God bless you, brothers in Christ. I am a Colombian biology student, and I have had doubts about how to reconcile my Christian faith and biological evolution. Some doubts are that, since we are descended from a species of great apes from Africa, we are the only ones that did not become extinct. What role do Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden play? Are they symbolic, or do you believe there was a Homo couple from whom we descend? Would the flood also be symbolic? Why did God wait until 4,000 years ago to communicate with a human, Abraham, and institute a religion? Why didn’t he communicate with Neanderthals or Homo erectus? These are sincere theological doubts. I hope your Christian kindness will answer them for me.
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Incorrect.
We and the great apes (in fact, we and any other species you might name) have common ancestors. The most recent common ancestor with a current existing species is the one we have with chimpanzees about 6-7 million years ago. This is purely theoretical calculated from mutation rates and genetic difference for no fossil of this common ancestor has been found. We can only guess that is was basically a primate with some chimpanzee/human like features.
On the other hand, we can calculate common ancestors with other great apes. For example for the gorilla this common ancestor was 8-10 million years ago. And once again we have no fossil evidence for such a creature so we can only guess that it had primate and gorilla/chimpanzee/human like features.
We might think this sums up to a more ape like ancestor, but these guesses have very little solid ground to stand on because we see plenty of examples of vast changes by evolution. So it is possible we would not see much in common with humans or the apes. What we do know is that our greatest visible differences (sparse hair and long distance running on two feet) is an adaptation as persistence hunters, using a more efficient cooling system with sweat than other animals.
I am not sure what you mean. We have DNA from Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Denisovans, as well as many other ancestors like homo erectus. So all of these survive in us. Most species change and adapt over time. Do you call that extinction?
This is not to say that there are no branches of the homo genus which did not become extinct without contributing to our own species. But candidates for such have been disappearing as we have found that those like the Neanderthals did interbreed with our ancestors contributing to the modern human gene pool. Current studies suggest that Paranthropus did not contribute to our ancestry, but this may change. Though others, like the Australopithecus have faced various shifts of opinion in the opposite direction regarding whether they should be considered ancestors. In the end it may simply be a measure of how much they contributed rather rather than a simple yes or no.
There are many suggested answers to this. In my case, I believe they were two homo sapiens (6,000 to 10,000 ya) God chose to speak to and it is inspiration (divine breath) which brought the human mind to life with new ideas like love and justice. No I don’t believe we all genetically descended from a single human couple let alone from Adam and Eve (WAY too much obsession with genetics frankly). I understand the story to be filled with symbolism, for I do not believe in magic fruit or talking animals. And we even see a treatment of things in the story as symbolic in the Bible. The serpent is referred to as an angel who is eventually cast out of heaven. And there are many references to the tree of life with many meanings – though I think the common thread is relationship with God (though that is my interpretation).
I see no reason for that. The problem with the flood is not a lack of evidence but too much evidence. Massive floods are common. Though a common misconception is the treatment of the word “earth” as a globe or planet which makes no sense since such a concept did not exist. The word in the Bible meant no such thing.
Well besides the fact that Abraham was not the first God communicated with, the answer is the same as the reason why God waited for Adam and Eve or anybody else in the Bible. He waited until the time was right.
Insufficient language skills. The Homo erectus had no language and the Neanderthals lacked spoken language. And even our own species which had spoken language for around 100,000 years was improving its mastery of language during that time. I would think some mastery of abstractions was needed in order to communicate with a non-physical being like God.
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Reconciling faith with Evolution is not an exact science (ironical). On this forum you will get a biased view towards Evolution and science with a few minor dissenters (of which I am one). Despite what yo will read there is no single answer, nor is Evolution as clear cut as some would have you believe. On the other hand The pure Biblical (YEC) view is ridiculed.
Without being assertive I would suggest that you do not take everything you read as certain, and make your own mind up as to what you “need” to believe, and what is personal faith.
