Adam and the Point of It All: The Theology of Evolution
Did you know that Adam and Eve didn’t eat the apple? They ate a quince.
Or it could have been a fig. Or a pomegranate. The text doesn’t specify what type of fruit it is. The apple, however, is the archetypal fruit in English and has the benefit of being punny in Latin, and that is likely why Western Christianity today imagines Eve biting into the red fruit of the apple tree rather than picking a pomegranate when committing humanity’s first sin.
Answering the question of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the second creation story in Genesis is not simply a pedantic exercise in biblical languages-- it holds up a mirror for how we understand scripture and highlights the importance of our context in our understanding of the text. Does it really matter what type of fruit Adam and Eve ate? For many, maybe most, probably not. But it might matter very much to you whether there was an actual Adam and Eve created by God’s own hands in an actual Garden of Eden, a narrative that could be challenged by evolution’s claim that humanity shares a common ancestor with other species on our planet.
While Darwin himself declined to publish any religious conclusions about his theory of natural selection and many Christians advocated for his theory when it was published, we all know that many important and contentious questions for Christianity have been raised since On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Today, we want to tackle evolution from the side of Christian theology. We’ll look at the history of how we’ve understood the second creation story and dig into the question of randomness as raised by evolution before offering some concluding thoughts. Our hope, as always, is to offer conversation starters rather than any definitive answer, so settle in and keep your own questions at the ready!
Genesis and Genre
As we’ve talked about before, much work has been done in trying to understand how we should understand the Bible. One way of studying scripture is to look at its genre, which changes the expectations we bring to the text. The psalms are songs and we don’t expect the same historical rigor from them as we would from, say, Chronicles. The New Testament epistles by and large follow the typical structure of letters of the time, an analysis of which can give us insight to the ancient world and the early church. Even within individual books, there are sections that are more hymnic than others, like the canticles we find at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke.
The genre of Genesis, as you might expect, is debated. Is it mythology? It does certainly have mythic elements, including creation stories, interactions between the divine and heroes, and epic events. Genesis tells us where humans came from and how they relate to God, a common theme in myths. Despite the connotation that the word “myth” carries for us today, saying that something is a myth does not mean that it’s entirely untrue. Take George Washington and the cherry tree, for example: while the story itself is likely not historical fact, George Washington was a real person who integrity is generally attested to.
So could Genesis be mythologized history, then? Is there a narrative behind the narrative that we should be searching for, a historical truth that could be found in the text once the layers of allegory and myth are removed? If so, we may be too far removed from it to find it. Because of this difficulty, scholars are instead draw insights from Genesis as an allegory about Israel’s history [1] or the Jerusalem Temple [2], from characters that act as paradigms (think of Abraham’s faithfulness, for example) and stories that act as etiologies, explaining why things are the way they are (think of the punishment for the snake in the garden).
Myth and allegory aside, however, there could also still be some evidence of ancient scientific thinking preserved in the text. In Genesis 1, God invites the sea and earth to participate in creation: the sea brings forth swarms of living creatures and the earth brings forth the cattle and crawling and wild things that live on the ground. In Genesis 3, Adam is told that he is dust and to dust he shall return. It is possible to see in these texts the fruit of observation and extrapolation: life comes from the earth and the sea and returns to the same; surely it has been like this since the beginning. In these layers of interpretation, one begins to realize the complexity in determining how the Genesis text is “meant” to be read.
Tradition and the Fall
The history of church tradition, though, from the world of the New Testament through the Patristic Period to the medieval period, understood Genesis non-literally. It is only with the Protestant Reformation (which, we should remember, involved a rejection of most of church tradition and came out of the same cultural milieu that produced the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) that the more literal interpretation of scripture that can be found among some Christians today emerges. [3]
One might think of Paul when thinking of how the New Testament understood what was its scripture, the Hebrew Bible: Paul uses Abraham as an example of faith and Adam as a symbol for the way in which evil entered into the world that God created good. Origen, a church father whose allegorical reading of scripture influenced the church for centuries to come, wrote that “if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.” [4] Even Augustine, whose theology would prove to be the basis for western Christianity, marvels at what “kind of days” the days of creation must have been, in order to create the wonders of the world. [5]
Still, though, Christian theology has logical reasons to insist on a certain historicity to the Genesis story. The Biblical genealogies and references to Adam certainly seem to assume the reality of such a figure. The world that God created good (which is to believed even if only allegorical interpretations are assumed) no longer contains only good things. We live in a world that contains suffering and death, both of which are surely not good things. It would seem that this change must have occurred some time in actual history, which leads to the idea of the first sin committed by the first humans known as the Fall. The Fall is what the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in Genesis 3 is meant to describe. For the writers of Genesis, the original sin was coveting the knowledge of God against God’s command.
