Recovering Evangelicals #186 – Christian theology and our hominid cousins
Do we need to update our theology in light of Christian-bigotry toward our genetic cousins?
During the millennia that Biblical characters were living out their lives, Biblical authors were writing their texts, the early Christian church was forming, and the medieval Church fathers were constructing a Christian theology, nobody had any idea that humans had genetic cousins: Australopithecus (“Lucy”), Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo juluensis, and so many more. But we today DO know about those hominid cousins, and that knowledge raises many, many, huge questions for the Christian theology that emerged during those 4,000 years of JudeoChristian history. Much of modern Christianity has been in denial of the existence or relevance of those “cousins”:
- Anwers-in-Genesis re-label any new hominid discovery as either human or ape, nothing in between (if the “human” doesn’t quite look human enough, they’ll invoke some kind of musculo-skeletal disease, inbreeding, or a reference to “the Nephilim”);
- Pew Research have for decades been tracking public perception of various things, including human origins: even today, a significant fraction of Christianity insist that we humans have always existed in our present form (rather than evolving over time);
- a new biology textbook written for Fundamentalist high-schools declared the following in its opening pages: “If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.”
Luke described a strategy that Christians typically employ when trying to cope with the new scientific evidence: first try to just extend the timeline (from 6,000 years to a couple hundred thousand years, but otherwise keep all other parts of the Adam&Eve story intact), then start admitting that “God used biological evolution” instead of a potter’s wheel and Adam’s rib to create the first humans, and then finally accepting that the origin of humans was very much a random, unguided thing.
We discussed a wide range of [theological] questions that are raised by these scientific discoveries of our hominid ancestors. Some of those questions are of the “low-hanging fruit” kind that always come up immediately in any conversation about this topic:
- what then does it mean that we’re created in God’s image?
- what does it mean to “be human”?
- what do we do with the fact that “Adam and Eve” are not literal?
- what about the sinful nature we inherited from Adam&Eve?
But there are other questions that are hanging a bit higher up on the tree that are rarely, if ever addressed by other speakers/writers/podcasters:
- without an Adam&Eve to serve as our starting point, how far back in human history do we go to extend the full scope of the overall Divine plan, or the Human-Divine relationship …. ten thousand years? …. fifty thousand years? ….. 300,000 years (to the very beginning of the H sapiens line?
- if we do go back 300,000 years to include all Homo sapiens, do we also include our genetic cousins — Neanderthals, Denisovans, H Heidelbergensis, H floresiensis, H juluensis — with whom we interbred and interacted at that time?
- Neanderthals also built societies, showed compassion, believed in an afterlife, possibly worshipped deities; and H juluensis had a brain which dwarfed our modern brains and Neanderthal brains, so it likely was much more intelligent than we were at that time ….. perhaps they too worshipped the Deity that we H sapiens later called YHWH?
- could H sapiens end up going extinct (suicide by nuclear and biological weapons) and the world go on for another billion years while other species evolve and far surpass our peak state …. Would they also be included in the overall Divine plan, or the Creature-Creator relationship?
- Much of Christianity holds a worldview which has no place whatsoever for these genetic cousins. We act like God has only ever been concerned about the last 0.02% of the entirety of history when H sapiens existed.
- John 3:16 is not only about humanity!
Maybe it’s time that we come up with an updated, more inclusive Christian theology.
We’re going to unpack many of these questions/ideas in the next handful of episodes:
- Gareth Roberts: evolution of the English language
- David Livingstone: Pre-Adamites invade the 17th century
- Doug Ottati: theological changes raised by these discoveries
- Michael Shermer: the Moral Arc of humanity
- mailbag: listener’s comments and questions
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our mini-series of episodes on evolution, or Luke’s book Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins
Episode image by Andrew K. Thanks Andrew!
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