William Lane Craig's Two Adams (Part 2)

Schrödinger's Adam and the Black-Box of Mytho-History

In part 1, I introduced William Lane Craig’s book, In Quest of the Historical Adam. Craig believes that his novel genre of mytho-history allows the modern reader to reconcile the biblical account of God’s creation with both the de novo creation of Adam and Eve and the science of animal-to-human evolution. Craig’s proposal relies on his specific set of distinctions between two Adam; the textual Adam and the historical Adam.

On the positive side, Craig’s commitment to Adam and Eve as the first two humans is commendable. However, Craig’s mission to set the modern reader at ease by reconciling the special creation of Adam with animal-to-human evolution through the lens of mytho-history leads his model to collapse.

Here in part 2, I’ll support my conclusion by unpacking Craig’s language of universal progenitorship, sole genetic progenitorship, sole biological progenitorship, fount of all humanity, and genealogical ancestry.

Mytho-History and Schrödinger's Adam

What Craig means by mytho-history is unclear. His writing is full of noncommittal statements, subjective claims, and vagaries. In his Defenders Class, Craig concedes the futility of even trying to discern which parts of Genesis 1 through 11 are myth and what parts are history.

It’s probably futile to try to discern to what extent the narratives are to be taken literally—to identify which parts are figurative and which parts are historical…. Did a serpent speak in the Garden? Was the first woman made from Adam’s rib? Was there a worldwide flood? I see no reason to think that the viability of a genre analysis of Genesis 1-11 as mytho-history should depend upon or imply the ability to answer such questions. The author simply doesn’t draw such clear lines of distinction for us.¹

Yet, Craig in his June 09 podcast does draw some lines for us. The Garden events in Genesis 2, Craig says, should “largely” be taken as metaphor.

Now, when it comes to the stories of Adam and Eve and the primeval narratives in the book of Genesis, I think that these are largely metaphorical and figurative language. This is most obvious in the descriptions of God in chapters 2 and 3 as a sort of finite humanoid being walking in the cool of the garden and calling out to Adam and Eve who are hiding from him and the foliage. This is completely incompatible, if interpreted literally, with the transcendent portrayal of God in the opening chapter of Genesis, where God creates time and space and all of physical reality in the beginning. So the author of the Pentateuch, the author of the story, obviously knew that God is not a physical humanoid He is a transcendent creator of the universe. And so these descriptions are simply using anthropomorphic language in the story. That is to say, language that describes God in bodily terms, but is figurative or metaphorical, not to be interpreted literally (00:21:06 — 00:22:34).

Let’s set aside for the moment the concept of theophany² which better explains Genesis 2 and focus on Craig’s genre analysis. How does Craig know which “large parts” of Genesis 2 are myth and which “small parts” are history? Using his “definition” of mytho-history, there’s no agreed upon answer. In his book, Craig affirms that this definitional ambiguity is a strategic part of his model,

The lines between myth, folktale, and legend are apt to be blurry, so that it is probably impossible and unprofitable to lay down necessary and sufficient conditions for each of these narrative types. In that sense, the search for a strict definition of myth is a misguided and rather surprising pursuit. Instead, what we ought to be looking for is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” among stories regarded as myths (43).³

I’m not the only one confused by Craig’s confusion. James Rochford concludes, “in all honesty, it is quite difficult to nail down precisely what Craig means by mytho-history.” Rochford goes on to ask,

Am I the only one confused by these statements? I’ve seen more clarity in assembly instructions for Ikea furniture. In attempting to clarify the genre, these statements actually seem to make this view even more disorienting…..

As we saw above, Craig began with an incredibly broad definition of “myth.” Here, he adds confusion to chaos by adding the term “history” into the mix. He states that Genesis 1-11 have “an interest in history.” We honestly aren’t trying to be obtuse, but what exactly does he mean by this? To what extent is Genesis interested in history?

It’s clear to me that the lack of clarity in Cragi’s definition of mytho-hisotry is actually a critical feature, and not a bug, of his model.

