timeline, including its connection to the rise of civilization, then if they were recent, they would still be ancestors of everyone. And that solves a major conundrum that theologians were facing for a very long time.

So to try to restate this, For our audience, I am not a scientist. I joke, I've got a high school education in science. So I'm going to let Josh speak to those things with any sense of expertise. But the felt conflict is there's an evolutionary story, which is that through a process of natural selection, that's how we humans came to be. We assume that there's no other human beings out there and that the only ones or the first ones were Adam and Eve and that we've all descended genetically from them. And you're questioning whether or not that's the narrative that the Bible is telling. And you're asking, if the evolution narrative could actually fit with a different telling of what's happening inside of the Bible. I want to be really cautious with several things you said there. First of all, I'm not offering a new interpretation of Genesis. This is actually a very old interpretation. This is, I would say, the traditional account. For a long time, there's been certainty about Adam and Eve in theology, but a lot of question marks about what's going on outside the garden. And for hundreds of years, or even thousands of years, people have been wondering about what's going on outside the garden.

borders. Now I was a Young Earth creationist, and we really cared about Scripture. That's why I was a Young Earth creationist. And one thing that puzzled me as I moved past what I heard from Young Creationists about Genesis, but then actually read Genesis myself, was the weird fact that there's so much emphasis placed in Genesis 2 and in Genesis 3 on the borders of the garden, that there's the tree of life inside, and there's borders to it, and really the way how death comes to all of Adam and Eve's descendants is because they're actually exiled from the garden. And that didn't actually make sense with a lot of the images I'd had of the garden expanding across the entire Earth, because that's not what Genesis says. The garden is in a localized area. It actually teaches that there was actually

death outside the garden. And people have been wondering once again for a very, very long time about people outside the garden, which then would not have access to the tree of life. So it's not so much that I'm giving a new interpretation of Genesis. I'm actually recovering the historical interpretation, the traditional view. It's a great way of putting it. And we've probably already queued up a lot of questions for people who are listening to this. So let's zoom in on one. One of the things you said in your book is that we have thought about Adam and Eve primarily asking the question, are they our genetic ancestors? And you've pointed out that that's not actually what the Bible seems to be presenting. The Bible seems to be saying in various passages that they are our genealogical ancestors.

Now, to someone like me, those sound like the exact same thing. Can you explain the difference between Adam and Eve being our genetic ancestors and Adam and Eve being our genealogical ancestors. So this gets to the one of the major, there's a few, another one is on the meaning of human. And honestly, there was several other big misunderstandings in the dialogue between scientists and theologians, between science and theology. And one of those is what is the meaning of ancestor? Now, the way how scientists tend to conceive of ancestry is genetics. And genetics is about DNA. It's a molecule in all of our cells. And we get half of it from our mother, half of it from our father. about, and we can study that really directly as scientists. So that's what we mean when we talk

about ancestry. Now, that has given us a way to talk about it. We can study and see really distant things in the past like a telescope. We can also see things in our immediate vicinity like a streetlight. But it's not an eye of saron. It doesn't tell you everything. And in fact, it's not even the way how people conceived of ancestry in the past. And that makes sense. You know, it's been less than 100 years, really, since people knew what DNA was, a deoxine ribonucleic acid. I can't even say it straight, and I'm a scientist, because we're so used to sing it with acronyms. But if you went back 100 years and said DNA to people on the street, they would have no idea what you're talking about. If you talked about a double helix, they would just have no idea.

And the reason why is that it's a very recent discovery. And so when scripture talks about ancestry, it doesn't actually ever mention these things. What it mentions instead is about lineages, about parents giving rise to offspring. And you can see these lists in Genesis at several chapters and also in other places. and in a really critical place is Jesus's genealogy. And the key thing to understand about those genealogies is they're not speaking in the language of genetics. They're speaking in the language of just normal descent or ordinary descent in a way that an ancient person would understand. And also we understand too, if we're not confused by genetics.

