By: Shafer Parker, FBB Contributor

Way, way back, when I was a young pastor serving my first church in the deep piney woods just north of Houston, Texas, I came across a brand-new book by William Lane Craig (WLC) entitled The Son Rises: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. I couldn’t afford it, but I bought it anyway and it became the beginning point for my lifelong fascination with apologetics. I include some of its proofs for the resurrection in sermons and talks to this day.[1] But there was more in that little book (156 pages) than a defense of the empty tomb. WLC taught me that it was not enough to merely appreciate the Bible as God’s Word, but that I should learn to see the Christian worldview presented therein. He helped me understand how this worldview, almost more than anything else, should then be used to help shape the interpretation of individual passages.

WLC will forever inhabit a place of respect and appreciation in my heart. But that only serves to sharpen the pain of what I write next. His latest book, In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.), is a huge disappointment. Why? Because it demonstrates over and over that every time there is an apparent conflict between modern science and the clear teaching of Scripture, WLC goes with modern science—even to the point of calling Christian theologian Donald Carson “naïve” for refusing to agree with him. WLC may believe he is still defending a Christian worldview, but the view he presents in Quest is a shrunken little thing, not nearly robust enough to persuade the world’s nations to own Christ as Lord “lest he be angry, and [they] perish in the way” (Ps. 2:12).

Before we look further into the book, we need to think about why WLC wrote Quest in the first place. Indeed, why should he wrestle with the question of Adam’s historicity? No evolutionist believes humanity began with the special creation of the first man, and most theistic evolutionists—people who believe God used Darwinian evolution to create—have also declared they see neither the need nor the possibility of any such thing. But WLC is both an evolutionist and in some ways a Bible believer, thus his quest to reconcile the two.

The reason Adam’s existence is crucial to the Christian faith is found in the New Testament, where the first man is not only declared by our Lord to be historical (compare Mat. 19:4-6 with Gen. 2:24) but presented as the product of God’s special creation (Gen. 2:7), and the head of the entire human race. In Romans 5:12-21, Paul presents Adam as not only the first human being, but also as the representative party to a covenant God established with him and all his descendants. Theologian G. N. M. Collins writes: “As the natural head, [Adam] stood in a federal (foedus, Latin “covenant”) relationship to all posterity. His obedience, had it been maintained, would have transmitted an entail of blessedness to them (all of Adam’s descendants); his disobedience involved them with him in the curse which God pronounced upon the transgressors of his law.”

Paul puts it this way in Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—“

As you can see, Paul breaks the sentence in an awkward place to chase a parenthetical point, but his meaning is clear. When Adam ate the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:6-7) he sinned against God’s direct commandment, and as the human race’s covenant representative he acted on our behalf in such a way that his sin became legally and effectively our sin. To prove that Adam’s sin was counted as our sin, Paul notes that the death Adam brought upon himself then passed to all human beings. Why do infants die? Not because they have themselves broken God’s law, but because they are held guilty of sin in Adam. Why do people die who have never heard of Adam and who know nothing about the Bible? Again, because in God’s plan they are legally guilty of Adam’s sin, and they suffer the same penalty God had promised Adam for his sin (Gen. 2:17).

This, of course, is not the whole story. Paul goes on to explain that just as Adam brought condemnation and death upon all his descendants, so Jesus, the second Adam, provides forgiveness and eternal life to all who belong to him. Paul explains this in Romans 5:17, “For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.” Collins summarizes this teaching: “The first Adam was the federal head of the race under the covenant of works; the second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the federal head of all believers under the covenant of grace.”

Two conclusions must be noted: (1) before anyone quibbles that it isn’t “fair” that every human be condemned in Adam, remember that it is no more “fair” that gross sinners (do you deny you are a gross sinner?) should be forgiven and redeemed on the basis of someone else’s righteousness, and (2) for this line of reasoning to mean anything it is necessary for Adam to be as real an historical figure as Jesus was. In fact, there is a third conclusion to note; this so-called “federal (representative) theology” is as old as the New Testament and has been considered part of orthodox Christianity from earliest days. As Collins concludes, “A real imputation of the righteousness of Christ as federal head of his people requires a real imputation of the guilt of Adam to his posterity.” Mainstream Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed Protestantism) has always affirmed this basic Biblical truth.

