Many believe that before Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, Christians as a whole maintained an entirely literal, six-day interpretation of Genesis in which the earth was only a few thousand years old. In fact, however, the idea of an old earth had already become increasingly popular among Christians throughout the half century leading up to The Origin of Species. ¹

Another misconception is that the arrival of Darwin’s theory led the scientific and theological communities to immediately take up positions opposing each other. But history reveals that one of the earliest supporters of evolutionary theory in the American scientific community was a devout Christian botanist named Asa Gray. And among theologians, BB Warfield—an architect of the contemporary evangelical understanding of biblical inerrancy—believed that certain forms of evolution were also compatible with a high view of Scripture.

The First Christian Response to Origin of Species in America

Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution. By the time The Origin of Species was published, the idea of evolution in many natural processes was already popular, and the term development was used in its place for discussions of society’s change or the history of the solar system.² What’s more, it was widely accepted that the earth was much older than previously thought. Most of the groundwork for this understanding resulted from geological work done earlier that century. Through meticulous study of the fossil record, naturalists helped spread the view that the earth was old rather than young.

See How are the ages of the earth and universe calculated?

Though many people like to focus on Christian hostility to evolutionary theory, a careful look at history reveals some surprising facts. For instance, the first American scientist to carefully review and publically support Darwin’s Origin of Species was a devout Christian named Asa Gray, now regarded as one of the most prominent American biologists of the 19^th century. A shy person who avoided politics, Gray worked quietly and does not have the same name recognition as scientists like Louis Agassiz and T.H. Huxley—both flamboyant self-promoters who provoked public debate. But, his brilliant research during his 30-year career at Harvard University helped usher in the era of modern biology in the United States.

Source: http://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/Gray_Bicent/images/gray_1325.jpg

Asa Gray made his commitment to Christ in 1835, a few years after completing medical school (much like Francis Collins of our own era). ³ As a professing Christian, Gray was a committed churchgoer and member of a local congregation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a professional scientist, he insisted that science was neutral in matters of religion and metaphysics. Gray found evolutionary theory incredibly stimulating to his scientific research, but never found it threatening to his faith. Both before and after reading Origin of Species, Gray remained firmly grounded in the Nicene Creed, a profession of faith that Christians have shared since the early Church. ⁴

What happened when Origin of Species burst onto the scene? Gray’s extensive research on American and Japanese plants—which he published after corresponding with Charles Darwin—had already convinced him that species and genera found in both countries resulted from common ancestry, not separate creations. He responded to Darwin’s book by writing the first major review⁵ of Origin on his side of the Atlantic, and he defended Darwin’s scientific theory in a series of meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1859 and 1860. Gray was determined that Origin would get a fair reading from the scientific community, and he even took a leading role in negotiations to reprint Origin in the United States in 1860, ensuring that Americans could have the most accurate edition in their hands.

Regarding the theological implications of evolution, Gray believed that Darwin’s theory was not atheistic, although he recognized that some would use it as an “excuse” for unbelief. Henceforth, he concluded, we need “to reshape” the argument from design “in such wise as to harmonize our ineradicable belief in design with the fundamental scientific belief of continuity in nature, now extended to organic as well as inorganic forms, to living beings as well as inanimate things.” The question of whether or not life evolves should not be confused with the issue of God’s existence. Instead, Gray thought that each issue should be investigated using methods appropriate to the subject of inquiry. His refusal to argue for either extreme in this contentious debate upset both anti-evolutionists and radical popularizers of science, both of whom were eager to believe that evolution implied atheism.⁶

For more, be sure to read the full FAQ "How have Christians responded to Darwin’s Origin of Species?" in our Questions section!

Notes

1. Two of the most insightful books dealing with the discovery of Earth’s antiquity are Paolo Rossi’s The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Rhoda Rappaport’s When Geologists Were Historians, 1665-1750. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
2. David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1987), xi. (book info)
3. Francis Collins’ conversion to Christianity is described in his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for his Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007) (book info)
4. Dupree, A. H. Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
5. Asa Gray, “Darwin on the Origin of Species”, in The Atlantic, July 1860 (html).
6. Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School of Yale College (C. Scribner's Sons, 1880) (html). Asa Gray, Darwiniana; Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism (D. Appleton 1884) (html)

Darwin’s finches are some of the most visible and recognizable symbols of evolution in the world today. Biology textbooks feature them prominently, and the National Academy of Sciences has enshrined them in the entrance of their headquarters in Washington, DC. Surely the finches that Darwin collected on the Galápagos islands were a central feature of his evolutionary theory, right?

Lobby of The National Academies Building. Courtesy of CPNAS. Photo by Robert Lautman

Actually, the Galápagos finches are never even mentioned in Darwin’s famous work On the Origin of Species. Nor do they appear in Darwin’s famous notebooks on “Transmutation of Species”, in which he formulated the idea of evolution by natural selection.¹ Even Darwin’s private diary of his voyage on the HMS Beagle only mentions the Galápagos finches briefly in passing.²

It was only in 1845, in the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle, that Darwin included a tantalizing sentence about the Galápagos finches:

Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.³

However insightful this statement may have been, Darwin never published anything else about the Galápagos finches for the rest of his life. Nor did he publically present these birds as direct evidence for this theory of evolution.⁴

If these finches were so important to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, why did he remain silent about them? One of his comments in The Voyage of the Beagle provides us with a clue:

Unfortunately most of the specimens of the finch tribe were mingled together; but I have strong reasons to suspect that some of the species of the subgroup Geospiza are confined to separate islands.⁵

When Darwin was exploring the Galápagos himself in 1835, he had not formulated his theory of evolution yet, and thus he did know what data would be necessary to make definitive conclusions about finch evolution. In particular, he did not keep careful track of which of his specimens came from which islands. Moreover, as was customary among naturalists at that time, Darwin only collected a small number specimens—he brought home only 31 finches and 64 total birds from the Galápagos.⁶

Though Darwin sensed that these birds were truly special, he lacked sufficient evidence to reach any specific conclusions about their evolutionary origins. It would be up to the rest of the scientific community to carry out the necessary empirical research. Subsequent expeditions in 1868, 1891, 1897, and 1905 brought back thousands of Galápagos finch specimens, but instead of unlocking the mysteries of evolutionary theory, the Galápagos finches became a great enigma.⁷

A century after Darwin's voyage, scientists still struggled to explain the staggering variety of finches on this tiny, remote archipelago. By the mid-1930’s, British Museum ornithologist Percy Lowe argued that the finches presented a "biological problem of first class importance", and he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the finches displayed a "bewildering diversity, intergradation, and distribution".⁸ Who would be up to the challenge of making sense of such tremendous biological complexity? It was David Lack.

David Lack

Ornithologist David Lack

David Lack had an exceptionally keen eye for bird-watching, and he possessed a passion to match it. By age 15, he had already observed 100 distinct species of birds, and before entering college, authored his first scientific paper. At Cambridge University in the early 1930’s, Lack was disappointed to find that his zoology professors taught “nothing about evolution, ecology, behavior or genetics, and of course nothing about birds.”⁹ In fact, at that time, there were only two professional ornithologists in all of Britain!

Thus David Lack took it upon himself to create his own learning opportunities. As an undergraduate, he became the president of the Cambridge Ornithological Club, traveled to Greenland for a bird-watching expedition, and cultivated a relationship with the prominent biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley). Huxley was an inspiring mentor and encouraged Lack to expand his research further by studying tropical birds.¹⁰ Following this advice, Lack embarked on a research trip to Tanzania in the summer of 1934, but his greatest adventure was yet to come.

In 1937, Lack became fascinated by the scientific mysteries surrounding the Galápagos finches. But in order to study their behavior, Lack would need to travel to remote islands halfway around the world. How could he possibly get there? Once again, Julian Huxley was tremendously supportive and raised funds from two prominent scientific societies to pay for his expedition. After a long delay, David Lack and five companions finally set off on their journey.

Instead of residing in comfortable quarters aboard a royal naval ship, Lack’s group subsisted on a shoestring budget, traveled on commercial steamers, and stayed with local settlers. Their experience was definitely not a romantic tale of imperial expedition:

The Galápagos are interesting, but scarcely a residential paradise. The biological peculiarities are offset by an enervating climate, monotonous scenery, dense thorn scrub, cactus spines, loose sharp lava, food deficiencies, water shortage, black rats, fleas, jiggers, ants, mosquitoes, scorpions, Ecuadorian Indians of doubtful honesty, and dejected, disillusioned European settlers.¹¹

Whereas Charles Darwin spent only nineteen days on the shores of the Galápagos, Lack and his crew conducted more than five months of meticulous and exhausting study in the harsh climate. At that time, even the finches themselves provided little solace. Lack wrote,

Darwin’s finches are dull to look at, not only in their orderly ranks in museum trays, but also when they hop about the ground or perch in the trees of the Galápagos, making dull unmusical noises. Only the variety of their beaks and the number of their species excite attention.¹²

Large Cactus Finch on Española Island in the Galápagos Islands

The repetitive tedium requisite for important scientific discoveries is rarely discussed in public, and even today many bright-eyed science students become disillusioned by the painstaking work demanded by their Ph.D. programs. But one of the things that distinguishes great scientists is their unwavering commitment and tenacity in completing major projects. David Lack's efforts were not in vain:

"Despite his personal discomforts (or perhaps because of them), Lack did see something on the Galápagos that no one had ever seen before—natural selection at work among its finches through interspecies competition." ¹³

When the birds’ breeding season ended in 1939, Lack was ready to return to his home in England. But the captive finches that he had brought with him fared so badly on the voyage home that he detoured to San Francisco and put them in the care of the California Academy of Sciences. Turning this mishap into an opportunity, Lack stayed there for five additional months to study the Academy’s enormous collection of Galápagos finch specimens.¹⁴

To complete his systematic research, Lack then travelled across the United States to study the Galápagos finch collection housed at the American Museum in New York.¹⁵ Altogether, Lack examined more than 8000 specimens and specifically measured the length, width, and depth of all their beaks.¹⁶

Lack’s final obstacle was in getting his research published. Though he completed his academic manuscript “The Galápagos Finches—A Study in Variation” in 1940, paper shortages during World War II delayed its publication by the California Academy of Sciences until 1945. Were he only interested in making an original contribution to science, Lack could have stopped here and congratulated himself on a job well-done. However, his motivation sprung from a deeper source:

David Lack's drawing of 14 species of Galápagos finches, p. 19 of Darwin’s Finches

"I did not watch birds primarily for scientific reasons but for sheer enjoyment, and from the age of 15 onward returned day after day in a glow of excitement after seeing a new bird or a new habit." ¹⁷

Lack’s joyful fascination with the Galápagos finches inspired him to continue developing his conclusions long after returning from his expedition. While waiting for his academic paper to be published, he began writing a book that would enable students and the general public to share his excitement about these remarkable birds and the evolutionary processes that shaped them.

