Did Adam and Eve really exist? The answer is yes, but perhaps not in the way you think.
If we mean by this question: does Genesis chapter 2 recount a narrative of actual historical events,
as they happened: that the first man and woman were named Adam and Eve, that they
lived in a garden, and that they ate fruit from a forbidden tree? If these are the questions,
then I would answer: perhaps that is not how the text was intended to be read by the human author
of Genesis, and above all by God himself who inspired that sacred author. In other words,
perhaps this scriptural text wasn't intended to be received in the same way as we read a
contemporary narrative sequence of events, like was we find in a news story, or a history book.
Still, someone might then ask: well, are you saying that this is all just made up? Is it
mere myth or poetry? Is it just a story to tell us something about the human condition?
Are you saying that there were in fact no original first parents?
Or that we can't trace our lineage to an original couple who fell from grace?
The question is, at the end of the day, is there a real historical foundation for what we read
about Adam and Eve in the Bible? These questions call for a different answer – the Catholic faith
holds that God has revealed to us that we are all descendants of Adam, the name given
in Genesis for the first true human being. He was created in grace -- and, because he sinned,
we all inherit from him as his descendants a wounded and fallen human nature.
As we will explain in our next video, we don’t get this from a simplistic reading of Genesis
chapter 2. Many other texts in Scripture refer to our first parents and to their fall – especially
St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, where we learn that this is why the human race needed a savior,
and why God sent his son, Jesus Christ, to redeem us.
So while the book of Genesis isn’t claiming to hand on precisely WHEN our first parents lived,
or to give an eyewitness account of their sin, the Bible as a whole IS teaching us that the whole
human race has its origin in a first human being or an original couple, who really existed at some
point in the distant past. That is, this is truly an element of what God is revealing to us – and
it seems that God is not doing so to satisfy our curiosity about our history, but more importantly
so that we would understand his original plan for the human race, our first parents’ rejection of
that plan, and how he nonetheless has come to save us from the terrible consequences of that sin.
Does Genesis answer whether our first human parents had biological ancestors
who were merely animals, that is, who did not have rational and spiritual souls?
No, but neither does Genesis preclude us from thinking that this could have been the case.
Contemporary scientific research in the field of genetics has uncovered a tremendous
wealth of knowledge about the biological ancestry of the human race. For example,
we know with a very high degree of probability that homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals,
perhaps tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago.
But we need to be careful about how to interpret this scientific data. Because it is looking at
our genetic code, this genetic research cannot simply identify at what point a hominid animal
received the gift from God of an infused rational soul. Theologically speaking,
THAT is what Genesis is telling us about -- the true moment of the creation of human beings.
Likewise, we should be wary of identifying Adam and Eve with the most recent common ancestors
that science has discovered – like so-called Mitochondrial Eve, who lived perhaps 160,000
years ago, or so called Y-chromosomal Adam, who may have lived around 300,000 years ago.
In fact, current scientific techniques face important limits about what
they can discover about our past. For example, when genetic research reaches
a single common ancestor at each point in the genome, it has gone as far as it can go,
it is like a black hole in astrophysics, from which no information about deeper time can escape.
How then might we bring together what the Bible reveals and what recent scientific research
suggests? We might theorize that, a very long time ago, there could have been a population of
hominids—animals physically like human beings in many ways but lacking the light of reason;
and that, from this population, God might have brought forth
two new creatures, endowing them with rational souls – the first human beings.
Some scientists are skeptical of this kind of theory because they read the genetic evidence
to suggest that in our past there must have been a larger pool of ancestors than a single
original couple. But there are a variety of ways to reconcile this evidence with what is revealed
by Scripture. For example, is it possible that the new human beings, living in the midst of
non-rational hominids, had offspring with them, either voluntarily or involuntarily?
If it was by choice, that certainly would have been a terrible sin, but we know that human sin
entered very soon into the picture, and this is just one way to make sense of the data.
It would be compatible with what God has revealed in Scripture.
In any case, the genetic history reconstructed by scientists is
quite complex, and something like this could only have happened a long time ago. Still,
recent research cannot rule out the possibility that two genetic
parents of the human race might have lived together hundreds of thousands of years ago.
It's hard to untangle all of these possibilities,
but we can say that the scientific investigations of genetics and evolutionary biology do not
contradict or rule out the truths that we learn from divine revelation about our first parents.
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