My breakthrough moment for understanding Craig’s intentionally opaque language was the realization that Craig’s Adam is like Schrödinger's Cat.

In Erwin Schrödinger’s 1935 thought experiment, a cat is hidden inside a sealed box with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter is triggered, the vial breaks, and the cat dies; if the atom doesn’t decay, the cat lives. Until the observer opens the box, the cat is both alive and dead. Schrödinger used this paradox to criticize the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum superposition when applied to everyday objects.

Now consider my thought experiment which I call Schrödinger's Adam. In my analogy, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum superposition is like Craig’s interpretation of Genesis 1 through 11 through the genre of mytho-history.

In Craig’s model, Adam exists inside the black-box of mytho-history, which conceals the true state of Adam from the modern reader. Consequently, Craig’s mytho-hermeneutic allows each reader to imagine Adam as both evolved from lower animals and created de novo without any means to observe the truth about Adam.

The intentional paradox of Schrödinger's Adam is evident in Craig’s 2023 podcast titled, Genetic Study Confirms Dr. Craig's Model.

My model doesn't say anything about human evolution from lower primate forms. This has been a misunderstanding of the book by some people. It is neutral with respect to that. The model is consistent with saying that there were ancestral primates to the human population, but it's also consistent with a de novo creation of the founding pair of Adam and Eve by God at the beginning of this population bottleneck. So my model is neutral with respect to the question of what went before the bottleneck.

Understanding Craig’s interpretive paradox helped me see more clearly why the language used to explain his model is often unclear and, at times, peculiar to his book. Let me illustrate this problem using Craig’s recent interview with Sean McDowell. In the span of just a few minutes, Craig paradoxically claims that the mind of the Hebrew person reading Genesis is both unknown and known.

Taking Craig’s belief that the truth of Genesis 1-11 is hidden from the reader in a quantum state of mytho-history, we can start to untangle his language of human origins.⁴

I’ll start with a comparison of Craig’s Origins Model 1: Mytho-Historical Adam (outlined in Part 1) with three other models,

• Origins Model 2: Archetypal-Adam

• Origins Model 3: de novo Monogenesis

• Origins Model 4: Genealogical Polygenesis

Origins Model 1: Mytho-historical Adam

By adopting the term “mytho-history” Craig has “given away the store.” — John Oswalt

Is Adam the Universal Biological Progenitor?

In part 1, I quoted the article where Fazale Rana criticized both Craig’s and Joshua Swamidas’ models of human origins. The essence of Rana’s critique was that both models reject Adam and Eve as the sole progenitors of humanity. Craig bristled at this criticism but Rana’s critique is fair in the sense that Craig’s book does not use the phrase “sole progenitor.” However, Craig’s pushback is also understandable because his book does defend the “universal progenitorship” of Adam and Eve. Here’s Craig’s singular use of that phrase.

Prior to their creation there simply was no man or woman. The name later given by the man to his wife, said to mean “the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20), is prima facie an affirmation of her (and the man’s) universal progenitorship of all mankind. For these reasons the story of man’s creation in Gen 2 is not intended by the pentateuchal author as a sequential account distinct from and later than the creation of mankind in Gen 1:26–27, but rather as a focused version of it (92–93) [emphasis mine].

So boom… mic drop… Craig is correct and Rana is a sloppy thinker! Right? Well… not so fast. We still don’t know if Craig’s use of “universal” and Rana’s use of “sole” mean the same thing. I realize that sounds overly critical or pedantic on my part, but please bear with me because Craig’s writing is very technical. Craig’s statement on “universal progenitorship” is certainly a point in his favor, but there’s 450 pages of context along with numerous interviews and podcasts that we must examine.

