Adam, the Fall, and Death

Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people, the central myth of Christianity is destroyed.  If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin.  If there never was an original sin, there is no need of salvation.  And if there is no need of salvation, there is no need of a savior.  And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed.¹

Paul treats Adam as a historical human being, humanity's first parent, and contrasts him with the historical Jesus Christ.²

I think the evangelicals have got it right, in that there really is a deep incompatibility between evolution and Christianity.³

Summary

1. The Old Testament names Adam as a man at the head of a line. Genesis 2-5 moves from ha-adam ("the man") to Adam as a personal name, gives him a wife, three named sons, "other sons and daughters," and a death at 930 (Gen 4:25, 5:1-5). 1 Chronicles opens its genealogy of Israel with the bare word "Adam" (1 Chr 1:1). Hosea 6:7 is the one disputed text: "like Adam" (ESV) or "at Adam," a town on the Jordan (NET, Wolff), and the article does not lean on it.⁴⁵
2. Jesus and every New Testament writer who mentions Adam treat him as the first man. Jesus dates the making of "male and female" to "the beginning of creation" (Mark 10:6, Matt 19:4). Luke's genealogy ends "the son of Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). Paul says "From one man he made every nation of the human race" (Acts 17:26), that "Adam was formed first and then Eve" (1 Tim 2:13), and that "the serpent deceived Eve" (2 Cor 11:3). Jude counts Enoch "the seventh in descent beginning with Adam" (Jude 14). None of these passages argues for Adam; each assumes him.⁴
3. Paul's argument in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 needs a man, not a metaphor. Paul sets "one man" against "one man" (Rom 5:12, 15, 17, 19), "a man" against "a man" (1 Cor 15:21), and calls Adam "the first man" (1 Cor 15:45). Joseph Fitzmyer, the Jesuit author of the Anchor Bible commentary, who thinks Genesis itself uses Adam as a symbol, concludes that the symbolic reading "does violence to the contrast that Paul uses," so "Paul has historicized the symbolic Adam of Genesis."² Peter Enns, who rejects a historical Adam, grants that "Paul, however, presents Adam as the first human and responsible for the problem of universal sin and death."⁶
4. The one serious counter-reading is James Dunn's, and it is a claim about what Paul needed, not about what Paul believed. Dunn writes that "it would not be true to say that Paul's theological point here depends on Adam being a 'historical' individual," because "an act in mythic history can be paralleled to an act in living history without the point of comparison being lost."⁷ The reply is that Paul's point is not a comparison but a causal chain: sin entered, death spread, "the many died through the transgression of the one man" (Rom 5:15). A myth cannot kill anyone.
5. The modern positions can each be stated fairly, and each has a price. Enns: Adam is "proto-Israel," and "attributing the cause of universal sin and death to a historical Adam is not necessary for the gospel"; the price, in his words, is "leaving behind Paul's understanding of the cause of the universal plight of sin and death."⁶⁶ Walton: Adam and Eve are "real people in a real past," but the forming accounts are archetypal, so Genesis 2 "does not, however, make definitive claims about the material origins of either Adam or Eve."⁸⁸ Collins: "mere historical Adam-and-Eve-ism," a minimum that leaves the date and the material open.⁹ Venema and McKnight: the population "has not dipped below several thousand individuals for the last 3 million years," a claim Richard Buggs showed had never been tested and Venema walked back.¹⁰¹¹ Swamidass: a couple created without parents about 6,000 years ago, in a world where God "created everyone outside the Garden through a providentially governed process of common descent."¹² Craig: Genesis 1-11 is "mytho-history," and Adam is a Homo heidelbergensis "living more than 750,000 years ago."¹³
6. Cain's wife was his sister, and the Bible says so in the plainest way it can. Adam "had other sons and daughters" (Gen 5:4). Eve is "the mother of all the living" (Gen 3:20). Jubilees names her Awan; Josephus counts Adam's daughters; Augustine says brothers "took their sisters for wives -- an act which was as certainly dictated by necessity in these ancient days as afterwards it was condemned."¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶ The prohibition (Lev 18:9) is Mosaic law; Abraham married his half-sister (Gen 20:12) and Moses's father married his aunt (Exod 6:20) before it existed.
7. The genetic objection to sibling marriage fails on the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is shown. Gao and colleagues measured 0.29 recessive lethal alleles per haploid human genome (95% interval 0.10 to 0.84) from a Hutterite pedigree.¹⁷ For a brother-sister marriage, F = 1/4, so the expected number of lethal homozygous loci per child is 0.25 x 0.29 = 0.07, and the excess child mortality is 7% (2.5% to 19%). Counting all lethal equivalents, 1.5 to 2.5 per gamete, gives 31% to 47%. Those are the costs today. A freshly created pair carries no inherited load; its children carry only their own new mutations, of which recessive lethals are of order one in a thousand per gamete, and the first-generation cost rounds to zero.¹⁸ The weak point is that a created genome without load is an assumption the model supplies, not a measurement.
8. Cain's fear and Cain's city are not problems. Cain kills Abel before Seth is born, and Seth is born when Adam is 130 (Gen 4:25, 5:3). Adam's other children and grandchildren in a century of high fertility are the people Cain fears. The Hebrew ir (עִיר) that Cain builds (Gen 4:17) is any walled settlement; Josephus calls it a city "fortified with walls."¹⁵
9. The curse changed the ground, birth, and death. It did not change physics. Genesis 3:14-19 names four things: the serpent, the woman's pain, the ground with its thorns, and the man's return to dust. Romans 8:20-22 says the creation "was subjected to futility." C. E. B. Cranfield reads ktisis as "the sum-total of sub-human nature" and the subjection as "the judgment related in Gen 3.17-19"; Dunn agrees that "the primary allusion is to the Adam narratives."¹⁹¹⁹⁷ Hugh Ross reads the same verses as decay "since its beginning" and cites Origen.²⁰ The claim that the second law of thermodynamics began at the Fall is on the do-not-use lists of both Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International, in their own words.²¹²²
10. Fossil thorns are the cost of the reading, and the young-earth side says so. Creation Ministries International's own article grants that "spiny plant fossils from Devonian strata (360-410 million years)" sit far below the first human fossils in the column, and answers that they were buried in the Flood.²³ Every fossil thorn is therefore post-Fall on this reading. The same commitment governs animal death, which is treated in the child article Death Before the Fall.
11. What hangs on Adam is what Paul hangs on him. Frank Zindler's chain, quoted above, is the same chain Paul builds in Romans 5 read backwards, and Robert Ingersoll drew it in 1884: "the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity."²⁴ Pius XII wrote in 1950 that "the faithful cannot embrace that opinion" that Adam "represents a certain number of first parents."²⁵ Enns himself distinguishes "original sin," which "requires a historical Adam," from a "sin of origin" that does not.⁶ The choice is which of those Paul taught.

