Why Do Many People Still Believe that Adam and Eve Were Real?
And why it really matters a lot.
According to dozens of polls taken by Gallup from 1982 to 2014, the number of Americans who believe that the earth and human beings were created within the last 10,000 years has remained above 40%. 56% believe that Adam and Eve were literal real people and 51% believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and contains no errors.
In another survey, 73% of pastors said that evolution was not involved in creating humans while 82% of pastors believed that Adam and Eve were literal people. Only 1% of those who attend church at least once a week believe in evolution by natural selection without God.
The very influential and fundamentalist Christian publication Christianity Today, which has connections with Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, published a bombshell in their June 2011 issue. Its cover is seen below.
In short, this issue expressly concedes that the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding evolution can no longer be denied. However, it goes on to say that since the Bible is the perfect word of God, our understanding of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve must be reinterpreted. It issued a plea to Christian scholars and theologians to develop an updated interpretation of that account as soon as possible. It addressed the obvious problem that since Paul explained that the doctrine of God’s salvation was based upon Jesus being the “second Adam” that delivered us from the “fall” of the first Adam, the entire foundation and basis for Christianity was at stake.
It seems that such an in-depth and intellectual article was either not understood or just discarded by most Christians as being too inconvenient.
Albert Mohler, the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, correctly summed it up in an interview with NPR: “Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul’s description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament.” In the same NPR article, Fazale Rana, Vice President of the evangelical think tank Reasons to Believe, after conceding that “small details of Scripture could be wrong,” said “But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you’ve got a problem.” Nothing was said, however, about another big problem regarding the fact that the New Testament, in Luke 3, traces the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam.
The same disregard is also seen with the books, articles, and speeches by Dr. Francis Collins. Dr. Collins is not only the current director of the National Institute of Health working in the fight against Covid-19, but was also the lead scientist that successfully completed the Human Genome Project in 2003. That project has resulted in an untold number of medical and other advances that greatly benefit millions of individuals. Ten of the benefits are outlined here.
Dr. Collins, a professing Christian, makes it clear that the evidence shows that “all members of the human species descended from a common set of founders, approximately 10,000 in number, who lived about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago.” (page 126 of his book entitled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.) He affirms that life evolved very slowly, having started with a simple single-celled organism a couple billion years ago. That, of course, would make the words found in I Corinthians 15:21 entirely false (“for since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead”); not only did death occur long before humans, but 99% of all the species were already extinct. That is a lot of painful death.
Let us first ask if it really matters what someone believes. Obviously, people have the right to believe anything they want, including that the earth is flat, that man never walked on the moon, or injecting bleach in your veins will prevent Covid-19.
However, the right to believe, or claim you believe, does not allow us to injure others. The Bible teaches that one should stone a disobedient child to death, yet that is not a defense in court for murder. Withholding medicine from a sick child believing God will heal them has landed many parents in prison. Religious beliefs also do not allow you to refuse to pay taxes, capture slaves from neighboring countries, nor marry a 12-year-old bride…even if God commands you to. The list is endless of harmful religious beliefs that are not permitted by most civilized societies to be carried out in action.
Given the millions of fossils that clearly show the record of evolution, along with the remarkable astronomical discoveries regarding how all the stars are moving away in every direction (supporting the big bang theory) and the things DNA clearly teaches us about basic heredity — to believe that Adam and Eve were real people created less than 10,000 years ago is more absurd by several orders of magnitudes than for the early Greeks to have believed in Zeus or any of their other gods.
The Greeks had no science to explain how lightning bolts developed and no Google to do the least bit of fact-checking. Believing that the earth was flat or that the sun orbited the earth was reasonable and appeared quite obvious, as was the belief that any event that they did not understand, such as eclipses, earthquakes and floods, or how the sun rose and set every day, must have been caused by one of the gods. We should know better now.
Despite the hundreds of blatant contradictions contained in the Bible and the many incidents it not only condoned, but also advocated, including slavery, genocide, murder and rape to name just a few, how is it possible that educated people can still claim that a perfect and holy God inspired it?
The lack of evidence for any religion or god is similar for all the world’s religions and gods…most of whom have been discarded, given the advanced knowledge of science and history that the human race continues to discover and learn about. With very few exceptions, the believers of those thousands of gods based their belief upon their parents and/or culture’s traditions and example. It is amazing how easy it is for some people to not realize the random luck or chance that they were born at the right time in history and in the right location and family to have inherited the knowledge of the only right religion or god, while the untold billions of the rest of humanity were just left out.