Though the church throughout the centuries has affirmed some idea of the Fall, modern science and religion thinkers have often sought ways to soften the idea because according to evolution, humans wouldn’t exist in the first place if not for death, predation, and the process of natural selection. Death, in the light of evolution, is more of a cause than an effect. For some, like John Polkinghorne, an answer lies in understanding Adam as the first being with spiritual depth and awareness, the first being capable of sin and thus the first to commit it. [6] Therefore, the death that befalls Adam and Eve is a spiritual one. This perspective is a popular one but is met with protestation by others who argue that this compromise commits injustices both to the Biblical text and biology.
As theology develops and seeks to provide ways of understanding our current human condition that will reach the world today, it seems likely that this discussion over allegorical interpretations of scripture and the necessity of a historical Adam will continue, with the added complication of evolutionary biology. There is, however, another theological flag raised by evolutionary biology: the question of teleology.
Randomness or Direction?
Telos is a Greek word meaning “end” or “purpose,” so teleology could be said to be the field that (finally) answers the question, “What’s the point of all of this?” Teleology has a rich tradition in Christian theology, which insists on a final redemption of the world in which every valley is exalted and every mountain made low and God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes, in which our telos is to joyfully return to God. With the advent of evolution and the observation of nature as red in tooth and claw, however, thinkers have had a serious reason to question whether a good and loving God is truly in control.
New Atheists like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins famously argues that the only designer “in nature is the blind forces of physics… Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.” [7] What’s more, evolution runs on random genetic mutations, randomness here meaning that there is no statistical order or predictability to them. If someone is selecting these genetic mutations, they are doing it in a way that matches the outcome of when a human rolls a die or flip a coin--it is statistically random.
But as we’ve discussed previously, “randomness” does not necessarily mean “purposeless.” A debate rages between thinkers like Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris over teleology of evolution, the first arguing that if we “[w]ind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay,” [8] the latter arguing from the same evidence that one may “Rerun the tape of life as often as you like, and the end result will be much the same”. [9] Either way, the point is that purpose may be wrought even from random processes. As Arthur Peacocke observes, "It is gradually being realized that, far from the epic of evolution being a threat to Christian theology, it is in fact a stimulus to and a basis for a more encompassing and enriched understanding of the interrelations of God, humanity, and nature" [10] Randomness challenges certain understandings of God’s sovereignty, but in a way that perhaps answers important questions regarding free will and the persistence of evil. Perhaps God does not will genetic diseases for individuals or spare the afflicted from their suffering, but it is no less true that all things may work together for good for those who love God.
Some Final Thoughts
The scientific evidence for evolution is not something to be taken lightly. Nor is the authority of Scripture. These pillars of faith and reason raise important theological questions that one must not be too hasty to defend or attack. Whether you believe in evolutionism, creationism, or any of the variances in between, you will be taking a theological position that comes with it’s own strengths and weaknesses. No belief held by humans is free from imperfection. As always, approach the issues with humility and think about your context and the biases that come along with it: Would you still trust God if God allowed some randomness to exist in the world, in your life? Are you inclined to believe in a God that grants freedom to humans, no matter the cost, because of your own commitment to freedom? Do you think there’s a need for a historical fall; do you believe that most humans are really good at heart? Do you find wisdom from thinkers from the past or do you prefer to draw your own conclusions from the data as it’s presented to you?
Evolution raises all these questions and more, but so does any work in theology. Though the questions have been given a new context in light of evolutionary biology, we are still left as we have always been to grapple with our hopes and beliefs about where we come from and who we are meant to be.
[1] Enns, The Evolution of Adam (2012).
[2] John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009); Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (2010); Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation (2010)
[3] Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (1998).
[4] Origen, De Principiis, 4.16.
[5] Augustine, City of God, 11.6.
[6] John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, Questions of Truth: Fifty-One Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief (2009), p. 67.
[7] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), p.5.
[8] Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life, p.14.
[9] Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, p. 282.
[10] Arthur Peacocke, “Biology and a Theology of Evolution.” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 34, no. 4 (December 1999): 706.
