https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/myt...ical-adam/
EXCERPT: One of the most influential conservative Christian theologians goes all-in for evolutionary science and finds room for a Paleolithic Adam and Eve. This has left some schools of Christian orthodoxy scrambling to find a way forward. With any luck, they may start to reevaluate their opposition to evolution altogether.
[...] So sharp is William Lane Craig’s intellect that the professionally acerbic atheist Sam Harris has famously called him, “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”
I was therefore quite surprised when an advanced copy of Craig’s newest book, In Quest of the Historical Adam, arrived in my office with a request for an endorsement. What would I, an atheist and evolutionary biologist, find to endorse in a book about Adam and Eve?
Quite a lot, it turns out. To be sure, evolution is not the main focus of the book. In fact, the first half is an erudite theological discussion of the book of Genesis. I must confess my supreme disinterest as I began to slog through what I expected to be the usual circular reasoning regarding divine inspiration, biblical authority, and so forth. Craig, after all, considers the Bible to be the inerrant word of God and believes that morality flows, solely and completely, from divine commands.
But my expectations were happily dashed. What I actually found was a penetrating literary analysis of the creation story of Genesis, heavily informed by archaeology and recent scholarship on contemporary texts from the ancient near east.
Craig calls this a genre analysis and identifies ten specific resemblances to other texts that attempt to explain primeval history—in other words, creation myths. Some examples of those resemblances include the frequent use of figurative rather than literal language, the inclusion of fantastical elements and representations that are contrary to what we know the author(s) actually believed, and inconsistencies in the text if taken literally.
It was satisfying to read Craig grappling with the fact that Genesis 1 and 2 recount completely different creation stories, that no one in the ancient near east thought snakes could talk, and that literal days and nights could not exist before the creation of the sun and earth. Craig therefore concludes that the creation account in Genesis is mythical.
However, Craig’s analysis goes further and argues that the creation story of Genesis is not pure myth, but rather a genre known as mytho-history, in which the author is indeed recounting real events but in a figurative way. This classification for Genesis was first pioneered in the 1960s by Harvard Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen, who was among the top authorities in the world on Sumer and the Akkadian language.
For example, several Mesopotamian texts include tales of global floods, no doubt stemming from the fact that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers frequently breach their banks with horrific consequences. While it is patently ridiculous to hold an ancient flood story as evidence that the entire planet was ever covered in water, from the author’s perspective, his world was indeed inundated.
The flood narratives are mythical retellings of real events. Importantly, Craig restricts this classification to the first eleven chapters of Genesis, declaring that much of the rest of the Bible does attempt to recount historical events with literal accuracy.
The classification of the biblical creation story as mytho-history provides Christians a means to hold on to the parts of Genesis that are essential to their faith without requiring them to believe the absurdities of a woman made from a rib or a piece of fruit that imparts knowledge upon consumption... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: One of the most influential conservative Christian theologians goes all-in for evolutionary science and finds room for a Paleolithic Adam and Eve. This has left some schools of Christian orthodoxy scrambling to find a way forward. With any luck, they may start to reevaluate their opposition to evolution altogether.
[...] So sharp is William Lane Craig’s intellect that the professionally acerbic atheist Sam Harris has famously called him, “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”
I was therefore quite surprised when an advanced copy of Craig’s newest book, In Quest of the Historical Adam, arrived in my office with a request for an endorsement. What would I, an atheist and evolutionary biologist, find to endorse in a book about Adam and Eve?
Quite a lot, it turns out. To be sure, evolution is not the main focus of the book. In fact, the first half is an erudite theological discussion of the book of Genesis. I must confess my supreme disinterest as I began to slog through what I expected to be the usual circular reasoning regarding divine inspiration, biblical authority, and so forth. Craig, after all, considers the Bible to be the inerrant word of God and believes that morality flows, solely and completely, from divine commands.
But my expectations were happily dashed. What I actually found was a penetrating literary analysis of the creation story of Genesis, heavily informed by archaeology and recent scholarship on contemporary texts from the ancient near east.
Craig calls this a genre analysis and identifies ten specific resemblances to other texts that attempt to explain primeval history—in other words, creation myths. Some examples of those resemblances include the frequent use of figurative rather than literal language, the inclusion of fantastical elements and representations that are contrary to what we know the author(s) actually believed, and inconsistencies in the text if taken literally.
It was satisfying to read Craig grappling with the fact that Genesis 1 and 2 recount completely different creation stories, that no one in the ancient near east thought snakes could talk, and that literal days and nights could not exist before the creation of the sun and earth. Craig therefore concludes that the creation account in Genesis is mythical.
However, Craig’s analysis goes further and argues that the creation story of Genesis is not pure myth, but rather a genre known as mytho-history, in which the author is indeed recounting real events but in a figurative way. This classification for Genesis was first pioneered in the 1960s by Harvard Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen, who was among the top authorities in the world on Sumer and the Akkadian language.
For example, several Mesopotamian texts include tales of global floods, no doubt stemming from the fact that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers frequently breach their banks with horrific consequences. While it is patently ridiculous to hold an ancient flood story as evidence that the entire planet was ever covered in water, from the author’s perspective, his world was indeed inundated.
The flood narratives are mythical retellings of real events. Importantly, Craig restricts this classification to the first eleven chapters of Genesis, declaring that much of the rest of the Bible does attempt to recount historical events with literal accuracy.
The classification of the biblical creation story as mytho-history provides Christians a means to hold on to the parts of Genesis that are essential to their faith without requiring them to believe the absurdities of a woman made from a rib or a piece of fruit that imparts knowledge upon consumption... (MORE - missing details)