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There's a large contingent of a minority of Evangelical Protestants who want to feel scientific exploration and discovery is done in good faith while also wanting to believe the Scripture, as currently received and understood (39 "books" of O.T., 27 "books" of N.T., written by diverse authors over more than a millenium), is what Almighty wanted us to have, and that it represents the spiritual truth as we should understand it ... how literal/symbolic/allegorical that Scripture might be is hard to determine. So, this contingent usually is berated in religious forums ("No, the first two or three chapters in Genesis are 'historical narrative', heretic! ... BTW, here are the mental gymnastics for addressing inconsistencies in the two creation narratives [0]") or secular forums ("The Old Testament is a collection of inconsistent myths with no value in historical interpretation! There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus! The New Testament passages weren't written till the year 300!"). But ... we (of this contingent) still want to meld the scientific and scriptural views, and we aren't too proud to be monkeys. For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point, while evolution must also hold. There perhaps aren't many ways of reconciling these, so it's a struggle. The best I can reconcile is that "God made humankind from the dust of the earth" is the beautiful hack of evolution, and the Almighty chose, during one code review, from among candidate resulting species, his version 1.0 of the physical substrate of humankind, and "breathed the breath of life into [them]" to make them spiritually conscious. Then Garden-of-Eden, Tree-of-Life-vs-Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil, Partaking-of-the-Forbidden-Fruit, and we get to humankind's current reality. I look forward to seeing how wrong or right I am. [0] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/do-... EDIT: mention the Exodus |
I’m surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine melding scientific and scriptural views without having any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be literal.