And therein lies the problem facing WLC in Quest. To maintain his reputation as a Christian apologist, he is almost forced to express belief in a historical Adam, but as a thoroughgoing evolutionist, he struggles to fit Adam into his Darwinian worldview. This conundrum, by the way, is not unique to WLC. It is shared to varying degrees by a surprising number of supposedly conservative Christian theologians and apologists, not to mention the pastors who study under them.

To return to the narrative, in WLC’s attempt to get around the plain meaning of the text in Genesis 1-11 he makes two moves. First, he embraces the 19th-century Graf-Wellhausen documentary hypothesis, which assumes that Genesis, along with the rest of the Pentateuch, was cobbled together in the last centuries before the birth of Christ from stories found in various ancient Near East (Middle Eastern) tablets. The Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis applied evolutionary ideas to religion in much the same way Darwin applied them to biology, thus relegating the earliest books of the Bible to little more than efforts on the part of primitive people to explain their own existence. 

This approach allows WLC to choose which parts of Genesis he wishes to believe as well as which parts he can reject as “fantastic” and “mythological.” His list of rejections is long, including the creation of the world over six consecutive days, the vegetarianism that characterized all animal life before Adam’s fall (Gen. 1:29-30), the serpent who tempted our first fore-parents, the trees of life, and the knowledge of good and evil, the rivers that flowed from Eden, the cherubim, the long lifespans of the ante-diluvian world, the worldwide flood, the table of nations (Gen. 10), and the Tower of Babel.

Check out our Friendlies!

*Click the image to go to their site.

Having freed himself from the constraints of the Biblical text, WLC then embraces evolution and its related themes. Here’s how he puts it: “As creation scientists themselves recognize, this puts a literal interpretation of Gen 1-11 into massive conflict with modern science, history, and linguistics.” Rather than grapple with the idea that Darwin et al may be wrong, he goes on to list the supposedly insurmountable problems creationists face, including too little time for such things as dinosaur evolution, the post-flood spread of the animals to the furthest reaches of the globe, and supposed problems with post-flood plate tectonics, all of which he makes worse by misrepresenting what leading creationists teach. “Truly,” he suggests, “young earth creationists are living in a different universe than the rest of us.” He concludes his dismissal of the Biblical text by first declaring his faith in God’s power to work miracles (his way of proving he remains an orthodox Christian) but admits that he must still reject Genesis for the “non-miraculous features of the story that, if taken literally, are palpably false.”

The irony of the title given to Quest’s third section completely escapes WLC. “Scientific Evidence and the Historical Adam.” Somehow, he fails to see that by rejecting Genesis and embracing evolution he has rejected the inspired history of the Old Testament (affirmed repeatedly throughout the New Testament) and replaced it with the unprovable speculations of materialistic science. Yet, it is this that he calls “history,” and it is in this arena that he seeks for some semblance of a human being (two, actually, a man and a woman) who, out of many millions of other proto human beings, could conceivably have been the first parents of the single race that now comprises today’s homo sapiens.

I won’t bore you with the details of his search for just the right bone structure at just the right time (approximately 750,000 years ago) to enable Adam and Eve to be “plausibly identified as members of Homo heidelbergensis and as the founding pair at the root of all human species.” (He is fixated on finding a big-enough skull to indicate its owner had the brain power to be human.) But this is too general. It is important to know exactly what WLC is looking for, and what he thinks he has found.

