There wasn't a historical Adam and Eve, the story is mythical.
I think we are pretty close to seeing things the same way. Let me try to explain.
I agree that the story is mythical in the sense that if read literally, it doesn't describe events exactly as they happened.
There wasn't a historical Adam and Eve, ......But homo sapiens began (we'll never be able to put a finger on where and when) to conceive of deities.
Take, as a starting point, the standard story described by science. Now, we agree that in that story (in that actual history), at some point, transitional ape/humans got to the point of being able to conceive of deities (as the Cardinal said).
OK - what if, hypothetically, I called that first creature to conceive of deities, "Adam"? I don't have to put a finger on exactly when - I can say that whenever it happened, I'll call that person "Adam".
Now, in that situation, "Adam" was the first person to be able to rebel against God, right? And hence, no doubt, the first person to do so. Plus, what if I supposed that it was at that point that God gave this transitional human a soul? As the first being with a human soul, I could call this the first "human".
No deviation from the scientific history is needed in this construction. "Adam" is part of a population, yet is the first "human" - among a population of creatures that are biologically nearly identical, yet lack souls.
Doesn't that reconcile our positions?
It did help! Although, I still have trouble reconciling a literal Adam and Eve with TE.
Then I have not adequately explained it. As mentioned before, it is fully consistent with all we know from science, with all evidence, and with mainstream scientific views of human evolution. Let me try again (plus, read what I wrote above in this post).
Due to the fact that most scientists agree that there were simply no first human being. It was so gradual that there would not be a point in time, where we could say "aha! now it's a human."
The confusion is because we are using two different definitions of "human". The scientific one is: "the primate with
physical features indistinguishable from those members of
Homo sapiens alive today.".
The definition I'm using is stricter than that, for a specific reason. To understand that reason, imagine a big bucket of BBs & ice cold water. Now, imagine, one morning, that I slowly begin to heat that entire bucket. That evening, the water begins to boil.
Was there a first "hot" BB? Well, yes. After all, all the BBs in the boiling water are hot, and there were zero hot BBs in the morning. So whatever line we pick to define "hot", some BB had to cross that line before the others, since their temperatures are never exactly equal. If we pick that "hot" line to be 116.43929573F (or for simplicity, let's pick 100.0000000000 F), then in the morning a bunch of their temperatures might be:
33.485763 F
33.483354
33.484432
33.484318
33.485561
33.485629
Right? Then, by around 11:00 am, say, a sample of BBs gives:
99.86734 F
99.89623 F
99.88848 F
99.91822 F
99.90445 F
99.86989 F
You can see that sometime soon, one will cross the line of 100.00000, and when it does, by our arbitrary definition, it will be the first "hot" BB - even though there are thousands of BB's with very similar temperatures at that time.
God could well have seen similar advances in intelligence, and at some line that He chose, saw the first hominid to cross it. He could have, at that point divinely granted a soul. That first human was biologically almost identical to all others in his tribe - yet from a theological standpoint, he was different. He was Adam.
Thus "Adam" can be a real, historical person - without saying that anything in the Adam story is literally true (it's a myth - a story made to tell a deeper meaning).
So the definition for "human" I"m using here is: "the primate with a God-given soul". Thus, "Adam" is probably "human" by both definitions. The first soul likely was given to an anatomically modern human, though I don't know.
All the objections about "never being one human" only apply to the scientific definition, not to the theological definition. Since fossils don't tend to fossilize well, fossils can only tell us about when humans fit the scientific definition.
How would you address this?
I hope that addressed it. In short - I'm talking about the point at which God gave a transitional ape a soul - that's Adam, and that's when we became theologically human. That could have been 12,000 years ago, or 80,000 years ago, or whatever.
And also, what about all the other organisms that were on the same level of evolution as Adam and Eve, were they not humans? Or is it just that given they had no soul, they just died?
Nothing is ever at exactly "the same evolutionary level". In any population, there is variation, and some are a bit more evolved than others. They were not theologically human. Not being given a soul, yes, they just died.
Is that starting to make sense?
In Christ-
Papias
