For the Rev. Jim Bachmann, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Green Hills, the answer is clear. The Bible teaches that Adam and Eve existed, so that’s what he believes. Doubting their existence undermines the authority of the Bible, he said.

They may be the most influential couple in human history.

For centuries, the Bible stories about Adam and Eve defined gender roles for men and women, shaped political battles over gay marriage and abortion, and prompted lawsuits over what should be taught in public school science classes.

Now discoveries in genetics have prompted a debate over whether they really existed. The so-called quest for a historical Adam and Eve has become the latest point of conflict in the uneasy relationship between faith and science.

Some believers say Adam and Eve were real people, the father and mother of all mankind. Others say that the Garden of Eden account is a story about what it means to be human.

For the Rev. Jim Bachmann, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Green Hills, the answer is clear. The Bible teaches that Adam and Eve existed, so that’s what he believes. Doubting their existence undermines the authority of the Bible, he said.

“If you start playing fast and loose with Adam and Eve, you might as well start playing fast and loose with Moses and David and all the way down to Jesus,” he said.

Darrell Falk, president of the BioLogos Forum, a nonprofit group that seeks to reconcile faith and science, disagrees. Falk says the numbers don’t add up — while the Bible traces all human beings back to one couple, modern genetics tells a different story.

Human beings alive today descended from a group of about 10,000 people who lived between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, he said.

“There is more diversity among human beings than we can account for with a single couple,” he said.

BioLogos Forum attracts scientists who also are people of faith, such as Falk, a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.

Falk has always believed in evolution, especially for animals. But human beings, he once thought, might have been created directly by God. After looking at data comparing the similarities between human and chimpanzee DNA, he changed his mind and now thinks both came from common ancestors.

For years, Falk taught students about evolution. He and his science department colleagues didn’t tell the churchgoers who fund the university about the curriculum.
“They didn’t ask, and we didn’t tell,” he said. He later published his views in a 2004 book titled Coming to Peace with Science.

‘One human family’

C. John Collins, author of Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?, said he’s willing to accept that Adam and Eve weren’t the only human beings on the planet.

“I would prefer that it would work out that there was a couple at the fountainhead of the human race,” he said. “But I am not going to make it a hill to die on.”

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