John Walton's Lost World of Ethics

To get things started, let’s look at the footnote for the above quote. This footnote is interesting because in it Craig distances himself from John Walton’s model which Walton describes below.⁵

In my view, Adam and Eve are historical figures—real people in a real past. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that the biblical text is more interested in them as archetypal figures who represent all of humanity. This is particularly true in the account in Genesis 2 about their formation. I contend that the formation accounts are not addressing their material formation as biological specimens, but are addressing the forming of all of humanity: we are all formed from dust, and we are all gendered halves. If this is true, Genesis 2 is not making claims about biological origins of humanity, and therefore the Bible should not be viewed as offering competing claims against science about human origins. If this is true, Adam and Eve also may or may not be the first humans or the parents of the entire human race. Such an archetypal focus is theologically viable and is well-represented in the ancient Near East.⁶

I’ve illustrated Walton’s Archetypal-Adam in the figure below.

Origins Model 2: Archetypal-Adam

Craig’s model, in principle, allows for Walton’s belief that humans evolved from lower animals in the ancient past, however, there are differences.

First, Walton’s Archetypal-Adam is a fictional character created by the author of Genesis and used only to teach theological truths. In contrast, Craig’s textual Adam is both a mental fiction and more than a mental fiction. Craig’s Adam is necessarily a historical person who is clothed in mythical language.

Second, Craig argues that Walton’s historical Adam contradicts the author of Genesis, who believed that Adam and Eve were the universal biological parents of all living humans. Note here in Craig’s critique of Walton, how he defines the terms universal and biological.

Walton attempts to avoid this implication [Adam and Eve are the universal progenitors of all humans] by pointing out, first, that the word living “can refer to all creatures, yet all animals are not biological descendants of Eve.” Second, “the expression ‘mother of all …’ is not necessarily one that pertains to biology,” for Jabal was called “the father of all who live in tents” and Jubal “the father of all who play stringed instruments,” which shows that this sort of expression has larger associations in mind than just biological descent (Lost World of Adam and Eve, 187–88).

Craig sarcastically rejects Walton’s argument with these rhetorical questions,

Are we seriously to think that because the expression “the father/mother of” can take most anything as the object of the preposition, the expression used of Eve in Gen 3:20, “the mother of all living,” does not have to do with biological descent or that because living can be used of animals, it is not used here to designate Eve’s biological descendants?

Craig goes on to say,

Walton says that the core proposal of his book is that “the forming accounts of Adam and Eve should be understood archetypally rather than as accounts of how these two individuals were uniquely formed” (Lost World of Adam and Eve, 74). NB the “rather than.” Walton assumes that being the first human beings to have been created and being the archetypes of other humans are mutually exclusive. “Once the forming accounts are recognized as archetypal, they cease to be meaningful in terms of chronology or history of material human origins, even given … that Adam and Eve are historical persons” (200). But like his distinction between so-called material creation and functional creation, this is a false dichotomy that subverts Walton’s entire treatment of human origins. Adam can be both the first man and the archetypal man; indeed, being first makes him uniquely suited to be the archetype.

Walton gets Genesis wrong, Craig says, because Adam can be both the first man in history and archetypical. Craig concludes that Walton’s hermeneutic is flawed for the following reason.

Again, we see Walton’s penchant for dichotomous thinking. Why cannot man be mortal because he is made of dust? When Walton says that would be “flawed chemistry from our vantage point” (73), he lapses into not only concordism but wooden literalism.

I agree with Craig that Walton’s hermeneutic relies on a false dichotomy, but Craig fails to see that his Schrödinger's Adam—who is both evolved and created de novo—is concordist and incoherent. Even more, I find it ironic that Craig replaces what he calls an “overly literalistic” reading of Genesis with his overly rationalist hermeneutic. As you can hear in the clip below, Craig relies on what I call a “psychic-apologetic” to mock Christians who believe that Adam was fashioned from the dust of the earth, walked in the Garden with God, ate from the “magic” Tree of Knowledge, or talked to a snake.

Setting aside Craig’s condescension to the millions of Christians, like myself, who do believe Adam was formed of the dust, I’ll focus my analysis on Craig’s mytho-historical Adam and Eve as the universal biological progenitors of every human. Craig’s critique of Walton’s model helps us see that he does use the term “universal progenitor” as a synonym for “universal biological progenitor.” This gives us Craig’s first commitment.