Richard
I come at this from the direction of the Hebrew text, and will say that given the types of literature involved there is no conflict between the text of Genesis and any science at all, including evolution. Neither of the two Creation stories was written as history, though the second may qualify as mythologized history, i.e. based on something real but framed and told in a way to teach a serious truth or truths.
Personally I vacillate between a view much like that of @mitchellmckain and a symbolic position, though given the ancient definition of a “symbol”, as something that conveys what it portrays, even as symbolic there is more substance than just some made-up story.
As for the matter of Abraham: First, Yahweh was communicating with some others that we’re told about, so it’s probable that He spoke with still others as well and that just didn’t get written down (one of my professors suggested that He approached several others before Abraham became the first to trust and respond). Second, there’s a theme of spiritual warfare that fits why Abraham was seemingly the first, that the rebel angels (including Satan) of Genesis 3, 6, and 11 were fighting with God to control all the nations; we learn in Deuteronomy 32 that Yahweh divided up the nations among the elohim, who were supposed to guide them all in following Yahweh but who instead decided to claim the status of gods themselves and misled the nations. We meet Abraham after Babel, when Yahweh basically washed His hands of all those nations and started a new plan: find one faithful man and build a nation for Himself starting with that man! So while God spoke to others earlier (e.g. Noah), we find Abraham as “first” because he was the start of the plan that would lead to Jesus, through Whom God would reclaim all the nations and dethrone the fake gods.
This fits Abraham’s status as father of the faithful; the point was to build a faithful people and thus set the stage for the victory that Jesus achieved. Since we and Israel are among that number, what is written is what is relevant to that plan.
This leads back to the opening of Genesis, the first Creation account, which we now know is a severely edited version of the common Egyptian creation story, used to set forth that all the gods of the Egyptians were nothing but created entities made by Yahweh to do various jobs. At the same time that uses a form of literature known as “temple inauguration”, where the writer describes how Yahweh built His own temple, the world, and set in it an image (or idol) just like all ancient near eastern temples had, and that that image is humanity, male and female. This also attacks the common ANE idea that royalty and possibly priests are the ones who are the gods’ images, declaring that all humans are in the Creator’s image. Both of those are radical, giving women equal status with men before God and in essence saying that all humans are royalty, being the representation of Yahweh in His cosmic temple.
So there’s no conflict between Genesis and evolution because they are talking about two entirely different things! The one is instructing us as to who we are in God’s eyes (and who aren’t gods) while the other is telling us how God’s command to the earth to “Bring forth!” life ended up with us.
Just BTW, numerous ancient scholars concluded that Genesis doesn’t give an age for the Earth. Some noted that the days in Genesis 1 are not necessarily one right after another, so there is no way to know how much time actually passed because it doesn’t tell us what happened between the days; others noted that up until day 6 there were no humans around to count time, and thus the days were “divine days” and suitably long; others concluded that the story was poetic in nature and not to be taken as a schedule of time but as a memorable way to communicate that God is orderly. For those who tried to figure out how old the world is, they came up with numbers between ten thousand and a trillion years! though my favorite is the conclusion that the earth is uncountably old and the rest of the universe uncountably older still.
Ah – almost missed the flood question. No, it isn’t symbolic; it qualifies as mythologized history (or perhaps “theologized”), an account built to make theological points using a real event as the core.
“Why didn’t [God] communicate with Neanderthals or Homo erectus?” We don’t know that He didn’t, but then we don’t know if they qualified as humans under the definitions of Genesis. And while we may be curious, we aren’t told either way because the answer isn’t important when it comes to the plan of building a faithful people from whom the Christ would come.
BTW, I’d say it wasn’t so much that God “instituted a religion” as that Abraham and all the others had expectations of how a deity should behave, which in other words means that they expected there to be some sort of religion, so God used that as a way to communicate.
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Good point.
