I grew up not believing in evolution and thinking it was something crazy that atheists just believe to reject God, but now that I’m an undergraduate majoring in biology, I’ve learned a lot more about evolution and how nuanced it is. I’ve been trying to work this into my theology, but can’t quite figure some stuff out.
When do humans become humans? Many Christian denominations believe that animals don’t have souls, and as such will not be subject to heaven or hell. Well, when did humans receive this soul when we can’t pinpoint at what point homo sapiens became their own distinctive species? Did God just arbitrarily choose Adam and Eve’s generation to magically have souls?
Many other organisms, like dolphins and elephants, seem to have the same emotions that humans do, like grieving when members die. Maybe they also have a sense of justice, but I’m not too familiar with the evidence. If other species can have these kinds of emotions, are we even that much different than other species? What excludes/includes them from heaven/hell?
Things like greed, envy, slander, malice, fornication, etc., are considered to be sins. However, couldn’t one attribute these things to a more selfish evolutionary strategy compared to altruistic behaviors like sharing, being kind to one another, etc., that we as a society deem acceptable? If these behaviors can be explained biologically and not as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God, why do we need Jesus’ death and resurrection?
I’m sure I have a lot more in my noggin that I’m not remembering to ask right now, but some clarifications on these points, as well as some book recommendations that has explainations on science and theology would be much appreciated.
There is a lot in your OP, much of which Christians like to gloss over. The establishment of humanity as sentient and “superior” is more a theological standpoint than a scientific one. Trying to combine the causes all sorts of problems and conflicts between what we can see and observe and what we try and asset from Scripture.
For now I will just address the last point.
The Christian view of the resurrection and the Atonement is directly related to the view that God demands or needs perfection for us to be with Him. No matter where or how the Sin comes from Jesus removes it so that we can be with God. That is the simplistic answer. We can delve deeper if you wish, but for now it means that it doesn’t matter whether the sin came from Adam or Nature, The cleansing is still necessary.
I don’t think Jesus’ death and resurrection are needed because God “demands perfection” in a procedural sense. The deeper issue is humanity’s condition: alienation from God, captivity to disordered desires, and subjection to death. Evolutionary explanations may help explain why certain behaviors arise, but they don’t define our vocation or heal the rupture. The gospel claims that in Christ, God reconciles us, liberates us from sin and death, and inaugurates new creation—and the resurrection is essential to that work, not incidental.
Perhaps Jesus was an accommodation for man’s obsession with purity and perfection? It can be argued, that forgiveness of His death is the Ultimate demonstration that it is not about what we do that matters.
It is humanity that is obsessed with Justice and procedures.
I, for one, see no reason to create a situation for God to fix (as in the fall) so as to suggest that God had not already included it it in His creation in the first place. The fall is as much human vanity “we did it”, as it is anything else.
The whole premise behind the Garden narrative is that God must have made the world paradise and we shut ourselves out of it. Surely God could not have intended all the suffering and trials of life!
When I say “alienation from God,” I don’t mean a mere human feeling or a divine squeamishness about ritual purity. I mean an objective rupture in communion expressed in the Bible as sin, idolatry, injustice, and ultimately death.
You seem to be proposing something else: that Jesus is primarily an accommodation to humanity’s obsession with purity/procedure, and that the cross shows “it’s not about what we do.” If that is your thesis, then please say so explicitly. Pray tell, what, in your view, Christ’s resurrection accomplishes beyond validating a human religious instinct. Is anything objectively defeated or healed (sin, death, estrangement), or is the gospel mainly pedagogy?
Also, if Christ is not uniquely necessary but one “accommodation” among others, then give me a concrete account of reconciliation in other theisms. How, specifically, does Allah reconcile anyone to Allah? How does reconciliation to YHWH work apart from Christ—by what means and on what basis? In Hindu traditions, what is the analogue of “reconciliation,” and how is it achieved? I’m not asking for slogans; I’m asking for the mechanism. Without that, “Christian exclusivity is pragmatism” reads like an assertion rather than an argument.
You are assuming that there is a necessity. All your questions are based on that one thing. How do other religions answer the problem Christianity perceives!