📦Craig’s 1st Commitment: universal progenitor = universal biological progenitor

Craig is right on this point, Genesis does teach that Adam and Eve are the universal biological parents of all humans. However, this point of agreement does not fully answer the original challenge from Rana. When Craig says Adam and Eve are the universal biological progenitors is this language synonymous with Rana’s sole biological progenitor?⁷ Before I can properly answer that question, I need to introduce another term Craig uses to define his model, sole genetic progenitorship.

Is Adam the Sole Genetic Progenitor?

Remember, for Craig’s model to work the contemporary theory of animal-to-human evolution must explain his historical Adam. Therefore, Craig’s model necessarily rejects Adam and Eve as the sole “genetic” progenitors of every human.

But the existence of a historical Adam and Eve need not imply their sole genetic progenitorship, especially over tens of thousands of years; and even if their descendants were for a time reproductively isolated, such isolation could result from social distancing due to a myriad of factors, including geographic isolation, tribalism, language barriers, xenophobia, cognitive capacity differences, racism, just plain revulsion, and so on, as well as any population reduction we might imagine. Perhaps these barriers were sometimes breached, but then we do not have any idea whether there were offspring of such unions that had genetic input into the human line. Of course, once Adam and Eve’s descendants replaced Homo heidelbergensis, we know that there was interbreeding among the extended human family, but we can only conjecture as to what happened in the interim (355).”

In other words, Craig’s model must allow for some kind of interbreeding between the descendants of Adam and Eve with the descendants of genetically isolated populations of some intentionally unspecified Homo species. This gives us Craig’s second commitment.

📦 Craig’s 2nd Commitment: universal biological progenitor ≠ sole genetic progenitor

Now here’s the critical question, does Craig’s position on sole genetic progenitorship open up his model to the possibility that humans evolved outside the Garden and outside of the genetic line of Adam and Eve? While I think Craig would like to say no, it seems to me that barring an ad hoc modification of his model the answer is really yes. The possibility of interbreeding between different Homo species is partly the reason I’ve included the “Evolved Biological Woman” with a question mark into my illustration of Craig’s Origins Model 1. This intentional ambiguity of Craig’s language leaves us with a new challenge, is Craig’s tacit rejection of sole genetic ancestry also a denial of Rana’s sole biological ancestry? I’ll look at that next.

Is Adam the Sole Biological Progenitor?

To understand the difference between universal and sole progenitorship, I’ll need to introduce Origins Model 3 and Origins Model 4.

Origins Model 3 is what I call de novo monogenesis. In this model, Adam and Eve are the first two humans specially created by God. They did not evolve, nor did they ever interbreed with evolved humans (The second point is obvious since this model rejects animal-to-human evolution). In this model, all humans come from one single source (monogenesis) and therefore Adam and Eve are the sole biological progenitors of every living human. Ironically, Rana, like Craig, never uses the term “sole progenitor” in his book, Who was Adam?. Neither does Rana use the phrase de novo. However, it is evident from Rana’s work with Reasons to Believe that his view best fits with model 3. According to the RTB website,⁸

God created the first humans (Adam and Eve) both physically and spiritually through direct intervention.

Genesis 1:26–27 and Genesis 5:1–2 state that God created the first man and woman in His image. In these verses two different Hebrew verbs, ‘āśâ and bārā’, translate as “make” and “create.” Both verbs communicate God’s direct action in creating human beings. Genesis 2:7 also describes God’s formation of Adam from the dust of the earth. Then God breathed life into Adam. Genesis 2:22 explains Eve’s creation from Adam’s side. The text clearly teaches that God Himself created the first human pair.⁹

The RTB model treats Adam and Eve as the genetic sole-progenitor pair. This is a critical point since the RTB model also rejects the genealogical sole-progenitor pair model as defined by Joshua Swamidass (see Model 4 below).¹⁰ In the RTB model, Adam and Eve are, from the beginning, the sole biological progenitors of every generation of humans.

