FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Pergunta: Qual é a posição da Igreja sobre Adão e Eva?
Question: What is the Church's position on Adam and Eve?
The Church consistently insists that there is a historical Adam
What does this mean? Some members take this to mean that the narrative in Genesis should be understood in some way as a literal history. For others, it means that there is little more than the assertion that in all of God's creation over a very long period of time (early members at the time of Joseph Smith speculated that it could be billions of years) there is a certain point when we have the first man (as a child of God). Whether that man was created directly by God (one view in Mormon speculation), or whether there was some other divine or natural mechanism (there are several different views in Mormon speculation here), all of them come to the conclusion that there is this person Adam who represents the first of God's children on the earth, and that he and his wife Eve existed at some point in time and gave birth to all of humanity.
Beyond the existence of a historical Adam, the rest of it can be understood literally or metaphorically, or more commonly as a mixture of these extreme positions
Most members of the Church employ some combination of all of that. Consider, for example, this comment in the Ensign in 1994:
This concept is further solidified by the description of the creation of woman as being formed from the rib of Adam—a rib being a metaphor for a person corresponding to Adam. Modern prophets have taught that the creation of woman from the rib of the man is to be taken figuratively. (See Spencer W. Kimball, Ensign, Mar. 1976, p. 71.) [1]
Most of the leaders of the Church have understood the use of Adam's rib as a metaphor and not some literal history
Most of the leaders of the Church have understood the use of Adam's rib as a metaphor and not some literal history - even while the same leaders would assert that other parts of the narrative of Adam and Eve should be understood literally. For those who take different approaches, it is simply an issue of assigning more parts of the narrative as being mythical or metaphorical and fewer as being understood literally or the other way around. For us as individuals, as we find the approach that resonates with our own understanding and our own spiritual witness, I think that as long as we try to answer the question of what the scriptures are trying to teach us, we will do reasonably well. It is only when we try to assert something through the text that was never intended that we run into trouble.