The Sean McDowell Show - Historical Adam: Updates and BIG Lessons (w/ William Lane Craig)

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Was Adam a real historical person? Is belief in Adam and Eve compatible with science? Is it required by scripture? Dr. William Lane Craig is back to update us on the latest findings/evidences about the search for the historical Adam. READ: Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve: Four Views (https://amzn.to/4eTnYXZO *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Ten years ago, Carl Truman said the question of Adam is arguably the biggest doctrinal question facing the current generation. Is that still true today? What have we learned about the search for the historical Adam and Eve, both biblically and scientifically over the past decade and more? Our guest today, Dr. William Lane Craig, has written a whole book on this in the quest of the historical Adam, but recently contributed to a Four Views book that I found fantastic called Perspectives on Historical Adam and Eve. He's here to discuss these questions and more. Bill, thanks for coming on. Oh, it's a pleasure, Sean. Good to be with you again. Well, let me frame this a certain way. I remember about a decade ago, it was you, John Lennox, and J. and JP Moreland at an event at

Biola hosted by Hugh Hewitt on the intersection of science and faith. And one of the questions that came up was on the historical atom. And I was there watching, and I don't know any other way to put it than sitting there going, I'm somewhat unsatisfied with the response on the historical atom. And it's not that I had a better response, obviously, and you hadn't studied it yet, but I remember thinking, this is a big question and I'm not sure we've really wrestled with this

and offered a satisfactory view. So I'm curious your thoughts on what Carl Truman said about this question being so big and maybe just kind of how we've come in the past 10 years on this question being so big and maybe just kind of how we've come in the past 10 years on this question. Well, let me say something first about that dialogue at Biola with you, I entirely agree with you about how unsatisfactory it was in dealing with the challenge to the historicity of Adam and Eve. If you remember, John Lennox completely skirted the

question. He would not address it directly, and I felt incapable of addressing it. I didn't know enough about the subject, and so had to simply confess my inability to know how to defend the historicity of this founding pair of the human race. And that was part of what prompted me to do the study that led to the book In Quest of the Historical Atom. Now, as interesting as the question of the historical atom is, I think that Carl Truman's statement that this is the biggest doctrinal question facing the current generation evinces a terrible understanding of theological priorities. I think that is not at all true. I'm currently studying the doctrine of salvation, and I've got to tell you, Sean, the debates that are raging today over the doctrine of justification,

its nature, and how we're to understand it in relation to other salvific motifs in the New Testament is a huge debate in which a lot is at stake. Perhaps even the central premises of the Reformation itself are at stake. And so that far supersedes these questions about whether or not there was a historical Adam and Eve. That's helpful. I can't wait to discuss those issues with you, but that is for another time. Okay, I'd love to do it if you want to do it another time. Oh, good. Good. Well, so maybe give us a sense of 10 years ago, you're unsatisfied, you've studied it. How has debates on this shifted in that past decade or even before that? How things changed? Well, I think that the prevailing default position was the traditional view of Adam and Eve

that is defended by young earth creationists, namely that Adam and Eve existed somewhere around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago and were the universal progenitors of the human race. And the problem is that such a view just flies in the face of what we know about modern paleoanthropology and history and archeology, that view is collapsing. And there was nothing on the horizon to replace it. And so I think there was a sort of crisis with respect to the historical Adam and Eve that prompted some evangelicals like Peter Enns and Kenton Sparks to deny altogether that there ever was such a person. And that he's a purely symbolic or mythical figure. That's helpful to see that shift. Now, maybe not now, but at some point, I'd love to host a

discussion or debate with you and a young earther like the book. But for now, the book lays out four different perspectives. People make their case, they respond, and people can go there for that kind of dialogue. Let go there for that kind of dialogue let's go back to kind of the beginning so maybe 10 years ago i had no idea that dialogue was one of the things that spurred you because it really like in the back of my mind bothered me a little bit like we've got to do better on this and so when you decided to study it how do you approach a topic that involves theology, involves Bible, and it involves science? What's your methodology in approaching it? I had a very self-conscious methodology

