Imagine the moment when Adam stepped out of the Garden of Eden. The lush perfection of God’s “very good” creation faded behind him as the gates sealed shut, guarded by the flaming sword of a cherubim. Before him stretched an unfamiliar land, harsher and less welcoming. He could feel the curse of the Fall in his bones: toil, pain, and mortality had entered his existence. Yet, to Adam, the world still bore striking resemblances to the creation he had known—a testimony to its original divine craftsmanship.

Adam’s experiences shaped the oral tradition of the Genesis account. Passed down through generations, these stories eventually found written form under Moses, who wove them together with God’s guidance. From Adam’s perspective, the narrative began in the unfallen creation, where he was formed from dust and crowned the first man, steward of all life. When he shared the story with his descendants, Adam would naturally describe the “very good” creation God had made—a world he had walked in and known intimately. There would be no reason for Adam to recount the cosmic repercussions of the Fall, let alone the timeline-shattering event we now call the Big Bang. How could he have grasped that the Fall might have fractured not only the moral and spiritual fabric of creation but spacetime itself?

When Adam was expelled into the fallen creation, he encountered humans who bore no resemblance to his own story of divine craftsmanship. These evolved beings, a product of the natural processes within the fallen cosmos, were perplexing but ultimately irrelevant to his testimony. To Adam, his identity as the first man, hand-fashioned by God, remained unshaken. The effects of the Fall were devastating, but Adam had no reason to think they extended so far as to rewrite the universe’s history, making him appear as though he wasn’t the first human. To him, the fallen world was still the same creation, albeit distorted, that God had pronounced “very good.”

The lack of explicit references to Fallen Earth Creationism (FEC) in the biblical text reflects this perspective. Genesis is not a scientific manual but the testimony of a witness—originally Adam—whose account is rooted in his direct experiences with God and creation. The broader story of the Big Bang and evolutionary history belongs to the fallen cosmos, which Adam could not fully perceive or understand. FEC bridges this gap, allowing us to understand Adam’s witness while embracing the truths revealed by modern science.