If Christ’s work is Universal, as is “for all people” where does that demand that “all people” know and understand it?
Secondly,
All your theology is based on Christian Scripture.
(Perhaps I should not go there)
II am a Christian because I believe it is the right faith for me. I do not impose it onto others. I witness because I think it is the best way to live this life, not because I think it is the only way to live this life, or that God will insist on it.
Your clarification shows where we’re now talking past each other.
Ben’s original question wasn’t “why should everyone be Christian?” It was whether evolutionary explanations of human behavior dissolve the need for Jesus’ death and resurrection. My argument assumes—not dogmatically, but classically—that the gospel addresses an objective condition: estrangement from God, bondage to sin, and death. That’s what makes reconciliation intelligible at all.
You seem to be denying that there is any such necessity—treating the “problem” as something Christianity perceives rather than something God addresses. If that’s the case, then terms like reconciliation, forgiveness, liberation, and resurrection no longer function as claims about reality but as symbols that some people find meaningful. That’s a coherent position, but it’s a different one from what the New Testament appears to be claiming.
Also, universality doesn’t require universal awareness. Gravity is universal without everyone understanding physics. In the same way, Christ’s work could be universal in scope without requiring universal cognition or assent.
Finally, I think this discussion has drifted beyond Ben’s question into a broader debate about religious pluralism and personal faith preference. That may be worth having—but it’s no longer addressing whether evolutionary explanations undermine the gospel’s claim that something real has gone wrong, and that God has acted decisively in Christ to set it right.
I guess that depends on whether this claim for the Gospel is accurate or not. If it is, I see no problem with it being caused by evolution rather than Adam. If the problem exists, then the Atonement answers it There is no need for humanity to be the cause.
The underlying theology is whether the Atonement was always an intention or whether it was prompted by humanity’s fall. To me, that puts too much power and control to humanity and makes God look incompetent. Surely God dictates what humanity is or can be not humanity itself. The fall implies that the the lunatics are running the asylum.
We agree that evolution does not undermine the gospel if the problem is real. But I do not agree that a real human fall—or real creaturely failure—would make God look incompetent. God can intend redemption from the beginning and still act in history in response to something that genuinely goes wrong without losing control. Saying that humans can really go wrong is not the same thing as saying “the lunatics are running the asylum”; it’s simply saying that human freedom and responsibility are real. If nothing has genuinely gone wrong, then it’s not clear what the atonement is actually doing beyond symbolism.
Thank you for your polite responses. I think we have reached an impasse.
As I see it humanity was never meant to be perfect so there was nowhere to fall from. Sin is a by-product of free thought therefor has to be accommodated one way or the other. Knowing humanity will sin Good ut the mechanisms in place. The timing of the Atonement is more due to practicalities and timing than desperation or rectification. Let’s admit it, if Jesus had come in modern Western civilisation it would not have been the same results or even the same continuance. It would have been forgotten without Scripture and with the diversity of cultures today there would be no way to make a universal Scripture.
My problem is not with the effectiveness or relevance of the Atonement but with Christianity’s conviction that we caused the problem. The problem is endemic to life, not Adam’s actions. The Atonement is as much for humanity’s state of mind as it is for God’s demands or requirements (more so IMO) Removal of guilt and refusal to accept are part and parcel of the Christian message. They are not weapons or coercions.
Not knowing you at all I shouldn’t presume to read too much into your questions. When earnestly asked - you’ll get lots of responses here, as you already have some - and from various perspectives of faith or even no formal faith at all. We draw all sorts here and welcome all so long as they can maintain earnest and civil conversation.
The only commentary I’ll make for now in response to you questions is that they embed lots of unspoken statements and presumptions! The very way you raise them has been shaped by the community that you say you’ve emerged from - and is in such a way as to (I think) create tensions and problems where there didn’t necessarily need to be any. Those believers here who have adhered to biblical faith and take evolutionary biology seriously too have various ways of approaching some of your questions (or discovering that they may not be as important as some have made them). But to get the most out of responses - you may want to back up and revisit some of the presuppositions embedded even in your questions! In any case, blessings on your new year, and may you find productive engagement here.