in approaching this question. Namely, I wanted to bracket the scientific question, to put it temporarily to the side, and to approach the hermeneutical question of the proper interpretation of Genesis 1 to 11, the so-called primeval history, on its own terms. And so for me, it was important not to let science lead the interpreter by the nose. And I think that is what has happened with some influential books on the historical atom. For example, the book published by Dennis Venema and Scott McKnight. It opens with a discussion of the scientific evidence for the antiquity of man by Dennis Venema, a biologist. And then poor Scott McKnight, who is a New Testament theologian, comes along and has to respond to it and is basically impotent to respond to the scientific case that Venema has made, and so completely capitulates to it. And I think that's just bad hermeneutics the way you

want to approach these questions hermeneutically is to interpret the text within their own original horizon and try to understand them in the way that the original author and audience would have understood it. And then for better or worse, let the chips lie where they may. And so that was my project, was to begin with a lengthy, exegetical discussion of the issue, and only once I felt confident that I understood the text. Could I then raise the question, is this incompatible with the deliverances of modern science? So if you thought the text implied that we didn't need a historical atom, or if you thought the text implied it was a young earth, you would have followed where you thought the text led

and then dealt with a science secondary. Is that fair? Yes, that's exactly right. And in the book, I say that the Younger position is very defensible. Hermeneutically, I think it's indefensible. Scientifically, I think creation science is indefensible. But as a hermeneutical claim, it seems to me to be an extremely plausible interpretation. And so, yes, I was definitely open to that, but I was also open to the idea

that this could be pure myth. And we're not committed to a historical Adam and Eve after all. So for me, Sean, as you may know, this was truly a deep existential crisis for me. It was hard. I was really wrestling with doubts and struggles about this, and it was difficult to do, and I feel such relief that I came to intellectual peace ultimately over these issues. I don't know that I've ever heard you use the term crisis and existential doubt just kind of in your life and your faith. I knew this was a challenge for you, but I'm not sure I grabbed it was quite that level of one. Does that make this qualitatively different than other research projects you've done? And maybe how did you just kind of navigate that? Were you talking to Jan? Were you talking to other scholars praying about it? Yeah, it is different than most of all of the other subjects

I've delved into. For example, the nature of God and time, or the nature of divine eternity, for example. The situation there is that the biblical data is under-determinative. The Bible doesn't tell us clearly whether God is timeless or omnitemporal throughout infinite time, and so the biblical theologian is patient of both alternatives and can learn from what the philosophical theologian has to say about this. But in the case of the historical Adam, there we seem to be prima facie committed to the historicity of Adam and Eve and a view that seemed at loggerheads with contemporary science and history. And so it was much more difficult. And in pursuing this, I did talk to other people. I had heart-to-heart talks with people like Gavin Ortland, for example, about my struggles. I went to Michael Lapine and one of our board members at Reasonable Faith and

said, these are the conclusions that I'm coming to. Do you think these are theologically unacceptable? Am I going down the wrong trail? I was very concerned about these things and so did seek to talk with others about it and to participate in conferences like the Creation Conferences hosted by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School on the origins of humanity. It was there that I met Josh Swamidass and Bill Arnold and other scholars that helped me to work through these issues as well. In some ways, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'd love to ask you now, now that you've worked

through this intellectually and emotionally, if there were other such challenges on the intersection of science and faith, would there be a certain level of confidence or experience you bring to it that would probably give you a different experience studying it, or you just have to take it on its own merit? I think that this does inspire confidence. I know in my previous work, working through philosophical challenges to theism or the Christian faith does give one an increasing measure of confidence that there just aren't any good philosophical objections to theism or to Christianity. And that really does give one

confidence when one begins to open a new chapter and explore a different issue, for example. That makes sense. Let's shift back to the historical Adam. How essential is it to the Christian faith? Like, is it an issue a Christian can agree to disagree on, or do you think it's theologically and biblically necessary? I think this is going to depend, Sean, on your view of the doctrine of original sin. If you think with St. Augustine that Adam's sin was imputed to every one of his descendants so that we are guilty of Adam's sin, even infants, even little babies, bear the guilt of Adam's sin, even though they haven't committed any sins themselves and they're proper persons. If you hold to that Augustinian understanding of original sin, then the historicity of Adam is going to be absolutely critical, because if there was no such person,