And moreover, they're not complete. They don't tell you where all the wives come from. They don't tell you where all the children go. They didn't tell you about all the gaps in them. There's several different open questions that you're going to get from that. And so if you start to think about genealogy that way, not just considering what was written down, but also what really happened in that real past that we all share, then it gives you a different view of ancestry that isn't in contradiction with genetics, but it's closer to the scriptural account. So how does reading Genesis as a genealogical account rather than a genetic account, how does that actually help resolve the apparent tension between Genesis and science? Well, what it does is if you read Genesis as a genealogical account, and you also remember that people have been wondering about people outside the garden, then we can ask not whether or not we got all of our DNA from Adam and Eve. We can ask whether or not there are ancestors of all of us, which is actually how it's been framed in traditional theology. And we can find out that actually not only is it possible, we expect from a scientific point of view that if Adam and Eve were created, even in the recent past, we expect it would be hard to imagine how they wouldn't be ancestors of all of us.

That bit shocked me. If you told me that someone who lived six, seven thousand, however many years ago, would be the ancestor genealogically of every living human, I think there's no way that's true. So walk us through that. Help us understand that. So I did write a book to explain exactly. That's one of those things where, you know, it also helps to look at the diagrams and things like that. But a simple word picture or thought experiment can help is you kind of think in a naive way about how many ancestors you have, you go back in the past. It doubles every generation. I have like two parents, four grandparents. eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and it goes like that back and back in the past. So you kind of see the number of ancestors, and my genealogy seems to be increasing really dramatically. But if you actually look at the population size over this time, it's decreasing as I go back in time. So if I do that, then I'm going to have like trillions of ancestors, not that long in the past, but there's not that many people on Earth. So what's going on? What's going on is that that simple naive calculation was not double counting.

It turns out that at some point, I start to have multiple paths back to the same person. And so, I mean, if I consider someone else across me, even if their ancestors from across the globe, I'm from India, you're probably from Europe. But even though we are different parts of the globe, it turns out that very quickly we would start to actually share common ancestors just because of that double counting. And it happens very quickly in a way that's even surprising for scientists, even though it's well established, peer-reviewed and, you know, leading journals within scientific literature. Yeah, that was going to be the question I asked, because I think some people hear this and say, well, this is all, sounds great, but do scientists really agree on this point? And you're saying, yeah, you can go to the best journals and you're going to find agreement about genealogy. There's a key article from 2004 in nature that came out. It's been in the literature now for over 15 years.

And the way how science works is you want to see kind of how papers age over time and if they ever get disproven. And there are several people that come out afterwards that have actually really validated those findings. Now, some of the details are really surprising. And the way how even scientists think about ancestry is first from a genetic point of view. So if you go tell a scientist something like that, their first instinct will be to think, oh, this is pseudoscience. but when they look at it, they'll be like, oh, this is actually really solid. And one of the ways how I wanted the church to be really clear about this is by getting other scientists involved in reviewing it.

There's two people who endorse the book that I think are really worth noting. One of them is Nathan Lentz. He's an atheist biologist who endorsed the book because it had good science. He read it and he said, you know, I'm a skeptic of this whole thing, but wow, he actually did demonstrate that that's the case. He also wrote, by the way, a really brilliant article in USA Today that's worth looking up, explaining why he endorsed the book. We'll make sure to put some of those links into our show notes if anybody wants to go check that out. Oh, that'd be great. Then the other person who endorsed the book

is not an atheist. He's Jewish. And his name's Alan Templeton. He's actually here at Washu, too. He's one of the great living population geneticists who really played a really key role in the 1970s of really demonstrating that biological race wasn't really a valid concept. He actually endorsed the book. And we had workshops where scientists and theologians were participating. And really, it seems that there wasn't any durable objections to what I wrote. I think this is pretty interesting, actually, because most scientists I presented it to initially are just certain it's false, but then they actually read it and they're like, oh, okay, if that's what you mean,

that's probably correct. Well, there you go. I guess time will tell, right? That's great. Let me ask you a question from someone like me, kind of the layperson in science. How long would it take for the real life Adam and Eve to become the genealogical ancestors of the human race? Oh, yeah. That would just take a few thousand years.

