The tenth anniversary of the human genome has been marked by some striking new genetic insights into human evolution and diversity. Do these new discoveries have any significance for the dialogue between science and religion in general, or for our sense of human uniqueness in particular?

The publication of the Neanderthal genome sequence in May 2010 set the pace. Not surprisingly -- given that our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee was around 5 to 6 million years ago, compared to a mere half a million years for our last common ancestor with the Neanderthal -- it turns out that we are genetically far closer to the Neanderthals than to the apes. In all, only seventy-eight changes in the genetic letters ('nucleotides') that would change the amino acid sequence of particular proteins were found in the Neanderthal DNA that were the same as the chimpanzee sequence but different in the human. Amongst other differences, 111 duplications of small DNA segments were found in the Neanderthal but not human sequence. Genetically we are closely related twigs on the great evolutionary bush of life.

But we knew that already. More surprising for many was the provocative finding that non-African humans are genetically closer to Neanderthals than African humans. In fact, the European and Asian genomes that were sequenced appear to contain one to four percent DNA of Neanderthal origin, and the gene flow that occurred appears to have been almost entirely from Neanderthal to human, rather than vice versa. How come? The most likely scenario is that there were a few instances of sexual reproduction between Neanderthals and human individuals belonging to the population that is thought to have emigrated out of Africa to populate the world sometime after seventy thousand years ago, explaining why the Neanderthal DNA sequences are not found in African genomes. The contribution of the Neanderthal genome has remained in European and Asian populations ever since.

To put this in perspective, most of our genes are very similar anyway to those found in Neanderthals and chimpanzees, and to other mammals like mice. We all share a "how-to-build-a-mammal" instruction manual, and the relatively minor genetic differences between us (minor relative to those we share in common) are the icing on the cake, as it were, that make us a human rather than a mouse, a chimp or a Neanderthal.

The year 2010 saw yet another twig appear on the hominin branch of the evolutionary bush, this time one even closer to the Neanderthals than our own. This story begins with the discovery by a Russian team of a sliver of finger bone from a remote Siberian cave in the Altai Mountains, known as the Denisova Cave. The team stored it away, thinking it was from one of the Neanderthals that frequented the cave between thirty thousand and forty-eight thousand years ago. But when DNA extracted from the bone was eventually sequenced, the results -- published just before Christmas -- revealed a population distinct from both humans and Neanderthals.

The finger appears to belong to a novel hominin population that shared a last common ancestor with Neanderthals more recently than humans, and overall is genetically closer to Neanderthals than to humans. It is too early to say whether the so-called 'Denisovans' represent a separate species and fossil data will be required to clarify that question. But what the results do suggest is that Melanesians -- the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia -- have inherited as much as one-twentieth of their DNA from the 'Denisovans', indicating that some limited inter-breeding took place between these ancient populations. Most fascinating of all is the idea that multiple hominin lineages were coexisting in Europe and Asia, along with modern humans, as recently as twenty-thousand to forty-thousand years ago.

Do these findings have any particular theological significance? It is difficult to know why this should be the case. In the Judeo-Christian tradition humankind uniquely is made "in the image of God". The suite of capabilities that emerged during human evolution is necessary but not sufficient to do justice to this much discussed theological insight. Our particular genetic instruction manual generates large frontal lobes, advanced cognitive abilities, rationality, language, consciousness and the ability to choose between right and wrong. It is this suite that gives us the ability to pray, worship and engage in communal religious practices.

But the idea of being made "in the image of God" is not encompassed simply within a static list of such human qualities. Theologians have drawn attention to the dynamic, relational aspects of the concept. It is humanity-in-relation-to-God, together with God-given responsibilities to humans in relationship with each other, that are thought to be more central to the idea. When did such spiritual capabilities and responsibilities first come into being? It is really difficult to know, but the answer certainly seems more rooted in God's intentions and purposes for humankind than in genetic change per se. Students can spend a long time being trained in the finer points of drama, but the play only gets off the ground when the actors are finally given their lines.