Origins Model 3: de novo Monogenesis

Origins Model 3 aligns with the church’s traditional teaching on Genesis and explicitly rejects genealogical ancestry which entail polygenesis (many origins).¹¹ This brings us to my illustration of Origins Model 4 and the Genealogical Adam proposed by Joshua Swamidass.¹²

Origins Model 4: Genelogical’ Polygenesis

In Origins Model 4, Adam and Eve 1.0 represent the humans who evolved tens of thousand of years ago from animals outside of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve 2.0 represent the first two humans specially created by God to inhabit the Garden of Eden six to ten thousand years ago. Swamidass’ model proposes two distinct origins for humanity (I must note that Swamidass disagrees with me on this point, but as I’ve argued before, Swamidass’ model is historically speaking polygenesis not monogenesis. You can read our discussion of this here).

Given Swamidass’ genealogical polygenesis, Adam and Eve 2.0 are the sole biological progenitors for Biological Humans 2.0 (at least in their first generation of children) but they are not the biological progenitors in any way for the evolved Biological Humans 1.0. Consequently, the Biological Humans 1.0 have no inherited biological connection to Biological Humans 2.0.¹³ Eventually, Swamidass believes, the kids from parents 1.0 and 2.0 did interbreed. Over time, once enough generations had passed, Adam and Eve 2.0 became the genealogical ancestors of every living human but neither the universal nor the sole biological progenitors.¹⁴

Ep 20: The Genealogical Adam and Eve

In short, Swamidass’ model of Genealogical Polygenesis attempts to reconcile a Young Earth model of human origins with the Darwinian model of long ages of evolution. Swamidass’ textual Adam 2.0 and the historical Adam 2.0 are one and the same, but his reading of Genesis does not exclude what he considers the historical truth of Adam 1.0 who evolved outside the garden. My analysis makes clear that Swamdiass’ definition of genealogical ancestry (Model 4) is wholly incompatible with Rana’s definition of sole biological progenitorship (Model 3).

🚫 Craig’s Dilemma: genealogical ancestry ≠ sole biological progenitorship.

With this distinction in mind, we need to unpack one final phrase used in Craig’s book, “fount of all humanity.”

Is Adam as the Fount of All Humanity?

Craig uses the term “universal progenitorship” only one time in his book. However, he uses the term “fount of all humanity” three times.

As we have probed human origins, the evidence has pointed us again and again to the progenitor of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis as the fount of humanity, “the ever mysterious Homo heidelbergensis (330).” [emphasis mine]

The second use, also in chapter 12, is here,

While these narratives need not be read as literal history, the ordering presence of genealogies terminating in persons who were indisputably taken to be historical and the teaching of Paul in the NT about Adam’s impact on the world, which bursts the bounds of a purely literary figure, oblige the biblically faithful Christian to affirm the historicity of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are asserted to be the fount of all humanity, the genealogical ancestors of every human being who has ever lived on the face of this planet (363). [emphasis mine]

Note in Craig’s second use that the phrase “fount of all humanity” and “genealogical ancestry” are synonymous. Adding this third commitment to our list, here’s what we’ve established so far,

📦 Craig’s 1st Commitment: universal progenitor = universal biological progenitor

📦 Craig’s 2nd Commitment: universal biological progenitor ≠ sole genetic progenitor

📦 Craig’s 3rd Commitment: fount of all humanity = genealogical ancestry

But… Craig’s three commitments lead to a significant dilemma for his Schrödinger’s Adam.

🚫 Craig’s Dilemma: genealogical ancestry ≠ sole biological progenitorship.

Here’s where Craig’s attempt to reconcile animal-to-human evolution with de novo creation runs into trouble. For Schrödinger's Adam to succeed, Craig’ mytho-hermenutic must somehow reconcile his paradoxical embrace of both genealogical ancestry and sole biological progenitorship.

Ep 29: Craig's Fantastical Adam with Casey Luskin

Up Next

Take some time to work through this post. Paid subscribers are encouraged to ask questions or offer critiques of my analysis. In Part 3 , I’ll make the case that the Schrödinger's Adam interpretation of mytho-history fails because it cannot reconcile both Adam and Eve as sole biological progenitors of every living human and the genealogical Adam and Eve.