It is usually my thinking that God created for a relationship, so I expect that God had a relationship with other living thing before us. So I guess I should modify the above to say… IF God waited (at least to tell them what He told Abraham and others), then a good reason might be the lack of sufficient language to do so.
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It is true that we are great apes. We did not evolve from great apes but rather we and several other species of great apes shared a common ancestor. Closest cousins are chimpanzees and bonobos. We three make up the Hominini tribe. One lineage became Pan and one became Homo but way before that our ancestors were most likely Australopithecus and Homo erectus. But I’m assuming you know most of that and are more at a crossroads with the theology.
Take Adam and Eve. Could they have been real? They could have potentially been real people heavily mythicized like Abraham Lincoln was in Vampire Slayer. I use to believe this for a decade. But as I read more stuff by scholars and read more Bronze Age literature from the Middle East the more I moved towards them being fictional characters. In general Genesis 1-11 is considered ancient Jewish mythology and it was often built off of other Mesopotamian writings.
There are two main easily accessible writings from ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia that was potentially the source for Genesis 1-11 though we don’t know if it was just a Jewish reimagining of those stories or if all three shared an even older source, which very well could have just been a oral tradition already embedded into society.
Anyways one is the “Atrahasis Epic” which includes humans made from clay and divine blood much like Adam was made of dust and divine breath.
The other is my favorite and it’s “The Epic of Gilgamesh” which includes several parallels.
Gilgamesh is the king in the epic. He’s powerful and done gods want to humble him. So a “clone” is made that resembles him named Enkidu though he’s somewhat shorter. They were going to battle but instead became friends. But before becoming friends Enkidu was like an animalistic man. He lived naked in the wild. He ate abd drank with the animals and fought off hunters who came to close. He became “civilized” after women seduced him.
You’ll notice the similarities with Adam she Eve. Adam was split in half ( not just a rib ) and the other “clone” had became Eve. They lived naked in the garden. Before Eve Adam even spent time with the animals naming them.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu fights the Bull of Heaven who was the cedar forest protector. They kill the bull and are then punished by Enkidu growing sick and dying. This drives Gilgamesh into rage and sorrow and so he decides to seek out immortality so he never has to die. During his hunt he’s told to find a man who the gods granted immortality to after he alone survived a global flood. This man tells him of a magical fruit that gives eternal life at the bottom of an ocean and Gilgamesh seeks it out and finds it. But before he can eat it a snake sneaks up and steaks it.
This seems to be very similar to Adam and Eve being deceived by a snake concerning magical fruit that grants knowledge and after eating it they get lucked out so they can’t eat another fruit of eternal life and hints of Noah and the flood.
There is a third take out of Sumeria called Enki and Ninhursag where they live in a paradise called Dilmun where there is no death or sickness. Nibhursag causes magical plants to grow which Enki eats becoming cursed with diseases.
So very similar tropes which is why i think it’s purely a myth no. There was never just two humans. The flood was a myth too. There is zero evidence of a global flood or even a Mesopotamian flood within human history.
The flood is a play on Genesis 1.
Genesis one opens up with the spirit of god fluttering “like wings” above a formless watery darkness. It’s “tohu wabohu” the great chaos. Imagine the stormy scene of the flood. Noah on an ark surrounded by dark deep waters underneath and a dark cloudy sky blotting out the sun with rain pouring down so hard it’s like an ocean above and below. But God is in control and calms it. This is later played out again by Jesus being seen as a ghost ( a spirit of a man ) ( spirit of a god ) above dark waters under a dark stormy night which he also calms. Showing power over the great chaos. This is also what baptism symbolizes. Another trope of that same story.
We don’t know if god ever communicated with ancient humans. But yes those other species/subspecies are extinct. We see genetic evidence of them caused by ancient hybridizing between us and them, but they are extinct. Just like our ancient bony lobe-finned lunged fish ancestors are now extinct despite us sharing our HOX gene clusters with them.