Verdict:  The New Testament treats Adam as a person and Paul's argument needs him.  Archetypal, genealogical, and mytho-historical readings can be stated fairly;  the first two keep a real Adam at a price in what Genesis 2 asserts, and Enns's and Craig's readings give up either Paul's Adam or Genesis's chronology.  The genetic objection to Cain's wife is arithmetic and it fails.  The curse is a curse on ground, birth, and death;  the movement's own organisations have retired the claim that it rewrote physics.  Whether animal death is included is the child article's question.

The Old Testament names Adam as a man at the head of a line

The Hebrew word adam (אָדָם) means "human," and Genesis 1-5 uses it three ways.  With the definite article, ha-adam, it is "the man" (Gen 2:7, 3:8).  Without an article and paired with "male and female," it is humankind (Gen 1:26-27, 5:1-2).  Without an article and followed by a wife, a son and an age, it is a name (Gen 4:25, 5:3-5).  John Walton, who reads the forming account as archetypal, tabulates the same three uses and says only the last one "would be tied to the individual as an individual, historical person."⁸

The last use is not rare.  Genesis 4:25 says "Adam was intimate with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son."  Genesis 5:3-5 gives his age at Seth's birth (130), his remaining years (800), his "other sons and daughters," his total (930), and his death.⁴  Numbers with a death notice are the genre of a king list, not a parable.  The same chapter runs the identical formula for nine more men down to Noah.  Nothing in the text marks Adam off from Seth or Enosh as a different kind of entity.

1 Chronicles 1:1 opens the Chronicler's nine-chapter genealogy of Israel with three bare words:  "Adam, Seth, Enosh."⁴  The list runs without a break through Noah, Abraham, Jacob and David.  The Chronicler, writing about 400 BC, is counting Adam as the first ancestor of the tribes he is about to enumerate.  Walton makes the point that ancient Near Eastern genealogies, whatever their political purpose, do not insert imaginary people:  "genealogies from the ancient world contain the names of real people who inhabited a real past.  Consequently there would be no precedent for thinking of the biblical genealogies differently.  By putting Adam in ancestor lists, the authors of Scripture are treating him as a historical person."⁸

Hosea 6:7 is disputed and the article does not lean on it

The one prophetic reference is Hosea 6:7, which the ESV renders "But like Adam they transgressed the covenant" and the NET renders "At Adam they broke the covenant."²⁶⁴  The Hebrew ke-adam can mean "like Adam," "like a man," or, if the preposition has been miscopied for be-, "at Adam."  Adam was also a town on the Jordan (Josh 3:16).  Hans Walter Wolff, in the Hermeneia commentary, translates "in Adam" and argues that the place-name "is made necessary by the following word sham" ("there"), which needs a location to refer to;  he judges "as Adam" or "as a man" to be "unsatisfactory," and he pairs it with "Gilead" (v. 8) and "Shechem" (v. 9), two other place-names in the same oracle.⁵⁵  That is a strong argument.  Job 31:33 ("if I have covered my transgressions as men do," literally "like Adam") has the same ambiguity.  Neither verse adds anything a young-earth reader needs, and a case that rests on them is weaker than one that does not.

Jesus and the New Testament writers treat Adam as the first man

Every New Testament reference to Adam assumes him.  None argues for him.  That is what one expects if his existence was not in question for the writer or the audience.

Asked about divorce, Jesus answers from Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 together:  "from the beginning of creation he made them male and female.  For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and the two will become one flesh" (Mark 10:6-8;  Matt 19:4-6 has "from the beginning the Creator made them").⁴  Jesus puts the first marriage at "the beginning of creation," not at the end of a long process, and he treats the two texts as one account of one event.  The Age of Earth in Church History article carries the argument over what "beginning of creation" implies for the age of the earth;  this article needs only that Jesus locates a first couple there.

Luke's genealogy of Jesus runs backwards seventy-seven names to "the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38).⁴  Luke does not change register between David and Adam.  Adam is one name in a chain whose other names are men.  The Old Testament Text and Chronology article handles the Cainan of Luke 3:36 and what the manuscripts show;  the point here is that Luke's chain has a first link.

Paul at Athens tells Greek philosophers that "From one man he made every nation of the human race to inhabit the entire earth" (Acts 17:26;  ESV "he made from one man every nation of mankind";  some manuscripts read "from one blood").⁴²⁶  The audience was pagan, so the appeal is not to Jewish scripture but to a claim about human origins Paul expected to stand on its own.  Writing to Timothy, Paul grounds a church order in sequence and event:  "For Adam was formed first and then Eve.  And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, because she was fully deceived, fell into transgression" (1 Tim 2:13-14).⁴  To the Corinthians he writes, "the serpent deceived Eve by his treachery" (2 Cor 11:3).  Jude quotes Enoch as "the seventh in descent beginning with Adam" (Jude 14), which is a count, and counts run over individuals.

A reader who holds that Paul, Luke and Jude were wrong about Adam can hold that consistently.  A reader who holds that they did not believe in him cannot.