First published in 1947, Lack’s book became tremendously influential. Before this time, biology textbooks had never even mentioned the Galápagos finches. But after David Lack’s study, the finches became a primary example of evolution by natural selection, specifically adaptive radiation. Not only did textbooks fully rely on Lack’s findings, they also followed his lead in calling them “Darwin’s finches”, the title of Lack’s famous book.¹⁸

Iconic Finches

What was it about these birds that made them such a prominent symbol of evolution? As Darwin himself pointed out, the numerous Galápagos finch populations each have distinctive beaks, and he speculated that they could have evolved from an ancestral species that came to the islands. But a complete picture of finch evolution would have to wait another hundred years, when David Lack arrived.

During his five months on the Galápagos, including both the rainy and dry seasons, Lack observed that these beak differences enable the finches to subsist on different kinds of food:

The beak differences between most of the genera and subgenera of Darwin's finches are clearly correlated with differences in feeding methods. This is well borne out by the heavy, finch-like beak of the seed-eating Geospiza, the long beak of the flower-probing Cactornis, the somewhat parrot-like beak of the leaf, bud, and fruit-eating Platyspiza, the woodpecker-like beak of the woodboring Catcospiza, and the warbler-like beaks of the insect-eating certhidea and Pinaroloxias.¹⁹

Lack's image of beak adaptations from Darwin’s Finches

Specializing in such different sources of food enables these finches to live in close proximity without directly competing with each other or driving populations to extinction. The fact that so many of these closely related finches are able to co-exist is a remarkable fact in itself. As Lack himself put it, “It is not only the origin, but also the persistence, of new species which require explanation.”²⁰

But it is also fascinating to consider how these birds got to be so different in the first place. How did a finch come to have a beak like a “parrot”, “woodpecker”, or “warbler”? The answer lies in the distinct characteristics of the Galápagos. Because the islands are so remote, no actual parrots, woodpeckers, or warblers ever settled on it. In the absence of these species, the Galápagos finches were able to adopt feeding habits and forms that they would never have taken on a large continent full of other birds competing for food. The isolation of these islands offered just the right conditions for us to see living examples of adaptive radiation.²¹

Conclusion

Considering the immense popularity of the Galápagos finches, it is quite surprising to learn that Charles Darwin himself had so little to say about them. In fact, it was actually David Lack, one century later, who conducted the critical research that immortalized the finches in biology textbooks and popular lore. By naming his landmark book Darwin’s Finches,²² Lack paid homage to the man whose voyage on the HMS Beagle helped transform the study of natural history. But at the same time, Lack also obscured the fact that evolutionary biology is an enterprise conducted by a large community of brilliant scholars, not just the product of one man’s efforts.

This tendency to immortalize “great men of science” has also led many people to refer to modern evolutionary theory as Darwinism, despite the fact that it has substantially changed and developed over the past 150 years. It is important to give credit where credit is due, and if that’s the case, we should seriously reconsider how we refer to the Galapagos finches. Evolutionary biologist Dolph Schluter, who studied the finches several decades after David Lack, had this to say:

I find Lack's intuition really stunning given how little information he had. He's my hero actually… They should be called Lack's finches.²³

In the second part of this series, we’ll explore the fact that David Lack, in addition to being a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, was also a devout Christian. His study of evolutionary theory did not cause him to lose his faith; in fact, he actually converted to Christianity after completing his Galápagos finch research.

For Discussion

Further Reading

• Grant, Peter R.; Grant, B. Rosemary. How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches, Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Sulloway, Frank J. (Spring 1982), "Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend" (PDF), Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1): 1–53.
• Weiner, Jonathon. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Vintage Books, 1995.

Notes

1. Sulloway, F. (1983). "Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend." Journal of the history of biology 15(1): 32. Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation mentioned Galapagos tortoises and mockingbirds, not finches.
2. Lack, David. Darwin’s Finches. Cambridge University Press, 1947: 9. Confirmed by Sulloway (1983), p5.
3. Darwin, Charles. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world. London: John Murray. 2d ed. 1845: 379-80. This edition of the book also contained the drawings of four different finches that have become enshrined in biology textbooks and on the walls of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.
4. Sulloway, p35. Sulloway points out that the first published evolutionary account of the Galapagos finches was not until 1876, by Osbert Salvin: "On the Avifauna of the Galapagos Archipelago." Trans. Zool. Soc. London, 9:447-51.
5. Darwin (1845), p395.
6. Sulloway, p40.
7. Sulloway, p40.
8. Larson, E. J. Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York, Basic Books, 2001: 166-67.
9. Lack, David. (1973) “My life as an amateur ornithologist.” Ibis: 424.
10. Lack (1973), 425-27.
11. Lack (1947), p1.
12. Lack (1947), p11.
13. Larson, 167-68.
14. The California Academy of Sciences sponsored an expedition to the Galapagos in 1905-06 and collected nearly 9000 Galapagos finch specimens (Sulloway, p40).
15. In New York, Lack roomed with the curator of the finch collection—German émigré zoologist Ernst Mayr. By developing this relationship, Lack had close ties with two of the biggest figures in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Julian Huxley and Ernst Mayr (Larson, 168).
16. Larson, p168.
17. Lack (1973), p424.
18. Larson, p198.
19. Lack (1947), p60.
20. Lack (1947), p158.
21. See Lack’s concluding chapter on “Adaptive Radiation”, pp146-159 of Darwin’s Finches (1947).
22. British ornithologist Percy Lowe originally proposed the name “Darwin’s finches” in 1935, but the name did not catch on until Lack used it in his book. See P.R. Lowe, (1936) "The Finches of the Galapagos in Relation to Darwin's Conception of Species." Ibis, 13th ser., 6:310-321. (Cited in Larson, p287)
23. Schluter, in an interview with Edward Larson, 16 March 2000.

In Part 1 of this essay I pointed out that metaphysical naturalism is not necessary nor inextricably tied to the practice of science, and that essentialism is only one of the historically-Christian ways to think about being human. As a case in point, we can identify the Patristic Fathers and Medieval Christian thinkers who discussed a relational alternative for understanding the nature or being of persons.¹ Roughly, the idea is that the three persons of the Trinity are what they are and who they are in virtue of their relationship with each other, not based on some intrinsic properties that ground their uniqueness as persons in the Godhead. That is to say that Father, Son and Spirit co-constitute each other, or are bound up together with enabling each other to be distinctly the persons that they are. Far from a static form of being and relationship, there is a dynamic interrelatedness in the Trinity. Father, Son and Spirit mutually constitute each other while enabling each other to be particularly who they are and engage creation and salvation in particular ways suited to who they are as persons. Father, Son and Spirit are being in community.

By analogy of relationship, humans are what we distinctly are in our being and personality in virtue of our relationship to God, creation and each other. Our involvements with others necessarily shape who we are as particular persons. The personal realm, then, is characterized by a dynamic relationality, as persons have ongoing mutually constituting influence on each other. This is part of the “dynamic order” of creation “that is summoned into being and directed towards its perfection by the free creativity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That orientation of being is, of course, distorted and delayed by sin and evil, and returns to its directedness only through the incarnation and the redeeming agency of the Spirit. But evil distorts the dynamic of being, does not take it away.”² Like the relationality of the persons of the Trinity, we are being in community.

We can also pursue the doctrine of creation as an alternative to essentialism, to see if it sheds any light on possibilities for what it means to be human in a non-reductionist sense.³ As other writers have been exploring in the Forum over the past few weeks, the biblical claim that humans are created in the image of God is important to the Christian of view of humankind. This may sound like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, for there are both Christians and non-Christians who claim that if humans arose through evolutionary processes, then we cannot be made in God’s image. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring as a way of showing that there are strong alternatives to a strictly essentialist understanding of being human.

The Image of God

Over the centuries, the dominant view of humans as the imago Dei has been grounded in the idea that there is something distinctive about the creation of humans that both sets us apart from the rest of the animals and that marks us as unique kinds of creatures. Though we are clearly both distinctive and unique, does affirming the imago Dei require this kind of essentialism? On the one hand, Genesis 1:27 has often been interpreted as grounding humanity’s being in the divine image of God on Earth. On the other hand, recent discussions in human evolution have focused on several independent lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis of common ancestry among primates and humans: fossil evidence over the last 6 million years; homologies or anatomical similarities between humans and the primates; biogeographical distribution of supposed human ancestors; similarities in developmental biology between humans and primates; and several lines of genetic evidence favoring common ancestry. In addition, our current best understanding of the genetic diversity of humans is inconsistent with models that assume all humans descended from a single original pair of individuals. Instead, the current best data and models indicate the human ancestral population was never smaller than several thousand individuals.⁴

On the surface, then, what contemporary evolutionary science currently says on human origins appears to challenge cherished beliefs and understandings of many Christians. However, to understand what implications, if any, an evolutionary development of humans might have on the image of God, we first need to get clear on what it means to be the imago Dei, and that has to be settled theologically, not scientifically.

Historically, some of the most popular proposals for the imago Dei were rooted in human rationality, human freedom or human creativity because it was thought that humans alone among the animals possessed one or more of these qualities. There are two problems with this traditional line of thought. First, investigations since the early 18th century have progressively led to the conclusion that such qualities of humans mark a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind (e.g., brains of mammals and humans are anatomically homologous, dolphins, primates, and some species of birds exhibit degrees of rationality and creativity). The degree of difference may be significant, but a difference in kind is necessary for the traditional line of essentialist thought.

