Aside from the virtual total agreement among the scientific community that the theory of natural selection is generally sound and the total lack of any peer-reviewed publication of studies supporting either “creation science” or “intelligent design,” there are factual tests that demonstrate your statement to be demonstraby false without the need to positively assert the validity of the theory of evolution.
First, there is more genetic variability in the human population than can be explained by our having descended from a single fertile human couple living 7-10 thousand years ago. Jimmy Akin of Catholic Answers wrote honestly about this on
his blog a few years back.
Second, through tracing specific genetic signatures in the human population (“haplotypes”) geneticists are capable of tracing the migration patterns of human beings from their putative ancestral homelands (e.g,. Israel for Jews), back tens of thousands of years to east central Africa. Incidentally, the indigenous people currently living in that part of Africa have far greater genetic variabilty than do other similarly-sized indigenous populations in Europe (e.g., Lapps of Scandinavia), Asia (e.g., Tamils of Sri Lanka and India), Australia (e.g., aborignal Australian), or the Americas (e.g., Mayans of Mesoamerica). Much of this technique is possible because the DNA in our mitochondria is conserved over many generations, and we receive it from our mothers. Also, the DNA in mens’ Y-chromosomes is also well-preserved over many generations. Therefore, you can take a swab of the inside of your cheek, send it to
National Geographic or many other companies, and they will tell you where your deep ancestral DNA came from. Using these techniques, scientists have been able to identify where the genetic makeup of the human population got split up, as people migrated from a central population (in Africa) to different parts of the world, carrying slightly different components of the orignal mix. Hence, you can identify genetic differences between Poles and Russians based on their deep ancestral divergences in geography (e.g., Kievan Rus was settled by Norse viking colonists, whose ancestors came from Scandanavia).
Using these techniques, scientists have been able to estimate the likely year at which our most recent common ancestors (MRCA), male and female, likely existed. Using mitochondrial DNA to identify “
mitochondrial Eve” and Y-chromosome DNA to identify “
Y-chromosome Adam,” scientists have estimated that these two different MRCAs lived tens of thousands of years apart.
We don’t need to talk about evolution to discuss how the human family tree spread over time. Even without discussing how new species come into being, there’s plenty of evidence that we must read Genesis figuratively.
Without even talking about biology, most modern biblical scholarship of which I’m aware indicates that most of the Pentateuch was written after the prophetic books of the 7th-9th centuries BC. If that’s the case, Genesis must be viewed allegorically, as early Church scholars such as Origen did.