Paul's argument in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 needs a man

The two passages on which everything rests are Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49.  Here is the first in the NET translation:

So then, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because all sinned -- for before the law was given, sin was in the world, but there is no accounting for sin when there is no law.  Yet death reigned from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam (who is a type of the coming one) transgressed.  But the gracious gift is not like the transgression.  For if the many died through the transgression of the one man, how much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ multiply to the many! (Rom 5:12-15)⁴

The Greek of verse 12 is di' henos anthrōpou hē hamartia eis ton kosmon eisēlthen kai dia tēs hamartias ho thanatos (δι' ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτία εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθεν καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θάνατος), "through one man sin came into the world, and through sin death."²⁷  The phrase "one man," heis anthrōpos, is used of Adam in verses 12, 15, 17 and 19, and of Christ in verses 15, 17 and 19.  Fitzmyer notes that Paul uses the same phrase of Jesus "thus emphasizing his humanity and what he did as an individual human being in the course of his earthly life."²  The symmetry is the argument.

Paul's second passage is shorter and sharper.  "For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also came through a man.  For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Cor 15:21-22).  And then, quoting Genesis 2:7:  "'The first man, Adam, became a living person';  the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (1 Cor 15:45).⁴  The Greek is egeneto ho prōtos anthrōpos Adam eis psychēn zōsan (ἐγένετο ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος Ἀδὰμ εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν).²⁷  Paul calls Adam "the first man" in a sentence whose whole point is a numbered pair, first and last.

What the critical commentators concede

The three standard critical commentaries on Romans in English, none written by a young-earth creationist, agree on what Paul thought.

Fitzmyer, a Jesuit and one of the twentieth century's leading Catholic New Testament scholars, thinks Genesis itself uses Adam as a symbol for humanity.  He then writes:

Paul treats Adam as a historical human being, humanity's first parent, and contrasts him with the historical Jesus Christ.  But in Genesis itself 'Adam is a symbolic figure, denoting humanity.  ... Some commentators on Romans have tried to interpret Adam in this symbolic sense here (thus Barth, Romans, 170-71; Leenhardt, Romans, 141; Schlier, Römerbrief, 160); but that reading does violence to the contrast that Paul uses in this paragraph between Adam as "one man" and Christ as "one man," which implies that Adam was a historical individual as much as was Jesus Christ.  So Paul has historicized the symbolic Adam of Genesis.²

He adds that "the causality of Adam's sin expressed there is reiterated in 5:19," so that "whatever one wants to think about 5:12 and its problems," the causal claim stands in the text twice.²  Fitzmyer's own view is that Paul was wrong about Genesis;  his exegetical verdict on Paul is the one this article needs.

Cranfield, whose two-volume International Critical Commentary is the standard Protestant work, takes the "commandment of Gen 2.17" as the model Paul had in mind for the Mosaic law in Romans 7, and says "there is little doubt that, when Paul was writing these verses, the narrative of Genesis 3 was present to his mind."¹⁹

Dunn, in the Word Biblical Commentary, is the one who tries to separate what Paul believed from what Paul needed.  His sentence is worth quoting whole, because it is the strongest form of the non-historical reading:

In particular, it would not be true to say that Paul's theological point here depends on Adam being a "historical" individual or on his disobedience being a historical event as such.  Such an implication does not necessarily follow from the fact that a parallel is drawn with Christ's single act:  an act in mythic history can be paralleled to an act in living history without the point of comparison being lost.  So long as the story of Adam as the initiator of the sad tale of human failure was well known, which we may assume (the brevity of Paul's presentation presupposes such a knowledge), such a comparison was meaningful.⁷

Two things about this.  First, Dunn is not saying Paul thought Adam a myth;  he is saying the comparison would survive if Adam were one.  Second, the comparison is not all Paul does.  Verse 15 says "the many died through the transgression of the one man."  Verse 17 says "by the transgression of the one man, death reigned."  Verse 19 says "through the disobedience of the one man many were constituted sinners."  These are causes and effects, and an event in "mythic history" causes nothing in living history.  Dunn himself, six pages on, describes Paul's view as "the epochal significance of Adam's act as determining both character and end of the epoch as a whole."⁷  An act that determines an epoch has to have happened.

Enns concedes the exegesis and rejects the history

Peter Enns holds a Harvard doctorate in Old Testament and wrote The Evolution of Adam (2012) to argue that Christians should give up a historical Adam.  His book is more useful to the traditional side than most defences of it, because he refuses to pretend Paul agrees with him.  He writes that "For Paul's analogy to have any force, it seems that both Adam and Jesus must be actual historical figures."⁶  He writes that in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 "Paul seems to regard Adam as the first human being and ancestor of everyone who ever lived."⁶  And he states the cost of his own proposal without softening it:

By saying that Paul's Adam is not the historical first man, we are leaving behind Paul's understanding of the cause of the universal plight of sin and death.  But this is the burden of anyone who wishes to bring evolution and Christianity together -- the only question is how that will be done.⁶

Enns's alternative is that Adam in Genesis is "the proto-Israelite rather than the first human," a figure whose exile from the garden mirrors Israel's exile from the land, and that Paul, "as an ancient man," read Genesis in a way modern readers need not.⁶  Whether Paul can be an authority on the gospel and a mistaken ancient on its premise is the question his book leaves with the reader.

The eph' hō question does not change the verdict

The last clause of Romans 5:12, eph' hō pantes hēmarton (ἐφ' ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον), has been read since Augustine as "in whom all sinned," with "whom" as Adam, and since Erasmus as "because all sinned."²⁷  Fitzmyer records Augustine's argument that the relative pronoun "cannot refer to 'death,' which in Greek would be masculine, but has to refer to Adam."²  Modern translations, including the ESV and NET quoted above, read "because."  The dispute is over how Adam's sin reaches his descendants, whether by imputation, by inheritance, or by each person's own sinning in a world Adam broke.  It is not over whether Paul thought Adam started it.  Fitzmyer's verdict on the whole passage is that "Paul ascribes the mortal condition to a dual causality, to Adam and to the sins of individual human beings."²  Both causes are real on his reading, and the first is a man.