Second, if we look to the Incarnation for clues to the imago Dei we find that Jesus’s humanity is never depicted as exercising extraordinary powers of rationality, freedom, creativity, and so forth. Primarily, Jesus lived as an embodied person in relationship with the Father, other humans and creation as enabled by the work of the Holy Spirit. In other words, Jesus’ human life in Scripture indicates that the divine image is a special relationship, or form of relationality: to be in relationship with the Father as a created, embodied person; to be sustained or upheld in this relationship with the Father through the perfecting Spirit; and to be in relationship with other persons and all of creation.⁵ Moreover, this special relationship is also a vocation to mirror or reflect the glory, life and worship of God.⁶

If to be the image of God is to be sustained in a special relationship with the Father, each other and creation through the Spirit, then the imago Dei is not grounded in intrinsic qualities that particularly mark humans as distinct from the rest of the animals, as essentialism would have it. Christians can understand Genesis 1: 24-31 and 2: 4-5, as many of the Patristic Fathers did, as an account of our unity and connection with the rest of creation as well as of our special relationship with God and role in God’s kingdom. So if Father, Son and Spirit created human beings through evolutionary processes, we would have continuity and connection with all of creation while still being the imago Dei. Evolution does not threaten human specialness before God unless it is viewed as a replacement for divine creative activity (which, of course, is what Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and Answers in Genesis all do repeatedly).

If evolution is broadly right as an account of the creation of all living things (an empirical matter), and if some form of essentialism is found to be consistent with such an account (a philosophical and biological matter), Christians would then have two options for how to understand what it means to be human. We can look for some stable, unique intrinsic features in virtue of which we are human; or we can look to the special Spirit-sustained relationship we have with God, creation and each other. Both are biblically consistent, though I judge understanding the imago Dei as special relationship to make better sense of the whole of the Bible, as well as our experience in the world.

Notes

1. See Gunton, The one, the three and the many and Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, T&T Clark (2003).
2. Gunton, The one, the three, and the many, p. 166.
3. Gunton, The Triune Creation; Robert C. Bishop, “Recovering the Doctrine of Creation: A Theological View of Science,” 31 January 2011.
4. For example, see Dennis R. Venema,“Genesis and the Genome: Genomics Evidence for Human-Ape Common Ancestry and Ancestral Hominid Population Sizes,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol. 62, No. 3 (2010): 166-178.
5. See Gunton, The three, the one, and the many.
6. As such, the imago Dei has an inextricable missionary focus towards extending the kingdom. See N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, HarperOne (2012).

In a Nutshell

The meaning of the “image of God” has been debated for centuries in the church. A common view is that the image of God refers to the human abilities that separate us from the animals. However, scientists have found that abilities like communication and rationality are also present in animals on a basic level. Plus, theologians do not see the image of God as human abilities. Some theologians see the image of God as our capacity for a relationship with God. Other theologians see it as our commission to represent God’s kingdom on earth. Both of these theological positions are consistent with scientific evidence. Whether God created humanity through a miracle or through evolution, God gave us our spiritual capacities and calls us to bear his image.

In Detail

The “image of God” is a key concept in Christian theology, foundational to Christian thinking about human identity, human significance, bioethics, and other topics. Many Christians see evolution as incompatible with the image of God. How could God’s image bearers have evolved from simpler life forms? Doesn’t image-bearing require miraculous creation of humans rather than shared ancestry with chimpanzees? And when in the evolutionary process did humans attain this image? These questions are tied to many other issues concerning human origins, including the soul, the Fall, and the historicity of Adam and Eve (see sidebars), but in this article we will focus specifically on the image of God.

See “How does the Fall fit with evolutionary history?” and “Were Adam and Eve historical figures?”

The phrase “image of God” does not appear many times in the Bible, but the importance of the concept is emphasized by its repetition in the creation account:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. -- Genesis 1:26-27

From this text, it is clear that part of bearing God’s image is ruling over the animals. Genesis 9:5-6 reveals another aspect of image bearing: all human lifeblood is sacred because all humans are made in the image of God. The emphasis on Judeo-Christian thought on the sanctity of human life is derived in part from this passage. In the New Testament, the idea is expanded further as Christ is revealed as the true image of the invisible God (2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15).

For centuries, theologians have discussed these and other passages, debating the meaning of the image of God (“imago Dei” in Latin). Being made in God’s likeness is not a matter of our physical appearance, because humans don’t all look the same. But to what does the image of God actually refer? Many ideas have been suggested over the centuries, producing a huge body of theological writing. While hard to summarize, we give a brief overview below of three common themes for the image of God. After developing this theological context, we’ll consider how these ideas intersect with evolution.

Image of God as our abilities

A common view is that the image of God refers to human abilities. When people talk of the things “that make us human,” they refer to abilities like reason and rationality, mathematics and language, laughter and emotions, caring and empathy, and cultural products like music and art. Often the motive is to distinguish humans from animals by showing that humans have unique abilities that make us special and superior to animals. Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wrote something like this when he said “Man's excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.”¹ Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) also emphasized intellect and rationality in his discussion of image bearing.² But Augustine and Aquinas were not speaking of intellect as an aptitude for math or music; Aquinas instead writes of an “aptitude for understanding and loving God.” In fact, the modern emphasis on reason comes more from secular Enlightenment ideas than from Christian theology. During the Enlightenment, the image of God was connected to ideas like the natural dignity and majesty of humankind that separates us from the brute beasts of the animal world.

Scientific evidence is piling up that humans have more in common with animals than was once thought. Genetic evidence shows that humans and chimpanzees share much of their DNA. Studies of animal behavior (particularly of chimps and other apes) show that animals not only laugh and cry and care for each other, but can learn sign language and even have basic reasoning ability. In fact, Christian neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves writes that “any attempt to set down a clear demarcation between the reasoning abilities of nonhuman primates and humans is found to have become blurred.”³ Obviously, humans have a much larger capacity to reason than animals, but reasoning is not a uniquely human ability. As neuroscientists and animal behaviorists learn more about animals, they see how traits appear in a rudimentary form at a level similar to human children.⁴ Whether or not one accepts evolution, evidence from living humans and animals does not show a distinct difference in kinds of abilities (only degree).

See “Made in the Image of God: The Theological Implications of Genomics” a 2-part blog by Denis Alexander.

Another challenge for this picture of the image of God is the place of people with mental disabilities. If a person is impaired in reasoning or language, are they bearing less of God’s image? Are they not showing his true likeness? The Christian answer to these questions is No! The Bible repeatedly teaches that God values all people, particularly those who are rejected by society or unable to care for themselves.⁵ In fact, Genesis 9:5-6 points to image bearing as the reason that all human life is valuable. This is a major motivator for Christians who seek to protect the unborn, the poor, and the aged. Surely bearing God’s image must mean something other than using our abilities.

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ANSWER HERE.

Notes

1. Saint Augustine The literal meaning of Genesis, Book 6, Chapter 12 (Google books, p. 193)
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 93 (html)
3. Malcolm Jeeves, “Neuroscience, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Image of God” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (2005) 57.3, p. 178 (PDF)
4. Similarly, many human traits have been replicated in artificial intelligence, particularly logic and math but also conversational language and computer-generated art.
5. For more see, Kathy McReynolds “More Than Skin Deep” BioLogos Forum June 2010

As we’ve seen in recent essays (and comments) touching on Biblical scholarship, philosophy, theology, and anthropology, the imago Dei is a complicated idea, linked to the question of whether what makes humans unique among the creatures on earth is physical, cultural, spiritual, or some combination of all three. As Christians who seek to frame what the natural sciences tell us about our physical humanity with what the Bible suggests are our defining human qualities, we tend to focus on what Genesis means when it says Adam was “made in the likeness of God”; but it is helpful to remember that the first mention of God’s image in human form looked forward to the full revelation that would come in Christ. Thus, we ought also seek to understand Jesus as the model towards which Adam always pointed, and by which we should understand both Adam and ourselves.

Going one step further, we should also look forward from Jesus to the life of the Church. For if Jesus was the true image of God, then at Pentecost, the new community of believers took on the role of imaging the continuing presence of God in and for the world. The Church was constituted as the very Body of Christ, charged with making him known in their lives as well as their words. Thus in the structure and life of the Church we also see something important about the imago Dei.

Perhaps one way to hold in tension the various interpretations of the image—that is, to affirm the incomplete truths available through the relational, functional, substantial, and elective models—is to look at a literal image of the way the social aspect of imaging God via the Church interacts with the intensely individual and personal aspect of imaging God in individuals. Picking up on Kathy McReyolds’ sketch of personal transformation through encounters with those with disabilities (More than Skin Deep), I’d like to turn our attention towards the work of Chicago artist Tim Lowly, whose monumental portrait of his disabled daughter (Temma on Earth, 1999), is pictured above. Lowly’s work compels us to recognize the image of God even in one who lacks markers of those other roles, capacities, and relationships, and highlights two linked characteristics common to Jesus and Church: brokenness that does not merely equate with imperfection, and a social picture of our essential identity in Christ. By allowing Lowly to place Temma’s identity and humanity at the center of our attention, we can reframe our sense of what it means to bear the image of God and reflect the crucified Christ as his Body.

Profoundly Other

Born in North Carolina but spending his youth in South Korea (where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries), Tim Lowly attended Calvin College and began work as an artist in Michigan. But his life and work took an unexpected turn in 1985, when Tim and his wife Sherrie’s daughter was born and suffered a medical emergency during her first two days home from the hospital. In 2002, journalist Fred Camper’s incredibly sensitive article treated the Lowlys’ physical, emotional and spiritual journey with Temma at length, and I encourage readers to turn to that essay for the full narrative background to Tim’s approach to his daughter and his art. But the central facts are that for all of her now 27 years, Temma’s host of physical and mental disabilities have made her completely dependent on others, and have meant that the relationship she has with her parents (and they with her) is a radical departure from ‘normal.’ Temma’s “profound otherness” challenges most of our expectations about the human capacity to image God. Speaking to Camper, Lowly describes Temma:

It's unlikely that she thinks in a way that we would call thinking," he says, "because our ways of thinking are based so much on learning, experience, sight, socialization, and history, and I doubt any of those things have any bearing on Temma. I don't even think comparing her to animals makes sense. There's a certain wholeness to the way animals think that I don't think Temma is capable of. I'm pretty sure she does have an inner life, but I don't think she has the mental mechanisms that would make it correspond in an understandable way to the way we think.

