I Miss the Middle Ages

Those of us struggling to promote evolution to skeptical evangelicals—as I have been doing for three decades—invoke the familiar history of Galileo, hoping by analogy to open closed minds to the possibility that evolution might be both true, and compatible with Christian faith, just as heliocentricity has turned out to be both true and compatible with the Christian faith. Indeed in my first book, written almost a quarter century ago I wrote: “The Galileo incident, when extracted from the significant political and personal milieu in which it was embedded, can serve as a paradigm for the present conflict.” My thinking—far from original—was that Christians should deal with Darwin and evolution, just as they dealt with Galileo and heliocentricity. I am no longer convinced this analogy works.

America’s present controversy over evolution is being labeled in some circles as another “Galileo Moment,” although the present controversy is really just the  ongoing battle over evolution, recently intensified by emerging genetic evidence against a literal first man.  As I have looked more closely at the arguments defending Adam and assaulting evolution, however, I have come to see that the present controversy is really quite continuous with the one that gave John Donne such pause in the 17^th century, namely, the longing for coherence and the demand that it not be lost.

17^th century concerns about what Copernicus and Galileo did to the earth were not primarily about its location or movement per se.  There were, to be sure, a few awkward Bible verses about the earth being “fixed” but they were easily handled as figurative or observational, once it became clear that the earth was indeed in motion. The real issue was the loss of the order that created the structure on which the Christian worldview had been based. In particular, the well-defined earthly realm, extending only to the moon where the corruption of sin ended, provided a comforting limitation on the extent of the curse placed by God on the creation.  When Donne says “The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit can direct him where to look for it” he is lamenting that the new location of the earth makes no sense in the theological scheme of things. Why are we looking in the perfect heavens for the imperfect earth? Why do we seek the perfect sun at the center of the world, as far from God as possible?  What parts of the world share in the curse of sin? Where is the boundary between the heavens and the earth, between perfect and imperfect, between changing and eternal?

Note how the following 17^th century objection to Copernican astronomy is based entirely on the way it disrupts the system of religious thinking, rather than the challenges it poses to a literal reading of the Bible:

“It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it cannot be that any such great things have been done especially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Savior?”

Today’s anxiety about the historical Adam takes this same form. The literal meaning of the Bible verses about his origin—created from dust in a perfect garden in the Middle East about 6000 years ago—is up for grabs, just as the literal meaning of biblical references to the fixity of the earth has long been up for grabs.  Only the most fundamentalist Christians who reject most of science anyway feel no pressure to modify their interpretations of Genesis.  For Christians who take science seriously the biblical Adam is not as important as the theological Adam—that is, Adam as the source of sin, death, and the Curse is what matters, not when and where he lived. In other words, Adam has a role to play in keeping the theological system coherent just as a centralized earth had such a role.

Today’s controversy over evolution and the historical Adam is best understood as the ongoing controversy over the Copernican revolution because of the great degree of overlap between the central concerns raised by each—concerns about how the overall Christian understanding of the world and its history, especially the central theological role played by humans, fits with the reality disclosed by science.

A historical Adam fits into the “Christian Theology 101” scenario known as “Creation-Fall-Redemption”: God created everything perfect in the beginning; a human choice to reject God and commit sin messed up the perfect creation—all of it; Jesus’s work of salvation redeems humans from that sin, a precursor to God redeeming all of creation at the end of time, creating a “new heavens and a new earth.” Phrases like the “unified biblical narrative” are often applied to this simple scheme.

The theological system here contains the following elements: 1) God created a perfect world free from sin, consistent with his nature and omnipotence; 2) God gave his creatures freedom; 3) The creatures—Adam and Eve—abused their freedom and sinned; 4) the source of all the imperfection, evil, death, and suffering is the sin of Adam, and God is in no way responsible for it—he created only perfection; 5) God, working through Christ, redeems humans from their sin; 6) God wraps it up at the end.

This scenario entwines naturally with the medieval worldview. God creates the world with two realms—earthly and heavenly—both perfect. When Adam sins, God curses the earthly realm, the human part of the world, conveniently bounded by the orbit of the moon.  This curse creates thorns, carnivores, and germs that produce sickness. God does not curse the heavens since that part of the creation is completely separate from the realm where Adam lived. 

The entanglement of the two concerns—the location in space of the earth and the location in time of Adam—emerges when we look at two related theological questions: 1) the special role played by humans in the divine drama; and 2) the spatial and temporal extent of the Fall. If the earth orbits the sun what is the spatial domain of the Curse? When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon was his footprint on perfect soil? Does the Mars rover explore a perfect planet that could never be home to weeds and thorns? Is the outer solar system photographed by the Voyager spacecrafts different than the region around the earth? Are aliens on distant planets sinful? Would aliens like Star Trek’s “Mr. Spock,” with one human parent, inherit Adam’s original sin? These questions seem strangely out of place in an age of science and yet a curse on the physical creation has long been a central Christian doctrine, discarded only by liberal theology.

In the same way, the temporal domain of the curse is impossible to pin down in time without a historical Adam at the beginning of time. If sin and death entered the world with Adam’s sin, how did so many species go extinct before he sinned? If nature was indeed “red in tooth and claw” before sin, is God then responsible for so much suffering? Did God intend the lion to chase down the hapless zebra as we see on nature shows? Or is that grisly scenario a consequence of human sin? If we evolved from earlier life-forms, how did our sinful natures arise? And at what point in the development of ever more intelligent primates does the concept of “sin” begin to make sense? Do we even have sinful natures? If there is no fall from perfection, then what does salvation mean?  Is it “all in pieces, all coherence gone”?