Dr. Deborah Haarsma (previously a professor at Calvin College, a
Christian college in Michigan) is the newest president of BioLogos (an
organization attempting to get the church to reject a literal Genesis).
She recently contributed to a series of articles on whether there really
was an historical Adam. Her article, “Historical Adam: Embracing the Questions,” does just that—it embraces questions and provides no answers. In fact, it sows more doubt and confusion than anything.
Haarsma accepts evolutionary ideas and mixes them with Scripture, a
view that is known as theistic evolution or evolutionary creation. After
listing a number of artifacts that evolutionary scientists have dated
as anywhere from 15,000 to 200,000 years old, Haarsma claims, “These
discoveries fly in the face of the conventional reading of Genesis, in
which Adam and Eve lived just 6,000 years ago in the Middle East and
were the progenitors of all humankind.”
Aside from the obvious problem that Dr. Haarsma relies on
evolutionary beliefs to substantiate her claim, she also has
misrepresented the “conventional reading” of the history in Genesis: we
have no idea where the Garden of Eden was located! So we cannot begin to
guess where Adam and Eve resided. You see, after the Flood, when Noah
and his family exited the Ark, they may have renamed many things with
names they were already familiar with. The Garden of Eden can’t be
located now because there are layers of dead things covering the land
that was buried during the Flood, not to mention that the land itself
would be completely rearranged (see A Catastrophic Breakup).
Since there was no death and suffering until sin entered the world, the
Garden couldn’t have been sitting on top of layers of dead creatures. Continue at Ken Ham
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