1. William Lane Craig, Life & Bio-Diversity - Part 22: The Central Truths Expressed in Genesis 1-11, Defenders Class 3: Excursus on Creation of Life and Biological Diversity, (Part 22): The Central Truths Expressed in Genesis 1-1.

2. For those unfamiliar, here’s a helpful description of theophany. “A theophany is an appearance of God that people can discern—not all appearances of God are recognized by people. The term comes from the Greek theos, ‘god,’ and the verb phaino, ‘to appear’ or ‘be revealed.’

Since people cannot possibly process God’s nature as a disembodied, formless spirit, theophany allows God to make His presence known in a physical way that people can discern through their senses. Theophanies also address the problem in the Old Testament that people cannot withstand direct contact with the unfiltered divine presence (Exod 33:20; compare Deut. 5:24; Judg. 6:22, 23; 13:22). Theophany both protects people, and allows for contact with God.

Theophanies in the Old Testament occur when God takes form in the natural world, as a phenomena (like wind, spirit, or the burning bush) or when God takes human form (like the Angel of Yahweh).” See, Barry, John D., Douglas Mangum, Derek R. Brown, Michael S. Heiser, Miles Custis, Elliot Ritzema, Matthew M. Whitehead, Michael R. Grigoni, and David Bomar. 2012, 2016. Faithlife Study Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

3. Craig’s reliance on Wittgenstein (the father of logical behaviorism) for his definition (or lack of definition) of myth should not be overlooked. Carl F.H. Henry, warned about this kind of anti-literalist hermeneutics. Henry writes, “Perpetuating his revolt against ‘literal theism,’ Paul M. van Buren attempts ‘to work out … the implications for Christian theology of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations’ (The Edges of Language, p. ix). In applying Wittgenstein’s later thought to religious concerns, van Buren places God-talk at the ‘edges’ of language in order to avoid making it either literal or ‘unsayable’ (the wholly other). For van Buren, poetry carries a nonliteral message. But that hardly settles the issue of whether and when statements in poetic form tell the truth. In contrast to his earlier The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, van Buren in his The Edges of Language defends the meaningfulness of God-language. But he leaves the truth of God-language as indeterminate as in the previous work. Indeed, when he distinguishes in midcourse between the literal and the unsayable, van Buren finally is moved to affirm that believing in God is ‘in no way like believing a statement to be true’ (p. 76). But if truth is irrelevant to belief in God, informed believers will sooner or later consider belief no less irrelevant.’”

Henry concludes this section with a warning that I think applies to all those who trust in Craig’s mytho-hermenutic, “The alternatives to the historic evangelical insistence that Christianity conveys literal truth about God are hardly convincing and lead invariably toward skepticism. There is only one kind of truth. Religious truth is as much truth as any other truth. Instead of being devised for tasks other than to express literal truths about God, human language has from the beginning had this very purpose in view, namely, enabling man to enjoy and to communicate the unchanging truth about his Maker and Lord (128).” — Henry, Carl F. H. 1999. God, Revelation, and Authority. Vol. 4. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 115–116. Henry

4. My use of “untangle” here is an intentional play on words, specifically, on the concept of quantum entanglement. Einstein coined the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to show his own issues with explanations of quantum mechanics. I wanted to do a write up for the post with this idea to show my unease with Craig’s model, but just ran out of time. Instead, I asked Grok to use Einstein’s phrase as an analogy to Craig’s mytho-history and thought it would make a fun footnote. Here’s how Grok responded to my prompt.

