Denying Adam: Navigating Evolutionary Ideas and Biblical Truth

They affirmed Scripture’s teaching that the first humans were supernaturally created on the sixth literal day of history about 4,000 years before Christ. But that view of history came under attack about 200 years ago when atheist and deist geologists invented the idea of millions of years of earth history.1 The attack intensified with the book Descent of Man (1871), in which Charles Darwin contended that we evolved from apelike creatures.

Hoping to somehow marry the prevailing scientific theories with biblical teaching, theological liberals have followed the Darwinists. In recent years, a growing number of professing evangelicals are doubting or denying Adam and Eve’s existence or at least denying some of the details about Adam in Genesis. These evangelicals deny or redefine Adam as a way to make the evolutionary story and timeline fit with Scripture. But Adam isn’t an inconsequential character whose history in Genesis 1–5 can be changed based on the ideas and words of secular scientists and the compromising theologians who follow them. In fact, the very authority of the gospel depends on Adam’s existence as a real, historic human, the father of the human race who fell into sin just as Genesis describes.

Ironically, atheist Richard Bozarth offers exquisite reasoning for the foundational importance of Adam:

The whole justification of Jesus’ life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.2

But while prominent evangelical theologians continue devising compromising explanations to account for the first human, Scripture has settled the matter in both the Old and New Testaments. By contrasting the established Word of God with these novel views in the evangelical world, we can better reject false teaching when it arises.

Genesis Speaks

Genesis 1–11 is inerrant history, not poetry, historical fiction, or mythology.3 These chapters teach much about God, marriage, sin, morality, the gospel, and more, but those truths are rooted in accurate history. Therefore, we should take these chapters as literally as we do the accounts of the virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. So what do these chapters teach us about the origin of man and his relationship to the rest of creation?

According to Genesis 1:26–30, Adam and Eve were created on the sixth literal day of history and uniquely made in the image of God to rule over the rest of creation.

Genesis 2:7–25 tells us that Adam was created with the ability to understand and use spoken language. He had the intelligence and reasoning ability to name animals and discern that he was alone—the only human being—until God made Eve.

All evangelicals who deny some or all of the Genesis truths about Adam have ignored or superficially dealt with this verse.

The critical verse 2:7 says, “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” All evangelicals who deny some or all of the Genesis truths about Adam have ignored or superficially dealt with this verse.

It clearly says that God made the first male (Hebrew: אָדָם, ’adam) from the dust of the ground (אֲדָמָה, ’adamah), added the divine breath, and he became a “living creature” (חַיָּֽה נֶ֫פֶשׁׁׁ, nephesh chayyah).4 The same words, nephesh chayyah, describe sea creatures, flying creatures, and land animals in Genesis 1:20–21 and 24, 2:19, and 9:9, 12, and 15. They are all living creatures (though they are not made in the image of God as Adam, Eve, and all subsequent humans were made). This verse is impossible to harmonize with human evolution. God did not make a living creature by natural processes over millions of years and in some figurative sense “breathe” into that living creature so that it was changed into a human being. Adam was made literally and supernaturally from dust.

Verse 22 is likewise critical to note. Unlike Adam, the first woman, Eve, was made from a preexisting living creature (Adam). She too was not made by any natural process but rather by supernatural surgery.

Note, too, that Genesis 1–2 makes a clear distinction between how the first plants and animals and first two humans came into existence (by supernatural creation) and how all subsequent plants, animals, and people would come into existence (by natural procreation, “after their kind” from the seed, sperm, or egg within them).

Genesis 3 reveals many important truths. Eve was deceived by a talking serpent,5 and then Adam disobeyed God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This rebellion produced immediate spiritual death (v. 8) and precipitated God’s judgment in cursing the nonhuman creation (v. 14, 17–18) and initiating the physical death process in humans (v. 19).

God also gave the first promise of the coming Messiah, a descendant of Adam and Eve who would defeat Satan and save sinners (v. 15). Pointing to the fulfillment, God made coats of skin for them, implying the first blood sacrifice as a covering for sin (v. 21), a picture of what would come through the Lamb of God (Jesus) who gives forgiveness of sin. Then God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden to live in a fallen, cursed creation (v. 23).

