If you ask most irreligious people about Adam and Eve, they’ll say that they are fictional characters in a fanciful story about an apple and a snake.

If you ask the people I grew up with about Adam and Eve, they’ll tell you that they were the father and mother of mankind 6,000 years ago and that modern anthropology is a big fake.

Neither one of these answers is adequate or even helpful to the strained relationship between science and religion. 25 years ago, when I was a 20-something discussion leader at an adventurous mega church, I asked a group of people (most of whom were not Christians):

“Would you guys like to study the opening chapters of Genesis?”. They agreed and I had the foresight to make a disclaimer: “I don’t care whether you think this is literal or fiction or allegory or anything else. We’re just going to read it and really try to understand what it’s saying.” And thus we began.

Six weeks later, we had only gotten to the middle of Chapter 3 and the whole group was transfixed at an entire world that had opened up to them. It was a cosmos of seemingly bottomless questions and endless overtones and deep implications. It subtly shifted their perspective of the entire human condition.

The stories in Genesis are the richest and most thought-provoking literature in the history of civilization. These stories retain their power regardless of how you historically interpret them. What matters most is that you take them seriously as a communication of human nature. This is how robust they are. That said, any serious student of Christian theology or cultural history finds herself or himself trying to understand exactly what to do with them.

I believe that for the survival of civilization, science may be optional but religious narratives are mandatory. We survived hundreds of thousands of years without science but, without divine truths to guide us, we will drive our own civilization into the ground.

This is why a nuanced historical understanding of the Old Testament accounts matters. It is possible to harmonize modern archeology, anthropology and genetics with the stories in the biblical narrative. It requires a significant shift of several basic assumptions that are usually never called into question.

Carol A. Hill has done exactly this. This Carol Hill article (Original Sin with Respect to Science, Origins, Historicity of Genesis, and Traditional Church Views) is a very rare paper that respects both the biblical writers and their ancient culture alongside modern discoveries about history and integrates them both.

This paper was published in the September 2021 issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). ASA is the largest society of professional scientists who are Christians. This letter from ASA member Dick Fischer is regarding Carol Hill’s article and evidence for Genesis historicity.

Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/

Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0