The modern positions, each stated fairly, each with its price

Since about 2010 the historical Adam has been the main front in the evangelical argument over evolution.  Six positions cover the field.  The table states what each needs the text to say and what each gives up.  The genetics of a first pair is handled in Population Bottlenecks under "The Adam and Eve bottleneck debate" and is not redone here.

Collins: the minimum the tradition needs

C. John Collins, professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, wrote Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? (2011) to define the smallest historical claim that keeps the biblical storyline intact.  He names it "mere historical Adam-and-Eve-ism" after C. S. Lewis, and says outright what he is not deciding:  "I am not entering here into distinctions between various Christian positions on such topics as:  the origin of the material for Adam's body, or how long ago he lived; the meaning of 'the image of God'; how the sin of Adam and Eve comes to affect us."⁹  His four criteria are that humankind has a common origin, that the origin was recent enough for the story to be one story, that there was a real Fall by real people, and that the Fall was at the headwaters of the race.  The young-earth reading meets all four;  so do Walton's and Swamidass's;  Enns's does not.  Collins is the useful test because he is an old-earth scholar who has drawn the line where Paul draws it.

Walton: real people, archetypal forming

John Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton, is often cited as having dissolved the historical Adam.  He has not, and he says so.  Proposition 11 of The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015) is titled "Though Some of the Biblical Interest in Adam and Eve Is Archetypal, They Are Real People Who Existed in a Real Past," and he writes, "I am quite prepared to affirm the idea that Adam is an individual -- a real person in a real past."⁸⁸  What he denies is that Genesis 2:7 describes how that individual was made:  "The core proposal of this book is that the forming accounts of Adam and Eve should be understood archetypally rather than as accounts of how those two individuals were uniquely formed."⁸  Being formed from dust, on his reading, "is a statement about our essence and identity, not our substance."⁸

The cost is stated in his own words:  the archetypal reading "does not, however, make definitive claims about the material origins of either Adam or Eve," so that "if scientific evidence suggests that human beings were not created de novo, we could not necessarily claim that the Bible contested that evidence."⁸  A reader has to decide whether Genesis 2:7, 2:21-22 and 3:19 ("for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you will return") read as statements about identity or about origin.  Genesis 3:19 ties the dust to the death sentence, which is an event, not an essence.  Walton's honesty about what he keeps is the reason his position belongs in the fair column;  his reading of the dust is the reason this site does not adopt it.

Venema and McKnight, Buggs, and the claim that went untested

Adam and the Genome (2017) paired Dennis Venema, a geneticist at Trinity Western University, with Scot McKnight, a New Testament scholar.  Venema's chapters argued that genetics rules out a first pair.  In the book's words, as quoted by Joshua Swamidass in his 2022 review:  "All methods employed to date agree that the human lineage has not dipped below several thousand individuals for the last 3 million years or more -- long before our lineage was even remotely called 'human.'"¹⁰  Richard Buggs, an evolutionary geneticist at Queen Mary University of London and Kew, asked in 2017 whether that had been tested.  Chapter 3, he wrote, "claims that three population genetic studies give independent estimates that the population size of humans has never dropped below around 10,000 individuals.  Venema declares that a bottleneck of two is impossible, and this is a fact of comparable scientific certainty to heliocentrism."²⁸  After a forum exchange of more than 160 posts, Buggs reported in Nature Ecology and Evolution's community pages in 2018 that these contributions "have confirmed that the extreme human bottleneck hypothesis has not been rigorously tested in the modern genomic literature, unless we have all missed something," and that the methods actually applied allowed a bottleneck of two if it was older than about 500,000 years.¹¹¹¹  Swamidass records that Venema's first reply "began with a walk-back, stating that he only meant 'human' to refer to our species, Homo sapiens."¹⁰

The dispute matters for this article in one way.  A book aimed at pastors said the science had settled the question, and the scientists who checked found it had not been asked.  Whether a bottleneck of two within the last 10,000 years survives the genetic data is a different question, and the Population Bottlenecks article gives the honest state of it.

Swamidass: a created couple in a populated world

S. Joshua Swamidass, a physician and computational biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, argued in The Genealogical Adam and Eve (2019) that the traditional account and evolutionary science can both be true at once.  He defines the traditional account first:  "most readers of Genesis thought Adam and Eve were real people who (1) lived in the Middle East, just several thousand years ago; (2) were the ancestors of everyone; and (3) were created, with no parents, by a direct act of God."¹²  His proposal keeps all three, by distinguishing genetic ancestry from genealogical ancestry.  Because family trees branch so fast, a couple in Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago would be genealogical ancestors of every person alive by the time of Christ, even though their DNA would be diluted to nothing.  He is careful that the 6,000 figure "is merely a consequence of the math" and "should not be interpreted as a specific endorsement of dating Adam and Eve at this time."¹²

The cost is the people outside the garden.  "In this book, I hypothesize that God created everyone outside the Garden through a providentially governed process of common descent, a process legitimately described by evolutionary science. ... The DNA of our ancestors, their genetics, would still arise from a population, not a single couple."¹²  Genesis does not mention such people.  Swamidass reads Cain's fear (Gen 4:14) and Cain's wife as hints of them;  the traditional reading explains both without them, as the next section shows.  The proposal is coherent and it keeps Paul's "one man," but a reader who takes Genesis 3:20 ("the mother of all the living") to mean what it says will not buy it.