years. That's it. Again, because I know people are listening to this and they feel incredulous. They're saying there's no way that's right. But again, to reiterate it, this is based on peer reviewed science. This is not a high school level science, Patrick's saying this is a professor. I'll also say too. I first published this before I had tenure. I put my scientific reputation. I put my professional future on the line by putting this forward. And it was risky. And my colleagues still gave me tenure. I mean, they were fair to me. And the science here is good. So you can dispute it a few. like, but there's a whole bunch of scientists that are not even Christian that are lined up saying that it's good science now. That's great. So if we pull back the camera, what we're trying to say here

is that the book of Genesis, in fact, the whole Bible, it doesn't have the conception of genetics, that no one in biblical times knew what DNA was. That's not revolutionary. They did, however, think about ancestors genealogically, people who I am genealogically descended from. And in fact, if you go back to the book of Genesis and you read the book of Genesis, one of the most striking features, and every commentator will agree on this, is that the book is organized around a series of, guess what, genealogies, a series of genealogies, which are describing dissent from one individual down to the next. In other words, the claims that the book of Genesis is actually trying to make, from top to bottom, are about genealogical ancestors, not genetic

ancestors. Now, one of the other things that you've brought up here is you've talked about humans outside of the garden, and you pointed out that there's a lot of space for mystery, that the Bible opens up this space for mystery, that people have been asking these kinds of questions for centuries throughout church history. So I want to ask a few questions around that. So a lot of people hearing this, they're having red flags go up because they're hearing you talk about people outside of the garden. So that's making them, I'm sure, ask a lot of different questions. So let's just start here. Where do you see in the Bible evidence that there may very well have been people outside of the garden? You already talked about the boundaries bit with Eden. But where else do we see that evidence?

Yeah, so there's several places. That's one of the longest chapters in the book where I explained this. And there's another chapter we actually explain some of the history around this as well, going to St. Augustine and La Pereira and others. The key thing here is that there's actually several places in Genesis where this comes up. One example, as you pointed out, was Kane's wife. Oh, actually, you mentioned the borders of the garden, exactly. But there's also Kane's wife. There's also the distinction between the first account of creation in Genesis 1 and then the one that comes later in Genesis 2 and how people thought about how that fits. together. There's also Genesis 6 where it talks about Nephilim and the Gaborah and other sorts. There seems to be another population in a breeding with Adam needs lineage there. Let me pause you there for a second, just for the person not quite tracking along. So the first example you gave was Kane's wife. So in Genesis 4, it describes Adam and Eve. They're having sons. And one of their sons is Kane, and it says that he marries a woman. And of course, the inevitable question becomes, where did this woman come from? Yeah. And so some people would say, well, it was a sister. And that is technically possible.

But we have to be really clear. Scripture doesn't actually say that. So when you say it's his sister, you're filling in some details. And that's okay. But another way people have thought about it is that it was someone from a different lineage. And when you look at the details of that story, I think it actually makes the most sense, especially if you care about reading Genesis literally. Some people who object the most are the ones who care about reading Genesis literally.

But seeing it as Kane's sister is a fairly troubled way of reading it. Because, yes, it does talk about Adam and Eve having many sons and daughters. But that's later in the story. That doesn't actually come in in Genesis. 4, that's Genesis 5. And then it also raises questions about why is it that Eve was sad and God gave her Seth as a replacement if she had tons of other kids? And what sense is Seth a replacement if she actually had other kids, unless those kids came later? And along the same lines, I think we have to recognize that Genesis comes out of a bigger part of the Bible, the Torah, where there are actually

regulations against marrying your sister. And so on one level, while they didn't have those regulations back then, it would seem like a strange assumption to guess that, hey, he married a sister. I thought another part that was helpful is he pointed out that Kane is out there building cities. And apparently at one point he's running away from people. And again, it's just begging the question, who are these people? Where did they come from? There's obviously different options on the table. The other thing you said is you talked about the two different accounts of creation.

So again, just for the person who's like, what are we talking about here? In Genesis 1, we have our first creation account. And it talks about God making men and women in his own image. And some people have thought that that's a description of God creating an Adam and Eve. But other people have thought is it's the description of God creating an entire group of people. The Bible doesn't weigh in on it. And there's people who are very good scholars who take both of those arguments. Yeah.

