ETHNICITY AND OUR ANIMAL ORIGIN IN THE LIGHT OF ADAM AND EVE

The Bible says once there was only one human being Adam and he was given a wife Eve to be the mother of all the living. This contradicts science in how we have an animal nature and how we have different races. Adam and Eve had language skills which means there was not enough time for one race to form into many.

Human Relationship to Animals

Russell Stannard is a retired high-energy particle physicist born in 1931. He has written books in defence of Christianity against claims that the faith is against science. His book Science and Belief is referred to for this article.

Stannard asserts that we are not different from animals in quality but quantity on page 34. We have more faculties so that we were able to develop spiritual faculties.

That contradicts the biblical doctrine that we differ from animals in kind not just in degree. God had to make man from the ground and woman from man to stress that though there were animals there they could not be converted into man. God did not take a rib from a chimp to make Adam with it. To stress that we read that Adam needed a partner and found no creature to be suitable so God then made Eve.

Adam & Eve

In his book, Science & Belief, Russell Stannard, quotes the modern view that if we all came from Adam and Eve we would all have the same ethnicity.

Stannard argues that the Genesis story of the origin of woman was “highly unlikely…as a literal account of how women originated” (page 17). So what is it about then? He replies, “It is saying that man is not complete without woman and woman is not complete without man. It is drawing attention to the importance of marriage.” Stannard has failed to engage with the text. We must note that Stannard cannot read the mind of the author of the Genesis and cannot know what he was likely to intend.

Attempts to get around the literal meaning are attempts to make human opinion about the word of God into the word of God itself. That approach leads to people deliberately contradicting the Bible and claiming to believe that it is the word of God. If Genesis were being non-literal it would say so clearly. The Bible was meant to be understood by simple people and people of simple faith. How could it be if it used non-literal stories and wouldn’t say so?

An opinion is a view that does not really matter that much for it is open to dispute and is only a little better than a guess. To turn faith into opinion is to make a shipwreck of the Christian faith and is a recipe for confusion and chaos.

Though Genesis says that God made Eve as a companion for Adam, it does not follow that she was Adam’s wife from her creation. Perhaps they were to grow together. It cannot be argued that the story of Eve being made from Adam has something to say about marriage.

Stannard claims that Adam and Eve were sent by God into the Garden of Eden not “to laze about and have a good time. They were put there to till the soil and look after the garden” (page 17). This is said to have a lesson for us: “That we are not on the Earth to exploit it” (page 17). First, we are not in the Garden of Eden. Second, Adam and Eve’s idea of a good time might have been looking after the garden. Third, Adam and Eve looking after the garden might have been a hobby when they got fed up with being lazy. Stannard is just inventing the alleged lessons. If God or the Bible author were good teachers they would not leave us having to depend on the likes of Stannard to think it all out for us!