Welcome to the Forum, Ben! (Are you the Ben Lee at Wheaton? My daughter is a junior and a health science major and we were just discussing an origins survey they did in Dr. Lewis’s biology 1 course when she was a freshman and how interested she was in redoing the same survey in a senior level course. Dr. Lewis was my biology professor the first year he taught at Wheaton and I think I took the same survey. I was in a similar place of having been taught evolution was an atheist thing, and I had similar questions.) I hope if you have some down time over Christmas break, you’ll check out the Common Questions articles scientists and Bible scholars have carefully written up over on the BioLogos website. You might find more coherent and well-researched answers there than on this forum, where people come from a wide variety of perspectives, some more informed than others.
This is an idea lots of people have wrestled with and the answers people find appealing often depend on the theological commitments and non-neogtiables people bring to the question. By far the easiest way to reconcile Bible interpretation and science is to adopt a view of Adam and Eve that sees them as prototypical humans or archetypes or representative literary figures and not historical people. In any case, the narrative in Genesis isn’t really about ensoulment and the concept of souls that we tend to have is a later invention of the church influenced by Western/Greek thought, not ancient Near Eastern concepts, so in some ways the whole concept of Genesis speaking to humans “getting souls” is imposing foreign ideas on the text. What it does speak about is “image bearing,” which is indeed an ANE construct, and a very fascinating and enlightening topic I would encourage you to delve into. (This is a podcast with an OT scholar who wrote one of the most cited books on the topic, The Liberating Image, and if I remember correctly, I think it addresses some of your questions. https://biologos.org/podcast-episodes/richard-middleton-image-of-god )
Scientists would say that humans evolved as a population and species boundaries are arbitrary lines on a continuum that represent generalizations, not some absolute reality about individuals. So it would be impossible to identify “the very first homo sapien individuals” even if we could teleport back to the time they were emerging in history. So the way I tend to look at it is that the construct of “spiritual humanity” that we have as Christians, where you have people who are rationally capable of relating to and worshipping a personal God who communicates, and morally capable of choosing right from wrong, is a capacity that evolved over many generations. At some point in human history, God chose to call humanity to the task of bearing his image in his creation on earth. Whether that calling was extended to a literal first couple or to a group of people represented symbolically in the narrative by Adam and Eve is an interesting topic to explore, but at some point you just kind of pick what fits with your other beliefs. (Usually based on how you see original sin and interpret specific parts of Romans.) What is important for me is that Genesis teaches that humanity is special because humans are chosen, and the human condition is what it is because we fail to be the image bearers we were called to be. Christ sets creation right because he is the true human (the significance of the title Son of Man) and the only truly faithful human image bearer (Col. 1:15). Only Christ can reconcile all of humanity to God and begins the uniting of God’s Kingdom (the New Creation) with earth, so that creation and humanity can continue to move toward the final hope that has been held out in Scripture from the very beginning of Genesis: a good and peaceful world where humanity faithfully rules creation with God and God lives with his people.
I am a linguist by profession, and the topics of animal communication, animal culture transmission, and animal altruism are super fascinating to me. Sometimes I wonder if dolphins could have been chosen to be image bearers if evolution had taken a different path. Who knows, maybe they do have their own way of relating to God that we just don’t understand because we don’t speak dolphin. Great thoughts for long road trips. In all the pictures of the New Creation in the Bible, there are animals. All of creation gets redeemed and set right. Have you ever read N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope? It is a great book that shows how many of our ideas about heaven don’t actually come from the Bible, and reading it was the first time I understood the kind of hope for all of creation that is held out in Scripture. I think the heart of your question comes back to the same question of whether humans are special because we have souls or whether humans are special because we bear God’s image. In the OT, both animals and humans have “the breath of life,” (nephesh) which gets translated “living soul” for humans and “living creature” for animals, but there isn’t a distinction in Hebrew.
