Were ancient hominin species made in the image of God, did they have souls and how does that affect interbreeding with humans?

Faith & Science Conversation
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right! So the point would be that extending this to art in general would be taking it out of context.

Perhaps when dealing with making images of God, the point was that people confused the image with God and this was too limiting in developing a relationship with God. It made God into an object like a piece of furniture. And so it was a bit like they were using God like a convenient tool. It certainly seems to me that a lot of the rules in the OT where of a very pragmatic nature and all about dealing with the social context, confusion, and limitations of the people involved.

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‘They’ don’t reason at all.

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All predicated on the Fall. Where’s that in the fossil record?

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That’s a key challenge. The fossil record is bones and tools and footprints, whereas the Fall is a spiritual status. Both deciding what is an adequate indication of being fully human and deciding what is good evidence in the archaeological record are significant challenges. We simply don’t have the data to completely answer the question.

Given that becoming remade in the image of Christ does not follow biological descent, it is possible for the Adamic image of God to have been transferred laterally as well as linearly.

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For me it’s about what can transcend. A cabbage can’t. But a budgerigar?

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Sometimes when asking a question, one needs to be aware of the assumptions lying behind the question. The assumption behind this question, regardless of who originally framed it, is that there is such a thing as an immortal soul which outlives ourselves in the afterlife. This is an ancient Greek concept and it doesn’t quite fit the Biblical use of the term “soul” or ἡ ψυχή .

A quick check in lexicons of Biblical Greek reveals that the word is multi-valent; meaning it can carry a range of meanings which must be determined by the context. I cannot think of any Biblical example where having a soul is used as a precondition for salvation. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the Greek word for soul is the word from which we derive “psychology”, a derivation that points to “soul” meaning “mind”.

Should one persist in believing that one has to have a soul to be saved, it is worth considering Revelation 8:9, where the Greek text of the book of Revelation refers to creatures in the sea who have souls. It is usually translated as “have life”.

The question about the existence of souls parallels the question about sentient beings. Are animals sentient beings? My dog likes to steal my socks. I know that she knows that is not permitted, because the minute she grabs a sock she runs for her life. Does that mean she knows the difference between good and evil?

The question about whether hominins had souls is overtaken and made irrelevant by St Paul’s assertion …

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Rom 8:19-22 NIV)

This assertion makes deliberation, over the possession of a soul as necessary for salvation, as irrelevant as pontificating about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Having or not having a dubious thing called a “soul” does not seem to factor in here at all.

Just because Neanderthals were built like a team of Rugby players doesn’t mean they weren’t candidates for salvation. As for Australopithecus??? Well, Australopithecus was part of Creation, and Creation will be saved, according to St Paul.

As for being created in the image of God, we might have to wait until the theologians stop arguing among themselves over what that means.

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There is at least a quantitative difference; humans are worth more than sparrows, though sparrows are not worthless. Assessing the status of animals is difficult and there tends to be much exaggeration of “totally different” or “no difference” claims.

At the zoo, I was once watching a troop of DeBrazza’s monkeys. The adult male sports a white goatee and mustache, inviting anthropomorphism. It was evidently siesta time, and everyone was settling into a comfortable spot for a nap - except one lively youngster. As soon as eyes were closing, he slipped out of Mom’s lap, creeped up the branch, and started yanking on Dad’s tail. When he woke up enough to try to do something about this, Junior raced for the safety of Mom’s lap, somewhat waking her up. Dad went back to his spot on the branch and started to nod again, whereupon Junior started creeping up the branch again…

Obviously the young monkey knew what the physical response would be. It’s far from clear whether it would have the empathy to register “that hurts him”. Many animals object to unfair treatment of themselves; but is there empathy registering something being unfair for a thid party? These are some of the levels of complexity to try to figure out.

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Indeed, this is the problem with the simplistic magical treatment of things in most of religion, theology, and philsophy. We talk about intelligence, consciousness, and morality as if these were singular things. But that is just an artifact of language. The more we examine such things closely, the more we see that these are a rather complex constellation of many different abilities. And many of those are shared by different animals.

We are also confronting this with the advance of AI and computers where they can do most of things we associate with intelligence and reasoning so much better than we can, beating us all at our hardest strategy games. I remember the old saw about computers… “they just run programs.” But with computers beating as all strategy, it is becoming clear that much of what we have been calling intelligence is really just an ability to follow a set of rules systematically. And that is really rather fundamental – something which even elementary particles can do.

Now I think that is a good reason for rethinking the traditional theological ways we have been trying to set humans apart from animals, and made in the image of God as if the most important thing about God and human beings is their intelligence.

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I think part of the answer depends on what we think being in the image of God means. Various answers have historically been given related to intellect and/or ability to love. God puts the spirit into all creatures that gives life. I think the Genesis stories is about something of higher order of knowing and loving that is given to Homo sapiens. Presumably God could have given special measures of the Spirit and image bearing to earlier forms of humanity before Homo sapiens.

