Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve so leads the NPR article.

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”…

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it’s clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can’t get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

…

And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it’s time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.

“Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost,” Schneider says. “So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings.”

Wow! I mean, grin.

The article goes on to describe the problem this creates.

“Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul’s description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament,” Mohler says.

Uh yup. One or two people have made this point recently. Really, Evangelicals make is sooooooooo easy.

This debate over a historical Adam and Eve is not just another heady squabble. It’s ripping apart the evangelical intelligentsia.

Should Perry get caught in the middle! Oh but he’d have to be one of the intelligentsia. So that isn’t going to happen. Darn.

A nice bit of wisdom here:

“When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face,” Giberson says. “The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it.”

It would be nice if that happens before one of the wacky Repubs gets any more power than they already have (hey debt ceiling!).

“This stuff is unavoidable,” says Dan Harlow at Calvin College. “Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have.”

“If so, that’s simply the price we’ll have to pay,” says Southern Baptist seminary’s Albert Mohler. “The moment you say ‘We have to abandon this theology in order to have the respect of the world,’ you end up with neither biblical orthodoxy nor the respect of the world.”

Mohler and others say if other Protestants want to accommodate science, fine. But they shouldn’t be surprised if their faith unravels.

Mohler seems to have forgotten that exactly the same argument was made as a reason to suppress the heretical idea that the sun did not revolve around the earth, and that despite the idea that Christianity was under dire threat, he still managed to get born into a rabidly Christian family and community. I mean he even works for a Baptist seminary so I guess all those dire Catholic predictions were wrong. I bet these ones will be too.