The riddle of human origins is the shared epicenter of religion and science, Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria; "indeed it may be their ultimate raison d'etre.  Many Christians believe that the book of Genesis provides a literal account not only of human origins, in the creation of Adam and Eve, but also of human nature, in the account of the Fall.  Many evolutionists would counter that empirical evidence (from the fossil record, molecular studies of primate DNAs, etc.) suggests no identifiable first couple, but instead nomadic populations of African hominids; and that much of the dark side of human nature can be traced to these ancient nomadic tribes and to how they evolved in competition with one another.  To Christian eyes, the evolutionists' account appears morally bankrupt, a product of Godless "methodological naturalism."  To evolutionists, a biblical inerrantist reading of Genesis is intellectually lazy, a fairy-tale refuge for the benighted and the incurious.

In the preface to the present volume, Patricia Williams sets a goal no less than the reconciliation of Christian and scientific accounts of human origins.  Through substitution of evolutionary psychology for the traditional narrative of the Fall, Williams proposes to redefine our account of the origins of human evil, and to show how acknowledgment of the truth of human evolution is in fact fully compatible with Christian faith.  While her homepage describes the author as a philosopher and theologian, she is also clearly well read in evolutionary biology, and she achieves her aims for this volume remarkably well.  Doing Without Adam and Eve is organized as a textbook-length position paper:  Part One presents the negative argument, in which close reading of Scripture and philosophical tests of truth show how the mainstream Christian concept of original sin, originating with St. Augustine, not only fails truth tests but is in fact non-biblical, i.e. inconsistent with a close reading of Genesis.  Part Two presents the  positive argument:  Williams summarizes basic principles of evolution and its behavioral sub-discipline, evolutionary psychology (sociobiology), uses the same philosophical truth tests to verify the evolutionary account of human origins, then asserts that sociobiology can "reformulate the biblical account of original sin," explaining much of human nature "while still retaining the centrality of sin" (p.xv).  The latter chapters of Part Two explore the implications of the sociobiological model for the Christian theological problems of evil and atonement.  Williams shows how Jesus can still help us to deal with "our complex, evolved nature, our culture, and our relationship to God" (ibid).  She notes that disputes about original sin have long festered between the three major branches of the Christian church (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant), and hopes that a sociobiological redefinition of original sin can help Christians to reconcile with one another.

Williams is impressive not only as an erudite philosopher of religion, but also as a compassionate and pious individual.  Clearly, this book is intended not only as a work of scholarship, but as a comfort, sustenance and treatise of reconciliation for Christians and evolutionists alike; indeed, for all who search for truth in an uncertain world.  These are ambitious goals:  no less than a Solomonic resolution of the Scopes trial is attempted here, and for the most part, the author achieves her aims remarkably well.  Her intended readership, whether scientific, religious or both, is interested in the search for truth; and the early chapters introduce philosophical truth tests as follows:  The coherence test verifies that a theory is internally consistent; since two statements that contradict one another cannot both be true, an incoherent theory must be false.  The correspondence test verifies that a theory corresponds to the way the world is, i.e., is consistent with empirical evidence.  And finally, the consilience test asks whether a theory can draw together many different lines of evidence, as for example Newtonian physics was shown to work well for all bodies in motion, whether here on Earth or in outer space as viewed through a telescope.  These tests provide impartial yardsticks of truth, which are first applied to what the author calls "the myth of special creation."