Craig: mytho-history and a Heidelberg Adam

William Lane Craig, the philosopher, published In Quest of the Historical Adam in 2021 and summarised it in First Things the same month.  He argues that Genesis 1-11 belongs to a genre Thorkild Jacobsen called "mytho-history," so that "the brief history they chronicle" is "not to be taken literally."¹³  He then argues from Paul that Adam must nonetheless be real, and from archaeology that the first humans with the cognitive marks of humanity were the ancestors of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals:

Given the recent archaeological findings, Adam and Eve may plausibly be identified as belonging to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, usually denominated Homo heidelbergensis or Heidelberg Man, living more than 750,000 years ago.¹³

His conclusion is that "Adam plausibly lived sometime between around 1 million years ago to 750,000 years ago."¹³  This keeps Paul and keeps the genetics.  What it costs is everything Genesis says about when.  The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 give 1,656 years from Adam to the Flood in the Masoretic text, and Craig himself cites the figure only to set it aside as "a scant 1,656 years."¹³  A Fall at 750,000 BC also puts the whole of human prehistory, including every burial, every injury and every act of violence in the hominin record, after the Fall, which is at least consistent;  but it puts Abraham 700,000 years after Adam in a book that counts the interval in generations.  The Genesis Genealogies and Gaps article shows that no reading of the numbers stretches that far.

Cain's wife was his sister, and the arithmetic says why that was not yet a problem

Clarence Darrow asked William Jennings Bryan where Cain got his wife at the Scopes trial in 1925, and Bryan said he left "the agnostics to hunt for her."²⁹  The answer was in the text he was defending.

What the text says

Genesis 5:4 says that after Seth's birth Adam lived 800 years "and during this time he had other sons and daughters."⁴  Genesis 3:20 says Eve "was the mother of all the living."  Genesis 4 records Cain, Abel and Seth by name and no one else, and Seth is born when Adam is 130 (Gen 5:3).  The narrative is silent on Cain's wife's name because the narrative is silent on the names of all the daughters.  The only candidates the text allows are a sister or a niece.

The ancient readers said so.  The book of Jubilees, written about 150 BC, names her:  "And in the fifth she gave birth to her daughter Awan," and later has Cain marry her.¹⁴  Josephus, about AD 94, writes that Adam and Eve "had also daughters," and William Whiston's note on the passage records the tradition that Adam had thirty-three sons and twenty-three daughters.¹⁵  Augustine, in City of God 15.16, states the necessity and the later prohibition in one sentence:

as there were no human beings except those who had been born of these two, men took their sisters for wives -- an act which was as certainly dictated by necessity in these ancient days as afterwards it was condemned by the prohibitions of religion.¹⁶

The prohibition is Mosaic law, and the patriarchs did not have it

Leviticus 18:9 forbids a man's sister, "whether she is your father's daughter or your mother's daughter," and Leviticus 20:17 attaches the penalty of being "cut off."⁴  Deuteronomy 27:22 puts the same curse in the covenant ceremony.  These are laws given to Israel at Sinai, and the text before Sinai shows people acting as though they did not exist.  Abraham tells Abimelech that Sarah "is indeed my sister, my father's daughter, but not my mother's daughter.  She became my wife" (Gen 20:12).  Amram "married his father's sister Jochebed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses" (Exod 6:20), a union Leviticus 18:12 later forbids.  Tamar tells Amnon that David "will not withhold me from you" (2 Sam 13:13), which some read as evidence that half-sibling marriage was still thinkable at court in the tenth century BC.  Ken Ham's chapter for Answers in Genesis puts the point in a sentence:  "This law forbidding close relatives marrying was not given until the time of Moses."²⁹

The genetic objection, with the numbers

The modern objection is not moral but genetic:  children of siblings die of recessive disease.  That is true today, and the article will not pretend otherwise.  The question is how large the effect is, and whether it applies to the first generation after a created pair.

The measured input is the number of recessive lethal alleles a person carries.  Ziyue Gao and colleagues at the University of Chicago and Columbia estimated it in 2015 from the Hutterite pedigree of South Dakota, a closed community with near-complete disease records.  Their result:  "each haploid set of human autosomes carries on average 0.29 (95% credible interval [0.10, 0.84]) recessive alleles that lead to complete sterility or death by reproductive age when homozygous."¹⁷  A person has two haploid sets, so "each Hutterite founder carried 0.58 autosomal, recessive lethal mutations."¹⁷

The arithmetic for a sibling marriage is short.  Each lethal allele in one of the two parents reaches a given child with probability 1/2.  It reaches both of two siblings with probability 1/4.  If both carry it, their child is homozygous with probability 1/4.  So each parental lethal has probability 1/16 of killing a given grandchild, and two unrelated parents together carry four haploid genomes' worth, 4 x 0.29 = 1.16 lethals.  The expected number of lethal homozygous loci in a child of a brother-sister marriage is 1.16/16 = 0.07, which is the same as F x B with F = 1/4 and B = 0.29.  Survival is exp(-0.07), and the excess mortality is 7%.  Gao and colleagues run the identical calculation for first cousins and get "0.29/16 = 1.8%," which they note "agrees well with the estimated 3.5-4.4% increased risk for prereproductive mortality" once sub-lethal effects are added.¹⁷

The first five rows are today's numbers, and they are the reason sibling marriage is a bad idea today.  The lethal-equivalent rows count sub-lethal alleles as fractions of a death, and they are the figures the Population Bottlenecks article uses;  its table gives 39% for the grandchildren of a founding pair at 4 lethal equivalents per zygote, which is the same calculation at a different value of B.  The last row is the young-earth model.  A pair created without inherited mutations passes none to its children.  Each child carries only the new mutations of one generation, about 70 across the genome, and the fraction of those that are recessive lethals is small:  Gao and colleagues' equilibrium of 0.29 per gamete is the sum of many generations of input, so the per-generation input is of order one in a thousand.  A first-generation sibling marriage under that model costs a few hundredths of a percent.  The script that reproduces every number in the table is research/sibling-lethals.ts beside this article.¹⁸

Where the argument is weak

Three things should be said against the young-earth answer, because a skeptic will say them.

First, "created without inherited load" is an assumption the model supplies.  It cannot be measured, and a critic is entitled to say that a model which explains the data by positing an unobservable starting state has explained nothing.  The reply is that every origin model posits a starting state;  the question is whether the model's consequences are checkable, and the Population Bottlenecks article says which ones are.

