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Why do Half of Americans still believe that Adam and Eve were Real People? Is there a Correlation??? [1]
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Date: 2025-01-08
According to polls taken by Gallup from 1982 to 2014, the number of Americans who believe that the earth and human beings were created within the last 10,000 years has remained above 40%. 56% believe that Adam and Eve were literal real people and 51% believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and contains no errors.
In another survey, 73% of pastors said that evolution was not involved in creating humans while 82% of pastors believed that Adam and Eve were literal people. Only 1% of those who attend church at least once a week believe in evolution by natural selection without God.
The very influential and fundamentalist Christian publication Christianity Today, which has deep connections with Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, published a bombshell in their June 2011 issue. Its cover is seen below.
In short, this issue expressly concedes that the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding evolution can no longer be denied. However, it goes on to say that since the Bible is the perfect word of God, our understanding of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve must be reinterpreted. It issued a plea to Christian scholars and theologians to develop an updated interpretation of that account as soon as possible. It addressed the obvious problem that since Paul explained that the doctrine of God’s salvation was based upon Jesus being the “second Adam” that delivered us from the “fall” of the first Adam, the entire foundation and basis for Christianity was at stake.
It seems that such an in-depth and intellectual article was either not understood or just discarded by most Christians as being too inconvenient. Sort of like they did in the 2024 election.
Albert Mohler, the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, correctly summed it up in an interview with NPR: “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.” In the same NPR article, Fazale Rana, Vice President of the evangelical think tank Reasons to Believe, after conceding that “small details of Scripture could be wrong,” said “But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you’ve got a problem.”
Another huge problem is the fact that the New Testament, in Luke 3, traces the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam.
The same disregard is also seen with the books, articles, and speeches by Dr. Francis Collins. Dr. Collins was the current director of the National Institute of Health working in the fight against Covid-19, but was also the lead scientist that successfully completed the Human Genome Project in 2003. That project has resulted in an untold number of medical and other advances that greatly benefit millions of individuals. Ten of the benefits are outlined here.
Dr. Collins, a professing Christian, makes it clear that the evidence shows that “all members of the human species descended from a common set of founders, approximately 10,000 in number, who lived about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago.” (page 126 of his book entitled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.) He affirms that life evolved very slowly, having started with a simple single-celled organism a couple billion years ago. That, of course, would make the words found in I Corinthians 15:21 entirely false (“for since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead”); not only did death occur long before humans, but 99% of all the species were already extinct. That is an awful amount of death before humans.
Should we care what someone else believes? Obviously, people have the right to believe anything they want, including that the earth is flat, that man never walked on the moon, or injecting bleach in your veins will prevent Covid-19.
But given the millions of fossils that clearly show the record of evolution, along with the remarkable astronomical discoveries regarding how all the stars are moving away in every direction (supporting the big bang theory) and the things DNA clearly teaches us about basic heredity — to believe that Adam and Eve were real people created less than 10,000 years ago is more absurd by several orders of magnitudes than it was for the early Greeks to have believed in Zeus lightning bolts or any of the thousands of other gods created by humans in history. After all, none of them had Goggle or A.I. to fact-check.
Despite the hundreds of blatant contradictions contained in the Bible and the many incidents it not only condoned, but also advocated, including slavery, genocide, murder and rape to name just a few, how is it possible that educated people can still claim that a perfect and holy God inspired it?
The lack of evidence for any religion or god is similar for all the world’s religions and gods…most of whom have been discarded, given the advanced knowledge of science and history that the human race continues to discover and learn about. With very few exceptions, the believers of those thousands of gods based their belief upon their parents and/or their culture’s traditions and examples. It is amazing how easy it is for some people to not realize the random luck or chance that they were born at the right time in history and in the right location and family to have inherited the knowledge of the only right religion or god, while the untold billions of the rest of humanity were just left out.
Even worse, they do not even care to learn about the gods that billions of other people worship and have worshiped. Yet, somehow, they have concluded they have the right god. Belief in anything without solid evidence is, by definition, blind faith. The fact is, if any religious person really thinks hard about what and why they believe, the best they can hope for is uncertainty.
So just what is the danger in believing things that lacks any evidence? The danger is it often destroys or significantly limits a person’s ability to critically think. When someone presumes that they already have the truth, any evidence to the contrary is easily dismissed… regardless of how strong and obvious that evidence may be. It is sort of like training your brain to feed on emotions and wishful thinking while shutting down its ability for rational logic. However it happens, it seems like one part of the brain gets stronger while another part gets weaker.
The first of two examples showing just how dangerous this is can be found in a detailed article in August 2020 by the 120-year-old world-renowned MIT Technology Review. It explains why absurd conspiracy theories such as QAnon are finding such success preying on Churchgoers. All they have to do is include in their propaganda anything that supports Trump, opposes abortion or suggests a concern for children being sexually abused, and their entire message about white nationalism, anti-Semitism and other extreme views are immediately spread through the internet like a forest fire.
It has been repeatedly shown that conspiracies such as QAnon are quickly believed by those already holding extreme religious and political beliefs without one iota of fact-checking. When it was alleged that Wayfair Furniture stores’ high-priced cabinets were so expensive because they were trafficking children inside of them, thousands of followers posted it. Scores of national news reporters investigated the claims and Polaris, a national hotline for exploited children, was flooded with hundreds of calls. Many more details and examples can be found here.
When religion or other extreme ideology has robbed a person of the ability to critically think, there seems to be nothing that they are incapable of believing.
Another dangerous result occurs when children are taught that they must believe something despite having no evidence, sometimes with the penalty of eternal damnation should they even doubt it. That obviously has a powerful effect in preventing them from developing life’s necessary skill of critical thinking when making important decisions in life. To teach them that Adam and Eve were literal people is, in essence, instructing them to ignore and discard everything we now know about biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, archeology, ancient history and a wealth of other information and facts that have and will continue to advance the human race. It is literally teaching them that there is an alternate reality, and what they see is not really what they are seeing.
It is incredibly easy to recruit and manipulate that type of person to spread any message to the masses, free of charge, just like religion has been doing forever.
While many religious people are very sincere, most have never studied or considered “the other side” or did so with the overriding presumption that they already knew the truth. Zeus’ reign was over when science discovered that lightning bolts were really caused by the natural force of electromagnetism. Most of the other gods “died” a quiet death, one by one, as science presented the evidence that showed those gods to be nothing but myths.
It is way past time for the rest of humanity to come to terms with the clear evidence proving, without a doubt, that Adam and Eve are nothing but a myth — just like Zeus, Ra, Apollo, Poseidon, Osiris, Aphrodite, Hera, Demeter and the many thousands of other gods who were sincerely and fervently worshiped and honored with temples and sacrifices by millions of devotees who were certain they were worshiping a real god.
It is time to value truth and facts above everything else and not be driven and tossed by every wind of doctrine or baseless ideology.
Here are several other articles by the same author to continue with this line of discussion:
Oh How Easy it is to Create a God
Ten Fatal Flaws of the Bible
Want a Biblical Marriage? Really?
Ten Bible Stories Never Preached in Church
Do Christians Really Believe the Bible?
Ten Reasons Why No One Should Still Believe the Bible
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