Many Christians will say: “I’m OK with evolution, in general …. as long as you leave humans out of it”.

It’s only been four weeks since we summarized our discussions in this podcast series that began four months ago (episode #74). But during the four weeks since then, we’ve crossed that line: we’ve added humans to the list of evolved beings. For many people, this will raise all sorts of very unsettling questions. For them, it’s a game-changer. A step too far. For them, humans were “created in God’s image”, so they can’t possibly have evolved from ancestors shared by the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans of today… as well as the Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. floresiensis (aka “Hobbit Man”), and many other Homo species of the past.

So we need to carefully pull together the various threads from the last four weeks. We’ve learned that:

the evidence for our descent from those ancient hominids is undeniable: it’s written in our ancestral bones in the ground, and in our genes (episodes #72 and #73);
those ancestors began to develop a sense of the future, of mortality, of the afterlife, and became self-aware (episode #77);
they evolved a mind and soul, or “soulishness” (episode #75)
they began to work with symbolism, abstract thought, and language (episode #77);
they evolved a “hypersensitive agency detection system” and a “promiscuous teleology”, which together form a powerful engine for generating religions, as well as a morality and a religious streak (#76 and #78);
they began to create statues (of deities?), flutes (music, a deeply spiritual thing), and carry out ritual burials (episode #77);
they were showing compassion and a peace-loving nature (episode #77);
at the very distant edge of recorded history, we see religions popping up all over the world … Babylonians, Egyptians, Stonehenge, the Mayans, Aztecs, the Asian religions, and the aboriginal peoples of Australia and North America.

The evidence for the biological, cognitive, behavioral … and religious … evolution of humans is undeniable! The question is: what should Christian believers do about that?

Does this naturalistic explanation for the origin of religion invalidate a religious belief? Three of the four scholars we talked to are committed Christians themselves: they do research in these areas because they see themselves exploring the human-Divine relationship. Who’s to say that this evolutionary journey wasn’t divinely inspired? That our tendency for promiscuous teleology got us looking for the Divine, and the hypersensitive agency detection system helped us find the Divine.

Does this scientific view of human evolution impact our “traditional Christian worldview”? Of course it does! I can no longer see the arc of the human story as a downward one: that we started in perfection, and with an intimate relationship with the Divine, but then fell downward from both. Instead, I see the arc as an upward one: humans climbing up towards that perfection and that relationship with the Divine through a divinely inspired search. And we’re still climbing!

As always, tell me what you think …

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