Second, the answer proves too little.  By the time of Moses, on this model, sibling marriage had become dangerous because 2,500 years of mutation had accumulated.  But the Leviticus prohibition is not explained by genetics in the text, and cultures with no genetics banned sibling marriage on other grounds.  The genetic-load story explains why the ban was safe to delay;  it does not explain why it came.  Ham's chapter offers "three interrelated reasons," of which genetics is one.²⁹

Third, the objection can be turned around, and Ham does turn it:  "if evolution is true, science has an even bigger problem than Cain's wife to explain -- namely, how could man ever evolve by mutations (mistakes) in the first place."²⁹  That is a different argument and belongs to Genetic Entropy, not here.  Readers should not accept a rhetorical reversal as an answer to the load question;  the answer to the load question is the table.

Cain's fear and Cain's city

Two further objections ride on the same silence.  Cain says "whoever finds me will kill me" (Gen 4:14), and after his exile he "was building a city, and he named the city after his son Enoch" (Gen 4:17).⁴  Who are the people?

The chronology answers the first.  Seth is born after Abel's death, "in place of Abel" (Gen 4:25), when Adam is 130 (Gen 5:3).  Cain kills Abel at a point the text does not date, but the sons in Genesis 4 are adults with occupations when it happens, and Adam's unnamed "other sons and daughters" and their children have had up to a century to arrive.  A population of a few hundred by the time of the murder needs no assumption beyond ordinary fertility over a hundred years.  Cain's fear is of his own kin, which is how blood-feud works.

The Hebrew answers the second.  The word is ir (עִיר), and the Old Testament uses it for any walled or fortified settlement of any size:  Bethlehem, Jericho, and a village of a few houses are all ir.  The participle "was building" means the work was in progress, not that a metropolis stood.  Josephus paraphrases with the same sense:  "he built a city, and fortified it with walls: and he compelled his family to come together to it."¹⁵  A stockade named for a firstborn son is what the verse describes.

The curse changed the ground, birth, and death. It did not change physics

Genesis 3:14-19 is the only text that says what the Fall did to the world, and it is specific.  Four things are named.  The serpent is cursed "above all the cattle" and made to crawl.  The woman's "labor pains" are "greatly increase[d]."  The ground "is cursed because of you" and "will produce thorns and thistles."  The man will work "by the sweat of your brow" and "return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you will return."⁴  Then the pair is barred from the tree of life (Gen 3:22-24).

That is the whole list.  Nothing in it touches the sun, the seasons, gravity, friction, or entropy.  A reader who wants the Fall to have rewritten the laws of nature has to bring the idea to the text.

Romans 8:20-22 and what the commentators say it means

Paul's one comment on the state of the world after the Fall is Romans 8:19-22:  "the creation was subjected to futility -- not willingly but because of God who subjected it -- in hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay ... For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now."⁴

Two questions decide what this means:  what is "the creation," and when was it subjected?

On the first, Cranfield surveys eight readings, from the whole creation including angels down to believers only, and rules out each in turn.  Believers are excluded because verse 23 contrasts them with the creation.  Mankind is excluded because "not willingly" cannot be said of Adam, "the created man par excellence."  Angels are unlikely.  He concludes:  "The only interpretation of ktisis in these verses which is really probable seems to be that which understands the reference to be to the sum-total of sub-human nature both animate and inanimate."¹⁹  Dunn reaches the same place at verse 22:  "here certainly it is nonhuman, and, as we would say, inanimate creation which is primarily in view."⁷

On the second, Cranfield is explicit:  "The aorist hypetagē refers to a particular event.  The use of the passive veils a reference to God.  There is little doubt that Paul had in mind the judgment related in Gen 3.17-19, which includes (v. 17) the words 'cursed is the ground for thy sake'."¹⁹  Dunn:  "as in chap. 1, so here, the primary allusion is to the Adam narratives," and "the implication clearly being that creation was not party to Adam's failure but was drawn into it nonetheless."⁷  Dunn's gloss on the awkward Greek of verse 20 is that Paul "was attempting to convey too briefly a quite complicated point:  that God subjected all things to Adam, and that included subjecting creation to fallen Adam, to share in his fallenness."⁷  Neither man is a creationist;  Dunn was the leading figure in the "new perspective on Paul," and both are reporting what the Greek says.

Hugh Ross, the astronomer who founded Reasons to Believe, reads the passage the other way in Creation and Time (1994):  "The creation has been subject to 'its bondage of decay' since its beginning."  He argues that "Romans 8 explicitly indicates only when the bondage to decay will end.  It says little about when it first began," and he cites Origen's On First Principles 3.5 for the view that decay has operated since the creation.²⁰²⁰  He also argues from Genesis 3:16 that because God says "increase" and not "introduce," "there would have been pain in any case."²⁰  The verb point is fair, and the young-earth reading has to grant that the text implies childbirth would have hurt before the Fall.  The Romans point is weaker, because Cranfield's aorist argument answers it:  "was subjected" names an event, and the only candidate event in Paul's Bible is Genesis 3:17.  Ross's reading requires the subjecting to be the creation itself, which makes God subject the world to futility in the same act in which he called it "very good" (Gen 1:31).

A note on the word "decay," phthora (φθορά).  Dunn writes that it is "understandably" chosen "since an inescapable feature of the natural order is decay," and warns that "phthora should certainly not be taken in the sense of moral corruption."⁷  This is the word from which the thermodynamic argument grew.  The next subsection is about why the movement has abandoned that argument.

