>>Hardly. Paul states that death was the result of Adam's sin. If death occured before Adam's sin, or before he existed, then death is not the result of Adam's sin, i.e., a transgression of God's Law, and therefore sin is a fiction. Of course, you realized that Brown's attack wasn't against the concepts expressed by Paul, but the ideas expressed in the theories of Evolution that propose that man evolved from lower life forms. Brown is stating that both evolution and the creation story in Genesis cannot be true. Do you believe that death was the result of Adam's sin? If so, how can death have occured prior to Adam's sin if it was caused by Adam's sin? If you claim that death was not the result of Adam's sin then you have a disagreement with Paul, who claims it is. You will have to take that up with him.
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>A much more logical deduction would be that Adam was fictitious (or more simply Paul was wrong).

More logical? Only if you desire a specific outcome Rejecting parts or all of the testimony of the Bible is not a new solution. Wisdom knows her own children.

It is interesting to note that researching hereditary linage from mitochondrial RNA has led to data that suggests modern man was derived from a single female, now called 'eve'. If that research withstands analysis the question arises "with whom did eve conjugate to create offspring?" And, how was it possible that two such compatible beings could arise at exatcly the time, i.e., the child-bearing years of eve? The odds against that happening by random selection have to be astronomical to the point of impossible.

A similar nexus was reached in 1958, at a meeting of evolutionists in Denver, CO. They had convened to consider why, after 100 years of archeological and geological research the fossile record did not support Dawarin's theory of gradualism. Fredrick Hoyle, IIRC, showed mathematically why random collisions of precursor molecules causing the creation of a single cell with 2,000 protein enzymes was impossible, to say nothing of the nucleides inside and the cell membrane which surrounds them. Max Earnst responded with a tautological argument, stating "It just did!". The majority in attendence accepted Earnst's 'explaination' and that became biology's 'dirty little secret', according to Eldridge. He and Gould eventually developed, around 1972, an alternative theory to explain away the absence of gradualism in the fossil record, the theory of punctuated equilibrium. The two camps have been warring with each other every since.