Fundamentalists Think Science Is Atheism
By Karl Giberson, Ph.D
Posted: Updated:
I was reminded of this a few days
ago when Beacon Press released my book: Saving the Original Sinner: How
Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense
of the World. The book was inspired by the controversy raging in
evangelical Christianity about whether Adam and Eve were actual historical
figures. Recent advances in genetics have made it quite clear that the human
race never consisted of just two individuals and Christian geneticists have
been working overtime trying to convince their respective faith communities
they need to pay attention. Most of them are not.
In the book I show how Adam evolved
from an obscure character in Jewish literature to the "Central Myth of the
West," and now stands as an almost impenetrable barrier to millions of
Christians accepting modern science.
Many Christians, unfortunately
believe their faith requires a "first man" who sinned and brought
trouble on the world (feminists can thank two millennia of patriarchy for
getting the "first woman" off the hook). The central Christian theme
is "Creation-Fall-Redemption": God creates a perfect world; Adam
"falls" by sinning, wrecks everything, and God curses the creation
with death and suffering; and Christ redeems the world. In this picture Adam
and Christ function as symmetrical "bookends": Adam breaks everything
and Christ fixes it.
Adam and Eve thus stand on the bullseye
of the controversy about evolution -- a controversy that has taken on new
urgency over the past few decades as the human genome has been mapped. This
progress has established with near certainty that humans are closely related to
chimps and bonobos, with whom they share a common ancestor; that the human race
originated in Africa millennia before the events in Genesis took place; and
that the human race never consisted of only two people. The conclusion is
clear: The couple described in the opening pages of the Bible never existed --
and thus could not have precipitated the disaster known as "The
Fall."
Without Adam, the traditional
formula that has long defined Christianity must be reinvented and many
Christians are convinced that this is impossible. Millions of Americans would
prefer to reject science, rather than bid farewell to the first man: "The
denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and
the solitary first human pair," warns the influential and widely followed
Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler, "severs the link between Adam and
Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel."
I was reminded of the starkness of
this division this week when the first discussion of my book began to appear.
The journal Books & Culture ran an interview with me discussing the book
and the first comment to appear was the following:
"All this is a good example of
believing man's word instead of God's Word. That is, making a compromise with
atheists."
If this were a single voice it
could be ignored. But the sad reality is that this view runs through much of
evangelical Christianity in America. It has taken up residence in the GOP,
where denying various sciences -- evolution, geology, climate science -- has
become a de facto requirement for election. Many evangelical colleges have it
in their faith statement. Public school teachers find themselves embroiled in
controversy simply teaching the material in the Biology text. Ken Ham's entire
Answers in Genesis project is based on it. The starting point for so many
Christian has become the absolute truth of a particular interpretation of the
Genesis creation story. And any alternative viewpoint is now understood to be a
"compromise with atheists."
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