Williams shows how the biblical inerrantist reading of Genesis is incoherent, as in the two separate accounts of the creation of human beings, one simultaneous, the other sequential, with Adam followed by Eve (Genesis  1:1 vs 2:4b).  She applies the correspondence test individually to Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox dogma, as articulated in the  respective works of John Calvin, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria.  Of these three great theologians, only Athanasius passes the correspondence test; Calvin's ideas of innate human corruption and, especially, predestination, present what amounts to a "canalized version" of human evil, in which our first parents were purely innocent before the fall, just as the Serpent - evil incarnate - was purely corrupt.  Aquinas, by contrast, imports concepts from pagan Greek philosophy into the Genesis text when he conceives of Adam and Eve before the Fall as harmonious tripartite beings in whom the "human faculties" of reason and will were completely subservient to God, their non-rational parts to reason, and their bodies to their souls.  Athanasius by contrast speaks of God's "natural grace" which suffuses all creation; only a kind of "special grace" was withdrawn at the time of the Fall, and a sinless life is still possible, of the sort ascribed in the Eastern traditions to John the Baptist or the prophet Jeremiah.  Unbaptized infants likewise are not damned.  Williams cites this last account as the one which comes closest to actual human nature.  But she traces the fundamental errors of all Christianity to St.  Augustine, who was first to advance the concept of original sin as the ancient catastrophe which necessitated Jesus' death and resurrection as collective atonement for all our sins, and the sacraments of baptism and confession as forms of individual atonement.  According to Williams, Augustine came up with this notion while casting about for some event, any event in human history, which might have warranted God's gift of His only Son.  Pre-Augustinian Christians apparently saw original sin not in the apple, but in mundane sexual desire as described in Genesis 6:1, and Augustine himself may have been misled by a poor translation and misreading of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans (pp. 40-41).  Nevertheless his error was transmitted and amplified through other theologians, and Christians today still associate the apple with original sin.

Perhaps Williams' most religiously provocative claim is that a close reading of Genesis does not support the idea of original sin.  To drive home this point she cites the Gnostic interpretation, logically consistent with one reading of Genesis but long considered Christian heresy, in which Eden was created by a separate, evil God; the Serpent is truthful and good, and the punishment imposed on Adam and Eve for partaking of the apple is evil and draconian.  The Gnostic model passes the correspondence test with flying colors:  the snake being an animal, who lives only for the day, is truthful with Eve.  She and Adam eat the apple, but do not die that day.  In fact, they live for hundreds of years.  To this theologically naive reader, the undeniable absence of Augustinian original sin from an explicit reading of Genesis comes as a complete surprise.  Williams' negative argument is well supported by her analysis.  Even fundamental inerrantists are likely to find her biblical approach convincing.

The second part of Doing Without Adam and Eve presents sociobiology as an alternative model for human nature, one which Williams asserts can provide the underpinning for a modern Christian worldview, including accessible redefinitions for sin and atonement.  Her discussion of basic principles is not entirely free of errors - such as the obfuscating notions, during a discussion of Mendel's laws, that "genes change without mutation" in the course of independent assortment (p. 105), or that "the only organisms on the (Galapagos) islands were...capable of crossing hundreds of miles of salt  water" - in fact combinations of genes are rearranged, but genes themselves are not changed by sexual recombination; and the giant tortoises for which the Galapagos were named are completely helpless in the water.  For the most part, however, I found Williams' presentation of basic evolutionary principles to be clear, accessible, and more accurate than many an undergraduate textbook.  Her summary of fossil and molecular evidence for human evolution and migration out of Africa is excellent (pp. 115-121).  She notes that the evolutionary account of human origins passes the truth tests mentioned above:  it is internally coherent, corresponds to the physical evidence, and represents a consilience of many different lines of evidence (mitochondrial DNA, fossil morphology, radiocarbon dating etc) and many different theories (the New Synthesis of Darwin with Mendel, for example, or evidence for speciation from the "molecular clock" of DNA).