And to be clear, one red flag that all came up for people, which I just want to put the rest, is one way how this has been misunderstood in the past is for people who really doubted the legitimacy of Scripture to make an argument that Genesis 1 is in conflict with Genesis 2. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the undeniable fact that they're using different. words and they're different accounts or different stories, even though they're not in conflict and they're in some sort of meaningful tension. So they're both true accounts. They're both in tension. They're describing events in different ways. And one of the big questions in interpreting

Genesis is how do they fit together? Are they describing the same events in different ways? Are they describing different events? Yeah. And again, for our listeners, we even have pastors on our staff team who take different perspectives on this. But I think the broader point we're trying to draw out here is that we could point to multiple places in scripture that seem to be very comfortable with the idea that there were people outside the garden. I think the last one I would point out is if you go in your Bible and you read Romans 5, go in starting verse 12, it talks about Adam sinning. And then Paul has this weird phrase who says, and sin spreaded to the rest of humanity. Now, that could be taken to say, well, that was just his descendants. But taking that face

value, it seems like it's saying that something happened with Adam that affected other people out in the world. Yeah, it's actually fairly interesting that text. So it's in Romans 5, 12 through 14, which actually comes up several times in the book. That's often seen as a core text correctly for the doctrine of monogenesis, which I affirm in this book also affirms as the doctrine of monogenesis. Do you define that for people? Doctrine of monogenesis is the doctrine that we all descend from Adam and Eve. And that has never precluded the possibility of people outside the garden.

The big issue has been of whether or not those people who lived outside the garden extended and lived down to today. So we think everyone today descends from Adam and Eve. That's the doctrine of monogenesis. Now, whether or not there were people in the very distant past, that's a different question. So let's state the obvious. People who are living at the same time as Adam and Eve are not descended from Adam and Eve. But what you're saying is that in a period of a few thousand years, every living human on the face of the earth, or I should say every living person on the face of the earth, they are all descended from Adam and Eve. Yeah, that's right.

And so Romans is interesting because he actually says that through Adam, all humanity falls. But he has this weird phrase where he says that, to be clear, I'm not saying that there wasn't. sin already in the world. It just wasn't held against anyone's account because before the law it comes is not held against anyone's account. That's a very strange qualification to give. It's exactly right. He actually compares Adam to Moses and Israel and says that when Israel broke the law that God specifically gave them, their transgression was much more similar to what Adam did when Adam broke the specific law of God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and suggest that other people out there who have some kind of sin, it's just a different kind because it wasn't an

express breaking of God's law. And this is also a really key point, too, because I've got to hit this point in Genesis, where there's another clue to this that clearly the serpent is sinning, but he sins before Adam. Clearly, Eve is sinning, but she sins before Adam, but Romans identifies Adam as the key person. That means that it's not that he's saying that there was no wrongdoing beforehand. But there's a different weight, a different responsibility that Adam had. One distinction actually between Eve and Adam in the story is that Eve doesn't actually get the commands and not to eat of the fruit, but Adam does. And so when he sin, he's the only one in the story, actually, who's directly violating a command

directly given into him by God. And so that's, for example, a type of distinction between his sin and maybe the wrongdoing that came before. This is all really interesting stuff. So another flag that I think comes up for people is they know, evolution, survival of the fittest, there has to be death. And in a lot of people's picture, what they grew up hearing about the Bible is that there was no death until after sin. And so they're hearing this and they're wondering, okay, well, I get it. Eventually everybody could be the genealogical descendants of Adam and Eve. And then we could say that all people are their descendants. But what about all those people dying?

What about all the people who had to die to get to that point? Well, to be clear, evolution doesn't work by survival of the fittest. That's a gloss, which means oversimplification. That's high school education level. Another thing that's surprising for a lot of people is evolution is not merely natural selection. That's once again, a gloss. The key thing I'm really going after here is not some sort of godless process of atheism or whatever or randomness. What I'm saying is that God created us through a providentially governed process of common descent.

So what about the question, though, that does involve death? That's a great question. So this comes to some really important theological questions. And it really comes down to what scripture is talking about. And this gets to this question of whether or not there's humans outside the garden or what, how do you mean by that term? The first thing to remember is that scripture doesn't actually include the word human. The word in Genesis is Adam. Let's pause on the human conversation, because I want to talk about that next.

Okay, we'll talk about that next. But the key point is that if we define human for the purposes, for a technical reason of understanding scripture, as Adam and Eve and their descendants, well, then in the garden, there was no death before the fall. And if Adam hadn't sinned, Adam and Eve's descendants would never face death. So, in fact, no death before the fall is entirely consistent with scripture. Now, what about death outside the garden? Well, it doesn't really tell us much about that, but we can think about it from a theological point of view.