And yet Lowly has produced hundreds of paintings and other works that feature Temma, some of them monumental in scale, none of them shying away from questions of the purpose, value, and meaning of her life for their family, and for ever-widening circles of community. Certainly there is a political component to Lowly’s work that addresses inequity in culture and church. Generally, he says, the church has been compassionate, but “nearly always from perspective of the able-bodied and the ‘whole’ vs. the disabled, never mind that none of us measure up to complete wholeness.” Yet his work also reflects the way Temma, in her “otherness,” creates community. Artist-in-residence and gallery director at Northpark University since the mid-1990s, Lowly has often made Temma a physical presence in the studio and classroom. Carry Me, 2002 (drawing on panel, 108" x 48," at left) depicts students from an advanced class holding Temma, but they were also involved completing the project. Another large work, Culture of Adoration, 2008, shows Temma as the model in a drawing class, with Lowly drawing the parallel between that scene and the adoration of the Magi at Jesus’ birth. That comparison pictures the way a community forms around loving attention and worship, but subverts artistic and cultural expectations that only what is beautiful should be valued. Lowly notes that while Temma is often alone, in some ways she’s never alone: “She’s cared for by her parents, but that relationship extends out to a much broader church outside her family.” Both paintings, then, are images of Christ’s corporate body as much as they are of Temma or the painting students who carry and draw her.

What bearing, then, does Lowly’s particular way of seeing and depicting his daughter have on us, on our sense of the imago Dei? Part of his ongoing artistic project is to understand and interrogate the way the traditions of perspective in Western art and culture presuppose and privilege the individual, solitary and unified point of view as the most important, the most true. In the wake of modernist emphases on self-expression in art, Lowly also sees value in pursuing ways of working that bring out the meditative (and even prayerful) craft aspect of painting, and that at least partially de-emphasize his and other artists’ subjective positions. He increasingly works from photographs (and collages of many individual pictures), and has more and more sought to bring collaboration into the making of his work. When Lowly takes Temma as his subject, these features of his practice emphasize the way that, in the Church, our individual identity is experienced as a tension between brokenness and wholeness in the Body.

Broken Together

There is a sense in which we look at Temma and we want to affirm that she is made in the image of God by denying that the image of God has anything to do with her physical, material body. Indeed, one way to approach the problem made visible through Lowly’s painting is to imagine the soul as imparted to (or trapped in) the physical frame. This certainly fits with saying that the image-bearing role of humanity in general is an act of the grace of God, not something dependent on our abilities. But in the election model, we are reminded that God didn’t call Abraham just to a “spiritual” identity, but also to physically constitute a people sent into the very concrete physical world.

Likewise, if we recognize Jesus as our model for the image of God, we will not deny the physicality of the human experience, nor the incarnation, nor even Christ's suffering on our account. Indeed, we must affirm the goodness of creation and our physicality, even—especially—in its brokenness because Jesus, himself, was broken. Even after the resurrection, his wounds were not abolished or erased, but remained tangible marks by which the Lord revealed himself every bit as much as he did in his creative and healing power. And in the Revelation image of the victorious Christ, we have another picture of that essential and persistent sacrificial brokenness in the Lamb who appeared “as if slain.”

What of the Church? Similarly, the Church remains a fragmented whole when it is at its best—broken open to be dispersed into the world. And though it is also all-too-often broken by own individual and corporate sin, even that finds its meaning and redemption in the image of bread broken in the Lord’s Supper—the way that sharing brokenness together unites the individuals in a congregation with each other and with Christ. As a reminder of Jesus’ own individual body, communion addresses both of those senses; it is the means of both healing and sending.

Christ’s commission to the Church, then, presents a profoundly social model of being the continuing revelation of God for the world. We bear the image of God together, and the image of God is only fully realized when we are members of a community, in relation to other human beings (even if that relationship is one of complete dependence), as opposed to seeking independence. This does not and ought not compromise the absolute worth of each individual, but should remind us that part of our worth is tied up in our integration with the whole body of Christ.

One last example of Lowly’s work gives iconic form to this inter-relation between image-bearing, self, identity, and the community of the Church. Made to commemorate Temma’s 25th birthday in 2010, At 25(right, and below), is a collaborative piece constructed of 25 individual, two-sided panel blocks that fit together something like a puzzle. On one side is a black and white portrait of Temma, while on the reverse, the individual blocks have been painted and gilded in different patterns and techniques. Lowly constructed the piece, but sent each block out to be completed by 30 different artists, either working alone or in pairs. In requesting them to do their sections of the composite portrait in an “artistically neutral” style, he was asking them to subjugate their artistic personae and self-expression to the depiction of Temma. Not every artist was able to do that to the same extent, so the final object is an image of the imperfection of our self-giving—or our inability to see others without looking through our own particular lenses of self—even while being a testament to the compassion and care of Lowly’s dispersed community.

Most importantly for this discussion, At 25 suggests that our image-bearing of God does not rest on our individual “fitness,” much less how well we “fit in.” Rather, it is carried by the whole human community, most fully in the broken Body of Christ. In this respect, brokenness is not something to be corrected; it is something that makes the particular community of the Church possible. Individuals may not be able to fulfill or even recognize the functional aspects of the imago Dei, they may not even be capable of the relational aspects—or of returning expressions of love or kindness or thanks, or even awareness. But the whole body, the beloved community, the nation God set apart for himself and the world, is called to be the image of God for each of us—precisely when we can’t.

Tim Lowly is Assistant Professor of Art at Northpark University. An inter-disciplinary artist, he works with painting, drawing, installation, digital media, photography and music: both individually and collaboratively. His work has a lyrical realism and quiet spirituality that have contributed over the last thirty years to the development of a international reputation. While Tim’s art and music address a variety of subjects, the central pillar of his work has been his daughter Temma who is, in his words, “profoundly other”. The clinical diagnoses of “multiple impairment” or “spastic quadriplegia” do little to address the compelling presence of this young woman and the way her being and essence have shaped her father’s work.

Lowly was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina in 1958. The son of medical missionaries, he spent most of his youth in South Korea. He attended Calvin College and received a BFA degree in 1981. His wife Sherrie Lowly is a United Methodist Pastor. They reside in Chicago, Illinois. Since 1994 Tim has been affiliated with North Park University in Chicago as professor, gallery director, and artist-in-residence. Tim is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles.

For additional information (including exhibitions and collections) see Tim’s personal website.

All images © Tim Lowly.

For the past twelve years, I have had the privilege to teach in the Bible Department at a prestigious Christian university. Most of my students have been raised in Christian homes and have attended conservative, Bible-believing churches all of their lives. These students believe that they have a pretty solid understanding of what the image of God entails; at least they think they do until they encounter the world of disability. Disability creates a dissonance in their worldview that they are not expecting. All of a sudden, what they thought they understood about the image of God comes crashing down like a house of cards. The image of God and disability just do not seem to go together.

The following quotes from some of my student’s papers are representative of many and their experience with the disabled “strange other.” What is communicated loud and clear is the challenges disabilities raise for their conception of the image of God:¹

I believe that those with disabilities are equal to us … but I discovered a hidden evil in my heart. Deep in my heart, hidden from the world, I believed that children born with disabilities that would normally not survive its first few days should be allowed to die.

I think I could have intellectually acknowledged that all men and women are created in the image of God … In this class I was challenged to see the realities of disability and ask if I really did believe that God created these individuals in his image and salvation was for them too.

Though I have always known that these individuals are created in His own image, I often found myself secretly thinking that they were miserable and often a burden on others.

Sometimes I feel pity for disabled individuals because they are not “normal”. I feel that their disability is hindering them from experiencing the best life possible. I think disabled people experience a lesser quality of life because they cannot physically and/or mentally do as many things as a “normal” person could.

Now, these young people are not more spiritually or morally bankrupt than others in contemporary society. In fact, to the contrary, these Christian students are considerably more spiritually and morally sensitive in general because of their commitment as Christ- followers. Still, these views have been nurtured and influenced by two factors, one that is cultural and one that is religious: 1) the pervasiveness of a reductionist view of human being fostered by scientism; 2) a wooden, literal interpretation of Genesis 2:7 which says that “the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.”

Taken together, these two factors present a skewed view of human being, one that focuses on the physical and material rather than on the spiritual and essential. This is one of the reasons why my students twinge and recoil a bit at the thought that persons with disabilities can be made in God’s image. “They just don’t look like it,” they say, zeroing in on what is physically seen. This view has had enormous consequences for people with disabilities. In fact, Adolf Hitler, as part of developing his approach to the weaker members of society in his book Mein Kampf, identifies the stronger (better looking and functioning) members of society as “images of the Lord” in contrast to the weaker members who are mere “deformities” of that image, and who ought to be cleansed from society. Many have argued that Hitler’s ideas concerning those with disabilities were inspired solely by Darwinian evolution. However, these quotes from Mein Kampf reveal a horrific misuse of Scripture, not evolutionary ideas.

Furthermore, with regard to evolution, a face value exegesis of Genesis 1 & 2 does not dictate that the physical stuff God used to create human beings was special or unique or that the image itself resides in it. It shows, rather, that all matter was formless and void until God, who acted and willed out of his good pleasure and sovereign choice, brought order and harmony to it. This applies as well to the creation of human beings who are uniquely created in God’s image. If this image is not merely physical stuff, what is it? What does the literary and historical context of Genesis 1 & 2 reveal?

There are three views on the image of God: 1) Substantial; 2) Relational; and 3) Functional. The functional view sees the imago Dei as a function or role that humans fulfill--such as being priests or having dominion. The relational view has to do with humans imaging God in their ability to have spiritual relationships—primarily with God, but also expressed in terms of our male and femaleness and other nuances. The substantial view essentially says that God’s image is imprinted on the person’s soul as an image is impressed on a coin, and has much to do with human capacities like our free will and ability to reason. It has been predominant in Christian theology in the West since about 600 AD.

But though we do have specific capacities that bear on our responses to God, as the substantial view says, the human being is an embodied soul who has both relational and functional capacities, as well. The relational implications include the biblical truth that among all God’s creatures, only human beings can know Him and be consciously aware of Him. Most importantly, he knows us and can be in relationship with us even when we do not acknowledge him out of rebellion, or cannot respond to him because of disability. If we consider the Substantial view’s emphasis on conscious awareness, ability to exercise freedom, and decision-making capacities alone, however, some human beings may not qualify as persons, whereas some non-human animals might.

Against this, a more holistic view affirms that all human beings bear God’s image, regardless of capacities. The image of God cannot be lost or compromised in anyway. Even the poorest functioning human being profoundly reflects God’s image.