It seems quite likely that more twigs will continue to appear on the hominin branch of the bush of life as genomics continues to extend its reach. Such discoveries as such do not appear to raise any new theological questions. But other 2010 discoveries did highlight two genomic insights that do have relevance for religious views of human identity. The first insight comes from further Genome Wide Association studies that continue to subvert any lingering commitments to genetic determinism, for example the idea that there are genes "for" a particular human trait. The second insight comes from the finding that we are all more genetically different from each other than we realized even a few years ago. Genetics is underlining the uniqueness of each human individual. By the end of 2011 it is estimated that more than 30,000 human genomes will have been sequenced. Watch this space. Theological reflections on these findings will be the topic for Part 2.

According to Merriam Webster, the term “intelligent design” has been used since at least 1847, in reference to “the theory that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by a designing intelligence.” That’s a decent definition, also consistent with those offered by today’s proponents of intelligent design (ID). For example, the leading ID think tank, The Discovery Institute (Seattle), has this:

Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

And in the opening sentence of a book he edited with philosopher Michael Ruse, ID theorist William Dembski said, “Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that in order to explain life it is necessary to suppose the action of an unevolved intelligence.” (Debating Design, p. 3)

On the other hand, while a recent contest on a prominent intelligent design (ID) website uncovered several other early uses of the term, it is important to note that it does not always mean exactly the same thing in each reference. The term itself has an interesting history, and while ID authors obviously did not invent the term “intelligent design,” they have given it specific content in recent years. Indeed, they have even removed content in some cases: a point I will return to later is that, though it seems the only viable candidate for such an “unevolved intelligence” is God, ID proponents sometimes seem to do cartwheels to avoid saying as much. When a term has such a complicated past, there simply is no substitute for looking at specific references in their own contexts as we move to seeing how ID plays out today as one of the 5 ways of relating science and the Bible.

Interestingly, many Protestant “modernist” scientists and theologians from William Jennings Bryan’s day (see my previous column) unhesitatingly endorsed the idea that a designing intelligence lay behind nature. At least one such person, Nobel prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, even used the very term “intelligent design” in an address he gave at a Unitarian church in 1940: “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.” (Quoting his pamphlet from 1940, The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge, p. 13. For more about this aspect of Compton’s views, click here.) However, Compton regarded design as a philosophical and theological inference from science, not an explanation within science to be invoked when other explanations fail. He also accepted the common ancestry of humans and other organisms. This is a significant difference from the ID movement today, which offers ID as a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution and (at least in many cases) seeks to undermine public confidence in common ancestry (even though ID per se is not actually opposed to it).

If any ID proponents are sympathetic to the type of religious modernism that Compton and his friends embraced, I cannot tell you who they are. In a curious, ironic twist, ID is often used by conservative Christian apologists partly to defend a cluster of traditional theological and hermeneutical positions that none of the modernists would have defended. A further irony: the intellectual descendants of the modernists—those scientists and theologians who occupy the left wing of the modern “dialogue” of science and religion—exhibit a studied avoidance of the term “design,” disconnecting them on that score from the modernists of the 1920s.

Many other contemporary writers, including some evangelical TEs, are also reluctant to use the word “design,” precisely because in their view it has been co-opted by ID proponents and they do not want readers to misunderstand their position(s). They may agree with ID proponents that certain features of the universe reflect divine design, but because they do not see design as a scientific explanation they employ other language. (Likewise, the YECs have co-opted the word “creationism” to mean just one specific understanding of God’s creative activity, leading most advocates of other views either to provide their own definitions of the word or else to avoid using it altogether. Politics dogs this conversation at every turn.)

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Intelligent Design

With that bit of historical context for the term “Intelligent Design,” let’s now look at the first of the Core Tenets of this perspective in its current state, and as it is most often used by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement.

(1) The Bible is NOT to be mentioned (at least for now); ditto for “God” and “theology” as far as possible.