And I think it's very easy to see that God has an entire right to create a bunch of people that are subject to death and that he treats however he wants to. He doesn't owe us immortality. So one of the things I like to point out whenever people are reading Genesis 1 to 3 is I ask the question. I'll say, was Adam created immortal? Was he innately able to live forever? And if you want to read the text really carefully, it's obvious that how Adam is going to continue to live is by eating from the tree of life. God gave him a means by which he's going to live. And when God kicks him out of the garden, the logic is actually, if he stays here, he's going to eat that tree. That's what they literally say. They say, this is a person to broke your command. And we can't actually keep him here if he has access to the tree of life.

So we're going to cut that off by kicking him out of the garden. Which seems to suggest that Adam is, apart from the tree of life, himself a mortal being. That it is a grace and gift of God to give him access to the tree of life. And without it, there's mortality even for him. And to the broader point of whether or not a matter of life, not there was death outside of the garden, I think again we can say this is simply something that the Bible does not speak to. It doesn't say anything about what's happening outside of the garden in Genesis 2 and 3. I would go a little farther than that. I think if you take, I mean, of course,

if you take a metaphorical reading, anything goes. But if you're going to take anything remotely resembling historical slash literal reading, I think the teaching of Genesis is that there is death outside the garden. And if you look historically in the church, that's what everyone thought until very recently, meaning about what the Protestant Reformation in 1517. So I think it's actually very hard. You have to do some violence to the text if you care about a hermeneutic or literal reading to come away thinking that it isn't teaching if there's death outside the garden. You have to bring a lot of assumptions into the text. And that's one of the things we have to do. We always have to put ourselves in the mirror and ask, am I squeezing the text into my

categories or am I letting the text squeeze me into its categories? And that's the goal I think we should all have as we're reading the Bible. And that's also why I kind of pressed back a bit earlier too. I mean, I was raising Earth creationist. And when I left Young Earth Creationism, it was actually because I came to see Genesis in a more literal reading, not a less literal reading. And it's because I took a more traditional reading of Genesis, not a less traditional. My real objection to the stubbornness in the most aggressive forms of Young Earth Creationism is that they claim to care about Scripture, but they seem to be taking some pretty serious liberties with it that I can't really justify. Yeah, that's really interesting. So one of the things that you were bringing

up, and I tried to get you to pause on, is I think it's really fascinating, is this question of what's a human, okay? So again, we're talking about people outside of the garden. And immediately the question, when you and I first talked about this a few months ago, that came to my mind is, okay, well, what about the dignity of those people outside of the garden? Were they fully human? Were they in the image of God? And I think one of the most fascinating parts of your book is a section that's addressing the question of how do we define human. So let's just start here. What are the different possible answers to that question? Maybe start with how scientists would answer it, And then we can move into how theologians and Bible scholars would.

Yeah, so we're asking the question, what does it mean to be human? And we should know right from the start that every answer is going to be totally unsatisfying because that's the grand question. That unsettles simple answers. And so if we're really engaging that question, one sign that we're engaging in it is that there's a bit of unsettledness about everything. And in fact, what I really encourage is more of a multivalent or multifaceted or polyphonic approach to thinking about this, where we try and grant legitimacy to different definitions. Just to make sure I'm tracking with you.

What you're trying to say is the question we're asking can be answered different ways from different angles, depending on who's asking it and what perspective they're taking. And those all might be legitimate ways of answering that. Well, they all have a bounded legitimacy. So I think that that's okay. And I think what it means is that there's an invitation really to come to this part of the story and wonder together about that and understand each other through kind of engaging that question and knowing that we're not actually going to come up with a final answer because this is one of the grand questions. The grand question that unsettles all the simple answers. All of us. Yeah. So one of the most fascinating things you said in your book is that scientists can't even agree about how to define human. So this is actually a fairly well-known problem in science, which turned out to be totally unknown to many of theologians I talked to. I'd never heard this before. It turns out that scientists have no real way of defining what human is. It's completely arbitrary. And we're in big intractable debates about that that are not going to resolve.

But my assumption was homo sapiens. That's it. That's what a human is. Well, that's not even the major view. I'd say the more dominant view is just the homo genes. which goes back two million years ago and includes like Homo erectus and all that. If you go to the Natural History Museum in D.C., that's the image you'll be told. So we'll say, for example, things like modern humans, which would refer to Homo sapiens. But then also we might say archaic humans to refer to all those other ones. So we're talking about Neanderthals. Yeah.

