Answers in Genesis President/CEO Ken Ham is siding with the atheists for once, he says. Disturbed by a recent cover story investigating the need to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, Ham, who endorses a literal view of Genesis, criticized several Christian theologians for rejecting both a literal interpretation of the first couple and existence of a young Earth.
The story, entitled “The Search for the Historical Adam” featured on the June issue of the Christianity Today magazine, quoted a number of Christian scholars who held an evolutionary and allegorical belief of Genesis that accorded with scientific evidence.
Academics like Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, Darrell Falk, and other theologians, found that a literal account of Adam and Eve simply “did not fit the evidence” and suggested different theories, including Adam being a “story of Israelite origins,” not the origin of all humanity.
The founder of AiG reproved the majority of those cited, stating that they were compromising “God’s Word with man’s fallible beliefs about evolution, millions of years, etc.”
Not his first time blasting Old Earth creationists and Christian scholars who believed in an evolutionary account of Genesis, Ham has long touted his six-day 24-hour creation beliefs, as well as a literal view on Adam and Eve.
He emphasized that compromise on Genesis had opened a dangerous door regarding how the culture and church view biblical authority today, and argued that Christians must preserve the Bible’s authority as 100% true through a strong teaching of the first book.
But Christian scientists like Francis Collins, founder of the BioLogos website that claimed to represent the harmony of science and faith, found no conflict in seeing Genesis as “a poetic and powerful allegory,” unlike Ham, explaining that God could have possibly used the first couple to illustrate His endowment of a spiritual and moral nature.
Collins also “reported scientific indications that anatomically modern emerged from primate ancestors perhaps 100,000 years ago– long before the apparent Genesis time frame– and originated with a population that numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals.”
Similarly, a BioLogos paper by Dennis Venema and Falk declared that the human population “was definitely never as small as two.”
“Our species diverged as a population. The data are absolutely clear on that,” they commented.
Peter Enns was also quoted in the feature, supporting the same view as Collins that Genesis and the Bible itself was more allegorical than literal.
Reciting the first chapters of Genesis, Enn was recorded to state, “The Bible itself [invited] a symbolic reading by using cosmic battle imagery and by drawing parallels between Adam and Israel.”
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