then there can be no original sin to be imputed to his descendants. Now fortunately for me, that wasn't an issue, because I had already come to the conclusion that the Augustinian doctrine of original sin is not biblical. It is not found in Genesis 3 in the curses of the fall pronounced upon the man, the woman, and the snake, nor is it found, I believe, in Romans 5. Romans 5 does not teach that Adam's sin is imputed to all persons. Rather, what it says is that sin spread to all men because all men sinned. Sin was like a contagion that came into the world and then spread like a disease because every person sinned. So if you do not have that Augustinian doctrine of original sin, then I think that the historicity of Adam and Eve is not so

important an issue anymore. If someone takes him to be just a symbol for every man and his fall as a sort of fall into sin that every man experiences, then that would be, I think, acceptable. It's not the view I agree with, but I don't see that this would be a serious theological aberration. So I think it shouldn't be exaggerated in terms of its importance. As I see it, the main importance of the doctrine would be that if it is taught in the Bible that Adam and Eve are historical, then if there was no such person, then that means that the Bible is teaching falsehoods, and so you're going to have to revise your doctrine of biblical inspiration in such a way that the Bible can be inspired by God

and yet teach doctrinal falsehoods, and that would be a major dislocation. That would require significant theological revision. So in that sense it would be important, but in that sense anything taught in the Bible is important. I mean if the doctrine of baptism taught by Scripture is false, then that's going to affect your doctrine of inspiration. So Adam and the historicity of Adam has a kind of extrinsic theological importance, but it doesn't have a great deal of inherent theological importance unless you hold to this Augustinian doctrine of original sin. That's a helpful distinction for people to realize. There's the theological necessity of Adam, depending on our understanding of original sin. And then there's the biblical teaching of the historical Adam.

And you go into depth between somebody being mentioned as a literary figure, but not assume that figure is historical. But in Romans 5, it's taken in a straightforward historical fashion. And so what the Bible teaches is now at stake in a different fashion. Go ahead. If I might comment on that, I think that was one of the most important insights in the book. many New Testament authors refer to literary figures in Jewish folklore, pseudepigrapha, even pagan myths, and yet they're used simply illustratively without committing us to their historicity. It would be as though I were to say that just as Robinson Crusoe had his man Friday to assist him, so I have a teaching assistant to assist me, and no one would imagine that I'm thereby committing

myself to the historicity of Robinson Crusoe. It's just using it illustratively. But in Romans 5, when Paul talks about Adam's sin and its effects on the world, there he's talking about effects of Adam's fall outside the narrative. And no purely literary figure can have causal impact outside the literary narrative. Hamlet, for example, though described as a Danish prince in Shakespeare's play, has no effect upon the real world because he's just a literary figure. But Paul doesn't treat Adam that way. He doesn't treat him as a purely literary figure he is someone who has real impact causally upon the world outside the narrative and therefore i think that's one of the reasons i think we are committed to the existence of a historical atom that's a helpful distinction when i first read your book

in question historical adam that was also one of my big takeaways. Oh, maybe I haven't carefully thought through like historical versus illustrative use in the way that you do depending on the context. So that's a great takeaway. Now, there's four perspectives in this book. How many more perspectives? Are these kind of the big four or are you aware of it? They're like 20 or 30 or different i know like the genealogical atom there's kind of some different genealogical atom perspectives does this book kind of capture it or do you sense there's like no there's a whole bunch more we

could have done a 10 views book if we wanted to yeah i'm under the impression that these views capture the essence and that while there may be variations on these views, these would be the broad categories that would be available. Okay, that's helpful. So you hit at one of the views before that kind of denies the necessity of the historical Adam. That's one of the voices that is in here that I think you and I would say is at least outside of the kind of historic Christian position. But I appreciate that it's included here for the dialogue and the compare and the contrast. But then there's three views that at least theologically would be more in line with a broader kind of historic Christian faith, as I understand it. One of them is young earth creationism. Now we're going to come to your view, and you hinted at this earlier,

but maybe just kind of lay out for us so we understand how a young earth creationist position, whether they think the universe is six or 12,000 years old, or even take a gap theory, what would the young earth creationist perspective be of the historical atom? The young earth creationist interprets the narrative as being a historical account of the actual events that transpired that is to be taken basically literally. So he believes that the world was created in six consecutive 24-hour days, and that somewhere around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, God created a human being out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and he became a living being, and then he extracted a rib from his side and made a woman to be his companion, and placed them in this idyllic garden somewhere in the Middle East, and said you can eat of any of the fruit of the garden of any of the trees except you cannot eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But a serpent appears in the garden. We don't know where he comes from or what he represents, but the serpent