This is a deliberate strategy, adopted for political reasons to keep arguments at the level of philosophy and science. Here, “political” refers to the American political system, with its constitutional disestablishment of religion, not to partisan politics. Since the 1980s, federal courts have consistently ruled that “creationism” (which was specifically of the YEC variety in the relevant cases) is sectarian religion, not science, and therefore it cannot be taught in public school science classes. Anxious to avoid a similar fate, proponents of ID always want to ensure that they are not perceived as advocates of “creationism.” The less they mention God and the Bible, the reasoning goes, the less likely they are to fall afoul of those decisions.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pertaining to the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press.
Source: http://www.rochester.edu/college/psc/images/Courses/Spring2008/FirstAmendment.png

Phillip Johnson, the former law professor who effectively began the ID movement some twenty years ago, has put it bluntly: “To put things on a more rational basis, the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion.” He quickly adds, “This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact.” (“The Wedge: Breaking the Modernist Monopoly on Science,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/August 1999, p. 22.)

If God and the Bible are really to be left out for the time being, then why am I discussing ID in a series on “Science and the Bible”? It’s a fair question. I simply don’t see any way meaningfully to avoid talking about ID apart from the culture wars in which it is embedded (I’ll say more about this in a subsequent column), and the Bible is never far from the surface when the battle being fought involves origins. Conservative Christians sense that ID really is about God—Dembski’s “unevolved intelligence”. As Dembski himself has said, “no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life”, and there aren’t a lot of candidates for that job. Many Christians also identify strongly with the ways in which ID seeks to confront the secular establishment, in an explicitly-stated effort to combat what Johnson calls “the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions.” (“The Wedge,” p. 23.) They see it as a way of getting traditional theistic perspectives and Christian values back into the academy, once “design” has become an acceptable academic talking point—and it isn’t very far from there to conversations about “science and the Bible.” If this were not so, then why would so much ID literature be published by Christian presses? Indeed, when I tell church audiences with a straight face that ID purports not to be about the Bible at all, I’m usually met with considerable skepticism.

When I’m back in about two weeks, we’ll look at further Core Tenets of ID—the ones that have even less to do with the Bible, explicitly, and more to do with the way we approach the study of the natural world.

Asa Gray

If Thomas Huxley earned the title of "Darwin's bulldog," then Asa Gray should be remembered as "Darwin's dove." Whereas Huxley enjoyed a good fight in his defense of Darwin's theory, Gray sought to mediate and bring sides together around a common understanding of "good science." As Darwin's strongest and most vocal scientific ally in the United States, Gray recognized the scientific importance of Darwin's efforts for the growing professionalism of biological researchers.

But as an orthodox Christian, a Presbyterian firmly devoted to the faith expressed in the Nicene Creed, Gray saw in Darwin's theory both evidence for his philosophical commitment to natural theology and support for his opposition to the idealism advocated by Louis Agassiz and the Naturphilosophen in both Europe and America. Indeed, Agassiz's advocacy of Platonic forms as a basis of biological understanding (e.g., "A species is a thought of the creator")¹ would be a major source of American opposition to Darwin's theory.

Professor of botany at Harvard during most of the middle half of the nineteenth century, Gray was one of the few members of the scientific community to whom Darwin revealed his theory before the publication of On the Origin of Species, and, from what I can tell, the only American. Gray and Darwin met briefly in January 1839 during one of Gray's visits to England. Later, during the 1850s, Darwin wrote Gray on several occasions requesting information--a practice that Darwin frequently employed. In 1854, Darwin's friend and confidant, Joseph Hooker, showed Darwin Gray's review of Hooker's Flora of New Zealand, in which Gray had argued strongly against Louis Agassiz's idealism and had raised questions from his own work on the stability of species. Gray was not yet ready to deny their permanence, but hybrids and other observations were beginning to trouble him.

