Yes. evolution says there is nothing particularly special about us biologically relative to other animals. But I think what @St.Roymond was pointing out (and what I would point out) is that “image of God” doesn’t have to be interpreted as a specific morphological form. Rather, many Christians interpret it as a role or function that God gave to humans, as they image God as priests/ kings to the rest of creation. In other words, an image-bearer of God did not need to be a bipedal ape, per se.
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From a Biologos argument:
2. God is never absent in the evolutionary process.
Some people would interpret the phrase “God-guided evolution” to mean something similar to: “OK, perhaps evolution isn’t limited to making small-scale changes. But evolution left on its own would mean God wasn’t really doing anything.”
This misunderstanding is one that I call “episodic deism.” I think this is poor theology because it says that God usually lets nature run “on its own” except when God intervenes to push it in certain directions– but I don’t think that nature ever runs “on its own.” The Bible repeatedly affirms that when things happen in the natural world, God is still doing it. The sun goes down; God brings darkness. The beasts of the forest prowl; God gives them their food. Birds of the air eat seeds and insects and worms, and they receive their food from God (Psalm 104:19-21, Matthew 6:26). When things are happening in the natural world the way they always happen, in ways we can describe scientifically, God is just as much in charge as when God performs a miracle.
That is the point I was trying to convey above. We don’t need supernatural interventions. They could be there but everything that happens happens through Him that made the world and wrote what we would call it’s underlying physics. I’d prefer to think that God’s being is the glue that holds reality together.
Claiming evolution excludes God is to embrace deism. It’s hard to nail it but it’s more of a worldview error.
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That illustrates the separation between the ‘VFB’ and the ‘VFA’. One does not negate the other except for in the mind of the unbeliever, and probably necessarily so.
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His children do, and we have factual evidence that many have them.
Those interventions – all in my experience and by far and away most that I am aware of in others’ lives – do not break any physical laws. So it is not a stretch but a necessary inference to be drawn that God is sovereign over the whole of reality. That disturbs some who yell “That is micromanagement!” or damnable “Predestination!” (
; - ), but if we would step back and realize there is a wonderfully vital and dynamic relationship between our ‘timefull’ God and his creation, then it should be reassuring to Christians to know – and it is knowable – that we have a powerful Father who is good, even when circumstances may seem contrary to that fact.
You can have that too. 
The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.
Hebrews 1:3
I like Genesis 1. First day, make stuff. Second start arranging stuff and setting the laws by which that stuff will operate. The third day s fantastic, plants are provided and the magic miracle molecule chlorophyll is provided to convert sunlight from the Sun on the second day, into operational energy. Then, on the fourth day…before animals, the MOON mentioned above is provided, not only for the tides, but to provide a structure for life. Why is the human gestational period 9 moons? Ovulation…28 days. Three cheers for the moon. And the MOON provided clearly visible pictures to develop the week. Think how much easier life would be with 13 months of 28 days each…and a special extra day on the summer solstice? It is possible to argue about the “length of a Genesis Day”, but much more difficult to argue about the sequence? Plants are less needy for the moon, although the Old Farmer’s almanac might differ on that opinion. Perhaps God observed poor plant behavior and concluuded a moon was needed before going on to animals.
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I kinda think the moon was around well before plants and animals and wasn’t an afterthought. Hugh Ross’ cosmological day-age sequence in Genesis 1 works remarkably well, even perfectly… for cosmology and planetary science, though I guess his assumptions about the atmospheric transformations, opaque → translucent → transparent, while intuitively reasonable, are not established scientifically (I used to be a fan, OEC & ID). The biological sequence is more problematic.
I don’t believe in deism at all. I also don’t believe God makes it rain or causes the sun to go down. We know why the sun “goes down”‘and that’s because of earth rotating. We know why the earth rotates.
I can believe that god is active in the life of beings without thinking he’s somehow making the clouds form.
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Let me help here. @Dale has a unique view of how God works in this respect. Everything is preordained like a glorified computer program. It is not that God is throwing thunderbolts or pouring rain. He has programmed it to rain here or be sunny there, for this cloud to grow or dissipate. Every second is preordained. (And what we do makes no difference at all) It is Ecclesiastes 3.
Err, no, but I can’t convince him of that.
Richard
On this for one:
Dale McGowan, Ph.D. is Managing Editor of the Atheist Channel at Patheos and author of In Faith and in Doubt and Atheism For Dummies. He holds a degree in physical anthropology from UC Berkeley.
- There’s a book about Atheism for Dummies? I’m going to have ask my atheist nephews and nieces why they never told me.
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You’re making me chuckle again. You are not helping, I do not have a unique view and you still don’t get it about time based words like preordained and predestination. God will not fit in your time box and God.is.not.bound.by.time.
And you still fail to separate the view from below, time-based, and the view from above, independent of time.
“Evolution by natural selection is fatal to conventional religious belief, at least the Abrahamic kind. It doesn’t just snap one branch of religion. Challenging the idea that humans are special and separate from animals”
Dale McGowan has two problems. One, he does not see how God is involved in a simplistic, mechanistic, and false understanding of survival of the fittest as natural selection. Somehow he and his friend Richard Dawkins have failed to understand that natural selection is an organic, interactive, complex process that is full of surprises. It acts as if the extinction of the dinosaurs did not happen.
Two, he does not see how God created humans in God’s own Image without some kind of actual hands on experience. The problem with this is God does not do things in the way we expect God to do them. God does things the way God sees fit, and that is by creating living beings through ecological evolution.
So is “ecological evolution” unless I’m misunderstanding you, @Relates.
(“Whatever works” is simpler, more straightforward, and works for me, whatever. ; - )
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But that very view is deistic – I’ve seen it called “soft deism” – the idea that God allows the universe to run like a machine.
He also misses an option I’ve encountered fairly often, that God made “generic” humans via evolution but formed a specific pair “hands on” later.
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Our old pastor in Brookline, MA, used to say that God provides three way for action. First within ourselves, second interactions with others, and, just once in a while…a miracle.
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Since vinyl is back ‘in’ (who woulda thunk it ; - ), I can say ‘at the risk of sounding like a broken record’, that again conflates your ‘view from below’ and the ‘view from above’.
Deism is the belief that his does not interact with life. I believe his does. All day everyday. I just don’t think he hijacks free will or caused meteors to hit earth to create humans by wiping out dinosaurs or manipulating natural selection anymore than he causes wrecks or hurricanes to hit a house. So there is nothing deistic there. Just not interested in intelligent design.
Do you make a distinction between two types of miracles, one where natural laws1 are broken and the other where they are not?
1 Some prefer ‘physical’ or ‘scientific’ laws, or maybe ‘the laws of nature’ to distinguish them from ‘natural law’,
a system of law based on a close observation of human nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of positive law (the express enacted laws of a state or society) Natural law - Wikipedia