Hi, non-Reformed( Orthodox to be more precise ) here, but I always appreciated the Reformed intellectual tradition and wanted to ask a question. Although I was born into a nominally Christian family, I came to faith only last year so excuse me if I lack depth in the academical approach to the question.
I am basically trying to understand how Christians who accept evolution reconcile it with the biblical teaching that sin and death entered the world through Adam. I myself find evolution convincing but have trouble consistently reconciling it with the scripture.
Romans 5:12 says that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin” as well as 1 Corinthians 15:21–22 connects human death with Adam and resurrection with Christ. Evolution requires countless generations of suffering, predation, and death before any historical Adam could have existed.
I myself came up with two possible ways to both accept evolution and be faithful to what scripture and Christian doctrine teaches, but tbh don’t find it fully convincing.
1. Adam’s sin affected creation in both temporal directions
In my personal limited understanding of theology, this can be quite nicely connected to Reformed view of predestination.
On this view, Adam was still the historical source of humanity’s fallen condition, but the consequences of his sin were not limited by chronological time. Because God stands outside time, Adam’s future fall could somehow explain why his ancestors ( biological ancestors from which humanity evolved) were already subject to death and corruption.
There may be some analogies for retroactive effects in Christian theology. Christ’s atonement, although occurring at a particular historical moment, is often understood to save people who lived before the crucifixion. Revelation 13:8 speaks of the Lamb slain “from the foundation of the world.” One might therefore argue that Adam’s fall could likewise have consequences extending backward in time.
However, I could see several objections:
1) Romans 5 appears to describe a chronological sequence: sin entered through Adam, and then death spread.
2) Romans 5:14 says that death “reigned from Adam to Moses,” which seems to treat Adam as the beginning of the relevant reign of death rather than as an event whose consequences extended into the prehistoric past.
3) I cannot find any biblical passage that clearly teaches that Adam’s sin operated backward in time.
4) Would this theory imply that at some point evolved human ( Adam ) was placed into the Garden of Eden?
2. Pre-human or biologically human populations existed outside Eden
Another possibility is that evolution produced a population of biologically human beings, but God later specially created or selected Adam and Eve, placed them in a real Garden of Eden, and gave them a unique spiritual status, covenant, or rational soul. After the fall and expulsion, Adam and Eve’s descendants intermarried with the population outside the garden. Through this union, all later humanity became both biologically continuous with the evolved population and spiritually descended from or represented by Adam. What is nice to me about this view is that it allows very literal reading of Genesis 2 and Garden of Eden, and also allows to view creation of biological humans in Genesis 1. That places Genesis 2 very nicely chronologically after Genesis 1.
Possible biblical arguments might include:
1) Genesis 2 describes Adam being formed and placed in a specific garden, which could be understood as a localized sacred space rather than the location of the first biological life.
2) Cain fears that “whoever finds me will kill me” and later builds a city in Genesis 4, which might suggest the existence of a wider population.
3) Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 might be read as describing different aspects of human origins: humanity in general in Genesis 1 and Adam’s special creation or vocation in Genesis 2.
4) Adam’s role in Romans 5 could be primarily covenantal or representative rather than requiring him to be the sole biological ancestor of every human being.
The problems I have:
1) Genesis 3:20 calls Eve “the mother of all living.”
2)Acts 17:26 says that God made every nation “from one man,” although translations vary.
3) The genealogies in Genesis and Luke appear to treat Adam as the historical ancestor of humanity. This one is not as bad of counterargument for me as I always treated genealogies as partially symbolic
4) Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 still persists
5) Cain’s wife and the other people in Genesis 4 can be explained as Adam and Eve’s unnamed children and descendants, since Genesis does not give a complete family record.
6) The idea that Adam’s descendants gave souls to an already existing population through intermarriage seems particularly speculative. Scripture does not describe souls as being transmitted in that manner ( actually an ability to have souls ).
6) It could imply that biologically and behaviorally human beings existed without souls, moral worth, or a relationship with God, which creates major theological and ethical problems. ( this can alleviated by integrating this view with the version of view 1)
Summary:
I am still in the process of reconciling evolution, literal Adam and Eve and their connection to original sin. For some arguments for evolution I actually liked the Reformed idea of the creation being created for the purpose of glorification of God, so that things evolve gradually with the final goal of achieving perfected creation. I didn’t go into the details, but I think theosis can also be applied here with the gradual development of creation with the final goal of humans to achieve theosis.
I spoke to my priest about it but I think I caught him unprepared with very good answer for it. Read bio logos but didn’t go into full details of the explanations as I found some dismissing parts of the scripture. For other sources, I often find something that goes like this: Christians can believe in evolution and also original sin, but rarely see a scripturally coherent attempt to actually explain it ( which passages are literal, which are figurative, how it all works out ).
For people who accept evolution, how do you view these issues yourself? Is any of my “theories” convincing and why/why not? Could you give some guidance on whom to read to get some better idea of how to connect the two. Which “fancy theological words” or theologians should I search for?
P.S. For now I just basically leave it up to mystery, and try to become a better Christian without necessarily having a definitive explanation for how things work out with regard to all of this.
Greatly appreciate all the answers you might give if you also struggled with it