[Mike] Do you think there was an actual garden of Eden?
[Craig] I am inclined to think so, yes. The description of the four rivers
can make sense I think, and it's entirely possible that this could have been a sort of
oasis of sorts that existed in the Persian gulf region. I just don't think that it was as recently
as 10,000 years ago, but much much further back, hundreds of thousands of years ago.
But geographically, it could have been there. [Mike] What about the two trees, the tree of life,
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit on it that Adam and Eve ate, and the snake
in the garden? What do you think about them? Are they real? I think that those are attempts to
express, in a figurative and imaginative way, the moral choices and culpability that man has before
God, and also then the sort of spiritual death that ensues, the alienation from God and the guilt
before God as a result of sin. So I think that those are central truths that are to be affirmed,
that are taught by the story of the Fall, and you don't need literal fruit hanging on trees
in order to see those lessons. [Mike] Well I can see that... I mean it's already started, but
for those statements you're going to catch more flack from evangelicals than a B-17 over Berlin.
[Craig] Well you know, I think it's ironic Mike, because I have seen
quite a number of evangelical Christians who in order to preserve the literalness
of the narrative are willing to give up the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve. They're
willing to treat Adam and Eve as a couple that lived just a few thousand years ago that were just
two people out of a wider population of thousands of individuals, and that what Genesis 1 to 11 is
about is this select couple and their descendants, and thereby they give up what I take to be
one of the central and most important theological teachings of Genesis, and that is the universal
progenitorship of Adam and Eve. That every human being who has lived on this planet
is a descendant of this primordial couple. And so I find it so peculiar that
in an effort to save literality, they sacrifice one of these central theological teachings of
Scripture which I think is just grossly misplaced theological priorities. [Mike] So all right let's
just go back then to these symbols or whatever you call them, these imaginative figures.
You're saying the two trees, the serpent in the garden, the temptation that was given to Eve and
then passed along to Adam, that that didn't really happen. So what do we do with the Fall of man in
that case? Because if those things aren't true, then it would seem to suggest that Adam did not
sin, Eve did not sin. If there was no sin there's no original sin, there's no original sin there's
no need for a savior. And where does that leave Christianity? [Craig] Oh my goodness, well now
you've made a number of connections there. I mean the doctrine of Original Sin is not essential to
Christianity; the Orthodox Church doesn't hold to it. All that's necessary for the need of Christ's
atoning death is the universality of sin, that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God. Christ didn't die for Adam's sin; he died for all of our sins, and that's preserved whether or
not you believe in Original Sin. But in fact as I just said a few moments ago, I want to preserve
the truth of the Fall, that in fact there was a first moral choice that was made by Adam and Eve,
by which they rebelled against God and became morally culpable before God and were spiritually
alienated from him, they died spiritually. And so I do see spiritual death and alienation
coming as a result of these first moral choices by Adam and Eve.