appears in the garden and tempts Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, and when they do so, their eyes are opened, they realize they're naked and they're ashamed of it, and they hide from God. It's very clear that they are now estranged from God and that their relationship with God has been ruptured by their disobedience and sin. And God then confronts them. He pronounces curses upon the man and the woman and the snake and the ground, and then drives them out of the garden to eke out a painful existence in the wider world. And the young earther takes that story literally. And so typically young earth creationists believe that Adam and Eve were contemporaneous with the dinosaurs of the Jurassic age, and that they lived side by side, that in fact right up to the time of Abraham there were probably dinosaurs

running about. Some young earthers think then that Noah took dinosaurs on board the ark with him, and that there was a flood within human history within the last several thousand years that wiped out all terrestrial life on earth, except for that aboard the ark. So it's a very literalistic kind of interpretation of the narrative. That was really helpful. I think most people watching this would be familiar with the way that you framed it, whether it's just reading

the Bible kind of with our Western eyes today, taking it in maybe a straightforward fashion, or children's books and children's Bibles typically have a young earth take on it. Even a lot of former believers have a young earth perspective. So I think you laid that out really well. But I think what some people won't be as familiar with, because I haven't seen it in a single children's Bible, I'm not sure how they would demonstrate this. And it's more of a modern idea that really has been developed by our friend Joshua Swamidass is what's called the genealogical Adam and Eve. And I know there's recent and ancient views on this. That's one of the books, that's one of the

perspectives in the book, Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve you contributed to. But what is that? Lay out for us that perspective on Adam, if you will. Well, the young earth perspective that I just laid out, which is the traditional view of Adam and Eve down through church history, is, as I say, indefensible scientifically and historically. And therefore, somehow this traditional picture needs revision. And the proposal of Joshua Swamidass, who is an information biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, gives up the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve in order to preserve their recency. So he can have an Adam and Eve who lived very recently in the past, but they are not the universal progenitors of mankind.

As an information biologist, Swamidass is able to show that it only takes about 5,000 years, believe it or not, in order for the entire population of the planet to descend from an original human pair. All the billions of people that are alive today could go back to just two people, a man and a woman that lived around 5,000 years ago or so. Now, the situation, however, is there were lots of other people living there then as well, and they are what he calls genetic ghosts. They haven't transmitted their genetic material to us. All of it goes back to this pair. So besides the pair that existed in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, Josh imagines that outside the garden there was a population of people who were not descended from Adam and Eve, but who had evolved from primates. They had evolved, according to the regular evolutionary story, from common ancestors

with chimpanzees and gorillas and so forth. And when Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden by God, they began to mate and interbreed with these primate descendants, and that's why our DNA today has the vestiges of these genes that we share in common with chimpanzees and gorillas and so forth. It's not that we got these genes from Adam and Eve. It's rather that our lineage from Adam and Eve picked up this genetic material from these people outside the garden. So I hope you understand that on this view, he's able to defend the idea of a recent adam and eve and a literal creation a literal garden of eden oh it's very literalistic but he just thinks there's people outside the garden who have evolved and with whom then these children of adam and eve began to interbreed now at this point if people

are still with us we might have lost a bunch of people when we started out with people outside and evolution, et cetera. All we're trying to do is I recognize this raises a ton of questions about people outside the garden. This raises a question about evolution. I'm not ignoring those. And I know you're not as well. Josh deals with those and people can assess themselves if they want to in his book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve. And in this book, Andrew Loke, a friend of both of ours, gives a different version of The Genealogical Adam and Eve and also tries to make a case for that. What we're doing here is trying to just show how is this topic shifted? What's at stake? What are

the different views? That's what we're trying to lay out for people just so they understand what we're doing yes josh swami das's book on the genealogical adam and eve changed the debate because up until the time of his writing it was widely believed that that the genetic diversity of mankind today could never have descended from an original couple, much less an original couple that lived a few thousand years ago. And so organizations like BioLogos that are meant to foster the dialogue between science and religion, abandoned the idea of a historical Adam as impossible. Dennis Venema, whom I mentioned before, says that we can know with heliocentric certainty that Adam and Eve never existed. And by that he means with the same certainty we know that the earth goes around the sun, we can know that Adam and Eve never existed. And Josh just