This question seems to come back to a construct of original sin and atonement that not every Christian is going to share. Sure, all of our human behaviors involve evolved responses to our own biology (hormones, neurology) and our environment, and a good deal of morality is encultured in evolved human societies, as opposed to being some innate part of us. (That is to say, human children need to be taught in human social groups how to speak human language, reason in human ways, and behave in ways humans consider moral, it’s not instinctual). I don’t personally believe that Jesus died to fix original sin. And I think Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection accomplishes a lot more for humanity than simply paying the penalty for sin. That’s just one model or facet of atonement. There are lots of other very important lenses to look at Jesus’ mission on earth through besides “sin forgiveness.” People write whole books on these topics. Again, a lot of where you end up depends on the non-negotiable theological commitments you start with.
Thanks for stopping by with your great questions. If it all feels kind of unsettling, don’t put pressure on yourself to sort it all out. There is no deadline. You can wrestle with these topics for years and still love God and other people well, and that’s the main point of everything.
I don’t think God magically chooses anything. I would just say, in the fullness of time, when evolution and the developmental of the brain was at the point God wanted, he ensouled the first two humans (some might say a group or population). Arbitrary and magical are not really good words to use to describe God’s actions. Whether or not Genesis speaks of hylomorphic souls or not is irrelevant to me. That seems to be a common response for some in these parts. Christian conceptions of heaven are also hardly found in the OT but that does not stop any believer from accepting the reality of heaven. Some scholars also think we have been too dismissive of what ancient Israelites might have believed about souls and the afterlife in general. We reconstruct things using some pretty broad dots at times and might actually be connecting them in ways we shoudn’t.
At any rate, revelation occurs over time and God constantly teaches us new things. That human beings are specially made in God’s image is in the Genesis text. That we are somehow special to God and have a special purpose is quite obvious to me. It lines up nicely with what we have learned about the world through metaphysics and souls. Just as the ancients responsible for Genesis did not know modern science, their philosophical knowledge was also incomplete and reflects the background of their times. The totality of Scripture has no issue with souls despite some exegetes focusing in on one specific part.
As for when this happened, I am unsure. @Jay313 and some others think they can pinpoint when this transition might have occurred using archaeological and paleontological data.
From my perspective, if they have a sense of justice and can entertain abstract concepts and think in a way us humans can, I think we would have to say they have rational souls. I think that is still very much debatable though. I adopt the Catholic position of animal souls and view animals as solely material. I am open to the possibility of change on this issue though for a select view.
What do you think Jesus’s death and resurrection did? I believe we have biological inclinations from evolution but unlike pure animals we have rational souls and can make the choice to give in to them or to rise above them. When Chimpanzees go on a murderous raid of some rival group, I personally do not hold them morally accountable for their actions. I don’t accuse a dog of rape or sexual misconduct when it starts humping someone’s leg. I think we humans are different in this regard. We also cannot blame evolution for why we choose to give in to things we know are wrong. In what I think are better understandings of original sin (more of a privation and loss of original justice rather than a positive punishment God inflicts) I don’t think we can blame Adam and Eve for anything either. We can bemoan our lack of access to the preternatural gifts that otherwise would have been ours, but we have no entitlement to them by virtue of our nature. There are several models of atonement and a few things plaguing human beings. You seem to be coming at it from one specific perspective. I think of the atonement more in terms of us separating ourselves from God and being ultimately unable to get back into that relationship on our won. What Jesus actually did may very well go much deeper than this but that’s my starting model.
I understand that scientists can generally pinpoint a chunk in history where speciation occurs, but the problem is that they can’t pinpoint an exact date as it occurs so gradually. Like when a child grows to become an adult, you can’t really pinpoint at what point the child “becomes” an adult. Sure, you can argue that at the age of 18 or 21, they become adults, but that’s still just an arbitrary date for legality.
What would a “higher” creature be? Who is to assume that a mammal is “higher” than a nudibranch? Maybe you are addressing the creatures that are social compared to solitary animals, but I wouldn’t consider one to be higher than another; they are simply different strategies, as there are tradeoffs in both. So do social animals get an afterlife but solitary ones dont?
Thanks so much for all the resources! I’m not from Wheaton, unfortunately, I go to UIUC . Would you have any book recommendations for the last part about the atonement? I grew up Baptist, so I really only have that one view of the purpose of Jesus’ atonement.
. Would you have any book recommendations for the last part about the atonement? I grew up Baptist, so I really only have that one view of the purpose of Jesus’ atonement.