For the Christian evolutionist:
Ok so if we are not to take Adam and Eve literally, then that means we can discredit all their descendants.
Erm....
Discredit meaning question the existence of, sorry I probably could of found a better word to use.
Better.
Firstly, I don't think it follows that you can question the existence of individuals who descended from Adam and Eve. There's probably no records of your great-great-great-great-great (times....e.g. 200) grandfather. Does that mean you don't exist and the things you've done with your life didn't happen? While ancestry is somewhat important, ultimately it doesn't define the actions of your life. I realise there were a couple of prophecies that Jesus need to fulfil that involved genealogy - but if He was not of the house of David, He would still have been the Messiah, fully God, fully man, and would still have saved us.
It's also worth bearing in mind in some translations the genealogy of Jesus is written as "supposed." That word makes me wonder how precise the genealogies were to begin with.
Something else worth thinking about is - so what if one particular person didn't exist in the lines we know? Do you think that would stop God? I'm sure whatever lineage arose, his will would be done.
Which means Adam/Eve through Noah were all mythical, then Noah to lets say Jesus were all mythical? If this is true, then wouldn't that be like saying the entire Bible is nothing more than a 66 Book fable?
Well, assuming for the time being that this is a reasonable statement - it depends largely on the individual involved. Regarding Adam and Eve, I find it exceedingly unlikely that they were the SOLE ancestors of the rest of mankind, and this would have been during a comparatively unadvanced time in history, so contemporary records would be thin on the ground.
They carry a somewhat bigger burden of proof than, say, Moses - who was, for some part of his life, a member of the royal family in Egypt, which was a much more advanced civilisation who kept good records. His extraordinary events were on a much smaller scale, in an empirical sense (i.e., him and his wife weren't spawning all of mankind from just the two of them).
To simply say, well Adam and Eve might not have existed, therefore they all mightn't, neglects many additional factors, such as the state of civilisation in which they lived, which would alter the chances of additional pieces of evidence for different individuals surviving to today.
But this is somewhat of an intellectual argument - I personally don't go through historical data to crossreference the Bible myself, although I'm sure it would be a good thing to do. The thing is, most individuals in the Bible aren't claimed to have had such far reaching empirical effects quite like Adam and Eve. Spawning a whole civilisation from just two people simply isn't feasible. Whereas most other people in the Bible don't have those kind of claims made about them. So it's simply a case of them being more plausible to me.
So who exactly would of been the first human (i.e. evolved monkey) to have a conversation with God?
It could well have been Adam and Eve. They may not have been the only first humans - but they could have been the first to encounter Him.
This is where I guess I get confused, you say "of course they were decendants, just not of Adam and Eve's". Genesis clearly states they are the decendants of Adam and Eve. So without Adam and Eve, they could not have existed.
Or...maybe it was just one "clerical" error in one part of the genealogy and the rest is fine?
It is, of course entirely possible that the lineage is accurate all the way through. However, as regards evolution then, the problem with Adam and Eve is simply the concept of a population of ONLY two individuals speciating, and then having ONLY those two creating a vast network of descendants. It's somewhat more plausible if there were others human that existed too.
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