In an unexpected and peculiar way, my students discovered this truth about the image of God when they began to interact with people with disabilities in my classroom. This truth about the image utterly transformed and they began to see people with disabilities quite differently. The following quotes come from the same students quoted at the beginning:

What I came to realize is that since the disabled are people, they deserve life. As humans made in the image of God, we are to try to preserve our fellow disabled brothers and sisters who are also made in the image of God.

When I went to the day group home, it was an amazing experience. I really enjoyed interacting with everyone there. I was able to paint with them, and one of them sang to me and taught me to dance; it was so much fun. It was great to see how each and every one of them was so unique and made in the image of God.

In this class I was challenged to see the realities of disability and ask if I really did believe that God created these individuals in his image and salvation was for them, too. As a result of what I have learned from this class my answer to these two questions is a resounding yes! God loves individuals with disabilities and knows the depths of their hearts and minds on a level I could never comprehend. Who am I to doubt who God knows, who He loves, and to whom He offers the gift of His Son.

At the beginning of the semester, disability was a foreign world for me. That world was new and uncomfortable. I had no idea how to interact with anyone with a profound disability and had little desire to learn how. Throughout this course, the walls of misconceptions, fears, and insecurities that I have built up to distance myself from disability have slowly been chipped away. As I learned more about disability, my fears and discomfort were replaced with compassion and joy. Exposure to individuals and families with disabilities was the most effective way to break down those walls. Having the opportunity to observe and interact with individuals with disabilities was invaluable. Participating in disability ministry is not burdensome, as I had initially worried, but freeing. I left the night feeling uplifted, loved, and so aware of God’s mysterious presence within broken humanity.

During Jesus’ ministry on earth, often the best way to find him was to seek out those society considered strange, unclean, or undesirable; Jesus often sought them out, himself, in order to show that God’s love for us does not depend on our merits or abilities, much less our outward appearance. Similarly, my students today meet the Lord anew—and discover that same message of God’s unmerited grace and love—when they seek out relationships with those our society finds strange and broken, with those who they could easily avoid seeing at all. Rather than judging with the eyes alone, my students learn to recognize their cultural and theological blind-spots, and see both the disabled and themselves in the light of Christ’s love. Relationships are transforming; and relationships with people with disabilities can transform not only our image of them, but of the God who made in His image, and dwells with us in places deeper than the skin.

Notes

1. All student quotes used by permission. Names are left out to protect student privacy.

Left: "Abrahamic Covenant" by Christoph Weigel, 1695.
Courtesy Pitts Theological Seminary, Emory University.

The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. - Ishmael ¹

For the destiny of humans and the destiny of animals is the same: As one dies, so dies the other; Both have the same breath of life. And humans have no preeminence over the animals…All go to the same place; All come from dust, And to dust all shall return. - Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

What is humankind’s place among the animals? Should we even count human beings among the animals at all? Perhaps we—as men and women—are something else entirely? Such questions are not new. Indeed, they are as old as writing itself and similar ponderings about human identity occupy the most ancient of texts. While many of these primeval writings have crumbled in the winds of time and have come to us only in fragments, the Genesis account of human and animal origins remains a living document that occupies a vital place in the life of Christian practice and thought. In the first chapter of the Genesis narrative we read that humans—male and female—were created in the image (tselem) and likeness (demuth) of God. But what does this mean? There is certainly no shortage of proposed answers, and over two thousand years of theological tradition bears witness to this fact. Here, however, we are not primarily interested in tradition—as valuable and insightful as it may be—but we are concerned with what the Bible itself has to say.

Taking the authority of Scripture seriously demands that we engage with Scripture in light of both its original languages and its original cultural context. If we are to avoid—as much as it is possible—projecting our own personal, modern and post-modern cultural presuppositions onto Scripture, then we must be willing to do some of the hermeneutical (or interpretive) hard work. In other words, if we want to allow Scripture to speak for itself, we must be hyper-aware of the cultural lenses we are wearing when we read it. Interpreting the Bible through five hundred years of Protestant tradition, fifteen hundred years of Roman Catholic tradition, or one hundred years of Seventh-Day Adventist tradition won’t do.² Rather we must venture to take off the thick hermeneutical lenses of tradition and boldly attempt to go into the world of the sacred text itself so that we can allow the ancient inspired words to shape the lenses or our reading.

With this approach to Scripture in mind, I believe it is useful to address the matter of the image and likeness of God (or imago Dei) by first asking what the imago Dei is not. Throughout the centuries, theologians, philosophers, and others have posed a number of answers to the question of what the imago Dei is. The vast majority of these answers have focused on one or a few characteristics that humans alone have and that non-human animals lack. For example, Evangelical Christian author Kay Warren explains: “Animals and people are two different classes of created beings and they will never be equal in their worth. As precious as animals are to our daily existence, they operate from instinct, not volition. Only people have a spiritual dimension. We are the ones created in the image of the Creator, the only ones with a soul.”³ In a similar manner, political commentator Ann Coulter, citing “the story of Genesis”, maintains: “It’s not merely opposable thumbs and a bipedal gait that make us distinct from the other beasts. It is consciousness of our mortality, a moral sense, language, mathematics, art, beauty, music, love, longings for immortality, a sense of symmetry, the soul’s ascent, the ability to accessorize, and our fascination with Branson, Missouri…We are in God’s image, and we’re the only ones in God’s image, which is why we eat escargot rather than worship them.”⁴ While these are two popular contemporary voices, similar views are espoused by numerous academics as well. In this way the imago Dei has, for many, become synonymous with one central characteristic or several key traits that make humans unique among and/or superior to animals.⁵

As intriguing as such perceived indicators of human uniqueness are, and regardless of the scientific status of claims for such distinguishing human traits, the idea that there are particular physical features and/or behavioral characteristics that make men—and not beasts—in the image and likeness of God is not one that is found anywhere in the pages of Holy Scripture. With regard to humans as “the image and likeness of God,” a literal and consistent reading of the Genesis narratives discloses that the imago Dei designation does not refer to unique characteristics or capacities which humans posses in a way that excludes other non-human animals.

Hebrew scholar Phyllis Bird informs us that the scriptural context of the phrase “image and likeness of God” makes it plain that “its theological significance is in the place it gives to humans within the created order, not in any physical or moral attribute of the species, in either its present or ‘original’ state.”⁶ In the Bible the imago Dei is not about exceptional human capacities or characteristics that automatically qualify humans as being included in the imago Dei category. There is no reason, explains Bible scholar James Barr, to believe that the author of Genesis chapter one “had in his mind any definite idea about the content or location of the image of God.”⁷ The terms “‘image’ and ‘likeness’…make no statements about the nature of human beings.”⁸ When we read of “the creation of human beings in God’s image (Gen 1:26)…the biblical narrative remains silent…about any qualities of human nature that might account for their special standing.”⁹

If we are to properly understand the meaning of the texts, then, says Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann, we must confidently resist “the tendency to see the image and likeness of God as a something, a quality.”¹⁰ Consequently, a literal reading of the early Genesis accounts demands that no specific anthropological content or characteristics may be directly equated with the imago Dei. If one is to take the findings of biblical exegesis seriously, then—apart from theological tradition—the image of God cannot be defined on the basis of particular physical traits or behavioral characteristics. This means that—according to a straightforward reading of Genesis and the rest of Scripture—humans are not said to be biologically or behaviorally unique in a way that is related to their being named the “image of God.”

In addition to the broad consensus among biblical scholars that the image of God in humans, when understood within its original Hebrew linguistic and Ancient Near Eastern context, has nothing whatsoever to do with an appeal to the human possession of particular characteristics which non-human animals lack, research in biblical exegesis has similarly revealed that there is no essential or substantial super-natural divide between humans and other animals. Scripture, when read in the original languages, clearly describes both “man and beast” as possessing “the breath of life” and refers to both equally as “souls.” In this way Scripture makes no ontological or metaphysical distinctions between humans and non-human animals. Instead, the scriptural “emphasis lies on the commonality that exists between the humans and the rest of the animal creation.”¹¹

While the use of the Hebrew word nephesh, often translated as “soul”, to describe humans has been taken by some as an indication that humans are substantially set apart from the animals, the nephesh is not an exclusive possession of humans. Indeed, the Hebrew text describes both humans (Gen 2:7) and animals (Gen 1:21, 24) equally as nephesh hayyah or “living souls.”¹² Thus, Bible Scholar Gordon Wenham explains that in Genesis 2:7, which describes the human being as a nephesh, “it is not man’s possession of the ‘breath of life’ or his status as a ‘living creature’ that differentiates him from the animals—animals are described in exactly the same terms.”¹³ In Genesis, “human beings…are only one subset of God’s ‘living beings,’ into whom God has breathed the breath of life” and established as “living souls.”¹⁴

According to the biblical understanding, then, “what is distinctive about human beings is not that they have a ‘soul’ which animals do not possess, nor that they have a ‘spirit’ which other creatures do not possess.”¹⁵ It is clear, then, that “the possession of nepheš is not a unique characteristic of the human person.” Indeed, “unless one is ready to grant that animals have ‘souls’ in the same way that humans are alleged to have, then we might better conclude that the Genesis account is referring to the divine gift of life: ‘the human being became a living person.’”¹⁶ Consequently, “claims for a ‘special creation’ of humanity in comparison with animals and the material world conflict with the strong assertion in Genesis 2 that, physically (organically), Adam does not differ from the ‘beasts of the field.’”¹⁷ The theological language of anthropology in Genesis 1 and 2 “underscores Adam’s linkage with the animal creation, not his difference from it.”¹⁸

Whatever else the imago Dei might be, then, a clear and consistent reading of Scripture does not permit us to equate it with either a non-material soul which animals lack or some unique physical characteristic or behavior which animals lack. These conclusions regarding what the image and likeness of God in humans IS NOT lead us directly to our discussion of what the imago Dei IS.

In Part 2 of this series, Dr. Moritz examines how the phrase "image and likeness of God" is used within Scripture itself.