Genesis 4 reveals more important truths about Adam’s children. Adam’s first son, Cain, murdered his second son, Abel. Cain then built a city, and six generations later, Adam’s descendants had developed mining, metallurgy, and musical instruments. These brief references tell us early humans were not ignorant and primitive.

In Genesis 5, we learn that Adam lived 930 years and had many sons and daughters who, like him, were made in the image of God.6 Genesis 5, 10, and 11 show that all the people from Adam to Noah to Abraham were equally historical. And since all humans are descended from Noah’s sons who survived the global flood (Genesis 10:32), all humans that have ever lived are descended from Adam. These unique genealogies give us chronological information to know that Adam was created about 2,000 years before Abraham. According to other Scriptures, Abraham lived about 2,000 years before Christ. Those years added together with the 2,000 years since Christ make the whole creation only a little more than 6,000 years old.7

The New Testament Speaks

Jesus and the New Testament writers confirm the literal interpretation of the Genesis account.

Quoting from Genesis 1–2 in Mark 10:1–9, Jesus affirmed that God created marriage and that Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation.8 In Romans 1:20, Paul likewise taught that “since the creation of the world” humans have seen the witness of creation to the existence and some attributes of God. Jesus and Paul were clearly young-earth creationists. And I have found that most old-earth proponents in the church have ignored these passages (and others) that reveal that, in the minds of Jesus and Paul, Adam was not created billions of years after the beginning.

Luke traces the genealogy of Jesus, the Son of God who had no biological father, through a line of equally historical men back to Adam, the son of God who had no biological parents (Luke 3:23–38).

Paul says the most about Adam, showing that he took the details of Genesis literally. He affirmed that Adam was the first man (1 Corinthians 15:45 and 47) and that Eve was made after, from, and for Adam (1 Corinthians 11:8–9; 1 Timothy 2:13). Eve was deceived by the serpent (1 Timothy 2:14; 2 Corinthians 11:3). And we are all blood relatives in the one human race, regardless of skin shades or ethnicity (Acts 17:26).

Jesus, the descendant of Adam, came as the “last Adam” to give spiritual life and ultimately resurrected physical life to all those who repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

Most importantly, Paul taught, Adam brought sin and physical and spiritual death into the human race. But Jesus, the descendant of Adam, came as the “last Adam” to give spiritual life and ultimately resurrected physical life to all those who repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord (Romans 5:12–21; 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, 42–50). The whole creation is now groaning in bondage to corruption because of the first Adam’s sin9 and is waiting to be set free from the curse at the second coming of the last Adam (Romans 8:18–25; cf. Acts 3:21; Revelation 22:3).

Deniers Speak

Even in the face of clear scriptural teaching, many professing evangelicals have accepted the idea that the world came into existence over millions of years. In addition to accepting geological evolution, a growing number of evangelicals are also accepting biological evolution, even human evolution, as fact. The bewildering variety of views arises from the starting assumption that some or all of the secular scientific majority’s view on human origins must be used to interpret Genesis. Their clever exegetical gymnastics to evade the plain reading of the text—and the orthodox Christian view for 2,000 years—is a marvel.

The following is merely a sample of the many professing evangelicals who are undermining God’s Word by advocating aberrant views of Adam as well as of creation, Noah’s flood, and the age of the creation.

Dr. Denis Lamoureux

Millions of years of God-designed processes

Dr. Denis Lamoureux is professor of science and religion at St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta. He believes that the whole universe, including humans, were made by God-designed natural processes over millions of years. In Lamoureux’s view, Jesus was just accommodating the prescientific, mythical (and therefore erroneous) beliefs of his listeners. Likewise, he says, Paul’s statements about Adam reflect the same wrong thinking.10

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Dr. Francis Collins

Genesis as symbolic, poetic allegory

Dr. Francis Collins is founder of BioLogos, former director of the National Institutes of Health (2009–2021), and arguably the most well-known promoter of theistic evolution. He believes that Genesis 2–3 is symbolic, poetic allegory since the scientific majority says modern humans came from about 10,000 ancestors over 100,000 years ago.11

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Dr. John Walton

Adam as archetype representing humanity

Dr. John Walton is a prolific author and professor emeritus of Old Testament at Wheaton College. Through his writings and teaching, he is widely influential in America and many other countries. He insists that we should interpret Genesis in the light of Ancient Near-Eastern (ANE) pagan myths about creation and the flood of Noah, such as those found in ancient Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt. He also accepts evolution. He says Adam was a real, historical man who may or may not have been the first man or the father of the human race but an archetype representing all of humanity.12 All the details about Adam and Eve’s origin are figurative because Genesis 1–2 is not about material origins but only about God giving function to preexisting material.