exploded that confidence by showing that, given his hypothesis, it is possible for them there to have been an Adam and Eve from whom we all today descend. I mean, it was taken as axiomatic that there was at least the smallest possible population was like 10,000 hominids. And this was used to just end debates. And whether people agree with evolution or not, again, separate issue. Josh showed that that's not necessarily the case and advanced the conversation. And I appreciate he's engaged a lot of people

in dialogue about this. And the way he's gone about it, I think is helpful and shifted things. Now, is there a significant difference we need to focus on? If not, you've made the general point between his position and the one that Loke takes in the book, or is it broadly enough the same? It's broadly the same,

though Andrew is willing to push Adam and Eve much further into the past, maybe 150,000 years ago or so. And I think that that will accord much better with the archaeological evidence and the evidence of paleoanthropology, which shows that modern cognitive behavior existed long ago, and that therefore these ancient hominins deserve to be called human beings. They were real humans, even though they weren't, on Joshua's proposal, descended from Adam and Eve. And so Andrew really tries to make some fine descriptions between what is the image of God in terms of biology, and what is the image of God in terms of biology and what is the image of God spiritually, and he's willing to imagine that there were human beings who were anatomically and behaviorally just like us, even though they weren't descended from adam and eve um but he wants to say they weren't in god's image

in a spiritual sense and so this gets into really uh subtle theological differences and yet important ones and that's where the two of you have gone back and forth whether you're persuaded by that or not which is fine that's where some of the disagreement has come out, but also shows in some ways this conversation was like 30,000 foot view. We're now narrowing down into these particular questions, which is just a sign of progress in many ways, even though the conversation continues. Now you laid out the other two views, maybe lay out for us. And again, you've got a whole separate book on this, but just help us understand what do you mean by the mytho-historical Adam view? One of the superior, pardon me, let me say that differently. One of the advantages of my approach over Josh and Andrews and even the young earthers is that I give an analysis

of the literary genre of the narratives of the primeval history in Genesis 1 to 11. What is important for our listeners to understand is that the Bible incorporates a wide diversity of types of literature, and these types are called genres, literary genres, literary types. So, for example, in the Psalms, we have poetry. In the Gospels, we have biography. In the book of Acts, we have history. In the book of Revelation, we have Jewish apocalyptic. And not all of this literature is meant to be interpreted literally. No one interprets the book of Revelation literally. It's filled with apocalyptic symbols for national alliances and evil persons, or the Psalms as poetry are not interpreted literally.

So my question was, what literary genre does Genesis 1 to 11 belong to? This unit of the book of Genesis is very different from chapters 12 and following with the call of Abraham. And what I attempt to show is that this belongs plausibly to a genre of literature that the Assyriologist Torkild Jakobson called mythohistory. That is to say, it is a kind of fusion of myth and history. It relates real events, real people that actually live, but it relates the stories in the figurative and metaphorical language of myth. And so that implies that we don't need to read these stories with a kind of wooden literalism, but can take much of it to be figurative in nature. And so that's basically

the view of Genesis 1 to 11. And let me just say that this has huge implications, not just for Adam and Eve, Sean, but we mustn't ignore the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room here is the flood story. The idea that within human history, there has been a worldwide flood that wiped out all terrestrial life on earth, save that aboard the Ark, just is scientifically impossible. And therefore, many modern interpreters will try to say, well, this

was just a local flood. It was just a small flood in the Persian Gulf area or some other local area. It wasn't a worldwide flood. But when you read the narrative, it's very clear that it is describing a worldwide flood that submerged the mountains, that wiped out all human life on earth in God's catastrophic judgment. And by interpreting this in a mytho-historical way, we can say, yes, there was such a person as noah yes there was a flood but we don't need to interpret this with a sort of wooden literality um and so that enables us to read the flood story with a good conscience so you take that through genesis 11 but at 12 with the calling of Abraham, then you'd argue it shifts to a more somewhat modern understanding of history, correct? Yes. If you read commentaries on the book of Genesis, everybody recognizes that the primeval history is prefixed to the story of the call of Abraham and the founding of the nation of Israel.