Notes

1. Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (New York: Bantam, 1992), 146.
2. I mention SDA because the prophecies of Ellen White and her interpretations of Genesis have played a significant role in shaping contemporary Evangelical understandings of the text. See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 74. For an online lecture on this topic see http://vimeo.com/38687776
3. Kay Warren, “Puppies Aren’t People: When compassion for animals goes too far,” (Accessed May 22, 2012) http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2009/04/kay_warren_puppies_arent_peopl.html. In this essay Kay Warren cites the theological views of her husband Rick Warren.
4. Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), 266.
5. For example a recent group of Genesis interpreters concludes, “Evidence points to the fact that man is a unique creation, made in the image of God.” David N. Menton, “Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?” in War of the Worldviews: Powerful Answers for an Evolutionized Culture, ed. Ken Ham, Bodie Hodge, Carl Kerby, et al. (Green Forest, Arkansas: New Leaf Press, 2006), 43-59.
6. Phyllis A. Bird, “Theological Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo G. Perdue (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2001), 262.
7. James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis: A Study of Terminology, ” Bulletin of the John. Rylands Library 51 (1968-69), 13.
8. Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol 2, trans. Leo G. Perdue (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 115
9. Kathryn Tanner, “The Difference Theological Anthropology Makes,” Theology Today 50:4 (Jan 1994), 573.
10. Claus Westermann, Creation, trans. John H. Scullion, S.J. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 57-58.
11. Iain Provan, “The Land Is Mine and You Are Only Tenants (Leviticus 25:23): Earth-keeping and People-keeping in the Old Testament,” CRUX 42:2 (Summer 2006): 5.
12. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, 1st ed. trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 136.
13. Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15 (Waco: Word, 1987), 61.
14. Provan, “The Land Is Mine and You Are Only Tenants,” 5.
15. Ray Anderson, “Theological Anthropology” in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. Gareth Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 85 (emphasis added).
16. Joel B. Green, “Restoring The Human Person: New Testament Voices For A Holistic and Social Anthropology,” in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering, and Michael Arbib (Vatican City State and Berkeley, CA: Vatican Observatory and CTNS, 1999), 5.
17. Lawson G. Stone, “The Soul: Possession, Part, or Person? The Genesis of Human Nature in Genesis 2:7” in What About the Soul?: Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology, ed. Joel B. Green (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 50.
18. Ibid., 57.

I want to express my gratitude to those associated with BioLogos for the chance to dialogue with them. I have found their material to be challenging and thought provoking, and look forward to continuing the conversation. In the area of science, to call me a novice would be a kindness, and so to question their evaluation of the scientific evidence for the evolutionary process would be inappropriate for me. However, I do want to raise some questions about their evaluation of theological issues, especially concerning the image of God in humanity. I refer especially to their response to the question, “At what point in the evolutionary process did humans attain the ‘Image of God?’”¹

The BioLogos response begins by correctly noting that the precise meaning of the image of God has been the subject of debate throughout Christian history, but they believe the majority view sees the image of God as “characteristics of the mind and soul,” such as “the ability to love selflessly; engage in meaningful relationships; exercise rationality; maintain dominion over the Earth; and embrace moral responsibility.” They see these characteristics as being acquired through the evolutionary process, though they also state, “We do not know if humanity received the image of God by the immediate onset of a relationship with God or by a slower evolutionary process.” Further, since they identify the image with characteristics of the soul, they add in a discussion of the soul, “We also cannot know whether God directly intervened in the evolutionary process at this point [referencing Gen. 2:7], or whether the unfolding evolutionary process produced the human soul.” It is at this point I wish to question whether or not it is possible for the image of God to be produced through the evolutionary process apart from the special intervention of God. BioLogos seems to lean toward the image being produced through evolution, but is ultimately non-committal on the possibility of divine intervention. I want to argue that there is good reason to argue for the necessity of divine intervention in giving to humans the image of God.

I have no strong objection to the list of characteristics given in the BioLogos response, though I would see most of them as underlying the capacity for relationship with God, which I see as central to the image. Nor do I have any necessary objection to the idea that God used the evolutionary process in developing the brain and other physical abilities of human beings necessary for exercising some of the characteristics involved in the image. Nor do I think that Gen. 2:7 requires the direct intervention of God in implanting the soul (though it certainly allows it). The problem, rather, is in not recognizing that the image of God in Scripture seems rather clearly linked with something immaterial in the human constitution (whether it is called soul or spirit) that could not have come into being by evolutionary processes. My argument for affirming the necessity of direct intervention of God in the creation of humanity in the image of God rests on three assertions. Let me try to state and defend them.

First is the assertion that central to the image of God is the capacity for relationship with God. I do not think this would be rejected by those in the BioLogos community. Within the BioLogos response the phrase “relationship with God” is found numerous times in association with the image of God. They may not like the part about such a capacity being central to the image of God, but the fact that the image of God is what distinguishes humans from other animals in Genesis 1, coupled with the fact that it is humans, and not other animals, who engage in personal relationship with God throughout Scripture, makes a fairly strong case for linking “image of God” to “capacity for relationship with God.”

The second assertion is that this capacity for relationship with God is something that continues after the death of the body, and is associated with something in human beings that continues to exist after the death of the body. Here I recognize that there has been a growing chorus of voices advocating monistic views of the human constitution,² but they all seem to fail to account for the strong biblical evidence for human existence in the intermediate state.³ That which survives death is called the soul in some places (Gen. 35:18; Rev. 6:9-10) and the spirit in others (Eccles. 12:7; Heb. 12:23), but it is identified with the person himself in II Cor. 5:8 and Phil. 1:23. Jesus says to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Both of their bodies would soon be in graves, but the words “you” and “me” seem to affirm an existence apart from their bodies.

The third assertion is that whatever it is in human nature that survives the death of the body (soul or spirit) must be non-material, and could not be produced by the evolutionary process.⁴ Alvin Plantinga, in an argument against materialism, asks, “How could an immaterial soul have come to be by way of evolutionary processes?”⁵ He quotes Richard Dawkins,

Catholic morality demands the presence of a great gulf between Homo Sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom. Such a gulf is fundamentally anti-evolutionary [and hence wholly heretical?]. The sudden injection of an immortal soul in the timeline is an anti-evolutionary intrusion into the domain of science.⁶

I would change Dawkins’ wording from “Catholic morality” to “The image of God in humans” but the conclusion is the same. I cannot imagine how an immaterial reality, which survives the death of the body, could be produced by natural processes, such as evolution, even God-guided evolution. I do not think this is a God-of-the-gaps argument that could eventually fall to advances in science, but a logical argument, based on the intrinsic difficulty of seeing how the natural and mortal could produce something immaterial and capable of surviving the death of the body. Even if someone were to question my association of the image of God with the spirit or soul (assertion 1), I would argue that the mere existence of an immaterial spirit/soul that survives death (assertion 2) yields the same necessity of divine involvement in the creation of the immaterial aspect of human nature (assertion 3), which is my chief contention.

Notes

1. Subsequent references are taken from the response given at http://biologos.org/questions/image-of-god, accessed 10/14/2011.
2. Joel Green has been perhaps the most prominent voice advocating monism (see Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008] and Joel Green, ed., What About the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology [Nashville: Abingdon, 2004]), though a similar view has been affirmed by a number of his Fuller Seminary colleagues who advocate a “non-reductive physicalism” (see Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). For a more complete presentation of views, see Joel Green, In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005).
3. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) gives a strong defense for dualism primarily from the evidence in Scripture for the intermediate state.
4. I recognize the objection here of William Hasker and the idea of emergentism, or emergent dualism, in which a distinct soul or self emerges from the complex configurations of the biological organism, similar to magnetic fields generated by physical objects but distinct from them. See Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), for the fullest presentation of his view. The difficulty of his view lies in attributing to material stuff the power to generate a non-material reality. This difficulty is raised by Alvin Plantinga (see n. 5 below) and others and emergent dualism is as of today still a minority view in philosophical circles.
5. Alvin Plantinga, “A New Argument Against Materialism” (plenary address for the Evangelical Philosophical Society, Atlanta, GA, 18 November 2010).
6. Ibid. No source for Dawkins is given.

I take that as a hallmark of its significance—for many Christians today, science is seen as a threatening force, potentially even fatal to Christian faith: if we can’t believe that God created the Sun and Moon on the fourth day, then how can we believe that the Incarnate God suffered unto death for our sake? Others prefer to bracket the questions that science poses to Christianity, putting them off for some other time, a time that may never actually come. Although the sciences pose many different kinds of questions for people of faith, I’ll pass over most of them for the time being, in order to concentrate on issues related to origins, since for so many Christians the questions really start with Genesis. I’ll also ignore the big questions that faith poses to science—there are some of those, and they are also very important, but they would take us in different directions, so let’s put those, too, on the back burner for now.

So, let’s talk about origins, then, which is what most people implicitly mean when they talk about “science and the Bible.” I’ve been teaching adults and teenagers about this topic for thirty-five years, and have published work that addresses both the historical and contemporary aspects of the ongoing debate. All of that activity generates a lot of feedback—what works, what doesn’t; what’s helpful, what’s not; which issues to present, which ones to leave out. In the next few months, I’ll be offering an online version of lectures and readings that work, at least as far as I can tell from what students, faculty colleagues (several have sat in on my course), pastors, and members of local churches say about them. If you don’t find this course helpful, please tell me—in that way, you might at least be helpful to me, even if I haven’t helped you. However, if you do find it helpful, please tell others—and invite them to join in the conversation here at BioLogos.

What sort of conversation will this be? To a significant degree, it will be what you make it. I probably won’t be able to respond to each comment or question. My day job and other responsibilities will necessarily limit the time I can devote to this, as much as I might wish it were not so. Please don’t think I’m ignoring the author of a contribution, simply because I don’t respond to it. Actually, having too many comments for me to handle would be a great problem to have! Nevertheless, I’ll try to respond to as many separate issues (not necessarily separate comments) as I can. Quite often, I’ll point readers to places where they can learn more; IMO, the best learning experiences involve motivated minds pursuing the truth with diligence, sometimes with clear guidance from a teacher (a role I will try to fill as far as possible) and sometimes on their own.

An important caveat: print still matters, especially for this topic

One very important caveat: print books are not obsolete—at least not yet, and probably not for a long time to come. Keepers of the cloud would like you to believe that print has gone the way of the LP record, but the fact is that a lot of the best literature about Christianity and science is still available only in books, and a lot of those books are still available only in print. Or, perhaps the electronic version of the book is just not available for free from any source, whereas the print version can be borrowed from the library down the street—either from their own stacks or via “inter-library loan,” something else invented a long time ago that isn’t obsolete just yet.