Anyways zzzz I’m going to bed because I wake up in 4 hours to start a 12 mile ruck hike with some battle buddies.
Also some good podcasts that dive into this is
Recovering Evangelicals.
The Bible for Normal People.
Data over Dogma.
The Bible Project.
Genesis Marks the Spot.
Literature and History by Doug Metzger.
Some books I liked are the “lost World Series” by John Walton. Dan McClellan’s “the Bible says so.”
The Commentsry on the Torah by Richard Friedman and the books by Pete Enns.
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I take Adam. and Eve as symbolic and their story is about what we are like; what we are called to be and our common continued disregard of what we know of what God asks of us.
In respect to God’s relationship with earlier forms of the Homo genus, I presume God had a relationship with them in accord with their conscious ability to interact with the divine presence. I also believe in a future resurrection of all life and not just humanity. That which has been loved will be raised up.
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Welcome to our discussion site, Daniel Graciano! It is always good to have someone new bring up basic questions. I hope you do not feel overwhelmed by so many ideas about Genesis 1-3.
This happens to be a favorite topic of mine (and obviously of many others) and you can find my take on the subject in a small website I have put up: understandinggenesisone.com.
It is the fashion now to see the Bible’s creation accounts as rewrites of other ancient accounts in the ancient near east. I do not buy into this. Regardless of how the Bible’s accounts came to shape themselves in the human author’s mind, they have become the word of God for us. We need to take them as we find them.
Genesis 1 is written as a historical account: this happened, then this happened, etc. If it is taken as such, you will find that it outlines exactly what our science has recently discovered. The earth and heavens were not created in poor condition in verse 1, as too many believe. Verse 1 is simply an introduction. The first thing created is light. This fits with the scientific description of the big bang, and with the fact that it is the creative act of day one. On the next day, the “waters above” are the stars and planets of the universe which coalesced in the billions of years after the big bang. The “waters below” refers to the earth which was also created on the second day.
Genesis 2-3 is a whole different story, different human author, different purpose. This is told like a story; it has a setting, it has characters, it has a moral. I don’t think we are meant to believe that Adam and Eve are actual historical people, but we are to take them seriously as telling us something very important about our relationship to God.
The beginning of the Bible is very important, and I don’t think we quite get it yet. I don’t think God expected us to have to do research in ancient near east cultures in order to understand his opening chapter. I don’t think he was talking just to the ancients; he was also talking to us, if only we will hear it.
Hope this helps in some way. Keep thinking.
If you will send me your email address, I will send you an essay I think will be of help. My address is roy.a.clouser@gmail.com
Roy
Perhaps that needs another thread?
Trying to rectify Gensis 1 to science is a fools errand. It was never meant as such. The historical setting is just that. A setting. As such it is no more historically accurate than Brighton Rock or a Tale of Two Cities,(or the D’avinci Code)
RIchard
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Sorry, but no – it wasn’t. The first Creation account is an edited version of the common Egyptian creation story written to make theological points. It is two kinds of literature at once (brilliant job by Moses!), one being ‘royal chronicle’ and the other 'temple inauguration", both carrying theological messages as the edited Egyptian creation story slams the Egyptian gods and exalts Yahweh.
Nope. The “waters above” are the portion of the “great deep”, the t’hom (teh-home), the dark and watery abyss that the Spirit of God meditated over.
No, the “waters below” is the portion of the great deep that God pushed aside to make dry land appear.
And yet over the last several decades God has bestowed on us an immense treasury of knowledge from the ancient near east that has illuminated not just the two Creations stories but a lot more! We now have the ability to “hear” the Creation stories and more much like an ancient Israelite would have.
He talks to us through the ancients. If we are wise, we will strive to hear Genesis as Moses intended it to be understood by the original audience.
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“He talks to us through the ancients. If we are wise, we will strive to hear Genesis as Moses intended it to be understood by the original audience.” St. Roymond
No, St Roymond, you are wrong.