And then it concludes with the story of Joseph and his brothers. And the literary genre of these first 11 chapters that are prefixed to the call of Abraham is a very different kind of literature than what you have in the patriarchal narratives. It bears close resemblances to the themes and the motifs that are characteristic of mythology. But as I say, I don't think that it's pure myth. It is intended to be quasi-historical because these people, the primeval narratives, are structured according to genealogies that meld seamlessly into Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And just as Abraham and the patriarchs are regarded as historical persons, so those earlier in the genealogies are historical persons as well. So this enables me to defend the historicity of Adam and Eve, but without the sort of wooden literality that is associated

with the young earth hermeneutic. Probably 10 or 15 years ago, I was talking with my mom about the myth made fact by C.S. Lewis, and she about lost her mind. She's like, this is not a myth. Oh my goodness. I said, well, he means something different by myth. So maybe you could walk through what you mean by myth. And on top of that, the relationship, like was Moses looking at these other writings and saying, I need to kind of copy or borrow from them, or do we not know? What's that relationship like once you explain what's meant by myth? Oh, boy, you have really raised a nest of issues here. You're quite right in saying that this is the view that C.S. Lewis propounded. And John Collins, the Old Testament scholar,

has written a book called Reading Genesis Well, in which he uses a great deal of the writings of C.S. Lewis in talking about how to interpret these quasi-mythical sorts of narrative. Lewis was a specialist in myth and folklore, as you know, and he recognized this genre of literature when he read it, and this is how Lewis interpreted these stories. And many Old Testament scholars also interpret it this way, Sean, but they don't use the word myth because that word has become so associated in popular idiom with falsehood. We talk about things like the myth of the low-calorie diet, or even Elvis is a myth, or the myth

of Star Wars, things of that sort. And that is not the way the word is being used here. The way the word is being used here is the way it is used by students of folklore. Specialists in folklore distinguish between myth, legends, and folktales. legends and folk tales. Folk tales are fanciful stories that are meant to amuse and not taken seriously. Legends are stories that may have some historical value to them, but they're not so ancient. They don't go so far back in the past. The legends of Robin Hood, for example, would be a legend. There probably was a Robin of Locksley that lay behind them, but they become shaped by legend. is a different category, and the central feature that distinguishes myth is the attempt to ground realities and values that are present to the author and his society in events deep in the primordial past. And when you look at Genesis 1 to 11, it is brimming with these so-called etiological motifs of trying to ground Israel's values and practices in these events deep in the primordial past. And so myths can be true. They are not necessarily falsehoods,

but myths are also very figurative and metaphorical in the descriptions that they offer. And so when one talks about mythohistory, one is not talking about falsehood in the popular sense of that term. One is using the term in the way that folklorists and classicists use the term, namely traditional, sacred narratives that are handed down in a society that attempt to ground the institutions and values of that society deep in the primordial past. That's a helpful distinction for people to grasp. Now, in his response to you, which one of the things I love about Four Views books

is people get to lay out their case somewhat briefly, and you have the other three scholars respond, and then you respond. Andrew Loke pushed back because he has a different take on Genesis, and he says the first readers of Genesis 1 through 11 did not read it as mythohistorical. So these are not his words, but let me just frame it in a way someone might say, okay, Bill, are we supposed to believe that modern scholars with all of these tools have a better sense of how to read it than those who was written to and to quote c.s lewis maybe this is a kind of chronological snobbery to assume we now are elite and understand this in a way the original people who lived there didn't

hang on to that last question so we don't forget it. But let me address the first question. I don't think we know how the original interpreters of Genesis 1 to 11 took them, whether they took it with perfect literality or not. These stories were handed down in oral tradition probably 1500 BC, and then eventually became written down in Genesis, in the Pentateuch. And it's a fact, as I show in the book, that when you look at ancient Near Eastern myths in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, as well as contemporary myths in the world today, that societies who take myths seriously and accept their truth do not invariably interpret them literally, but interpret them figuratively and

metaphorically. Let me give briefly two examples. In the Mesopotamian myth of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story is told of how Gilgamesh slays the Bull of Heaven, which is the constellation Taurus, which comes down and is rampaging through a Sumerian town, and Gilgamesh and his partner Enkidu grab the bull of heaven by its tail, and they slaughter it and distribute the meat to the townspeople. Well, nobody at that time would have taken that, literally. They didn't think that the constellation Taurus no longer appeared in the sky at night because it had come down and been slain by Gilgamesh. That would have been ridiculous. Similarly, in Egypt, the myths of ancient Egypt portrayed the sky as the goddess Nut, who is arched over the earth with the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands

