Monthly Archives: November 2025

11/4/25

Looking at Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Book (2017) “Adam and the Genome” (Part 21 of 22)

0230 In two chapters, McKnight discusses how various Jewish writers and Saint Paul treated Adam and Eve.  Adam and Eve are real characters located in the mythic past.  Adam and Eve are literary, archetypal and bear the image of God.  They founded the Jewish people, as well as other peoples in the Near East.

0231 In chapter 5 of Romans, Paul comes eerily close to articulating the historical trajectory of the first singularity.  McKnight covers the passage in detail. Razie Mah’s e-article, Comments on Original Sin and Original Death: Romans 5:12-19, examines a similar analysis by Tom Schreiner.

0232 What does this imply?

Saint Paul senses, but does not grasp, what could possibly have generated the Adam and Eve stories.

0233 At 5800 U0’ (or 0 A.D.), no one imagined that the stories of Adam and Eve associate to a fantastic traumatic event in recent human prehistory.  No one imagined that those occasional funny hills deep in the deserts of the Near East could contain the ruins of the royal libraries of long-forgotten cities.

0234 At 6200 U0’, Augustine did not know that, either.

However, Augustine had the imagination to re-stage the stories as a play on the Manichean version of the descent of the soul.  Original Sin later became Christian doctrine.  God’s hand is in that designation.

0235 Then, the modern age of science arrived, digging up the hills of southwest Asia and fashioning classical Darwinism, then Neo-Darwinism.  The first shows that the early chapters of Genesis exhibit the literary style and some of the same themes as ancient (excavated) Near East literature.  The second shows that Adam and Eve could not be the biological ancestral parents of all humans.

0236 These two facts rule out the story of the Fall staged by Augustine.

0237 At the same time, the ruling raises the question: What is Original Sin?

0238 On one hand, modern theologians, such as Piet Schoonenberg, diligently worked in order to demonstrate that Original Sin corresponds to a combination of social conditions and personal sin.

In other words, Original Sin belongs to our current living world (Lebenswelt).

0239 On the other hand, someone had to wonder, “Why is our current Lebenswelt not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?”

0240 The genetic data shows that our current Lebenswelt is not due to a speciation event (as unwittingly predicted by Augustine).

0241 The data from excavations of ancient Near East sites shows that the public written origin stories point to a recent event occurring less than ten thousand years ago.

That event had to be cultural.  It gave rise to our current Lebenswelt.  It eclipsed and occluded the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. 

0242 The hypothesis of the first singularity is introduced in plain form in The First Singularity and its Fairy Tale Trace.  The hypothesis is presented in dramatic form in the masterwork: An Archaeology of the Fall.  These works, by Razie Mah, are available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

11/3/25

Looking at Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Book (2017) “Adam and the Genome” (Part 22 of 22)

0243 Certainly, Venema and McKnight lower two curtains on the historical Adam envisioned by Saint Augustine.

0244 With these comments, each curtain takes on a life of its own.

0245 The fact that descent with modification embodies the same relational structure as the message underlying the word “religion” suggests that there is more to evolutionary biology than meets the eye.  The discussion ends with the “university” becoming the “ulistentome”, the “college” getting relabeled as “harangue” and the seminary turning into “hope for salvation”.

Genetics rules out Adam and Eve as the biological parents of all humanity along with Augustine’s version of Original Sin.

What about the word games that speech-alone talk allows?

0246 The fact that the stories of Adam and Eve are written in the style of (excavated) ancient Near East literature suggests that all these stories came to us through a process of descent with modification.

All written origin stories of the ancient Near East point to the trauma of the first singularity.  They cannot see beyond this particular time-horizon.

The same goes for the Genesis stories starting with Adam and Eve. The stories of Adam and Eve mark the start of our current Lebenswelt.

0247 Here is a new image for Original Sin.

Indeed, the new version accounts for the old version.

0248 So, instead of pursuing ulistentome or harangue, seek hope for salvation.

Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science lowers the curtains on Augustine’s stage play about the nature and consequences of the Fall.  Yet, the curtains come alive with the category-based nested form and the hypothesis of the first singularity.

0249 The curtains may become the rage.

0250 Don’t lose faith.

Enter the fourth age of understanding.