The second law of thermodynamics did not begin at the Fall, and both organisations say so

For decades some creationist speakers taught that entropy, the "running down" of the universe, was a consequence of the curse.  The two largest young-earth organisations have both put that claim on their published lists of arguments not to use.  Answers in Genesis's index page states the reason in one line:  "We most often equate entropy with decay and thus associate this idea with the 'running down of the universe.'  However, some aspects of entropy are important for maintaining life, and these aspects are not 'bad.'"³⁰  The full article, by Tommy Mitchell, gives the examples:

We could not digest our food without the second law being in operation. ... If Adam walked up or down a hill, he could not maintain his footing without a degree of friction between his feet and the ground.  Friction is a process that converts kinetic energy into heat, another example of entropy.  Other examples would include the process of breathing (air moving from high pressure to low pressure) and the heating of the earth by the sun (a process that began on Day Four of Creation Week, obviously before the Fall). ... So entropy was in effect in the original perfect creation.²¹

Mitchell's conclusion:  "So the argument that the second law of thermodynamics began at the Fall is one that we believe Christians should not use."²¹

Creation Ministries International's list, first published in 2006, lists "The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall" and answers with the same physics:  "friction, which turns ordered mechanical energy into disordered heat -- otherwise Adam and Eve would have slipped as they walked with God in Eden!"  It adds that "all beneficial processes in the world, including the development from embryo to adult, increase the overall disorder of the universe, showing that the Second Law is not inherently a curse."²²  Both organisations keep a weaker claim:  that God "withdrew some of His sustaining power" at the Fall, so that decay was no longer countered.²²²¹  That is a theological claim, not a physical one, and it makes no prediction that physics could test.

Thorns in the fossil record are the cost, and the young-earth side pays it openly

Genesis 3:18 says the cursed ground "will produce thorns and thistles for you."  If thorns are a result of the Fall, then no thorn was buried before Adam sinned.  The fossil record has spiny plants in Devonian strata, which on the standard timescale are about 400 million years old and lie far below the first hominin fossils.  David Catchpoole's article for Creation Ministries International states the problem exactly as a critic would:  "By evolutionary reckoning, spiny plant fossils from Devonian strata (360-410 million years) were laid down way before the 'age of dinosaurs' (65-230 million years ago), and, in turn, way before the first humans appeared.  According to the Bible, however, these Devonian spiny plants cannot have been buried and fossilized until after Adam sinned."²³  His answer is that the strata are Flood deposits, so every fossil thorn is post-Fall and most are Flood-year.

This is the honest shape of the young-earth commitment.  The reading is not that thorns did not exist before the Fall as a botanical fact one could check;  it is that the entire column from the Devonian up was laid down after Adam.  That claim is tested in Fossil Order and the Flood, not here.  A critic should notice that an old-earth Christian has the same verse and a harder problem:  thorns 400 million years before a curse that introduced them.  Ross's answer is that the curse changed Adam's relation to thorns, not the thorns.  Both sides are reading "will produce thorns" as something other than a first appearance of thorns, and neither should pretend the verse is plain.

Animal death is the child article's question

The largest thing that may hang on the Fall is animal death, and it has its own article:  Death Before the Fall.  The shape of the problem is this.  Romans 5:12 says death came "to all people" (eis pantas anthrōpous), which is human death.  Genesis 1:29-30 gives plants as food to "all the animals of the earth," and Genesis 9:3 first permits meat to Noah.  Romans 8:20-22 puts the whole "sub-human nature" under bondage from the Fall, on Cranfield's and Dunn's reading.  Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25 picture a future with no predation.  The texts most naturally tie animal death to the Fall and do not state it.  The cost of tying it is that every fossil predator, tumour and venom is post-Fall, which is the same cost as the thorns, at larger scale.  Creation Ministries International's list, quoted above, states its own position without hedging:  "Death and suffering of nephesh animals before sin are contrary to the Biblical framework."²²  The child article tests that against the texts and the fossils.

What hangs on Adam

Frank Zindler, introduced at the debate as "a former professor of geology and biology" and an atheist spokesman, gave the chain in the epigraph in a debate with William Lane Craig at Willow Creek Community Church on 3 September 1993:  no Adam, no original sin;  no original sin, no need of salvation;  no salvation, no saviour;  therefore "Jesus, historical or otherwise," is "in the ranks of the unemployed."¹  Robert Ingersoll had drawn it in an 1884 lecture titled "Orthodoxy":  Darwin "shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; that the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity; that the serpent did not tempt, and that man did not 'fall.'  Charles Darwin destroyed the foundation of orthodox Christianity."²⁴  Richard Dawkins, asked on Revelation TV in 2011 what made him an atheist, said, "by far the most important, I suppose, was understanding evolution," and that "the evangelical Christians have really sort of got it right in a way in seeing evolution as the enemy," because "there really is a deep incompatibility between evolution and Christianity."³

These men are hostile witnesses, and they are describing the argument of Romans 5 run in reverse.  Paul's chain runs forward:  one man sinned, death spread to all, the one man Jesus Christ undid it for the many.  Zindler's runs backward:  remove the first link and the last falls.  Whether the last link falls is the point of the modern debate.

The chain in the churches' own words

The Catholic Church stated the dependence formally in 1950.  Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis allowed research into "the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter" and then closed the door on polygenism:

the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.  Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.²⁵

The reason given is the same as Zindler's:  original sin "proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam."  Fitzmyer, a Jesuit, records that Paul "makes no mention of sin's hereditary character (as Augustine later did)," and that "'Original Sin' is a Christian idea, which builds on what Paul teaches in this paragraph."²  The doctrine's shape is Augustine's;  its premise, that one man's act made "the many" sinners (Rom 5:19), is Paul's.

Enns draws the distinction that every non-historical reading has to draw.  Citing the Lutheran theologian George Murphy, he separates "original sin," which "refers to an event at the beginning of history and requires a historical Adam as the first human to sin and transmit that sin to all subsequent humans," from a "sin of origin," which "affirms the absolute inevitability of sin that affects every human being from their beginnings, from birth."⁶  The second needs no Adam.  The question is whether it is what Paul wrote, and Enns has already answered that Paul "presents Adam as the first human and responsible for the problem of universal sin and death that Jesus came to eradicate."⁶

What does not hang on Adam

Honesty requires the other list.  The resurrection of Jesus does not depend on Adam;  it depends on the tomb and the witnesses, and Enns is right that "we all need the Savior to deliver us from sin and death" is a claim a person can hold on the evidence of their own life.⁶  The existence of God does not depend on Adam.  The reliability of the Gospels does not depend on Adam.  A Christian who lost Adam would lose Paul's account of why death is universal and why one man's obedience could reverse it;  he would not lose the empty tomb.  Zindler's chain assumes that the only route to a saviour runs through Genesis 3.  Paul's route does.  Whether there is another is a theological question, and this article's claim is narrower:  Paul's route needs a man, and the New Testament writers believed there was one.