And in fact, if you go back to the question of Neanderthals arises right before Darwin proposes the origin of the species, it becomes a really critical part of Huxley's argument for the descent of man. And Neanderthals are a very puzzling sort of thing. They're not like humans that we see today. But they're certainly not like beasts we see today, too. Are they in the image of God? And no one, I think, can have a definitive answer for that because they're just something that doesn't appear in our world.

And we discovered them in the middle of the 1800s. So why is it so hard for scientists to answer the question, what is a human? What's making this so intractable? Part of its ambiguous evidence, science tends to be evidentially driven for the most part. And to really be able to have a clear definition, you have to have a clear line, identifiable in evidence. We have very good evidence for human evolution, but it also has limits, and it's not always easy to see any clear lines.

I mean, there are differences you can find, but is that a critical difference that defines the human condition? It's hard to tell. We know that there's a major gap between humans and animals when it comes to language. Chomsky argued that it had to arise from a single mutation, possibly, and it would be a large, sharp difference. But we don't know that for sure. It's not really clear how we could even,

ethically do the experiments to figure that out, and language doesn't fossilize. So there's a point where, you know, we don't really know how to map, like, the ontological category we have in theology for a fully human, rational soul, thoughtful mind, spirit, soul, whatever you want to say, to the evidence we see, there's no good way to do that. And scientists can't really draw a clean mind. That doesn't mean that clean night doesn't exist. It just, we can't see it. And so there's been intractable debates in science for a very long time that are actually kind of heating up right now. No, it's interesting because, again, I always just made the assumption, homo sapiens equals human. Those are the same things. And one of the challenges that your book gave me was it made me realize that one of these things is a scientific category. And the other one is really a metaphysical category. It's a way of talking about what we are. You use the word ontology, but it's a way of talking about what does it mean to be human. And so that kind of leads us into the second question, which is how have theologians answered the question? Yeah, that's a great question too. So one way, which I don't think is the only way or even the best way to think about it, and I can give you some edge cases that really unsettle it,

is to say that humans are the people that are in the image of God. Now, that might seem really clever. And to be clear, I believe that all humans are in the image of God today across the globe. I just don't think that's a good way to define human, because we can think about things that are not human in the way we'd imagine them that could be in the image of God. But let's just set that aside for a moment. Let's say even if we accept that view, it turns out that theologians can't even agree on what the image of God is. Now, you might think you know what it is, but it turns out that it turns out to be a fairly complex and unsettled debate where there just is an agreement. There's three major camps and they disagree with one another and there's a whole bunch of minor positions.

And even within the camps, they disagree with each other. And so this idea of what it means to be human, if we're going to say it's the image of God, well, that's not settled either. The three different camps out there, again, they have a great chapter in this book, are the relational camp, the material, and the vocational. Substantialist, yeah. I'm trying to talk to normal people. So these are three different ways of talking about it. So people will put different angles on it, but I think one way to think about it is they're both considering one of three different ways or locations to place our understanding of what it means to be human. So in the substantialist view, we locate what a human is with our internal attributes.

And with that, one of the challenges that view has is thinking through in a careful way how to make sure we grant full humanity to people with disabilities, for example. That becomes a really central challenge. There's ways to work through that. But that gives you a sense of what it means to locate humanness with who we are in our personal attributes. That's one view. The second view is a vocational view, and that tends to locate who we are as humans in our actions and our response to God's calling to us. So what it means to be human is in the dominion call overall creation, and that's kind of the central place of it. And then the third view is called the relational view. It's the least common, but it's actually the one that I think makes the most sense to me in terms of if I was to give a dominant account. And that really locates what it means to be human within our relationships to one another and perhaps to God. And it should be said that these things are not necessarily exclusive to each other at all. Well, I think everyone would agree that across the globe today, all three of those definitions apply to everyone. So that's not what the issue is.

The issue is what's the dominant part of the story in Genesis? And is it possible that in the distant past, different definitions might apply different times and come in? So, for example, one key question comes. Is it possible that a person could have a fully rational soul and intellect, be fully biological human, have the structure of being a human, but not yet have that calling of Adam? In other words, there's people outside of the garden. They might not share Adam's particular calling. So are they human by our definition? Yeah, so a vocationalist, so most people interpret scripture called exegetes, and most exeges are vocationalists right now. They would say, well, yeah, of course, that's not a problem. But you're pointing out there might actually be a little bit of a problem there. Well, I don't actually think there's a problem with that. If they think that that's going to work and they have no problem, what they would say is that the structure of what a human is arises in the distant past.