“The belief that Adam is both a divine creation and a product of evolution from lower animals can be likened to Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” Just as quantum entanglement defies classical notions of causality by linking particles across vast distances without a clear mechanism, this theological stance entangles divine fiat with naturalistic processes in a way that feels paradoxical. How can Adam be specially crafted in God’s image (Genesis 2:7) while simultaneously emerging through the gradual, undirected mechanisms of evolution? The “spooky” tension lies in the lack of a clear causal bridge: divine creation implies purposeful intent, yet evolution relies on random mutations and natural selection. Proponents might argue God guides the process, but this introduces a mysterious, unobservable interaction—akin to the instantaneous correlation of entangled particles—that challenges both theological clarity and scientific rigor. Without a coherent framework to explain how God’s action interfaces with evolutionary mechanics, Craig’s model of mytho-history risks being a theological superposition, holding two states in uneasy tension, much like Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead until observed.” — Grok

5. If you want to learn about Walton’s creation model and his hermeneutic for reading the Old Testament, you can start here with my journal article. Walton’s model aligns with folks like Dennis Venema and Scott McNight who writes, “What follows in Adam and the Genome, then, is a basic introduction to the science of evolution and genetics and how it impinges on the claim of many Christians: that you and I, and the rest of humans for all time, come from two solitary individuals, Adam and Eve. Genetics makes that claim impossible—as I understand it.” McKnight, Scot; Venema, Dennis R., Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science (p. ). (Function). Kindle Edition.

6. John H. Walton, “A Historical Adam: Archetypal Creation View,” in Four Views on the Historical Adam, ed. Matthew Barrett, Ardel B. Caneday, and Stanley N. Gundry, Zondervan Counterpoints Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 89.

7. For the sake of simplicity, I will take Craig’s use of the phrase “universal progenitor” as synonymous with “universal biological progenitor.” I will also take Rana’s use of “sole progenitor” as synonymous with “sole biological progenitor.”

8. Full disclosure, I’ve been a visiting scholar with RTB and did a two year fellowship that resulted in the publication of my book, Set Apart.

9. Rana, Fazale, and Hugh Ross. 2005. Who Was Adam?: A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Man. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress.

10. See footnote 2 in the 2020 article, Mosaic Eve: Mother of All (Part 1) by Anjeanette Roberts

11. I’m trying to avoid as many technical terms as possible, but it needs to be clear that all models of genealogical ancestry entail some form of polygenesis. This explanation from Encyclopedia.com is a good summary, “The position contrary to monogenism is known as polygenism, of which there are two types. According to the first (called monophyletic polygenism), since evolution always proceeds within an interbreeding group, humanity would have first appeared among a number of individuals, whose progeny gradually spread world-wide through emigration. Thus, one would speak of a first community rather than a first couple or man. The second type (called polyphyletic polygenism) hypothesizes that the human species arose through separate evolutionary lines in a number of different places at different times, with the different lines converging to form our present population. Scientists have not reached consensus on which of the two versions of polygenism—the monophyletic or polyphyletic—is more likely to be true (Harpending 1994).”

12. In many writings, the terms hominin and hominid are used interchangeably, and the difference is considered nominal. See, Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: Seeking the Origins of Human Singularity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3. In recent years, there has been some effort to differentiate these terms where hominin is taken as the tribe under the hominid family. The term hominin then entails all modern humans and human ancestral groups. This includes all extinct species which trace their origin back to the supposed common ancestor with the chimpanzee. The hominid family entails all hominin groups plus the modern and extinct Great Apes. Thus all hominins are hominids, but not all hominids are hominins. See Beth Blaxland, “Hominid and Hominin–What’s the Difference?,” The Australian Museum, February 10, 2020, https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/hominid-and-hominin-whats-the-difference/. And, Casey Luskin, “Missing Transitions: Human Origins and the Fossil Record,” in Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, ed. James Porter Moreland et al. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 439.

13. Figure 3 represents the model proposed by Joshua Swamidass. I don’t fully address his model in this post, but you can read my critique of his scientific shell game here.

14. For Swamidass, genealogical ancestry means that given a sufficient number of generations (x), eventually every human will be able to trace their family tree (genealogy) back to every ancient couple including both Adam and Eve 1.0 and Adam and Eve 2.0. By the time Paul is writing to the New Testament church, it’s true that Adam and Eve are the genealogical ancestors of every first-century A.D. human.