From: "Shuan Rose" <shuanr@boo.net>
I was watching a promo of a Discovery Science Channel program.The promo went
as follows:
"To understand who you are , you have to understand where you are coming
from. To understand where the human species is coming from, you have to
watch 'The real Eve', which is coming on..."
The program is presumably about the so called "Mitochondria Eve". Now, I
know this is just a TV promo, and that they possibly wanted it to be
provocative. Well, I was provoked. For there to to be a " real Eve", there
must be a false Eve to contrast her with. The false Eve is of course the Eve
of Genesis.
Obviously, the folks behind the promo have bought into the science-religion
conflict scenario, in which true science corrects the fake origin account
that religion has been pushing these many years. its important to know that
not only YECs believe in the science-religion war, but that many atheists
are pushing it, AND that it is becoming an article of faith in popular
culture.
Is it worth writing a letter to the Discovery Network on the issue?
is there anything that us ordinary folk can do to counter this "urban Myth"?
I agree that their reference to the "real Eve" is both provocative and
misleading. In my judgment, the mitochondrial Eve has essentially nothing to
do with the Eve of Genesis, the name used for the "Motherhood" character in
the narrative (or "storied") theology of early Genesis.
But there is, of course, a history that stands behind Discovery Channel's
misuse of Eve as the name of the individual woman, or small group of women,
at the genealogical bottleneck in human history. The relevant historical
fact is that numerous Christians have assumed that the Eve of Genesis was
indeed the biological mother of all humans, and that she lived in the
relatively recent past.
In that context, I'm not really surprised to see Discovery Channel and
others use the name Eve as they do, and treating the scientific account as a
corrective to a an outdated concept associated with a common (mis)reading of
early Genesis.
However, it might still be worth crafting an informative letter to Discovery
Channel that encourages them to move beyond the simplistic portrayal of
science and religion as adversaries.
Howard Van Till
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