And in the same way that Jews and Gentiles have different callings, Adam's descendants had a different vocation than those that are others, and that's fine. Now, I don't think you have to take that view. You could take a different view. And I proposed a different view actually in the book. Yeah, that's where I was going to go. So in the book, you proposed the idea of a textual human, which is kind of a mouthful, but explain what that means what that means. When you realize that if Adam were very recent, we would all still descend from them by 81, but before Jesus walks to the earth and so and so forth, there becomes an old definition of what it means to be human that becomes available to us that wasn't before. That's with an asterisk, because we wouldn't even really say the word human. I mean, our modern concept of what it means to be human is a little different than that. I mean this in a very technical sense. It's a relational definition.

And I'll explain that in a moment, is that we could say that what human is to scripture if you're a genesis. And if you look at the use of the language and how the story unfolds is human, or the humans to which scripture is concerned are Adam and Eve and their descendants. Another way to put it is Adam and Eve. And their descendants are bound to Adam and Eve and their descendants. and there might be people outside the garden that are humans in every other way. They're fully human. They're not beasts. But they're not the humans to whom scripture is referring.

Because they are not the genealogical descendants of Adameney. Now, this obviously is going to create for a lot of people a whole different set of questions. Again, I remember the first time we talked. Fun questions, right? They're fun questions. But the first one that I think is most pressing is that this can start sounding like a slippery slope down the way to racism and racial violence, a justification for delimiting. Here's what a human is.

and you're not human, ergo. So we'll see that. The very first part of that was a major error in logic. So just because Adam and their descendants are the humans to whom Scripture is referring, where Scripture is focused, Adam Eve are the first human of Scripture, and the descendants are the ones that are referring to, doesn't mean that there are no humans in the peripheral vision. So, for example, I could say there's one woman in my life, Victoria Swamadas, my wife.

That doesn't mean that your wife is now less human. or less a woman. It's a relational world I just defined. And so I'm actually speaking literally about my relational world when I say the only woman in the world is Victoria. So the people outside the garden might not be textual humans, but they are humans, we might say, coming at it from different angles. Oh yeah, exactly. So scientists would legitimately say they're fully human. If we lived at that time, we would look at them and say they were human, except for we don't live at that time. And so we have to be clear that, and we're not saying these other people are less human or subhuman or not fully human, that's not true. They're just not the humans to whom

scriptures are firm. That's a helpful way of putting it. In another way of saying that is, it doesn't mean that they can be treated with less dignity, less respect. So this gets to the issue of, well, what is the real issue here? Is it that they don't have the image of God? Well, maybe they do. But if they don't, what is the real issue? The real issue is that we want to be really concerned about adopting a theology that doesn't grant them dignity and worth. And that, I think, is the real core question that people are worried about. Absolutely. And I think there's good reason to be worried about that,

but it turns out that there's really good answers in theology to make sense of that. Whether or not they're in the image of God, that we can really actually find some very natural ways to make sense of why from a theological point of view. They have full worth in human dignity alongside us. And this goes to your distinction in the book talking about how we can talk about persons and we can talk about, again, textual humans, and that those persons out there still have the same rights, the same dignity as what we might call a textual human. And again, just to be clear, today,

everybody in the world comes under the category of textual humans. So whatever solution we end up with, it's a very academic solution. This is an academic in the past kind of thing. Okay, so I want to do something different. And that also takes it out of the racism issue because we're not saying, well, you know, those Indians out there, you know, I'm Indian, to be clear, or those Africans out there are somehow less human. They all descend from Adam and Eve. Absolutely everybody on the face of planet Earth. So we're coming towards the end of our time. I want to do something fun here. One of my favorite podcasts, they do something called a speed round where they ask their interviewee, a set of random questions, and you have no time to think. You have to give your

gut level answer in one or two sentences. Are you ready for this? Sure. Let's do it. Okay. I'll start easy. Best book you've read on Adam and Eve. My book. I know I'm kidding. Genesis. And you can buy it on Amazon today. No, I'm kidding. Genesis. Oh, come on. All right. You just juked me. Okay. All right. Salter or sweet? Both. You got to pick one. Neither. Neither. Okay, good. Favorite science fiction novel. Oh, I really like altered carbon the series. I haven't seen the books, but I'm going to say the series, altered carbon on Netflix. Awesome. Cool. Okay. Do you believe in aliens? Isn't Jesus an alien? Theologically, no. I'm going to take that as a yes. Okay. Should we give AI human rights?