You are grabbing what is fashionable in popular theology now and running with it. Stop and think.
We may strive to hear Genesis as “Moses intended it to be understood by the original audience” but that will be a matter of historical interest for those who like to figure out what ancient thought was like. It will not bring enlightenment to us in any other significant way. The words of the text are there to be read by any reader. Sometimes those words are very much tied to the time in which they were written, such as when Jesus says it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. We need to know whether he meant the eye of a sewing needle, or a gate into Jerusalem by that name. Here some historical research is very helpful. But Genesis uses words that were intended for all. God made light, he called it day, he separated light from darkness. We know all those words, they were not words that indicated something, like a gate into a city, that existed only in ancient times. A bit of mystery arises when God creates a divider between the waters below and the waters above. But part of the mystery is solved when we hear that the waters below are to move aside and allow dry ground to show. The waters below are clearly the earth on which we live. That leaves the waters above yet to be understood. There are dozens of theories as to what they are, but the simplest one is never mentioned. They are to other planets what the waters below are to us—the surfaces of the heavenly bodies. None of the other theories work. Theories abound about how the ancients saw the earth, theories that make use of waters in all sorts of ways. But none of them are certain. None of them make lasting sense. The real question to ask is what does this mean to us, to us who live in the 21st century? Do you think God did not know what we would learn about the earth? Do you think he was only writing the Genesis account for the ancients ? For the children? There are far more people living on the earth now, people whom God wants to communicate to, and who need to hear. If you were writing a letter to your family with an explanation of how you built your house, would you write it so that it would make sense only to the 2% who are 3-year-olds? No, God wrote Genesis 1 for all of us. If we live in the ancient past and think that the sky is a bowl, we will think that God made a bowl over the earth. That’s fine. But if we live in a different age when we think the sky is the atmosphere around us with the stars shining through it, then we should think that God made an atmosphere with stars shining through it. Why ever not?
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Joining “Genesis 1 to science is a fools errand”?
Well maybe it’s time for the fools to lead.
At that time Jesus said, “I praise you , Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.
Mat 11:25
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I do not wish to persue this form of reasoning or the beliefs that are behind it.
Richard
By reading the opening of Genesis as Moses intended it to be understood we get enough theology for multiple sermons. Read it as “history” and you’d be doing extremely well to get a three-minute homily . . . with almost no theology.
Moses used words that can only be understood as part of the kind of literature he used. In that sense, they do in fact indicate something that only existed in ancient times.
And just BTW, there was never a gate in Jerusalem called “eye of the needle” – that’s a fiction made up sometime in the Middle Ages.
Besides which the passage probably has a misspelling and the saying is actually a ship’s cable going through the eye of a sewing needle.
That’s contradictory – a thing can’t be the item that was moved aside to make room for it.
It also ignores the text, which tells us what the waters were – part of the great *t’hom".
That only comes after finding the meaning for the original audience. Otherwise you’re just making stuff up.
Of course we’re going to think that – but that isn’t what the opening Creation account is about. It’s about serious theology, focused on Who God is and who we are and the relationship between, on who isn’t God.
Here’s a question about theology from Genesis 1: Why aren’t the “two great lights” named? Here’s another: What does “image of God” mean? And a third: why are the days described as being divided by periods of darkness?
Those are serious theological points Moses was making. Read Genesis; opening wrong, i.e. as history, and you miss them.
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Yes, it is – it’s like claiming that the song Puff the Magic Dragon was intended to help sell drugs to kids, or that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is about a sexual encounter. Why? Because it’s reading into a piece of literature something that isn’t actually there.
It can be fun to do, but there’s no substance to it – humor, yes, as in the Fiddler on the Roof segment where Tevye and Lazar Wolf are talking past each other – but actual misunderstanding.
Sorry, but that throws out the theological messages in the opening Creation account.
