I’ve been revisiting the large Crossway Tome on Theistic Evolution of 2017, largely to see whether any of it affects me differently as my views on origins have developed since then. And partly to honour the memory of my good friend, the late Peter Loose, to whom the book is dedicated. The part that, when I first read it, seemed least convincing was the theological overview by Wayne Grudem (who did his PhD at Tyndale House, as a matter of recent interest).
Whilst, in defending a broadly historical understanding of Genesis 1-3 (he doesn’t say much about 4-11!), Grudem is careful not to preclude old earth approaches and the use of non-literal genre, his list of non-biblical views from theistic evolutionists seems to paint him into a Young Earth Creationist Corner not shared by most Intelligent Design proponents.
To infer those of his twelve important biblical criteria that will be relevant to this particular post (page 72):
- Adam and Eve must be the first human beings.
- They must be created directly or specifically out of dust from the ground.
- Eve must be directly created from a rib taken from Adam’s side.
- All humans must be descended from Adam and Eve, but this is impossible if thousands of humans coexisted with Adam and Eve chosen from an existing race.
At the time the book appeared, both Josh Swamidass and myself were developing the Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, which deals with the last of these by showing how such a couple-within-existing-humanity would become common ancestors of all humanity within a couple of thousand years, even if the whole world was already populated. But regarding the first, both Josh and I spend a lot of time in our books pointing out how difficult it is to pin down what one actually means by “human beings,” in the context of the world’s entire history. That is true whether one is thinking scientifically, or theologically.
As far as Genesis 1 is concerned, the defining criterion of mankind is “created in the image and likeness of God,” which being itself undefined, is of limited help as far as the question of anyone living outside the garden of Eden is concerned. For the rest of the Bible, Grudem is right is saying that it assumes descent from Adam and Eve, with the spirituality and the sin that presupposes, throughout its account of salvation history. Yet, as both Joshua’s and my book discuss, the question of how that descent relates to the creation account’s “image and likeness” is disputed, the main biblical concern apparently being mankind’s position as ruler, under God, of the earth. This is quite distinct from the tendency to assume that it means, on the terrestrial side, particular endowments like intelligence, speech, creativity, spirituality and so on, and on the heavenly side, the possession of an “eternal soul.”
The thing is that, leaving the matter of evolution entirely aside, Wayne Grudem still has to account for the existence of fossil “people” rather different from modern humans, and much older, right across the world – but he doesn’t even attempt it. One main purpose of my Generations of Heaven and Earth was to tackle head-on the place of Adam, Eve and salvation history within the story of the world known from other sources.
It’s easy simply to assert what the Bible appears to say and ignore other questions, but it simply isn’t true to say that the Bible trumps “human knowledge,” for we always use our knowledge of the world to interpret the Bible.
For example, we routinely recognise if the Bible is speaking poetically when it makes no sense literally – the morning does not have wings to take, and a woman constructed literally according to the similes in Song of Solomon would end up in an institution rather than the king’s bed. More prosaically, the knowledge of ANE war-rhetoric helps us understand that Joshua is not actually about genocide, and scientific study of ancient population sizes helps us to interpret the “thousands” of the Exodus as its alternative meaning, “troops,” and so retain Deuteronomy’s claim that Israel is the smallest of the nations, rather than being more populous than the whole of Egypt. So genre is crucial, and I don’t think Gruden’s criteria take it seriously enough.
So, if we take the genus Homo as a scientific proxy for being “human,” which is not unreasonable, then our anthropology and theology have to make sense of the minimalists’ H. erectus, H. neanderthalis and H. sapiens, together with the more disputable ergasters, naledis, Denisovans and so on. Erectus appeared nearly 2 million years ago and colonised Indonesia even before modern humans arose apparently 300,000 years ago, and they died out maybe 50,000 years after that. Neanderthals seem to have arisen in Europe and the Middle East around 430,000 years ago, coexisting with modern humans after the latter migrated from Africa, but dying out perhaps 40,000 years ago, roughly at the time sometimes seen as humanity’s “Great Cultural Leap Forward.”
I made some shift to account for this history, under the Genealogical Adam paradigm, in my book, but was aware that it needed further work. In the meantime, Richard Buggs and Steve Schaffner (with input from Swamidass), and Ann Gauger’s team, using different methodologies, refuted the BioLogos claim that a single human couple could never have existed. They agreed that there could be a possible 2-person bottleneck, but no less recently than around 500,000 years ago. William Lane Craig has used these findings to nail his colours to the mast for the Genesis 2 couple to have started the human race back then.
But as I pointed out in my book, in order to accomodate that view, Adam and Eve could not be gardeners and priests, their sons Cain and Abel could not be farmers and pastoralists, Cain could not have built a city, and Tubal-Cain could not have been the father of metallurgy in the sixth generation. They would all, instead, have been crude Acheulean hunter-gatherers who had not even, apparently, yet invented art, yet alone belief in Yahweh. The twenty documented generations to Abraham would actually be a meaningless twenty thousand generations, during which time God left the growing human race with no remedy for Adam’s sin. Furthermore, somehow Adam’s line would have had to diversify (by Darwinian evolution?) very quickly into the Neanderthals and Denisovans, possibly separate species, with which we now know they interbred. And Homo erectus remains completely unexplained. An awful lot of Genesis proto-history has been sacrificed to allow for such an ancient Adam, and therefore I can’t accept the conclusion, even though the science is impeccable.