The internet is wonderful in many ways, but the democratization of access to knowledge is not an unambiguously good thing. It’s not good when so many people seem to believe that everything they need to know about something can be found in three paragraphs that are no more than three clicks away. It’s not good when school children don’t use any print sources in their history projects (this is starting to happen). And it’s even worse when their school libraries have gotten rid of the very sources that might have been the best ones for them to use. I may sometimes recommend something that will be available to you only in a borrowed print book. You might have to wait a week or two to follow up with comments, but so what? To some younger folks that might sound like a life sentence, but if you limit yourself to what you can read in ten minutes on an iPad you might be missing something important that you really didn’t want to miss. So, if you have the patience to read something really good the old fashioned way, don’t hesitate to tell us about it, even if the current topic is something different. (Blogs aren’t usually seen this way, but as you’ve probably figured out I’m not your typical blogger.) Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your worldview is a lot more important than the Pantheon. Make the investment.

(Unfortunately, some of the best material is also found only in academic journals that can be accessed for free only at a few carefully selected academic libraries—even though almost all journals are now primarily in electronic form. I won’t hesitate to mention sources like these either. Articles can still be sent to public libraries by inter-library loan, and it’s not hard to do—someone at your local library can help you with it, if you want to follow up on a recommendation.)

Ultimately, that’s what this course will come down to: everyone has limited time, and everyone makes his or her own decisions about how deeply to explore the material I will present. Sometimes I’ll write a “lecture” that can be read in a few minutes, and that will be as far as you will want to go. Sometimes I’ll assign “homework” that may take a few hours, and perhaps you will find it time well spent. In short, you’ll have the opportunity to take an online course of the best kind—no grade to worry about, no tuition to pay, and no one making you do anything you don’t want to do. How’s that for a deal?!

Our goals for the course

Here’s what I hope to accomplish:

• To help people understand the range of opinion about science & the Bible among Christians
• To introduce people to the kinds of questions that come up, when origins is the topic
• To present biblical, philosophical, theological, historical, and cultural aspects of the origins controversy—and to do this accurately & fairly, without distortion or rancor
• To help people think more clearly for themselves about this topic

At the same time, I am NOT trying to do any of the following things:

• To persuade anyone that any particular view of origins is the “correct” view
• To persuade anyone that any particular view is NOT the “correct” view
• To confuse anyone about any aspect of the origins debate (if and when this happens, please tell me what is confusing and I’ll try to be clearer)

None of this means that I have no opinions myself, or that I won’t offer them from time to time, especially when responding to your comments. However, my overall goal is to educate, not to indoctrinate. As I tell my students: I’m not interested in cloning my opinions; I’m not interested in telling anyone what to think. However, I do want people to adopt a similar attitude: I want people to think for themselves, to be fair to the viewpoints of others (this doesn’t mean that you must agree with someone’s view, but it means that you must not deliberately misrepresent it), and to acknowledge the shortcomings of your own position(s). Hold me to the same standards: none of us has a monopoly on truth. Imagine (as the Beatles might have said) all the people doing this in political discourse—wouldn’t we all be so much better off?

Five basic attitudes & approaches to origins

We will discuss five overall views about origins in coming weeks, in this order:

• “Scientific Creationism,” or “young-earth” creationism. A common acronym for this view is YEC. When people use the word “creationism” without a preceding adjective, they usually mean this type of creationism.
• “Concordism,” or “progressive creationism,” or “old-earth creationism” (OEC). Although some prominent YEC people are fond of saying this is really a type of “theistic evolution,” that is neither accurate nor helpful. This is a type of creationism, in which the special creation of humans (and usually the evolution of many other organisms) is clearly held.
• The “Framework” view (I have not seen a common acronym). This view stands out because it’s not really about science at all, simply about the Bible; however, it is relevant to conversations about origins, as we shall see.
• “Theistic evolution” (TE), which the folks here at BioLogos like to call “evolutionary creation” (EC), because the noun should be more important than the adjective. I will use the older term (TE), partly because I’m an historian and partly because it’s more widely recognized.
• “Intelligent Design.” Nearly everyone calls this just ID, and so will I. Theoretically, ID is not supposed to be about the Bible at all (as I will explain when we get there), so it’s inclusion in this general topic could fairly be questioned. Indeed, I only started including ID in my lectures a few years ago, partly for that reason. I believe it belongs here, however, because many people sense (probably for good reasons) that ID can’t easily be separated from the larger conversation about God, origins, and the Bible—especially at the level of “culture wars,” where it seems to come up all the time.

One point about the “terms” of debate: many people who engage in on-line discussion of these topics take apparent glee in twisting these acronyms into dismissive alternatives, especially when they believe those who disagree with them aren’t just wrong, but stupid. Turning “ID-ists” into “IDiots” is one common example of what’s obviously just nasty name calling, and I won’t tolerate it. If you use any such terms, except to call attention to their pejorative usage, your post will disappear and you might not be back. You can find other ways to express strong disagreement with the positions of others without being childish.

I’ll present each of these positions in a separate column, or perhaps two columns if necessary. I’ll state the basic assumptions (for example, each view will include a proposition about the Bible), making every effort to do this in a manner that reflects what an adherent of that view would actually say. Then, I’ll draw some analytical conclusions about the view—again, trying to be fair to the position itself, even if I might be a bit critical of it. Finally, I’ll make some historical comments. This isn’t the place to write full histories of each view, and of course I will have to be very selective. I’ll let you in on a trade secret: every historian has to be selective, regardless of the topic and the word limit. The key is to do that without distorting the topic too badly. If you think I’m doing that, call me on it—but don’t be surprised if I answer simply by referring you to a book.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be back with one more introductory column before we start getting into the topic. I’ll introduce you to a few books where you can read broadly and fairly deeply about science and the Bible, and let you have a peek at the most important book that has ever been written about science and the Bible. That one is available on the internet, so we can all read it together. Can you guess what book it is? Hint: the author is no longer living. Not by a long shot.

For 30 years, Alaska Airlines gave passengers little prayer cards with their meals. One favorite among the inspiring messages was a verse from the 107th psalm: "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good; His love endures forever."

Gradually, the commercial airlines stopped serving hot meals. On Alaska Airlines they've stopped handing out prayer cards, too. Most passengers liked them, but a minority complained.

This wasn't a First Amendment battle, but the capitulation reflects the changing public face of religion in America.

Simply put: atheism and agnosticism are on the rise. Secularists are growing more vocal in the United States and western Europe, and increasingly insistent they not be force-fed a diet of someone else's faith. Unaware of the irony, many prominent atheists have become passionate proselytizers.

A spate of books by in-your-face atheists have made several unbelievers, notably Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, into best-selling authors and stars of the lecture circuit. This un-holy trinity is part of a larger trend. From his platform as talk show host on HBO, left-leaning social commentator Bill Maher openly ridicules organized religion. After a nuanced portrayal of a religious man in "Tree of Life," movie star Brad Pitt explains that off-screen he veers between agnosticism and atheism and that as a boy growing up in a Southern Baptist household he found Christianity "stifling." And so it goes.

Meanwhile, research in the relatively new discipline of "neuro-theology" by pioneering clinicians such as University of Pennsylvania professor Andrew Newberg suggests to some that spiritual rapture is really just the tickling of the pleasure centers in the brain.

All this activity is having an effect. Since 1990, the percentage of Americans who say they identify with no religion has doubled to 13 percent of the population. These numbers are even higher among the young, many of whom equate Christianity with political conservatism.

"By some key measures, Americans ages 18 to 29 are considerably less religious than older Americans," reports the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a study of so-called Millennials. "Fewer young adults belong to any particular faith than older people do today. They also are less likely to be affiliated than their parents' and grandparents' generations were when they were young. Fully one-in-four members of the Millennial generation...are unaffiliated with any particular faith."

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has warned of a prevalent "post-Christian narrative," particularly in the Northeast region of the United States, that he believes threatens the very fabric of American society.

In this environment, a Newsweek article proclaims "the end of Christian America." Writing in the Washington Post, secularist Gregory S. Paul gloats that atheism in western countries has "evolved." Atheists, Paul claimed, are at the vanguard of "a forward-looking movement that has the wind at its back." He acknowledges that the United States has been a "religious anomaly in the Western world," but insists that is changing, too. Atheism, he proclaims, is making "major gains while Christianity withers."

Is the portrait of religion in the United States really this linear? In a word or two: Probably not.

For starters, if 13 percent of Americans identify with no religious tradition -- "Nones" in the parlance of the field -- this means that 87 percent of the citizenry do consider themselves part of a faith community. That's a super-majority rarely found in U.S. civic life. Moreover, the most comprehensive study of American religion, the American Religious Identification Survey, found in 2008 that even among the "Nones" atheism is somewhat rare.

"Regarding belief in the divine, most Nones are neither atheists nor theists but rather agnostics and deists (59 percent) and perhaps best described as skeptics," the survey found. Likewise, a Pew study done the following year reveals that only about one-fourth of non-believers actually are certain enough to apply the word "atheist" to describe themselves.

Michael Cromartie, vice president of a Washington-based think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, points out that all the atheistic best-sellers of the last decade put together don't come close to the 25 million hardback copies of California pastor Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life." Nor is Warren unique. "Books by evangelical authors are selling like hot cakes," Cromartie notes. "Authors like Tim Keller, Philip Yancey, Eric Metaxas, N.T. Wright - and, of course, C.S. Lewis -- are always selling."

What's actually happening in the field of religion is that Americans are racing off in several different directions at once. It's true that the ranks of atheists and agnostics are growing, but it's also true that within Christianity, the staid, mainstream denominations are stagnating while evangelical congregations are exploding.

This burgeoning activity takes place in every venue from storefront congregations bursting with immigrants to sprawling suburban mega-churches. One of the most famous of the latter, Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, is in California, arguably the most culturally liberal state in the nation. A little over a year ago, Californians rejected gay marriage in a statewide referendum that united in opposition African American clergymen, conservative evangelicals, and Mormon elders. Speaking of which, a practicing Mormon is poised to become the Republican Party's presidential nominee.

And even among that 13 percent cohort of non-believers, transformations are taking place. For one, several cataclysmic events of the past decade caused secularists to take a hard look at their own relative lack of charitable works. When the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004, Rick Warren happened to be emailing a pastor from a satellite church in Sri Lanka, who felt the earthquake and asked Warren to "pray for us" -- because he knew it meant a tsunami was coming.

