CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

God’s Laboratory: On Science in the Service of Myth

Scientists have located the Garden of Eden. It is in Botswana. This was reported not in the theology section of any publication but as a science story, because it emerged from genetic research — mitochondrial DNA analysis tracing the migration patterns of early Homo sapiens back to the Okavango Delta. The researchers were doing real science. They were reading real data. And somewhere in the journey from data to headline, the entire epistemological project went quietly off the rails.

To search for where Eden was is to grant Eden the status of a historical fact. The myth is allowed to set the research question, which means that whatever empirical answer comes back gets absorbed into the mythology rather than challenging it. The Garden of Eden was not in Botswana. It was not anywhere. It is a story — a profound and psychologically resonant story, one that names something real about the human experience of self-consciousness and historical existence — but a story nonetheless. When science goes looking for it, science has already lost the argument before the first data point is logged.

I say this as someone who finds the underlying science genuinely interesting. The mitochondrial research on human population bottlenecks and migration patterns out of sub-Saharan Africa is important work. The Okavango Delta may well have been a refugium — a stable habitat that sustained human populations during a period of climatic stress. That is a meaningful scientific claim, and it stands on its own. The moment you call it Eden, you have handed the keys of your laboratory to Genesis.

The Bear and the Apple

I was reminded of a piece I read some years ago about the origin of apples. The article placed their origin in Kazakhstan, in the Tian Shan mountains, where the wild ancestor of the domestic apple — Malus sieversii — still grows. This is also real science, and fascinating. The mechanism of dispersal involves bears. Bears eating apples, wandering further from the orchard, defecating the seeds — selecting, over time, for the sweetest fruit because those were the ones worth walking for. Biology committed to sugar. The bear as unwitting horticulturalist. It’s a beautiful piece of natural history.

Someone at the time — possibly the author, possibly an editor — noted with a wink that Kazakhstan, not the Fertile Crescent, might therefore be the real Garden of Eden. It was a joke. It read as a joke. But it was the same move: the mythological category reaches out and tries to claim the scientific finding. The finding is interesting enough on its own. The apple doesn’t need Eden. Eden, apparently, needs the apple.

Both the Kazakhstan piece and the Botswana announcement share the same structural problem: they use the word ‘Eden’ as though it were a geographical designator rather than a theological one. You can find where apples originated. You cannot find where the Garden was, because the Garden was never a place. It was a condition — the condition of human existence before self-consciousness, before history, before the knowledge of good and evil. The story is about what it means to become human. That is not a location you can put on a map, regardless of how good your mitochondrial sequencing is.

The Nazarene College and the Double Life

I went to a Nazarene college for my first year of undergraduate education. I want to be honest about why: it was the late seventies, Bob Dylan had entered his Christian period, and I was trying to understand it. Two or three albums of fundamentalist conviction from a man who had previously seemed to operate at a different altitude than the rest of us. I didn’t want to dismiss it. I thought the best way to understand it was to go live among Nazarenes for a while and see what they saw.

They were, for the most part, warm and generous people. Church every morning was a condition of enrollment, and I went. What I was not prepared for was my introduction to biology.

The course was accredited, which meant it had to cover the contemporary scientific account of evolution. It did. It also, being a Nazarene institution, covered the biblical account of creation. Both frameworks were presented as competing explanations of the same phenomena. Both were in the syllabus. Both appeared on the exam.

I got an A. What I learned to get that A was a kind of cognitive code-switching that I have since come to........

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