Even worse, they know nothing at all about most of the gods that billions of other people worship and have worshiped. Yet, somehow, they have concluded they were the lucky ones. Belief in anything without solid evidence is, by definition, blind faith. The fact is, if any religious person really thinks hard about what and why they believe, the best they can hope for is uncertainty.
So just what is the danger in believing things that lack any concrete evidence? The danger is it often destroys or significantly limits a person’s ability to critically think. When someone presumes that they already have the truth, any evidence to the contrary is easily dismissed… regardless of how strong and obvious that evidence may be. It is sort of like training your brain to feed on emotions and wishful thinking while starving its need for rational logic. However it happens, it seems like one part of the brain gets stronger while another part gets weaker.
The first of two examples showing just how dangerous this is can be found in a detailed article in August 2020 by the 120-year-old world-renowned MIT Technology Review. It explains why absurd conspiracy theories such as QAnon are finding such success preying on Churchgoers. All they have to do is include in their propaganda anything that supports Trump, opposes abortion or suggests a concern for children being sexually abused, and their entire message about white nationalism, anti-Semitism and other extreme views are immediately spread through the internet like a forest fire. We are not talking about a mere hundred followers or posts; we are talking in the millions.
It has been repeatedly shown that conspiracies like QAnon are quickly believed by those already holding extreme religious and political beliefs without one iota of fact-checking. QAnon is a new cult-like phenomenon that started in the Trump era. One of the earliest posts stated that liberal democrats, prominent Jewish businessmen, along with the “crooked establishment” media were running a Satan-worshiping pedophile child-sex ring, with its headquarters being the Comet Ping Pong, a D.C. pizzeria, apparently a place where Hillary Clinton and John Podesta would sometimes meet. The followers often employ numerology and cryptic symbols and determined that Hillary Clinton used “cheese pizza” as code for child pornography. Again, we are not talking about a mere hundred followers or posts; we are talking in the millions.
Among other absurdities, they advocate that Covid-19 is a hoax and that Trump was sent by God to destroy this child sex ring, which they claim is now worldwide. These social media posts convinced many followers that Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, and Chrissy Teigen worked closely with Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to recruit young girls for sex.
When QAnon alleged that Wayfair Furniture stores’ high-priced cabinets were so expensive because they were trafficking children in them, thousands of followers posted it. Scores of national news reporters investigated the claims and Polaris, a national hotline for exploited children, was flooded with hundreds of calls. Many more details and examples can be found here.
NBC reports there are millions of QAnon followers on Facebook alone. When religion or other extreme ideology has robbed a person of the ability to critically think, there seems to be nothing that they are incapable of believing. It should be noted that Trump has tweeted hundreds of times to QAnon posts and they in turn constantly attack and slander his opponents and the media…non-stop and with fire. Even Michael Flynn has publicly sworn an oath to them.
Millions of Christians actively support and forward these false links to everyone they possibly can. QAnon is just one of a dozen groups that are floating debunked and fraudulent conspiracies through the internet. Since most of them are so easy to debunk, it seems that the inability for so many to think critically may be a greater risk to our society than Covid-19. The FBI has classified QAnon as a domestic terror threat while Roger Stone, a major supporter of QAnon, recently called for Trump to declare martial law if he loses the election and to arrest Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and the Clintons.
Another dangerous result occurs when children are taught that they must believe something despite having no evidence (sometimes with the penalty of eternal damnation if they even doubt it). Often, any questions or indication of doubt are punished. That obviously has a powerful effect in preventing them from developing life’s necessary skill of critical thinking when making important decisions in life. To teach them that Adam and Eve were literal people is, in essence, instructing them to ignore and discard everything we now know about biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, archeology, ancient history and a wealth of other information and facts that have and will continue to advance the human race. It is literally teaching them that there is an alternate reality, and what they see is not really what they are seeing.
QAnon understands how easy it is to recruit and manipulate that type of person to spread their message to the masses, free of charge, just like religion has been doing forever.
While many, and maybe even most religious people this article is talking about are very sincere, most have never studied or considered “the other side” or did so with the overriding presumption that they already knew the truth. Zeus’ reign was over when science discovered that lightning bolts were really caused by the natural force of electromagnetism. Most of the other gods “died” a quiet death, one by one, as science presented the evidence that showed that the gods were just not doing the things their followers thought they were.
It is way past time for humanity to come to terms with the clear evidence proving, without a doubt, that Adam and Eve are nothing but a myth — just like Zeus, Ra, Apollo, Poseidon, Osiris, Aphrodite, Hera, Demeter and the many hundreds of other gods who were sincerely and fervently worshiped and honored with temples and sacrifices by millions of devotees who were certain they were worshiping a real god.
It is time to value truth and facts above everything else and not be driven and tossed by every wind of doctrine or baseless ideology.
