Setting up apologists to look like idiots.

Using the bible to disprove a science class is, to pagans, no better than using Shrek to prove ogres once existed.

Other than family members forwarding Obama-bashing spam to me, I occasionally get junk from well-meaning Christians who want me to know about the valuable apologetics resources available to America’s young people. Occasionally I read ’em, then email back that they’re crap.

This one, fr’instance, purports to give the kids some evidence that Adam and Eve existed. Supposedly you’re gonna be in the middle of a biology class, and your teacher is going to bring up the theory of evolution, and as a Christian you’re gonna be obligated to stand up and say, “Evolution isn’t true. The bible says that God created the earth in six days, and that He created Adam and Eve on the sixth day, and they didn’t descend from any common ancestor we might have with monkeys. God said it; I believe it; that settles it.”

Now, if you’re an Adam-and-Eve-believing Christian (or Jew, or Muslim, or any other religion that believes in Adam and Eve) you’re not gonna have a problem with this spirited defense. But if you’ve grown up pagan—like many American kids, including the children of Christians who never bothered to personally disciple their kids, figuring that’s the youth pastor’s job, which is another rant entirely—you’re gonna think this statement is the ramblings of an idiot. It’s going to sound, in their minds, a whole lot like this:

“Evolution isn’t true. The Völuspá says that Odin made the earth out of the body of the giant Ymir, and made the first people, Ask and Embla, out of driftwood he found on the beach. Your so-called ‘science’ is blasphemy, by the hammer of Thor!”

Remember: To pagans, the bible is mythology, same as every other mythology. To argue your case from a book they consider mythology is simply dumb. Yet the website says, “There is good evidence to believe the story of Adam and Eve,” and then give you verses from the bible as their good evidence. This is only good evidence if you believe the bible. Pagans don’t.

I went poking around the rest of this webpage’s site to see if there was anything our budding anti-evolutionary apologists could use in order to explain why they think the bible is valid, and you gotta search the site in order to find stuff, but it’s there. I would argue certain points differently—if I believed in arguing people into the Kingdom—but it attempts to explain why the bible should be taken as historical, and does an okay job. However, the bible’s historicity has to be agreed upon before you can start quoting it at people for evidence.

But all this aside: What is the reason for arguing in favor of the existence of Adam and Eve?

I don’t need someone to believe in Adam and Eve in order to talk to them about Jesus. Almost everyone—unless they’re hardcore atheists or whackjob conspiracy theorists—have no trouble admitting that Jesus existed. It’s sorta obvious. If He didn’t, there’d be no Christians, and seeing as there are 2 billion of us, it’s kind of a given. From there, I just have to make a few points about what He’s done for them, and we’re off.

In comparison, it will take me hours to try to convince someone that Adam and Eve were historical. Now, the reasons apologists say we have to do this are sorta dumb, but here they are.

• We gotta prove the bible is true before they’ll accept what it says about Jesus. In my experience, we really don’t. If pagans accept that Jesus existed, they almost automatically accept that the Gospels accurately depict Him. (The only time they won’t is when they’ve been reading Gnostic gospels or have bought into The Da Vinci Code crap. That stuff is actually really easy to refute when you know your history.)

  Getting them to believe the Gospels is no problem. Getting them to accept the first couple chapters of Genesis: Harder. Getting them to believe the first chapters of Genesis are literally true: Really hard. Yet the apologists would have us accomplish that first. Have these folks ever actually talked to pagans, or are they mostly dealing with lapsed Christians? Well, anyway....

• Paul’s theological discussions about Christ sorta hinge on Adam being real. Imputation—the idea that humanity’s sin is put upon us through one representative human, Adam, and is cancelled out by another representative human, Jesus—is a big deal to theologians. If Adam isn’t historical, imputation doesn’t work. Right?

  Wrong. Adam is our representative human in this imputation idea. If there isn’t a historical Adam, then it’s gotta be some other human ancestor—whichever one of us was the first one to sin. Let’s say it’s Ook-ook the Australopithecus, and in his tiny little apelike mind, God drops the idea, “Don’t poop in the drinking water,” and Ook-ook, who is sentient enough to know better, does it anyway. Well, then that’s our representative human. We’ll call him Adam instead, and change his crime to “eating the berries off the wrong tree,” which triggers less snickering in Sunday schools. Whether Adam is historical or not (and I honestly lean towards the idea he is) someone started the sin problem. Doesn’t matter who.

• You can’t pick and choose which parts of the bible are true and which aren’t. Well, you shouldn’t, but everyone does. Christians eat ham and don’t wear fringes on their clothes, and violate the Sabbath like crazy.

  But if Christians ever actually get more spiritually mature—if they read their bibles carefully, trying to figure out what God wants of them instead of figuring “Once saved, always saved, so I don’t need to show God I love him by obeying Him ’cause I don’t; we just have a deal ’cause that’s legalism”—they start to read all their bibles, and wrestle with the difficult stuff, and embrace it. (Or they embrace an odd sort of legalism wherein they claim it’s automatically all 100 percent true, but never obey it, and only read the easy parts.)

  I figure it’s best to get folks to follow the Holy Spirit, and let Him lead them to truth. (Or drag them, kicking and screaming. Either way....) He’ll make the bible more true for them than any catchy slogan will.

• Believing we came from monkeys insults the inherent dignity of humanity. Um... ever hear of total depravity? We have no inherent dignity. We’re nasty, selfish sinners. God created us good, but we chose to be bad. It is only through God that we get any dignity at all, and it doesn’t make any difference whether we’re human scum or monkey scum. Believing humans have some sort of inherent dignity because we were created special creates this presumption that we deserve God’s grace. But if we deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace. It would simply be what was coming to us.

  No; if anything it’s more impressive that God might take the descendants of lower animals and join their species, as He did when He became human in Jesus. It gives you a better sense of how awesome the Incarnation really is.

Anyway. I ranted about a lot of this years ago, and still believe it’s a giant waste of time to become experts on Creationism or anti-evolutionism when we can better spend our time learning to love and follow Jesus, and in so doing develop awesome testimonies about what He’s done in our lives. People are definitely more interested in the acts of a living God than they are in the arguments of a know-it-all.