Warren did more than that; he fired off instant email communications asking his extended church family to gear up to donate money, medicine, food, and monetary aid to the tsunami's victims -- before the tidal wave had even reached shore. This is not an isolated example. Several studies have shown that Christians in this country donate at a greater rate -- even to secular charities -- than non-believers. Sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell found a six-in-10 chance that an American who never attends church worship services will give money to a secular charity, while the percentage for religious people is eight in 10.

But the 2004 Christmastime tsunami moved more than tectonic plates below the ocean floor. It motivated many "secular humanists" to contemplate the implications of the second word in that description. "There has been an absolute sea change," Dale McGowan, executive director of the Georgia-based Foundation Beyond Belief, told Religion News Service. "Boom, the beginning of 2005 was when these organizations started because our members called up and said, ‘What can we do for these people?' Giving has really become much more of a front-and-center concern for our community."

That's an example of how inter-faith dialogue -- that is to say, communications between those of faith and those without faith -- can influence each other. And despite the results of the 2010 California referendum, it's happening on the issue of gay marriage, with young people leading the way. Consider this: evangelical Christians under the age of 25 are more in favor of gay marriage than are New Deal Democrats over the age of 65.

On the personal level, the everyday interactions between Americans of faith and Americans who are non-believers is almost never as stark as it is on the Bill Maher show. Christianity may not be Brad Pitt's cup of tea, but he's the opposite of intolerant. In an interview with Parade magazine, the actor speaks with sensitivity and subtlety about why he turned away from the church, while acknowledging that, for most people, "religion works."

And while politically motivated commentators on the left and the right like to rail on about "the war on science" or "the war on religion," a more accurate way of looking at the age-old argument between science and religion is that in the 21st century, there is a historic cross-pollination taking place, which does not always cut in predictable ways.

When a Pentecostal pastor named Scott McDermott submitted himself to Professor Newberg's brain imaging experiments, he informed Newberg that he prayed at least two hours a day for 25 years. Asked by NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty what effect that might have on the human brain, the researcher replied, "The more you focus on something -- whether that's math or auto racing or football or God -- the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain."

But that wasn't McDermott's reaction.

After undergoing the procedure in Newberg's lab -- he was injected with a dye that shows the location and intensity of brain activity -- McDermott's faith was, if anything, strengthened. "The first thing that got me was I could hear God's voice," the pastor said. "And it so enamored me -- I mean, it changed me dramatically. I couldn't wait to pray!"

His take on neuro-theology? "I think we're wired for the supernatural. I think we're meant to sense a world beyond our five senses: Come on! Taste and see that God really is good."

Sometimes, the religion-science dialogue results in conversions -- not always in science's favor. Ard Louis, a professor of theoretical physics at Oxford University, recently told a group of journalists at an Ethics and Public Policy Center seminar in Miami that a friend of his, a biologist, was inadvertently steered on his faith journey by atheist Richard Dawkins.

This scientist, who had been agnostic, read Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker and was nonplussed by Dawkins's anger at organized religion. "Why is this guy so cheesed off?" he thought, adding that he was motivated to "read the other side."

He did -- and became a Christian.

Despite over-heated political rhetoric fueled by incendiary bloggers, partisan cable television formats, and opinionated radio talk show hosts, the one-on-one discourse on religion in this country is usually done with mutual respect. The best example might be the touching, if unlikely, friendship that Christopher Hitchens developed in the last years of his life with Francis S. Collins. Hitchens was a gifted writer and polemicist, author of god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; Collins is a committed follower of Jesus Christ, author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

But Collins is also a world renowned scientist -- he was director of the Human Genome Project -- and the two men developed a mutual respect while opposing each other in formal debates on religion. They also developed a mutual affection, which deepened when Hitchens' was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in June 2010.

"And the thing to note about stage four," Hitchens noted dryly, "is that there is no stage five." But the writer was determined to fight his disease, and he found a committed ally in Francis Collins, who helped devise an aggressive plan to fight it by drawing on his own research and identifying a gene mutation in Hitchens' cancer that doctors believed might lend itself to experimental drug treatment.

Christopher Hitchens lost that fight. He died six weeks ago. Among the many eulogies was one penned by Francis Collins, who wrote that he had been praying for his friend, adding sadly, "But the great voice finally fell silent on December 15."

After medical school, life and death issues faced by his patients prompted Francis Collins to search for answers to deeper questions. As a graduate student in chemistry in the 1970s, he had been an atheist who saw no reason to probe for truths that transcended the boundaries of math and physics. But asked by a terminally ill patient about his own beliefs, Collins undertook his own faith journey. Among his questions: Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms? From where do human beings derive their moral sense? What happens after people die?

Ultimately, Collins learned of a body of scholarship beyond science, making the acquaintance of thinkers ranging from C.S. Lewis to G.K. Chesterton, who observed, "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative."

At the end of his quest Francis Collins was a Christian, although he's the first to concede that one can't arrive at that place from a purely empirical standpoint. "Faith is reason plus revelation," he has written. "Ultimately, a leap of faith is required."

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Editor for RealClearPolitics.

But, as much as I sympathize with Giberson and Stephens, I am concerned that one of their central assumptions—that there is a divide between ‘secular knowledge’ and Christian faith that must be overcome—essentially undermines their very pursuit of a middle ground where the two can be ‘integrated’. Indeed, even to assume that knowledge/science and Christian faith need to be ‘integrated’ seems to me to play right into the hands of the scientistic fundamentalists, to have completely sold them the proverbial farm. Instead, I think a much better and more distinctly Christian case can be made against Christian fundamentalist aversion for science, but before I can make the case, I need to talk more about what I perceive to be the problem with Giberson and Stephens’ call for integration.

To put it succinctly, even to talk about ‘secular knowledge’ and the ‘integration’ of science and faith is to buy into a problematic bifurcation of knowledge. The basic assumption lying behind such a distinction is that the world of knowledge can be divided into two discreet realms. On the one hand we have the world of secular knowledge, the goal of which is pure objectivity, which is governed by reason and humility, and which finds its ideals embodied in the practice of science. On the other we have the world of religion, which has a completely different set of goals and ideals. Religious knowledge is based upon faith, for the goal of religion is fidelity to God, to Jesus Christ, to the Bible as inspired by God and revelatory of God’s truth.

There are multiple problems with this bifurcation of types of knowledge. For one thing, it simply does not match the facts. There is no ‘Christianity’ that stands or ever has stood as a whole against science or reason. Whatever Christianity IS it certainly is an incredibly complex movement, and throughout its history there have been multiple ways that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, science and theology. This is a point I wish to unpack at greater length in a later blog, but for now it is sufficient to say that there has never been any single way that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, much less what faith and reason even mean. So to treat Christianity (if there even can be said to be such a ‘thing’) as a univocal totality is highly problematic.

Same goes for science. Is it truly or purely a secular pursuit? What are we to make, then, of the countless religious individuals who have been scientists and who have made significant contributions to our knowledge of the cosmos? Did they do so only by some kind of compromise between their faith and secular forms of knowledge? Again, the historical evidence would indicate quite the contrary. Take, for example, the Islamic Golden Age of scientific discovery (c. 750-1200). For Medieval Muslims there was no such thing as a secular realm, much less secular reason or knowledge. One of the most vibrant eras of human discovery, medieval Muslim scientists like Avicenna, Algaurizin, and Omar Khayyam made countless important advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and even chemistry because of their faith that the cosmos is the creation of Allah and their conviction that they served their God by coming to understand better the majesty of Allah's handiwork. Indeed, one might say that it was their very rejection of a distinction between faith and reason, religion and science, that spurred on their desire to study and learn about the physical world.

Much the same could be said of scientific endeavors in the ‘Christian’ West up until the last two centuries. Many of the great scientists and nearly all of the great philosophers of medieval Europe were Catholic clerics, including a few popes! And the list of Christians who have made significant contributions to scientific discovery ever since is absolutely eye-popping: Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestly, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Lord Kevlin, Max Planck…to name just a few.

I can, I believe, say with a great sense of confidence that few, if any, of these great Christian scientists understood themselves to be integrating their faith with secular knowledge. In fact, even to talk about secular knowledge or a secular realm is to be somewhat anachronistic, for the very notion of the secular as a kind of non-religious, and therefore supposedly neutral, public sphere is a rather recent construction. Although with roots in both ancient and enlightenment philosophy and practically grounded in the rise of the modern nation state (in the efforts of monarchs to wrest power from religious authorities and later as democratic nations sought to establish religious toleration), the term itself and a full-blown philosophy of secularism did not appear until the mid-19th century.

Of course, secularism is now the name of the game in most nations outside of the Muslim world, even in countries that do still maintain some kind of official ties between state and religion, such as Britain or Norway. But even in such countries there is a considerable functional split between church and state, with faith now understood to be a matter of private, individual preference and practice, and such ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ endeavors as science viewed as features of the public, secular sphere. Aside from the fact that neither science nor any other kind of so-called ‘secular’ thinking has proven to be all that neutral or objective (see, for instance, Stephen L. Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion or just about anything written by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Jerome Ravitz, Paul Feyerabend, and Bruno Latour, among many others), it is easy to see why someone like Giberson or Stephens might presume the distinction between faith (religious) and science (secular): because that is what their audience generally assumes.

But this is exactly the division that we as Christians need to reject as we talk about the relationship between science and faith, and especially when it comes to providing a critique of Christian fundamentalism. Science belongs, I wish to argue, just as much to the church of Christ as it does to some so-called secular realm of knowledge. To treat the conversation otherwise is to give in to both the secular fundamentalists, who wish to see Christians surrender their faith in God for faith in science as the fount of all truth, and the Christian fundamentalists, who fear that any compromise with the secular ultimately amounts to selling out their fidelity to God.

A far more appropriate way to criticize the anti-intellectual and anti-scientific positions of Christian fundamentalists is to demonstrate how deeply anti-Christian and anti-biblical these positions truly are. In fact, I wish to argue that these tendencies actually mark the resurgence of the ancient heresy Gnosticism, which was roundly rejected by the Christian church in the first and second centuries. Defining Gnosticism and demonstrating the extent to which Christian fundamentalists are guilty of this heresy will be the central thrust of my next blog.

"I lay it down that all knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by a mental abstraction; and then again, as to its Creator, though He of course in His own Being is infinitely separate from it, and Theology has its departments towards which human knowledge has no relations, yet He has so implicated Himself with it, and taken it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating Him." (John Henry Newman, (1858), "The Idea of a University", p. 50-51)