Common Objections

Objection 1: "Genesis 1 and 2 are two different creation stories, and 'Adam' just means 'humanity' in Hebrew."

Both halves are partly true and neither reaches the conclusion.  Genesis 1:26-27 and 5:1-2 do use adam for humankind, male and female.  Genesis 4:25 and 5:3-5 use it as the name of a man with a wife, a son, an age and a death.  Walton, who is no literalist, sets out the three uses and grants that the last "would be tied to the individual as an individual, historical person."⁸  The two accounts are read as one by Jesus, who quotes Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 in the same breath (Mark 10:6-8).  A word can be both a common noun and a name;  "Man" was not a strange name for the first man in a language where the name and the noun were one word.

Objection 2: "Paul was using Adam as a literary type, the way a preacher uses Hamlet. He did not need Adam to have existed."

This is Dunn's argument and it is answered above.  The comparison would survive a mythical Adam;  the causal claims would not.  "The many died through the transgression of the one man" (Rom 5:15) is not a comparison.  Fitzmyer, who thinks Genesis's Adam is symbolic, says the symbolic reading of Paul "does violence to the contrast," and Enns, who wants a non-historical Adam, says "Paul, however, presents Adam as the first human."²⁶  When the scholars who reject a historical Adam agree with the scholars who accept one about what Paul meant, the exegetical question is closed, and the remaining question is whether Paul was right.

Objection 3: "Jesus never mentions Adam."

Jesus does not say the name.  He says the thing.  "From the beginning of creation he made them male and female.  For this reason a man will leave his father and mother" (Mark 10:6-7) quotes the two Genesis accounts as one event at "the beginning."  The Jesus who says that is the Jesus Luke traces to "Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38).  An argument from a name Jesus did not use, when he used the event, is an argument from silence in a passage that is not silent.

Objection 4: "Hosea 6:7 is the only Old Testament reference outside Genesis and Chronicles, and it probably means a town."

Agreed.  The article says so and does not use the verse.  The case rests on Genesis 4-5, 1 Chronicles 1, and the New Testament.

Objection 5: "Cain married his sister. That is incest, and their children would have been deformed."

The first sentence is what the Bible says (Gen 5:4;  Jubilees 4:9;  Augustine, City of God 15.16).  The second is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is in the table above.  With today's load, a sibling marriage costs 7% excess child mortality from recessive lethals alone, and 31% to 47% counting every lethal equivalent.  Those numbers assume 0.29 lethal alleles per haploid genome, which is the sum of many generations of mutation.  A created pair with no inherited load has children who carry one generation's worth, of order one in a thousand per gamete, and their sibling marriages cost a few hundredths of a percent.  The moral objection is answered by Leviticus 18 being Mosaic law, given after Abraham had married his half-sister and Amram his aunt.  The weak point is stated in the body:  "no inherited load" is a modelling assumption.

Objection 6: "Genetics has proven the human population was never smaller than about 10,000."

That claim was published in Adam and the Genome in 2017, and the geneticist who checked it found that "the extreme human bottleneck hypothesis has not been rigorously tested in the modern genomic literature, unless we have all missed something."¹¹  The author of the claim narrowed it to Homo sapiens under questioning.¹⁰  What the genetic data do and do not allow is set out in Population Bottlenecks, and this article does not claim the data favour a recent pair;  it claims the question is open in the literature and was misreported as closed.

Objection 7: "If the Fall cursed the ground, thorns should not appear in rocks 400 million years old."

They do appear there, and Creation Ministries International's own article says so.²³  The young-earth answer is that those rocks are Flood deposits and are not 400 million years old.  That is a geological claim tested in Fossil Order and the Flood.  This article's claim is smaller:  the reading commits the model to a post-Fall Devonian, and the model's own advocates accept the commitment.  An old-earth reader has the same verse and must also explain why thorns precede the curse that produced them.

Objection 8: "Creationists say the Fall broke the laws of physics. That is absurd."

Some did say it.  Both Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International now list the claim among arguments not to use, and give the physics:  digestion, friction, breathing and sunlight are all second-law processes that ran in Eden.²¹²²  Genesis 3:14-19 names the serpent, birth pain, the ground and death.  It names nothing else.

Objection 9: "Walton and Swamidass show you can keep a historical Adam and accept evolution. So the young-earth reading is unnecessary."

They show that a real Adam is compatible with evolution at a price, and each states the price.  Walton's Genesis 2 "does not, however, make definitive claims about the material origins of either Adam or Eve."⁸  Swamidass's Genesis has a world of evolved people outside the garden whom the text never mentions.¹²  Craig's Adam lived 750,000 years before the genealogies say he did.¹³  Each of these is a reading a Christian can hold.  None is the reading the text offers unprompted, and whether the price is worth paying depends on whether the science that demands it is right, which is a question for the genetics and geology articles, not for the exegesis.

Objection 10: "Without Adam there is no original sin, and without original sin no atonement. You have admitted Zindler is right."

The article has admitted that Zindler describes Paul's argument accurately in reverse, and that the Catholic Church in 1950 and Enns in 2012 both agree the doctrine of original sin needs an individual Adam.  It has not admitted that Adam is unhistorical.  The chain is only as strong as its first link, and the first link is the claim that "we know that Adam and Eve never were real people."  That is a genetic and palaeoanthropological claim, and the articles that test it are linked above.  What this article settles is the other end:  if there was a first man who sinned, Paul's argument stands as written;  if there was not, Paul's argument has to be rebuilt, and the people who have tried say so.

Sources