Not anytime soon. All right, beach, mountains, or city? Beach. All right, good choice. Okay, so we've got just a few minutes left. I want to dive for just a second into a completely extra biblical speculation. So we are now leaving the realm of our expertise as science,

actually, you eat everything else. And here's my question. How does this research help us to answer fresh questions about things like artificial intelligence and alien life? I think that there's a really interesting dialogue to be had there. These are these edge cases about the image of God, because depending on what we mean by the image of God, maybe, actually, if we ever did encounter intelligent aliens, maybe they are in the image

of God. Maybe they're not. How do we think about that? How do we think about how they connect to the story of Scripture? And we believe that God is a creator of all things. So he's the God also of those aliens. But how does that make sense? So this means you believe in aliens?

Well, I think that I'm like C.S. Lewis, where he started wondering about this in religion and rocketry. It's a really beautiful article. And also he ends up expanding this into a trilogy of novels called the Space Trilogy. wondering what it would look like for us to engage with this idea for the Christian God, as we understand him, theologically, how would we make sense of him being the creator of all things and having rational souls on another planet? I think it's a really great question that we don't know if that'll ever happen.

I mean, some people legitimately think we'll never see that. Fine, maybe we won't. But isn't it fun to wonder about that and think about that and try and make sense of it? And maybe we'll find out that ends up really preparing the church for the time that actually happens. Now, the question of AI, I think it's actually far more likely we're going to be challenged about artificial intelligence in the image of God in my lifetime than I've ever thought that before. Because it's actually far easier to imagine that artificial intelligence could get to the point

where it at least seems like it's somewhat conscious, seems. Now, is it, I don't know we have any way to figure that out in science. I think it's a debate, but we don't seem to know what consciousness is. It's been interesting talking to theologians because all of the questions about origins and something called theological anthropology that arise around origins, they arise with artificial intelligence when you think about these things, we can start wondering. And maybe even if you say, well, humans can't create life, well, maybe, but could God infuse a machine with a soul? Actually, there's no reason to think that he couldn't. And maybe he does. So even if you think that,

maybe God does that in the future. Now we're embarking on some questions about the human soul. It's getting real salty. So I'm going to pick that one too. I'm just saying that we really have. And to come back to the very beginning, look, we don't know what the future holds. We know some things about it that God's told us. We don't know everything that's going to happen. And what God has given us is that cornerstone, that place where we can have confidence to place one foot down solidly and know that that we really know who he is, that he exists and that he wants to be known and find that confident relationship with him. But that gives us a free foot to go and play and wonder and imagine things about what could be. And that's part of what it means to be

human is have confidence, but to also have play. I don't think I could say it better myself. So I'll wrap us up there. Thanks so much for being on the show, Josh. This was a blast. If you want to learn more, If there's anything in here that you found confusing, I can almost guarantee he's got a great chapter in this book that's going to help you think through it. Speaking for myself, I read a lot of books, and there are very few that I feel like our paradigm shifting are giving me entirely new ways of thinking about old problems. And this book did that in multiple instances. So I really can't recommend it highly enough. You can go by the genealogical Adam and Eve on Amazon. We'll have it in our show notes. So check that out. Also, make sure to check out. You can also pick it up in Barnes

Noble if you want to see it in person first. Do an in-person perusal if you're that kind of person. You can read more of his work at peaceful science.org. If you found this episode thought-provoking, go ahead and take an extra 30 seconds and text a friend or post it on social media, share a little bit about what you learned. Like I said, I think this is going to break some new ground in the dialogue between science and faith. And so I think it's important that this message gets out there and people are hearing about it and thinking about it. If you're a new listener listening to our podcast for the first time, you can stay up to date by subscribing. So make sure to get on there, subscribe, give us a rating. It helps other people find this content more easily. Thanks for

listening.