Since I wrote my book, two particular changes come to my mind. The first is on the scientific scene: every year that passes pushes back the onset of symbolic and cultural achievements in early hominins. Not only did Neanderthals bury their dead with ritual, but cave art has now been pretty firmly attributed to them. Their cranial capacity exceeds ours, and the degree of interbreeding is making it look as if “we” regarded “them” as people. And vice versa.
Homo erectus made the earliest spears found, and they show signs of thoughtful design akin to Olympic javelins. Likewise there is evidence both of planning and aesthetics in their stone toolmaking. And the consensus now seems to be that they had speech, which can only exist where there is symbolic thinking. Did they, too, interbreed with later type? If not, why were their toolmaking cultures so similar for so long?
In other words, it is becoming ever harder to deny that every member of the genus Homo was human, in the sense of being intelligent and articulate, although like “anatomically modern humans” their cultural achievements were slow to change over tens of thousands of years. So if we cannot even call H. erectus or H. ergaster brute beasts, but apparently people created in God’s image, we still have a theological problem of those outside a garden of Eden even 500,000 years ago. Genealogical Adam remains necessary, I think.
But the second change I want to mention since 2017 is in my own thinking. I finally came to the conclusion, given the ongoing discoveries in so many fields, that not only Darwinian evolutionary theory, but universal common descent, are no longer the most parsimonious interpretations of the scientific data, unless one is ideologically wedded to naturalism. And certainly not if one is wedded to the Christ of the Bible. So I now identify myself as a progressive creationist, and whilst common descent is not incompatible with that, it is an unnecessary complication.
Species, like individuals, appear to reach genomic senility and extinction after an average of about 10 million years, changing little rather than transforming into new species. God might well rejuvenate the genome of existing organisms whilst adding lots of new orfan genes, modifying body plans, reprogramming developmental systems and so on, in order to preserve some vestiges of a nested hierarchy. But why bother, when he could simply create a complete new, genetically heterogeneous, population in its habitat? That fits the fossil record better.
Given this new mindset, I was interested in the ideas of another writer in the “Tome,” developmental biologist Sheena Tyler. In her discussion, she proposes that there is a natural biological “kind” (not to be overly confused with Young Earthers’ biblical “kinds”) at the level of the biological family. This is based on the presence of hybridization, often pervasive (as in some birds) between the different species, or even between genera, which reveals that the creatures possess the same developmental “programs.”
In this way there is seen to be a natural relationship between members of the horse family, or the bird of paradise family, which is simulataneously an absolute boundary between different families even when they are similar. Every attempt to alter a developmental program results only in death – another nail in the coffin of evolutionary theory.
On a creationist paradigm, it looks as though God is more concerned to create families than species, which is unexpected. Biologically speaking, one can say that cats are one kind, in several varieties.
But it’s also (I think) helpful in understanding how we might fit early hominins (coinciding, it seems with the artificial classification of genus Homo) into the biblical account, on my Genealogical Adam model. For they too would be, in their diversity around a single body and development system, a single biological kind – a family. Or to put it St Paul’s way, they would all be “of one blood.” Note that, freed from the evolutionary paradigm, we don’t need to think of why or how one species became another, still less of how a “beast” transformed into a “man.” We don’t need to regard Neanderthals , Denisovans or Erectus as inferior sub-humans. They would all be just variants of the (scientific) family of man. They were people.
And biblically, we could take Genesis 1:26ff as a description of the creation of this family, in all its diversity, after the image and likeness of God. Such a polyphyletic creation might happen at one or several loci (explaining why the out-of/back-to/never-in Africa story continues to be so untidy), and at different points in time. This makes worrying about whether they are species, sub-species or races rather futile, and might even make questions about the divergence of modern variant populations (they are not different enough biologically to be termed races) redundant. Maybe there always were different gene pools.
What unites them physically is not a common origin in one couple, for after all the plain reading of most of Genesis 1 is that God created large populations of each type of creature, not a single pair. The unity of Genesis “kinds” is in their creation as such, not in being descended from a single source. And human unity comes from their “bearing God’s image,” and from being the interbreeding population of a biological family. The whole of humanity, past and present, is therefore “of one blood,” as Paul teaches the Athenians. But their basic unity comes from common creation, not from common descent. Each of the human varieties has its own history, with types merging, diverging or dying out as they fulfilled God’s purposes.
As for Adam, as the Genealogical Adam paradigm suggests, he is a new member of this family who is intended to usher in a whole New Creation through covenant relationship with Yahweh, and the spreading of this new relationship throughout the human race. For the rest, read the Bible!
I’ve speculated in my book on the spiritual status of those outside the garden and/or before Adam. What small progress this new thinking provides is that what was true for Mesolithic pre-adamites in Lincolnshire or Mesopotamia is likely to have been equally true of whatever human fossils may be dug up in future. We have no transitional forms with australopithecine apes, and don’t expect to find them because they never existed. We will not be surprised if we find better evidence of creative or symbolic, or even spiritual, thought in ancient humans.
However, if we should ever find a palaeolithic altar with only ritually tahor (clean) animal bones, then I’d read Willaim Lane-Craig’s book more carefully. But then, we might also find a Pre-cambrian rabbit.