In the middle chapters of Part 2 Williams delineates the major theories of sociobiology (kin selection, reciprocal altruism etc) with respect to human culture.  Humans are unique among mammals in many ways, besides the obvious differences of language and technology:  for example, we have an unusually prolonged childhood; our males devote (for mammals) inordinate effort and resources to child-rearing, and our females have concealed estrus and menopause.  Our prolonged childhood is in a sense the evolutionary basis for our concealed estrus and monogamy:  the woman absolutely needs help rearing a human baby; and uncertainty about the female reproductive cycle provides an incentive for the man to stay at home (fear of cuckoldry).  Sociobiological predictions about our reproductive behaviors tend to be accurate:  we are in fact much more generous and protective of our blood relations, and female infidelity is generally much more frowned upon than male.  Williams notes that evolutionary theory works better as a predictor of human behaviors in regard to our more biological activities, such as marriage and child-rearing; biology cannot contribute much to the question of why people do mathematics or ballet.  But she notes that we are not necessarily evolved as gentle creatures.  The dark side of reciprocity causes wars of retribution, and synthetic family ties are imposed by many groups to reinforce their "groupishness" and dehumanize the enemy - I was reminded of how Osama bin Laden calls Americans "infidels" and the 9/11 hijackers his "brothers."  Inasmuch as sociobiology is more accurately descriptive of human nature than the Augustinian account and its misguided reinterpretations by Calvin and Aquinas, Williams proposes a complete substitution, that Adam and Eve should be replaced altogether by Homo erectus, Homo habilis or some other ancestor, and that the idea of an individual man and woman should bow to the correspondence test - since after all, it is populations not individuals which evolve.

In her latter chapters, Williams analyzes the problem of evil in evolutionary terms, and redefines much of conventional evil as a natural byproduct of good:  concupiscence, far from being innately sinful in the Calvinist sense, is a natural drive to acquire resources, mate and produce offspring; deceit is the flip-side of within-group altruism; death provides space and resources for new life.  Williams sees no lying Serpent behind human evil; rather, an inevitable consequence of our evolved intellect is our wide range of behavioral options.  We know that we can choose to do evil; our tendencies towards greed, lust, and deceit helped us to survive in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.  In the modern world, therefore, laws and social consequences are also necessary evils.  With regard to atonement, Williams repudiates the traditional Christian notion of Jesus as an Agnus dei, a sacrificial offering in the tradition of Jacob and Isaac.

"The idea that God commands us to kill an animal and drain its blood properly before (being forgiven) boggles the modern  mind...(Jesus') death occurs because his behavior threatens the power and prerogatives of those in authority, not because God demands it to satisfy some divine hunger, even hunger for justice.  If God hungered for justice, the torture and death of an innocent man would sicken, not satisfy." (pp.  184-185).

Williams finds atonement (which she calls "at-one-ment," a means of becoming more at one with God and nature) in Jesus' life rather than in his death.  He was no ascetic; he turned water into wine for his disciples and neither forbade marriage nor separated men from women.  But he eschewed money, power and family ties, preferring to spend time with social outcasts.  To Williams, Jesus is modeling a life for us which minimizes our evolutionary drives without denying them.  Her concluding message is that an omniscient God, having used evolution to form our species, was well aware of human evil - a design consequence or by-product of our evolutionary history.  We needed to be acquisitive in order to survive at all; in order to be free, we needed large brains, which necessitated monogamy, coalitions and an intensely groupish social structure including artificial kin.  Groups entail reciprocity, and with reciprocity comes cheating and cycles of retribution.  According to Williams, this is all well known to God, who provides his only Son to model the kind of life that can save us from ourselves, a life distilled from the ancient Hebrew commandment to love one another...but now including concepts of forgiveness and enemy love, concepts which are unique to Christianity among the three great monotheistic religions.

Doing Without Adam and Eve succeeds remarkably well in its stated goal of reconciling Christianity with evolutionary psychology.  This book should appeal to all Metanexus readers, yet my hunch is that the print run was relatively small.  Mainstream Christians, particularly fundamentalists, will no doubt find blasphemy here.  Mainstream evolutionists consider any discussion of religion a waste of time (Richard Dawkins: "Church is very boring and I don't want to talk about it").  My chief misgiving is that this important and thoughtful work will receive too little attention outside of college honors seminars on evolution and morality.  I am therefore not only assigning it to students; I am also writing this review.

Worcester, Massachusetts - May 2002