The next year Gray wrote a lucid and penetrating positive evaluation of Alphonse De Candolle's two-volume Géographie botanique raisonnée, a pioneering work dealing with plant geography and distribution from a statistical perspective. Hooker had sneeringly dismissed the work. In A. Hunter Dupree's authoritative biography of Gray, he describes Gray's puzzlement at Hooker's response in these terms:

Although in the long view Gray's evaluation of the epoch-making nature of De Candolle's book was more justified than Hooker's sneers, [Gray was confused by his response, for] Hooker seemed to be talking with a more comprehensive theory definitely in mind, some reason for taking his position, which he did not divulge and which his friend [Gray] did not possess.²

Darwin, however, saw in both Gray's review of Hooker's book and in his comments on De Candolle's tome that Gray was troubled by some of the same empirical data that had been bothering him. In April 1855, Darwin wrote Gray to urge that Gray update his Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States first published in 1848, and especially to address the issue of the range of Alpine plants in the United States. Specifically, he said: "Now I would say it is your duty to generalise as far as you safely can from your as yet completed work."³

Behind this request was Darwin's desire to test his impression that Gray could make a good ally. Gray passed the test, and finally, in July 1857, Darwin let Gray in on his theory of the transmutation of species. Gray was never an uncritical supporter, and there are many evidences in the correspondence between these two scientists that Gray was willing to challenge Darwin and disagree with some of his conclusions. Nevertheless, Gray saw the importance of Darwin's work and the ways in which it provided answers to the troublesome issues that he had confronted in his own botanical efforts.

Gray responds to Darwin's theory

After considerable interchange--one might even say debate--among Gray, Darwin, and Hooker, Gray wrote to Hooker in October 1859 (one month before the publication of On the Origin of Species) saying that he had absolutely no problem with cognate species arising by variation. He did, however, raise a concern that would be the source of much future discussion. He wondered about Darwin's "carry[ing] out this view to its ultimate and legitimate results,--how [do] you connect the philosophy of religion with the philosophy of your science." He added: "I should feel uneasy if I could not connect them into a consistent whole--i.e., fundamental principles of science should not be in conflict."⁴

When Origins was published, Gray wrote a clear, positive, yet critical review in The American Journal of Science. Aware of mounting religious opposition, he ended his review by arguing that whereas one could use Darwin's theory in support of an atheistic view of Nature, one could use any scientific theory in that way. He wrote: "The theory of gravitation and ... the nebular hypothesis assume a universal and ultimate physical cause, from which the effects in nature must necessarily have resulted."⁵ He did not see the physicists and astronomers who adopted Newton's theories as atheists or pantheists, though Leibniz earlier had raised such reservations. And a similar situation existed with the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin, Gray continued: "merely takes up a particular, proximate cause, or set of such causes, from which, it is argued, the present diversity of species has or may have contingently resulted. The author does not say necessarily resulted."⁶

This far Gray could go with Darwin. But there was a point at which he parted company, and that was the fortuitous randomness of the process that Darwin's theory seemed to imply.

In part 2, Dr. Miles describes Darwin's struggle with the problem of natural evil and design in nature.

Notes

1. Cited in A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 151. 2. Ibid., 236.
3. Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903), 252.
4. Dupree, Asa Gray, 266.
5. Asa Gray, "The Origin of Species" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 44.
6. Ibid.

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 ask the question, “Why is the universe so special?” Now scientists don’t like things to be special; we like things to be general, and our natural anticipation would have been that the universe is just a common or garden specimen of what a universe might be like.

But we’ve come to understand a lot about the history of the universe. We know that our universe started 13.7 billion years ago, and it started extremely simple, just an almost uniformly expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could possibly think about. But a world that started so simple has of course become rich and complex. With you and me, in fact, the most remarkable and complex consequences are its history, at least of which we are aware. The human brain is far and away the most complicated physical system we have ever encountered anywhere in our exploration of the universe.

That fact itself might suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history rather than just one thing after another. But we’ve also come to understand many of the processes by which this rich fruitfulness has come to birth. As we’ve come to understand these, we’ve come to see that though these processes are of course evolving processes, they took long periods of time – the universe was 10 billion years old before any form of life appeared in it, at least as far as we know anyway – and life of our complexity only appeared yesterday.

Nevertheless, the universe is pregnant with life, pregnant with the possibility of life, essentially from the beginning onwards. By which I mean the given laws of nature had to take a very specific, very finely tuned form, if the universe was to have so fruitful a history.