planted on the ground. Now no ancient Egyptian, I'm sure, going outside would look up at the sky thinking that he would see the naked body of this woman arched over the earth. Nor did any traveling caravan, I hazard to say, think that they might come upon the huge palms of Newt resting on the ground with her arms stretching toward the sky. These are obviously figurative and metaphorical images. So it is easy to demonstrate that myths, whether ancient or contemporary, are not invariably interpreted literally by the societies who say these are true and we form our lives around them. But that doesn't mean that they don't recognize figurative and metaphorical language. Now, the second question was, are we to think, therefore, that we modern scholars have a better understanding of these stories than, say, the church fathers? Absolutely. that one of the triumphs of biblical studies is that we, through comparative literature and through the study of these ancient documents, have a far better understanding of them and their

interpretation than many of these ancient peoples did. We should not in any way depreciate or minimize the tremendous contribution that modern biblical scholarship has made to our understanding of these ancient documents. That's really helpful. Now that I, as I think about it in my own study on the deaths of the apostles, like the death of Peter being crucified upside down was just repeated by so many church fathers through the centuries. And I think when we go back to the earliest sources, that's not the best explanation. So they were doing the best, but it's not chronological snobbery to say we have it better. It's just saying, here's the data that we have. And so I think there's a way to do that while respecting the massive contributions. So I think that's a fair way to respond.

In the past 10 years as you've been studying this, how have your views shifted on this, if at all? I mean, not even just from the beginning, but as you were researching through this, either scientifically or biblically, what are some ways that your views adapted or even the interactions with other scholars? Yeah. I've never been a young earther. It seemed to me that the days in Genesis chapter one were not intended to be literal, consecutive 24-hour days. And I think there are many indications in the text itself that that's not what was intended. Similarly, I've always thought that the creation of Eve was figurative in nature. I didn't think that God literally put Adam to sleep like under a general anesthetic and then did surgery on him and extracted a rib and built a sort of woman out of it, you know, like Frankenstein.

It always seemed to me that this was a figurative story. But what I lacked, Sean, was a rationale for taking them figuratively in this way. I did not have an appreciation of the literary genre of Genesis 1 to 11 as mythohistory that now made this non-literal interpretation so plausible. And once you have this sort of paradigm shift in reading these narratives, you almost wonder how could I have ever read these in any other way with this sort of wooden literalism? Obviously that's not what is intended here. So that was a major change for me. And I owe this to Bill Arnold, the Old Testament scholar at Asbury Seminary, whom I first heard at this conference on creation in Trinity,

where he advocated this mytho-historical view and described Torquil Jacobson's work on these ancient narratives. And that was like blinkers falling from my eyes. The other major change for me was I had no deep appreciation of the paleoanthropological evidence for ancient man. And one of the most interesting and fascinating aspects of this study was the realization that modern cognitive behavior was exhibited by Neanderthals. And they interbred with Homo sapiens. And therefore, I think they were fully human.

And that pushes the origin of the human race, pushes Adam and Eve way back into the primordial past, prior to the divergence of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. And so in the book, I tentatively identify Adam and Eve with the last or most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and this is called Heidelberg man or Homo heidelbergensis, who had a cognitive capacity comparable to a modern man and I think was in that sense a cognitively modern human being. In Josh's book, as I recall it, he says, I'm not committing myself to this model. This is a plausible kind of intellectual exercise,

whether modern understandings of evolution rule out the historical atom in a biblically and theologically possible model. So in terms of debate, as you know better than anybody, it's like, let's set the bar as low as we need to to accomplish what we want to, he kind of sets it up. As I recall, in the quest of the historical Adam, you kind of do a similar thing. You're kind of saying, here's a philosophical or apologetic exercise to see if this genre fits with modern day understandings of evolution, as I recall. It sounds like you're talking here, like you believe in this evolutionary model and kind of modern science and the historical atom. Is that a shift or are you just saying, according to my model and not really willing,

