Adam and Eve - a fictional Love Story

The question asked was whether Adam & Eve are real or fictional. There are many common misconceptions and answers with faulty logic that accompany this question. Here are some responses to these mistakes:

uncorrectedvision says To relegate the Judeo-Christian creation story to mere fiction is to disregard the significant cultural and religious function served by the story. The creation story separates Judaism from all the surrounding religions. The story of Adam and Eve is meant to teach about humanity and human nature.

But this is irrelevant and begs the question - many myths serve societal purposes, but that is never a reason to show their reality. Many aspects of all religions probably have evolutionary positive effects which increase the chances that individual will pass on their genes. This is the subject of books like The evolution of God by Richard Wright. The answer to THIS question is still that Adam & Eve are fictional. There were never just 2 people in the world - that would have taken an act of creation, and would violate everything we know about science. The significance of this particular myth is an entirely different question.

Zubair Ahmed says The question is do you believe the Bible to be Gods word? If so then there is no doubt that Adam and Eve are real

Again, the conclusion does not follow from the assumption. The answer given here confuses science with belief. [Another example of this line of argument is the 'evolution is just a theory' or 'science is just your belief' line where the English words theory and belief are not recognized to have multiple semantic meanings.] Unless you take the bible as literally true in all facts. If you allow that the earth is much older than the bible claims, or if you allow that many of the bible's statements are allegories, metaphors or other rhetorical devices, then nothing in the bible can be taken as fact JUST because it says so. In this case, there is overwhelming scientific fact that disproves the statement.

enmarcha says...

On the other hand, evolutionary theories tell us that the humans have been around longer than that. However, there is a path that joins this two seemingly conflicting answers. We share genes from our parents who in turn inherited them from their parents and so on. Well, it turns out that scientists have discovered, through DNA investigation, that at some point in time, all the people in the world share common ancestors. All the humans alive today owe their DNA to a single man that lived around 65 000 years ago, and to one woman who lived between 150 000 to 200 000 years ago. If scientists are right, they obviously were never a couple but the idea of all humans sharing one single common mother and one single common father is fascinating to me.

Once more, you've misinterpretted what was said - the 2 theories do not say that all humans shared a common father AND a common mother. they also do not imply there was only 1 person of that sex at the time. the wiki page enmarcha quoted actually explains this fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

Not the only woman

One of the misconceptions of mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her that she was the only woman alive at the time. However nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below some tens of thousands; there were many other women around at Eve's time with descendants alive today, but somewhere in all their lines of descent there is at least one generation with no female offspring (and men do not pass on their mothers' mitochondrial DNA to their children). By contrast, Eve's lines of descent to each person alive today includes at least one line of descent to each person which is purely matrilineal.

Not a contemporary of "Adam"

Sometimes mitochondrial Eve is assumed to have lived at the same time as Y-chromosomal Adam, perhaps even meeting and mating with him. However there is no such parallel with the Biblical story. Like mitochondrial "Eve", Y-chromosomal "Adam" probably lived in Africa; however, this "Eve" lived much earlier than this "Adam" – perhaps some 50,000 to 80,000 years earlier.