Evangelical Scientists Debate Creation Story

Hugh Pickens writes "Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe humanity descend from Adam and Eve, but NPR reports that evangelical scientists are now saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account and that it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans. 'That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years so not likely at all,' says biologist Dennis Venema, a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. 'You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence.' Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century and say it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."

Comments

Re:So what faith are they reconciling, exactly?

[betterunixthanunix]

Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't?

The modern view of the bible is that it is not a textbook, that it does not contain "facts," and that it should be interpreted as a metaphor. Some people disagree and insist that we should go back to believing that the bible is 100% factual, but those people are idiots who don't understand the history of their own religion.

I think these people are nothing more than deep-cover atheists.

Only under the simplest definition of an atheist: someone who does not believe that any deities exist. The modern atheist movement tends to be composed largely of people who reject religion all together, because they believe that if there are no deities there is no point to anything else in the religion. It seems clear that the people described in TFA do not fall into the category of people who reject religion entirely, and I would personally doubt that they have given up their faith in the Christian god. If I had to guess, I would say that they probably believe that the bible was written by humans, and that human language could not possibly describe their deity or his (their? I never understood the trinity) work.