Help Me Understand, part duex

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Prompted by the thread started by Shuffle (Help Me Understand), this is for the Christians here that do accept evolution. Which is good, since it's been observed many times, in the lab and the field.


All the evidence available, in all the related fields (genetic, fossil, morphology, etc) all prove that modern homo sapiens did not come from one original man and woman. 

There is absolutely no evidence for an 'Adam and Eve'.

Therefore:

No eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. 
No 'original sin', no 'fall'.
No fall, no hereditary stain on humanity.
No reason for humanity to be forgiven.
No need for Yahweh to sacrifice his son (himself) in order to forgive humanity.


Please reconcile for me...

As much as it pains me to agree with ChadWooters, I have to concur. Allegory. I've discussed this with my fiancee, who is a biochemist who works in genetics, as well as a Christian, and keeping in mind that this is not meant to be a science book (even by the authors), the allegory goes something like this:

Adam is not a name, it is the Hebrew word for "man". Not necessarily one; like our word "man" it can be used to refer to all mankind.

Adam is a literary representative of the first humans like us, the reasoning man. Homo sapiens. Adam represents the first of the humans who were intelligent enough to begin making projections of themselves beyond their own mind, to think of things not in their immediate environment, and thus to be able to recognize their creator.

Now, the earth's ecosystem works by a relatively simple set of rules, from the perspective of the authors. God provides the food, we hunt and gather it. We live by the providence of God, in a balanced and perfect Garden (the world) which was provided for us. Within that garden was a metaphorical tree that contained That Which Only The Gods Know, "the knowledge of good and evil".

See, if you let animals decide for themselves what is good and evil, you get an imbalance. If you let the eagle decide, he will always catch the rabbit for dinner. This is good for the eagle, but evil for the rabbit, who just wants to go home to his burrow and make more baby bunnies. If you let the rabbit decide, then the eagle will always miss, and the eagles will starve, and soon we are overrun by bunnies. That is why only the gods may decide what is good and what is evil.

However, man had reached the point where he could decide for himself. Man decided he didn't want to live according to the providence of God; he wanted to decide for himself. So he stopped wandering the garden and planted crops, and eventually built cities. This tipped the balance; man had ceased to live in the garden with the other animals. We had to live by the sweat of our brows. From that point on, the world began to die. Man had abused his evolved brain, even after recognizing his Creator, and decided he knew better than God. This is the essential definition of sin.

Keep in mind, when reading this, that the story is told from the point of view of the nomadic sheepherders, the descendants of Adam, as an oral tradition, only written down by their descendants. (The later Christian concepts which were "tacked on" to the story are unlikely to be what the writers had in mind.) The story of Cain and Abel reads like a "why are our brothers killing us?", since God is "pleased" with the sacrifice of the sheepherders who, being nomadic, were still living close to the way their Adam forebearers had done, according to the story... while Cain, the farmer who chose what plants lived where, and drove away the competitors from "his" lands, was not able to please God at all with his sacrifice of fruit. The practice of pleasing God by animal sacrifice as atonement for the sins of our disobedience was thus born. So goes the story.

Later on, the Christ mythicists took those elements and made a whole different story out of it, but the essential element of "this sacrifice stands in for the disobediences to God, so that you may yet be reconciled with your Creator" remained.

At least, that's how I understand it.