Historical Adam and Eve and Race: How a Shared Origin Supports Human Dignity

The author, J.R. Miller, recalls a 2022 conversation with Sandra Dimas, host of the 28:19 podcast, in which they examined how different views of human origin shape thinking about race. He argues that belief in the special creation of Adam and Eve gives the strongest foundation for rejecting racism. In his view, the alternatives, which leave God out of creation, risk producing a hierarchy of human worth.

The post lays out three broad views of human origin: naturalism, which denies a historical Adam and Eve and sees humans as purely evolved; theistic evolution, which holds that God worked through an evolutionary process; and biblical creationism, which teaches that God specially created one original pair as the ancestors of all people. The author also traces the modern idea of “race” to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when thinkers began sorting people by skin color and later gained a claimed scientific backing for those divisions.

The author acknowledges a hard historical fact: some Christians who believed in Adam and Eve still practiced racial prejudice. He argues that such people distorted core doctrine, for example by inventing the “curse of Ham” to justify the subjugation of certain groups. The deeper question, he suggests, is whether the worldview itself supports such conclusions or resists them.

Ultimately, the post contends that the historical Adam and Eve offers a consistent basis for opposing dehumanization, including racism, in every culture and era, and not only when it is socially convenient. The author also notes that this principle can be applied to other dehumanizing ideas beyond race, though the post does not give specific examples.

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