Is Adam the father of all human beings, or do they have multiple fathers?
For centuries, Christendom had a simple, biblical answer. Adam was the father of the human race. But during the Age of Discovery, Westerners’ contact with other cultures increasingly called into question the chronology, ethnology, and geography of the early chapters of Genesis. The earth was older and its people more diverse and far-flung than the biblical history accounted for.
In the mid-seventh century, Isaac La Peyrere (a heterodox Protestant of Jewish descent) published two treatises—each a pioneering work of biblical criticism—that advanced a novel thesis: there were men before Adam. Adam was the father of the Jews, but other races were descended from other, equally ancient, progenitors. In line with this theory, La Peyrere also advocated a local flood affecting only Adam’s semitic descendants rather than covering the whole world.
As La Peyrere’s idea took root and grew in succeeding centuries, it mutated in several ironic ways. First, while La Peyrere intended his theory to create safe political space for European Jewry, the pre-Adamite idea caught on with racists—including many otherwise orthodox Christians—who used it to advance the thesis of “Caucasian” superiority to the “Mongoloid” and “Negroid” races on the ground that the former were of Adamite descent while the latter were of pre-Adamite descent. (To be fair, though, not all advocates of pre-Adamitism were racist, including La Peyrere himself; and not all advocates of the biblical record were egalitarians.)
Second, while La Peyrere was heterodox and a pioneering biblical critic, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his idea found a home among theologically conservative Christians who used pre-Adamitism to reconcile Scripture with emerging scientific discoveries, including the geological record of the earth’s old age, the paleontological record of long-deceased animal species, and the evolution of the human species itself. Not all Christians took this route, of course, but many leading intellectuals in Britain and America did.
Third, La Peyrere’s thesis contributed to the secularization of science by detaching most of human history from the biblical account and making it a fit object of historical and scientific study rather than textual exegesis. Increasingly, therefore, professionalizing scientists stopped thinking in terms of the biblical account of human origins and spoke more broadly of the human species’ monogenetic or polygenetic origins. Only religious conservatives still used the language of Adamic or pre-Adamite.
Fourth, while La Peyrere’s original idea was clearly polygenetic—with Adam as the father of Jews, and all other groups having equally ancient fathers—Darwin introduced a novel element, namely, pre-Adamite monogenism. All are descended from an aboriginal human pair who themselves evolved from human or humanoid ancestors. One of the key theological concerns of orthodox Christians was to protect the doctrines of original sin and redemption through Christ. The unity of the human race (monogenism) went hand in glove with these doctrinal concerns. For those Christians impressed by evolutionary accounts of human origins, Darwin’s pre-Adamite monogenism allowed them to eat their scientific cake and have it theologically, too.
These ironies make for a very messy history, which David N. Livingstone narrates with clarity and skill in Adam’s Ancestors, an excellent academic treatment of an idea that once roiled the intelligentsia but is now—for most—intellectual arcana. Without an understanding of this history, however, it is difficult to understand the development of the science of human origins in the West, not to mention the development of biblical criticism there. If you want to understand the interaction of Scripture and science in Western history, this is a great book to start with.
—–
P.S. If you found this review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.
GeorgePWood.com 