One of the most controversial scientific theories of the past two hundred years has to be Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Even non-religious people may not relish the thought that we share common ancestors with not only chimps and other great apes, but even with non-mammalian creatures. In fact, if Darwin's theory is accurate, we share common ancestors with cockroaches and even plants. On the surface, this seems to diminish humanity's special place within the cosmos. But is that really the case? Read on.
First of all, let me confess, not only am I not a biologist, but I also struggled in my college biology classes. Having said that, I love what biologists, and other scientists can teach us about life, especially human life. My struggle in the sciences comes down to details. I am not very strong in the minutia of mathematical and scientific formulas, but I enjoy scientific concepts from the macro level. I just need really smart people to dumb it down and communicate it to me in ways that I can understand. So, I am not in a position to argue for or against Darwin's theory from a scientific perspective, but I do feel qualified to comment on it from a theological and philosophical perspective.
Second, in this blog I am not arguing that a person should necessarily embrace evolution, but rather that there's nothing inherently heretical for followers of Jesus to do so. A great resource on this is the BioLogos website and organization (BioLogos ). The founder of the organization is Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins is a committed Christian and endorses Darwin's theory of evolution.
In this post I just want to shed some light on a short passage in Genesis 2 that might provide us with a different way of considering the way in which God created humanity.
"...then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." - Genesis 2:7 (NRSV)
There is a lot of intimacy and care in how this verse describes God's creation of humanity. He doesn't just speak mankind into existence; we are told he forms or fashions the man from the ground - the soil. In fact, the name Adam is the Hebrew word for man and comes from the same Hebrew root word for land, ground, or soil. God uses the stuff of creation - dirt - to create humanity. I don't believe that this passage is a historical, much less scientific description of how God created humanity, but rather a symbolic account of the significance that YHWH places on humanity from the very beginning of creation. It's not an accident that the "name Adam" literally means "man". But there was not literally one man, named Adam in the Garden of Eden. Rather, the Adam of the Genesis 2 story represents all of humanity. The stories in chapters 2 and 3 give us insight into the plight of all of us, not simply two individuals in the beginning. In a sense, we are all Adam and Eve.
So, how does this relate to evolution? If God is able to create humanity from the dust of the earth (from the molecules and atoms of creation), then he is capable of creating humankind from lesser and lesser developed organisms going all the way back to the primordial soup of the primeval Earth. What distinguishes us from other living things, and the rest of creation isn't our chemical and material makeup, but that God used the chemicals and materials of his creation to form us in his image. The process (or the length of the process) isn't the defining factor. Afterall, none of us place a great deal of importance on a shovel full of dirt, but it's pretty cool that our God can take basic stuff like that and create all of us!
So, whether or not evolution turns out to be 100% accurate, what all of us can be sure of is that we have been created in the image of the God who loved us and in fact became one of us. And that gives humanity its ultimate dignity. - Shay
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