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Perhaps humans reflect an aspect of God fitting to our kind while every other species likewise reflects an aspect of God’s image? Or do we think the inorganic world along with every non-human species has nothing at all to do with God? Personally I do not believe that the image of God which we bear rules over all the other aspects of God, nor did that part of God which is available to a creature of our kind direct the early expansion of the universe. There is an aspect of God for every purpose and none of them is beholden to that aspect which is reflected in us. It is all good.

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There are lots of different answers offered to your question.

The simplest answer is from young earth creationists who reject evolution. There were no hominids. Fossils characterized as hominid are either fully human or an extinct ape like creature or a mis-characterized ape fossil. Young earth creationists believe the universe is young, and that there was no evolution in the sense of one kind evolving into another, although each kind had enough genetic diversity (genetic information) so that it could develop into different species, each of which has less genetic diversity and less genetic information than the original kind.

Old earth creationists would generally hold that hominids came first, but some time in the last 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, God created humans. Then the hominids became extinct. Although humans and hominids likely interacted, they did not interbreed. Old earth creationists reject evolution in a similar manner as described above for young earth creationists. But they accept that the universe is billions of years old.

Gerald Schroeder suggests that God created Adam and Eve with human souls and that these souls could be passed on two ways: First through procreation, and secondly to hominids by contact with humans with souls. That may answer the question of hominids without souls interbreeding with humans with souls, as the human contact passes on a human soul. But if hominids looked like and acted like humans, as Schroeder suggests, then are there still hominids without human souls?

Schroeder is a biblical (Old Testament only) Jew. He holds that the universe is at the same time both 6000 years old, from God’s perspective looking from creation forward, and billions of years old as humans look back toward creation. That is not as bizarre as it sounds.

But if the Neanderthals were not fully human yet all or most humans have Neanderthal DNA, as current science asserts, and if Schroeder is not correct, then there must have been interbreeding between human and non-human from an evolutionary point of view.
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As to the assertion that animals have souls. I accept that as true, but not human souls, just animal souls.

You should check out both young earth and old earth creation viewpoints. These are readily available on-line. For evolutionists, this is akin to suggesting checking out heresy, but you will find that the arguments on their websites are more robust that you might think. None of the viewpoints about creation—Young Earth, Old Earth or Evolutionary—have answered all the questions, but don’t let that deter you from looking further.

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Mr Ewoldt, Thank you. Can you clarify? Also, I wonder how special creation old earth believers address genetics with pseudogenes, etc. Thank you.

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Yeah, Schroeder’s relativity days is kind of a fun perspective, not that it answers everything.

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This is not at all bizarre to a modern physicist, since the notion of absolute time has been discarded completely. Even in science, the measure of time can be completely different for different observers depending both where they are and how they are moving. So the notion that God, who isn’t even a part of the space-time continuum, might measure time differently or in different ways (plural) isn’t so bizarre or difficult for a physicist.

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thanks. What would seem unusual to me is that God would intentionally use 6000 years to communicate, when He meant billions. It seems more likely to me that this was accommodation. I don’t see that it has to be that God meant billions when He said thousands. It reminds me of the thread of the alternative universe having a universal flood without any evidence. Or am I misunderstanding? Thanks.

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I can see that from God’s perspective, but both the 6000 year figures and the billions of years figures are seen from the human perspective: what is derived from Bible genealogy and what is derived from physical measurements.

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My personal take is something along the lines of John 21 when it says:

So when Peter saw him, he asked Jesus, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus replied, “If I want him to live until I come back, what concern is that of yours? You follow me!"—John 21:21-22

To go with something like this:

So when I saw them, I asked Jesus, “Lord, what about the Neanderthals?” Jesus replied, “If I want them to bear my image in some different way, what concern is that of yours? You follow me!"—John 21:21-22

I personally find it appalling to hear people assert x, y or z about Neanderthals or Denisovans and their spiritual status (e.g. they are just “brute beasts” according to some Christian organizations) - or others just shove them into a very tiny box that makes no scientific sense where they all descended from Noah’s 3 sons or something and then went extinct in a very short time frame.

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Exactly. God never says “the world is 6,000 years old.” It’s just as much a human idea as billions of years, just with no evidence.

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I don’t see it as accommodation as much as simply using human beings as his writing instruments with their limited awareness of the space-time extent of the universe. I don’t see him confusing things with corrections which are outside the message He was aiming at. Scientific questions simply were not a part of what He was trying to teach or what was important for people to understand at that time. Obviously I don’t see the Bible as being written by dictation.

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Not being an old earth creationist, I don’t know. But let me take a shot at it.
Briefly, I suspect that old earth creationists would argue like this:

Vestigial organs and junk DNA was used as evidence for evolution. But they were really just arguments from ignorance. We didn’t know their function, so based on the evolutionist’s naturalistic perspective, they assumed there had no function. As it turns out, we find these organs and genes do have significant functions, just as if they were designed.

Similarly, there is a lot we don’t know about pseudogenes, so to say they support evolution is again another argument from ignorance. We are continually learning more about these psuedogenes, and find that many of the arguments which state these support evolution are now known to be invalid. And as we learn more about them, psuedogenes are becoming yet another evidence for design.

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