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Dr. Scot McKnight

Adam as archetypal not biological

Dr. Scot McKnight is professor of New Testament at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and an expert on the historical Jesus. He also has been influenced by Walton and ANE literature. He believes in human evolution and expresses his belief in a literary, genealogical, archetypal Adam, but not a historical, biological, genetic Adam.13

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Dr. Joshua Swamidass

Adam from supernatural selection within an evolved world

Dr. Joshua Swamidass is a computational biologist, physician, and an associate professor of laboratory and genomic medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. He is totally committed to evolution. In his very convoluted model, Adam and Eve were perhaps created supernaturally in an Edenic, paradise-like bubble within a world of death and suffering that evolved over billions of years. Adam sinned by directly violating God’s command. But untold thousands of pre-Adamic, mortal humans (not made in the image of God) outside the garden committed only moral “wrongdoings.” After expulsion from the garden, Adam and Eve’s descendants slowly (over many thousands of years) mixed with the preexisting population of humans that had evolved over millions of years from apelike creatures. Somehow all humans today are genealogically related to Adam and Eve but not genetically related to them.14

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Dr. William Lane Craig

Adam from divine mutation from apelike ancestors

Dr. William Lane Craig says Genesis 1–11 is mytho-history. He believes Adam was made about 750,000 years ago when a divinely orchestrated mutation in the genome of an evolved apelike hominid (one of thousands of Homo heidelbergensis) transformed that hominid into a fully human being.15

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Dr. C. John Collins

Adam from supernatural formation with accommodation for evolution

Dr. C. John Collins believes Adam and Eve were real, historical people “at the headwaters of mankind.” But he is “wary of being overly literalistic” (a term he never clearly defines) and avoids the biblical details about Adam and Eve, saying vaguely that “God acted specially (‘supernaturally’) to form” them. Therefore, he doubts that Genesis 2:7 is absolutely incompatible with some sort of evolutionary process, though he does reject the atheistic idea of “a merely natural process” to produce “our first human father.” He believes the fall was historical “in whatever form it took.” By avoiding many of the details of Genesis 1–11, he focuses on the “overarching story line” of Scripture (creation and redemption) and insists that “good thinking” about that story line “needs to start with Genesis 12:1–3.”16

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Dr. Hugh Ross

Adam from supernatural creation on an evolutionary timeline

Dr. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist and founder of Reasons to Believe. He believes that Adam and Eve were created supernaturally. But in accepting the big bang and a 13.8-billion-year age of the universe, he also follows the ever-changing evolutionary date for the first Homo sapiens. Consequently, his publications have increasing, contradictory, and biblically indefensible dates for Adam’s origin—up to 50,000–150,000 years ago.17

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Old-Earth Creationists

Many old-earth creationists have expressed their opposition to theistic evolution.18 In other words, they accept the big bang and billions of years of earth history, but they reject biological (and human) evolution. Sadly, however, as I have shown in previous articles regarding old-earth proponent Wayne Grudem,19 many of their objections against theistic evolution are also reasons the church should reject all old-earth views, such as the big bang and the claim of millions of years of earth history.

But while some old-earth creationists do not completely accept human evolution, their acceptance of select evolutionary claims causes them to deny some of the details about Adam and Eve’s origins and the fall, as discussed in the first part of this article.

The Final Word

Most importantly, Adam is critical to the gospel.

Rejecting a literal, historical Adam—or at least some of the details about him and Eve—undermines the authority of Scripture with enormous moral implications. Most importantly, Adam is critical to the gospel. The last Adam came to solve the problem caused by the first Adam, as literally described in Genesis. Evolution with its millions of years is a destructive myth, but God’s Word is true. The last Adam has the last word on the first Adam.

Editor’s note: Originally published as “The Last Word on the First Adam”