Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Idolatry takes many forms, #4: The Religion of Scientism

Paul clearly believed that there had been a single first pair, whose male, Adam, had been given a commandment and had broken it.... Our knowledge of early anthropology is of course sketchy, to put it mildly. Each time another very early skull is dug up the newspapers exclaim over the discovery of the first human beings; we have consigned Adam and Eve entirely to the world of mythology, but we are still looking for their replacements.... The general popular belief that the early stories of Genesis were straightforwardly disproved by Charles Darwin is of course nonsense, however many times it is reinforced in contemporary mythmaking. Things are just not that simple, in biblical theology or science.

-- N. T. Wright, commenting on Romans 5:12

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