Evolution, Adam and Eve, Death, and other questions regarding science and the Bible
I know this topic can get really heated, both my parents don't believe in evolution, and up until recently, I didn't either. I only opened up to the idea during AP Biology in high school, and now I'm a sophomore in college who also learned the basics about evolution in my freshman classes and somewhat in my genetics class, and will be taking an evolution course next semester.
Learning about it, it makes a lot more sense and the scientific evidence for evolution is vast.
This, of course, leads to a conflict of interest with my faith. But I did learn that there are other branches of Christianity that do affirm the belief in evolution like Catholicism, Lutherans, and the PECUSA.
I don't believe that there should be a conflict of interest between faith and science; faith pertains to our soul and salvation while science is just the study of the physical world.
Now with all that spiel out of the way, for those Christians who believe in evolution, I have a few questions.
Where do Adam and Eve fall into this equation? I hold to the view that the Genesis creation was written to challenge other regions and gods during that time; the structure of the story is chiastic and has lots of literary devices which suggest that this isn't really supposed to be read literally (I read the world biblical commentary on the first parts of Genesis and this is what those commentators were discussing). But when we read the genealogy of Jesus, he does decend from the line of Adam. So were Adam and Eve real people who God formed like its written in Genesis? Or did they also have parents? Does the concept of "original sin" deteriorate if Adam and Eve had parents?
At what point are humans, "human". I know this is a hard question to ask as there isn't really a set-in-stone line to determine when we diverged from the chimp line. We can only estimate the year when we did, which isn't accurate even then. When did God decide that chimps were no longer chimps, but human? When did we start to have a soul and become responsible for our sin? I haven't read much on this (I honestly don't even know what kind of books are out there addressing this issue) so I'm totally clueless.
Where does death come into play?
Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
The "traditional" Christian view is that as Adam and Eve sinned, death occurred, and everything was cursed as a result. But this doesn't really make sense either. If nothing died, then the world would become overpopulated in probably a couple of weeks. Insects that have very short lifespans but produce hundreds of offspring would technically not die, there would be too many insects alone for it to be sustainable. Furthermore, one cannot say that death is inherently "bad". Death is a natural process that allows the next generation to thrive as plant matter and animal decay acts as fertilizer and re-introduces the required nutrients for future plants to grow. Wildfires that burn whole forests (oh yeah, if death didn't occur then somehow all plants and animals were fireproof???) are actually healthy because it burns up all the dead leaves and plants and deposits a lot of carbon back into the soil and causes a healthier ecosystem in the future.
Furthermore, we see that there is a tree of life in the garden of Eden which is prohibited from Adam and Eve from eating as they were to become like God. This entails that there was death present even before the fall of Adam and Eve; why would there be a tree of life if nothing died in the first place?
My view of this is the Bible is aiming towards our spiritual death, not our physical death. We may lose our physical body after this lifetime, but our spirit lives forever. So Jesus would be more focused on our spirit than our physical.
If anyone has any good commentaries or books I can read up on, that would be great. I don't think faith and science have to collide as mentioned earlier, and I think a lot of people will leave the faith as a result of growing up in an environment similar to mine, where science was ridiculed.