EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE 



We can readily understand how the possession of such 

 gifts made the life of Adam and Eve very happy. Without 

 anguish of the terror of death, without obstacles to good 

 activity raised by passions, in intimate friendship with God 

 their Father, they inhabited a beautiful estate and began to 

 achieve mastery over material creation, free of the burden of 

 fatiguing labor. 



This teaching about the original perfection of mankind 

 presents today a serious challenge. How are we to reconcile 

 the data of revelation on the dignity of the first men with the 

 data of paleontology attesting that the farther back we go 

 into the past, the more the life of the human being, as borne 

 out by the traits of his fossil remains, approaches animality? 

 Although researches into prehistory are far from having 

 furnished us with a complete and sure picture of primitive 

 man, the results which have accumulated not only ignore a 

 paradisiacal state of mankind at its beginnings, but seem to 

 exclude it by what they have disclosed about the less than 

 rudimentary culture of primitive men. The man discovered by 

 the sciences of prehistory hardly resembles the man of the 

 earthly Paradise. On the one side, we have a being presented 

 as perfect; on the other, a being close to the beasts, advancing 

 toward a more human condition by painful conquests of him- 

 self and his environment. The idea of a Fall from a level of 

 perfection possessed from the outset yields to the idea of a 

 level toward which to struggle in the future. Perfection is to 

 be found, not at the beginning of the road, but at the end. 

 These two points of view on human origins are hard to 

 harmonize, and the more the scientific description of early 

 man gains in clarity, the more the picture painted by revelation 

 tends to vanish toward folklore. 



To tell the truth, the man exhibited by the author of Genesis 

 is not the primitive man of Java or Peking, but a man of his 

 own time and nation, transported to an idealized version of a 

 garden bearing topographical features of an oasis in his own 

 country. Contemporary theology is well aware of this situation, 

 and is eager to trace out a solution. 



In the first place, we must observe that the two kinds of 

 knowledge we possess about human origins are not located on 

 the same plane. Prehistory and paleontology move on the 



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