population would never dip down to
a single couple.
I find proposition number 5 above
to be particularly telling. Swamidass is
against any appeal to divine fiat, except
for the miracle at the core of his hypothe-
sis. That this is not science is further
evidenced when Swamidass explains
why we will never find any evidence of
Adam and Eve (p. 79):
Paradoxically, Adam and Eve could
have been created from the dust and a
rib, without parents, and at the same
time we all could also share common
ancestry with the great apes. These two
facts are not in conflict. There is no evi-
dence against the de novocreation of
Adam. Our genomes would appear as if
we shared ancestry with the great apes,
because we do. This evidence would
not imply God was deceitful, because
genomes would record the true story of
everyone outside the Garden. The ge-
netic evidence that we descend from
Adam and Eve, however, would be lost
long ago. For this reason, there is no ge-
netic evidence for or against the de novo
creation of Adam and Eve.So, there’s no evidence against the cre-
ation of Adam from dust and Eve from
his rib. However, there’s also no evi-
dence for this divine fiat. Ergo, there’s
no evidence, period. There being no ev-
idence of this miraculous creation this
hypothesis has all the substance and
sustenance of cotton candy.
If there’s no scientific evidence of
any difference between the evolved hu-
mans and the miraculously created
Adam and Eve, in what way were they
different? Here Swamidass invokes a
special definition of what it means to be
human: Adam and Eve were, in addition
to being biologically human, textual
human beings; i.e., they were mentioned
in the scriptures (p. 134). Swamidass
uses this difference to explain the contra-
dictions between the two creation stories
in Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis 1, human
beings are created as male and female
(Gen. 1:26-28). In Genesis 2, God first
makes Adam out of dust, then creates
all the animals, then makes Eve out of
Adam’s rib. Swamidass asserts that Gene-
sis 1 refers to the evolved humans out-
side the garden, while Genesis 2 tells of
the creation of Adam and Eve (pp. 135
and 140). Ergo, there’s really no conflict
between the two. This is neat, pat and
completely untestable. The author also
states that Genesis 4 suggests that there
were other people outside the garden (p.
136), answering the question of where
Cain got his wife, since he and Abel were
the only two children of Adam and Eve.
This vague hint of those evolved
humans would seem to be rather thin
scriptural evidence of the evolved hu-
mans. However, Swamidass invokes an-
other group of humans as the humans
created by God through evolution,
namely the Nephilim. In the King James
version of the account of this people, the
Nephilim are referred to as giants (Gen.
6:1-4, bracketed material added):
And it came to pass, when men began
to multiply on the face of the earth, and
daughters were born unto them, that
the sons of God saw the daughters of
men, that they were fair and they took
them wives of all which they chose.
And the LORD said, “My spirit will not
always strive with man, for he is also
flesh; yet his days shall be a hundred
and twenty years.” There were giants
[Nephilim] in the earth in those days
and also after that, when the sons of
God came in unto the daughters of
men, and they bare children unto
them; the same became mighty men
which were of old, men of renown.
Swamidass asserts that the Nephilim
were the offspring of the children of
Adam and Eve with those of the evolved
humans (pp. 144, 145). This is a variation
on what was known as the Sethite The-
ory, which emerged in both Christianity
and Judaism in the second century CE.
The “sons of God” are elsewhere in the
Bible understood to refer to angels, as in
the Book of Job when God speaks of how
he laid the foundations of the earth, and
(Job 38:7), “when the morning stars sang
together and all the sons of God shouted
for joy.” However, angels having sex with
human women, upon whom they sired,
“mighty men which were of old, men of
renown,” was too close for comfort topagan mythology in which gods sired he-
roes—such as Heracles and Perseus, both
sons of Zeus—on mortal women. Thus,
early Christians and rabbinic Jews inter-
preted the “sons of God” in Genesis 4
as referring to the godly line of Seth, the
third son of Adam and Eve, and the
“daughters of men” as seductive hussies
of the ungodly line of Cain.
Swamidass makes the “sons of God”
into descendants of Adam and Eve, the
daughters of men as descendants of the
evolved humans from outside the Garden
of Eden. Since the material on the
Nephilim is scripturally miniscule and
the interpretation of the Nephilim as any-
thing other than descendants of angels
and mortal women, even scriptural sup-
port for Swamidass’s hypothesis is thin.
Considering that the scientific evi-
dence for the miraculous creation of
Adam and Eve doesn’t exist and scrip-
tural support for it is thin at best, one
wonders what reason Swamidass could
have for insisting that Adam and Eve
were real people. The answer to this
question lies in the Christian doctrine of
Original Sin. The fall of man, in Jewish
terms, is how the human race lost im-
mortality. As such, the myth of Adam
and Eve eating the forbidden fruit is one
form of a myth common to all ancient
peoples, the myth of why we die. In all
forms of this myth human beings as orig-
inally created were, at least potentially,
immortal. So, there had to be a specific
reason why death came into the world.
The Christian reworking of the myth was
that not only were humans doomed to
die, but were born in a sinful state, inher-
iting Adam’s sin by way of biological
descent. Thus, unless saved through
Christ’s substitutiary atonement—him
dying on the cross in our place, then ris-
ing from the dead—humans are damned.
The importance for Swamidass of all of
us being descendants of Adam and Eve,
through interbreeding with evolved hu-
mans, is that they conferred on us all
Original Sin. Swamidass’s Adam and Eve
hypothesis, then, is a theological argu-
ment, not a scientific one.
Swamidass’s attempt to reconcile the
creation of Adam out of dust and Eve out
of Adam’s rib with human evolution andvolume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 5 5