That’s a very remarkable discovery, and let me give you some examples of why we believe that. If you’re going to have a fruitful universe, one of the first things you have to get right is that you have to have the right stars in the universe. The stars are going to have a very important role to play. First of all, you must have some stars that are going to be very long lived, live for billions of years, steadily burning, steadily producing energy which will enable the development of life on one of the encircling planets. We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way very well, and it depends on a delicate balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. The seats on which you are sitting are held together by electromagnetism and in fact you are held together by electromagnetism.

If you alter that balance a little bit in one direction the stars will begin to burn intensely, furiously, just pouring out energy and they will only live a few million years rather than a few billion years. If you move it a little bit in the other direction they will burn so slowly they will be brown stars and they will not produce enough energy to fuel the development of life. So you have to have a very delicate finely tuned balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetic forces in a fruitful universe.

Remember, science takes the laws of nature, takes the given strengths of gravity, the given strength of electromagnetism, uses that to explain processes in the world, how things happen, but it doesn’t explain where those laws of nature come from. They are just brute facts as far as science is concerned.

And the stars have another absolutely indispensible role to play. The stars are the place where the heavier elements essential for life are made in the interior nuclear furnaces. There are many elements that are necessary for life, of which carbon is perhaps the most essential. Carbon is the basis of the long chain molecules, which are the biochemical basis of life. The early universe only makes the simplest elements; it makes hydrogen and helium and it makes no carbon at all. Carbon only begins to be made when the universe, which started uniform, begins to condense and become lumpy and grainy with stars and galaxies. As the stars condense they heat up, nuclear processes begin again in their interiors. And it’s those nuclear processes in the stars that make carbon and the heavier elements. Every atom of carbon in your body was once inside a star. We are people of stardust made in the ashes of dead stars.

And that’s a very beautiful process that takes place in that sort of way. And one of the great triumphs of astrophysics and the second half of the 20th century was to unravel that process. One of the people who did some of the most important work on that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. And they were trying to figure out how to make carbon. They got helium, and if you can make three helium nuclei stick together that will produce carbon, but when you have something as small as a nucleus it is impossible to get three to stick together at one time, they’re just too small.

Ok, so let’s do it step by step. Stick two together gives you berylium. Helium 4 gives you beryllium-8, hope it stays around for a bit, another helium comes along, attaches itself, and bingo, you’ve got carbon-12. That’s the obvious thing to think about but it doesn’t work in the obvious way, and the reason it doesn’t work in the obvious way is that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable. It doesn’t oblige you by staying around long enough to catch that third helium, at least in an ordinary, straightforward way.

But Fred realized that it would be just possible for this to happen if there was a very large enhancement effect, in the trade we call it resonance, occurring in carbon at just the right energy, it has to be the right energy, which would enable that attachment process to catch that third helium much much more quickly that you might have thought, in fact so quickly that some of them would get caught before the beryllium-8 disappeared. It was a very good idea, and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself and he went off to just check in the nuclear data tables of this particular resonance’s energy levels, and it wasn’t in the tables, but he knew it must be there, he’s carbon based life like you and me.

So he rang up some friends in the States, a father and son team who were good experimentalists and he said, “Look, you missed something. There’s a resonance and energy level in carbon that you haven’t spotted, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. I know exactly where this energy has got to be. You go look for it.” And they said, “No, no, we don’t want to do that, we have more interesting things to do.” But Fred was very determined and he bullied them into looking for it and they found it.

Now that’s a wonderful achievement, to predict an energy level in carbon on the basis of how it might have been made in the stars is a fantastic scientific achievement. But it’s more than that. Fred had a lifetime conviction of atheism, realized of course that if the laws of physics had been just a little bit different that resonance wouldn’t have been there, and the possibility of carbon-based life is too significant for it just to be a happy accident in his view, so he says in a Yorkshire accent that is beyond my power to imitate, he said that the universe is a put-up job. Fred didn’t like the word God, and so he said some Intelligent, capital “I” Intelligence, must have monkied with the laws of nature to make carbon production possible. What that could possibly be I don’t know, but the more sensible thing to say is that creation is ordained, that the laws of nature would be such, as to enable the fruitfulness of carbon-based life.

