Category Archives: Adam

And so we come to the last model for a historic Adam listed by population geneticist David L Wilcox in his ASA talk this year. Symbolic Head – Adam was a character in a story told to illustrate the human dilemma – we are sinners for some reason or other. But the story does not represent the origin of that state, only its nature as rebellion against God.

David L Wilcox’s penultimate model for Adam is this: Experimental Head – Sin was already there, but we don’t know how – that’s why the garden was needed, the perfect environment. Adam was the experimental proof of the human condition – he showed we humans are all sinners by nature – that it is not environmental.

Continuing my series on the various models for a historical Adam listed by David L Wilcox we come to: Cultural Head – Adam was the appointed race representative in the garden. He sinned. Sin passed on from Adam to all other people then (and now) alive by communication between people – especially in families. Human society suffered a gradual transformation as sin spread like an infectious disease.

As a preliminary to this series about the possible scenarios to explain the Genesis account, which I listed in my previous post, I want to remind us of the biblical data to be accommodated, and its significance to theology. It’s easy to follow a hunch to a theory without considering this adequately.

I’ve expressed my appreciation before (here, here and here for example) of population geneticist David L Wilcox in his thoroughly orthodox integration of standard evolutionary theory with historic faith. Most recently I noted that James Stump at BioLogos flatly contradicted his statement that theistic evolution, by definition, meant guidance by God. Well, now I’ve stumbled upon the notes he made for a talk for ASA this year called Updating our Genetic Prehistory which has given me some ideas for a useful new series on Adam.

Well, the BioLogos thread to which I pointed two days ago has been abandoned by the questioners with, predictably, no reply from the hosts. The same conversation passed to another hopeful thread, a re-post of an old call to Evangelicals to engage courageously in rethinking their comfortable assumptions etc. Unfortunately nobody has been on hand to dialogue with those who did think, and also posted. Poster hanan-d suggested sympathetically (and seriously) that the silence from BioLogos staff is due to their sense of spiritual doubt from cognitive dissonance – they want to retain their faith in God as Creator, but the science suggests blind chance as the cause of living … Continue reading →