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I think we need to find a balance between reading scripture via the historical critical method (how the ancients understood it) and the canonical dimension. I think once we posit inspiration the canon takes on an added meaning. The sum is more than the parts and we can see God at work in the process.
Without understanding ancient thought and belief it would be very difficult, I presume, to even translate Biblical texts into modern language. There is also a difficulty in knowing what the ancients actually thought. We also cannot assume that they were univocal in belief. It is quite feasible and even extremely likely many of them they may have interpreted scripture differently. Christians today routinely read scripture and think it means something different than their neighbor. Then there is also the issue of how the NT treated the OT. NT authors had no problem reading Jesus into places He didn’t belong. That was certainly not “what Moses or the Israelites would have understood” as standard interpretation. I also think we have to allow for the Holy Spirit to guide individual believers and the Church as he sees fit. So for me Church tradition also plays a role in how I see scripture.
It is possible Genesis 1 was intended as a play by play account of creation but I think really good data has ruled it out as being accurate if so. For me, I see Genesis 1 at an etiology for the sabbath but also as theological comment on rival religions. People worshipped astronomical deities at the time. But they are just lamps placed in the sky by God. There isn’t any conflict in Genesis 1 because there has never been a time God has not been in charge. He didn’t need to rise to the top. I see a lot of forming on days 1-3 and filling on days 3-6.
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You are, as usual giving only half the story. The half that you align with. Whether the “Needle gate” existed or not is unprovable. And even if it did there would be little reason for a comel user to use it, unlss it was for nefariuos reasons. In truth the meaning is clear whether the actual example is real or not.
Is as ludicrous as the one yo are debunking. It makes even less sense as, in theory a camel could get throught the gate if all trappings were remove. A shp’s cable would never fit through a standard or even sailor’s neele.
So , perhaps this piecof human intelligence and learning was a fool’s errand.
The problem is that you are too obsessed with your scientific truths that you ignore people’s faith and what it means.
Jesus said
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
But you are more concerned with being right and your concept of Truth.
Good luck with that.
Richard
Most historical beliefs are unprovable. It’s not the goal of history to offer proof in that sense but probabilistic reconstructions. If I was going to sell you a 2,000 year old bridge that there is no physical evidence of, there is no paperwork for, that none of the thousands of ancient commentators who wrote on the Bible ever talked about, or that no one ever references or mentions until 100 years ago, are you going to run my way with a fistful of dollars to buy my bridge.
Of course there is no way to prove there wasn’t an actual gate named this because silence is not evidence it didn’t exist. Only evidence none of our surviving literature mentions it. Yet when an interpretation just shows up 1900 years later, I think it’s only proper to question it. And I think it a bit dubious to soften Jesus’s statement in such a way.
Vinnie
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The Creation account is clearly a historical account with a chronological order of events, divided up into seven days. Day 1 began with the formation of the earth 4.528 bya according to the Word.
If it is edited, its so severely edited that its more of a rewrite. The Egyptian creation story had multiple gods and also is not historical like Genesis is. There were no days in the Egyptian story.
I can agree here: Chronicle - a factual written account of important or historical events in the order of their occurrence.
Yahweh is not mentioned until the “second” Creation account which is also chronological in what follows.
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Gen 2:4 This is the history ( toledoth) of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,…
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Gen 5:1 This is the book of the genealogy ( toledoth) of Adam…
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Gen 6:9 This is the genealogy ( toledoth) of Noah…
The waters are anything in a liquid state that has no form, is formless and will conform to whatever is holding it. The early earth was a like a molten soup before something solid, that is the earth’s crust forming a “dome” shape… So then the full sphere of the planet is the firmament (heaven). The darkness that was upon the face of it can represent “obscurity” in that you could not see through the liquid, it was not clear.
The waters below (magma) gathered together to push up on the land to make it appear. God did not push the waters aside, defying gravity like the parting of the Red Sea.
Don’t throw out the history with the theology, and vice versa.