So we may envision . . . an initial population of, say, five thousand hominins, animals that are in many respects like human beings but that lack the capacity for rational thought. Out of this population, God selects two and furnishes them with intellects by renovating their brains and endowing them with rational souls. Only they are therefore truly human. At some point they become aware of God’s moral requirements, which renders them responsible moral agents. Unfortunately, they misuse their free will by choosing to commit a (the original) sin or transgression, thereby becoming morally guilty before God and alienating themselves from God, though not from the offer of God’s love and forgiveness. As we have seen from our study of Gen 3, 1 Cor 15, and Rom 5, Adam was thus responsible for introducing spiritual, but not physical, death into the human race, since as biological organisms Adam and Eve were naturally mortal. (Emphasis added)

WLC’s model cannot identify what original sin might have been, since he emphatically rejects the idea of a historical tree of the knowledge of good and evil early in his book. Nor does he believe Adam and Eve lived in a special garden, or that our fore-parents ever had meaningful conversations with their Creator. Quite the opposite; to WLC this first couple were a product of “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Death—the killing of game, the killing of enemies, etc.—was a part of their daily lives, and the idea of rejoicing in the special nature of their relation (“bone of my bone . . . taken out of man,” Gen. 2:23) is simply not to be imagined.

It is with some sadness that one reads WLC’s final conclusion: “Given the incompleteness of the data and the provisionality of science, the quest of the historical Adam will doubtless never be concluded in our lifetime—or anyone’s lifetime, for that matter.” Nevertheless, he believes he has “managed to narrow the window of opportunity considerably as to Adam’s place in history.” The first man, he says, “plausibly lived sometime between around 1,000,000 years ago to 750,000 years ago,” a conclusion he argues is “consistent with the evidence of population genetics.” In other words, after spending the first half of the book claiming Genesis 1-11 attempts to incorporate mythological ideas into what he calls “primordial” human history, he then spends the second half of the book developing an argument for some kind of half-ape Adam living in even earlier mists of deep time. At least he has the grace to realize he still hasn’t found what he was looking for.

Let me finish with one or two more thoughts. First, I am surprised that WLC, although anxious to examine all the premises that underlie a Biblical view of Adam, and apparently unafraid to reject anything that doesn’t fit within his preconceptions, shows little or no interest in examining the underlying premises of modern evolutionary science. The first is forced to prove itself each step of the way; the second he seems to accept as “proven” (his word).

It’s also obvious that WLC’s idea of proto-humans gradually acquiring abstract thought, as well as moving from grunts and cries to real language is exactly the opposite of what is taught in the Bible. In the Bible, Adam’s first communication was with God, his second with his wife, but WLC denies that such a thing could have happened. He believes about language and intelligence what he believes about biology; they both gradually evolved from simple to complex so that just as a germ evolved into a man, so the germ of moral responsibility eventually evolved into the Ten Commandments.

Finally, it seems to me that the central fallacy in WLC’s philosophy is his assumption that everything else comes before the Bible. Where there is disagreement between the Bible and modern geology, biology, psychology, linguistics, history, etc., the Bible must humbly allow itself to be corrected by those who are smarter and better informed than Moses, or in some cases, even Jesus.  As for Genesis, he believes the Ancient Near Eastern literature of Sumer and Babylon comes first, leaving Genesis a hodge-podge of selected myths from earlier peoples. It never seems to occur to him that Genesis could possibly be the corrective so desperately needed in the ancient, pagan world, just as it never occurs to him that in a general way a truly Biblical worldview provides actual answers for what to him remain questions.

The heart of the Christian understanding of human history is that a real God created two humans (male and female) in his image, and privileged them to live in a real paradise. That paradise was lost when the first couple chose to disregard God’s good plan. But because of God’s grace, He, in the person of His Son Jesus, was willing to take humanity’s punishment for their disobedience and restore that lost paradise, reconciling Himself with His creation. If WLC truly wanted to find Adam, he should have first researched the need for the death and resurrection of Christ.

[1] The Son Rises is still in print. If you live in Calgary, you can order it through Better Books and Bibles on 16th Avenue (www.betterbooksandbibles.com). If you live elsewhere, you can find it at Amazon.ca, either in hardcover or on Kindle.