David Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen's University, Belfast where he works on the history of geographical ideas and the historical geographies of science and religion. Widely published, he is a member of a number of national and international academic institutions including Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy. In the fourth of our On being human series of seminars, Professor Livingstone examines the history of the idea of Adam as the progenitor of the human race, how this has been challenged and how it has been intertwined with strategies to harmonise Scripture and science.

In one way or another, Adam and Eve continue to play a crucial role in thinking about human origins. Paleoanthropologists use the latest techniques from genetics to identify the earliest humans – often referred to as Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosome Adam.

At the same time, theologians continue to debate the meaning of the creation narrative in Scripture, and its significance for understanding the nature of the human.

In this seminar I will examine something of the history of the idea of Adam as the progenitor of the human race, and the ways in which the traditional monogenetic belief has been perennially challenged, not least within the Christian tradition itself.

In this narrative I hope to reveal the complex ways in which these proposals were intertwined with matters of cultural history, biblical hermeneutics, racial politics, civic governance, the shifting boundaries of the heretical, and strategies to harmonise Scripture and science. 

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Professor Livingstone’s seminar ‘Christianity and the science of human origins’ took place on Monday, 24th October 2016 at Union Theological College, Belfast.