willing might not be the right word, not desiring for whatever reason to land specifically on your views on kind of modern day evolution? What I'm saying is that the model that I've suggested is very plausible. It's not just possible. This is really a plausible account. I think that the account of the literary genre of Genesis 1 to 11, I mean, I hate to use the word undeniable, but it's just so compelling. And then in terms of the physical evidence for the antiquity of man, again, we have these archaeological artifacts that are dated to hundreds of thousands of years ago. These aren't fictional. These really lived, or these people really lived and really made these artifacts. So I find it to be very plausible, but I want to give a correction here, Sean. Our listeners misunderstand. In saying that Neanderthals

and Denisovans and Homo sapiens are all human beings, that is just positing development within the human genus. It doesn't say anything about where Homo came from. So this is not committed to saying that humans share common ancestry with chimpanzees or gorillas or other great apes. It says nothing about that. I don't talk about that in the book. I am just trying to locate historically when, plausibly, Adam and Eve lived. They were the original human beings on this planet from whom everyone else has descended. And I think they probably lived around 750,000 years ago. But where they came from, that's an open question. It's not discussed in the book.

That's really really really helpful so unnecessary so necessarily it's an old earth that's for sure place it back 750 000 years roughly but where they came from whether it was a god-guided evolution uh some other form evolution or special creation that is secondary to your model and doesn't matter in the sense of what you're trying to do directly. Is that fair? I mean, it's worse than secondary. It's just not part of it. Got it. It's just a question that isn't addressed. It doesn't arise. So the model just doesn't speak to that question of the origin of where Adam and Eve came from.

That's a really helpful distinction. Thank you for clarifying that. Oh, and I might add, could I just add, this is not some sort of radical position on my part. As you may have noticed, the young earth creationist, Marcus Ross, in the Four Views book, he also agrees with me that Neanderthals and Denisovans are human beings, and he identifies Noah with Homo erectus. I couldn't believe it that he thinksah was a member of the species homo erectus and he's a young earther so young earth creationists are very sympathetic to the full humanity of these primitive um and by primitive i don't mean stupid or simple i mean early these early hominins like neanderthals

and deniso vans i think the hard part is like the Geico commercials where they have the Neanderthal and like the popular description is just so loaded in our minds that you're not- I know, I have no patience for that. When Joe Biden compared Republicans to Neanderthals, I thought, what an insult to the Neanderthals. And he's using them as this paradigm of stupidity and ignorance, which is completely unjustified scientifically. That's helpful. So one more question for you. When I see a book like this, Four Views, kind of my take is, all right, outside the view that denies the historical atom that i'll take issues with i go genealogical atom you know mytho historical view young earth creationists

more power to us to have more room within the family of god so to speak to differ over these issues i hope they all can make their case and if they they can, there's more options within the fold. Do you view it that way? Or do you view it a little bit differently, maybe a little bit more critically, if I understand? No, I don't disagree with that attitude. I think having a plurality of models is very good. And I would say that that is the case as well for the Trinity, for the two natures of Christ, I think it's helpful to have various models on the table to explain the biblical data, and then people can decide for themselves which

model does the best job of accounting for the biblical data, and in this case, the scientific data as well. That's awesome. I actually contributed to the the BNH perspectives on apologetics methodology coming out next year so this is the first physical one I've seen of the way it's laid out uh so excited about that when is your book on the Trinity on the different perspectives come out and is it within the same publisher like BNH It is not the same publisher. Oh boy, I'm embarrassed now. It's not my book. It's Chad McIntosh's book. I'm just a contributor, but I think it's with Rutledge. But that should be out within a couple of months. It's supposed to be out this year. It's a four views book on the Trinity that includes someone, again, who denies the Trinity, a Unitarian, and then me and then William Hasker and then Bo Branson, who is an Eastern Orthodox thinker. And so you have these four different perspectives on the Trinity.

Well, that's super interesting. Can't wait to get that. Hopefully you'll come back and discuss that with us. We want to spread the word, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book, Bill. It's called Perspectives on the Historical Atom. It's a great place for people to start and goes in a far more depth. If you're thinking, why didn't I push back on this issue or that issue? Get the book. There's plenty of issues biblically and scientifically that you guys respectfully discuss, but really get to the heart of the issue and clarify what's at stake. So I think it's a great contribution and kind of a sign of how far we've come in discussions about this over the past 10 years. So I think skeptics and believers should get it and read with an open mind.

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