Doctrinal Adam & Eve and Genetic Adam & Eve

Many of those who believe that the Book of Genesis is divinely inspired also believe in evolution, and, in particular, in the descent of humankind from earlier species going all the way back to the unicellular. “God behind evolution” and “guided evolution” are popular ways of expressing their view. Most of these believers take the Adam and Eve story to be a myth, albeit a myth bearing important spiritual truth. Some, however, take Adam and Eve to be actual, particular persons, even though they had biological parents. How well does this sit with the science of human pre-history?

As I understand it, Catholic doctrine does not speak to the question of evolution, although recent popes have expressed confidence in it as "lay scientists". Still, the spiritual truth of Adam and Eve is a tenet of doctrine: there was an historical couple, the progenitors of us all, who were the first people on this planet in that they were the first creatures with immortal souls. This couple committed an actual historical act of disobedience to God that constituted original sin, prefiguring the relation of the our species to God. Salvation is possible for, and only for, the descendants of Adam and Eve. Some Protestants of a semi-fundamentalist caste hold similar views.

That there was a couple who were the progenitors of all living humans is not only consistent with, but required by, the theory of evolution. One such couple, whose time can be reasonably well approximated on the basis of current evidence, would be the parents of Mitochondrial Eve (the matrilineal ancestor of all living humans). They were homo sapiens, although perhaps noticeably different from us, of between one and two hundred thousand years ago. (The parents of Y Chromosome Adam are also our common ancestors, but they are probably farther back in time.)

If the couple of doctrinal importance, the spiritual Adam and Eve, were early homo sapiens, or even early “fully modern homo sapiens,” then their progeny co-existed with Neanderthals, who, not being the descendants of Adam and Eve, lacked souls according to the doctrine. As we know that there was some sexual contact between sapiens and Neanderthals. This makes it likely that there were Neanderthals that acquired souls. Perhaps a Neanderthal raiding party ambushed a small sapiens group, carrying off the women. According to the doctrine, their children, being descended from Adam and Eve, will have souls even though the rest of their band lacked souls. There is no contradiction in this, but it does cause some mental tension to imagine this ontological difference of kind within a single population and culture.

The possibility that by the end of their career on this planet half of the Neanderthal population had souls and half did not, only half being descendants of the abducted sapiens, is an embarrassment that might be avoided by an additional dose of empirical genetics. There is pretty good reason to believe that the most recent couple progenitors of us all were much more recent than the parents of Mitochondrial Eve. A date range of 3,000 to 10,000 years in the past seems plausible for our most recent common ancestor. There can, of course, be common ancestors in multiple generations. Indeed back in time beyond a certain point all our ancestors are common. So even if 3,000 years were a little late to fit comfortably with other aspects of the Bible narrative, there would probably be a couple ancestral to us all at a biblically more suitable date.

In any event, the Neanderthal possibility is not the only way a mixed population of the souled and soulless could arise. Some of the other pairs of the generation of Adam and Eve will have had children, grandchildren, and so on. None in their lines of descent will have had souls until they were crossed with a line descending from Adam and Eve. These non-Adam-Eve lines all do either so cross or die out on the assumption that we are now all descended from the select couple.

If Adam and Eve happened to live during the bottleneck generation some tens of thousands of years ago, there might have been only one thousand breeding pairs of humans. In that case, it would have taken only several generations before all sapiens were descended from Adam and Eve. If the couple had 100,000 contemporaries, it would have taken very many generations. I suspect that the believers in the theory have not much thought about how long after Adam and Eve many humans would, on the theory's corollary, have had no souls,

By the doctrinal definition the parents of both Adam or Eve would have been without souls. They must have been very like their children, but were just on the wrong side of the line separating animals from persons. Presumably the commandment to honor thy mother and father if it (retroactively) applied to Adam and Eve would apply with significantly weaker force. Doctrine is left with these uncomfortable consequences because its concept of a soul is binary. One has it or one doesn't.

Getting this far into the genetics does not flatly contradict the doctrine of a soul, of an either you have it or you don't sort, appearing all of a sudden in a human couple and transmitted ultimately to all humans. To grant this theoretical consistency, however, is far from conceding that there are two separate “magesteria” one of science, one of religion, each reigning in its own domain (souls for one, genetics the other), having no conflict when both observe the proper boundary. Paying attention to early human evolution does, I think, make the parented Adam and Eve doctrine implausible, a dubious compromise between recognition of myth and biblical literalism.

The idea of non-overlapping magesteria, when it comes to the traditional religious soul doctrine, is being progressively undermined by developments in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. 

A pure (non-revealed) deism might hold a separate magisterium, immune to the findings of science. For example, some form of cosmological argument might establish the existence of a creator God, and conceivably give us some of the most important properties of such a God (perhaps omnipotence). It could not, however, give us any details about God's interaction with the world. So there might be nothing to conflict with science. A religion based on any sort of revelation, however, will in all likelihood have a significant potential for conflict with empirical science. Even if what the revelation tells us is limited to the features of a separate reality, the revelation itself breaches the separation. Causal chains come into our physical reality as if from nowhere, and that is grist for empirical science.