We’ll come back to evaluating that possibility in a minute, but before we do, let me give you two other examples of how specific, how special, our universe has to be for us to be able to be here today to think about. We live in a universe that is immensely big, beyond our powers to imagine really. There are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy in the Milky Way, of which our sun is just a common or garden specimen, and there are about a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable universe, of which our Milky Way is a pretty common or garden specimen. So we live in a world that is unimaginably vast, and sometimes we might feel upset by that and think, “What could be the significance of us who are simply inhabitants of a speck of cosmic dust, as you might say, in this vast, vast universe?”

Nevertheless, if all those stars were not there, we would not be here to be upset at the thought of them. Because there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts, and a universe that is significantly smaller than our universe would not have been able to last the 14 billion years, which is the necessary time to produce beings of our complexity. So that’s another condition of the world that has to be right for human beings, or something like human beings, to be a possibility.

One final example, which is the finest tuning of all: quantum theory suggests that there should be an energy attached to space itself. In quantum theory the vacuum, so called empty space, is not just a void. There are things called vacuum fluctuations which occur in a continual sort of seething mass of things coming into being and going out of being all the time. So while there is nothing there that doesn’t mean there is nothing happening. That may sound strange and paradoxical but believe me that’s what quantum theory implies. And of course these happenings, these fluctuations, generate a certain amount of energy, we call it “zero point energy”, and that energy is spread out over the whole of space. So we expect there to be energy associated with space.

And just recently the astronomers have discovered something called dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe, which is just such an energy associated with space. Well that’s very good, you might say. However, when we estimate, just from thinking about quantum theory, how much energy there should be in space it turns out to be a fantastically large amount, and when we see the amount of energy there actually is per volume in space, it turns out to be very, very small in relation to that expected size. In fact, it turns out to be smaller by a factor of 10^-120. That means by a factor of 1 over 1 followed by 120 zeros. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to see that’s a fantastically small number. So some fantastic cancellation has taken place to turn that big number into the tiny number that we actually observe, and if it hadn’t taken place we wouldn’t be here to observe it because significantly higher energy would simply have blown the whole show apart too fast for anything interesting to happen. That’s the finest tuning that we know in the universe: one part in 10¹²⁰.

So we live in a world that is very remarkably finely tuned, and we have to consider that. And all scientists would agree about what I have been telling you; this is non-contentious. Where the contention comes in is what we might make of that, what is the further significance of it.

In the conclusion to Dr. Polkinghorne’s lecture, he looks at two explanations for the "fine-tuning" principle -- the multiverse theory and the existence of a divine intelligence -- and explains why natural theology alone is not sufficient to make the case for a God who interacts and cares for his creation. To make the case for theism, he argues, we need revelation, God's self-disclosure. This is manifest in various ways, including that which we experience personally, including ethics and aesthetics.

Design arguments have been around forever and expressed in various ways. Most of them fall into what we call natural theology, which is the process of inferring something about the existence and nature of God by the inspection of nature. The story of creation in Genesis launches the discussion in the Judeo-Christian tradition when it speaks of God ordering nature and driving back chaos. On the fourth day “God created the sun, moon, and the stars to give light to the earth and to govern and separate the day and the night. These would also serve as signs to mark seasons, days, and years.” All this suggests design and purpose. Job speaks of God making “water drops evaporate” so the clouds can “shower abundantly on mankind.” (Job 36:27-28 HCSB). The psalmist expresses awe at the grandeur of the night sky but remarkably does not comment on the grandeur of his own existence:

When I observe Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, . . . what is man that You remember him? (Psalm 8:3-4 HCSB)

In the New Testament, Paul speaks of the created order testifying clearly to the reality of God, arguing that, “the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20 KJV). Biblical scholars have interpreted this to mean that an open-minded seeker can infer the existence of God by studying the creation. As theologians reflected on the nature of the creation these arguments were repeated and refined. Augustine in the fourth century, Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Luther and Calvin at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century—all were understandably convinced that the world had a grand design that was readily discernable. After all, nobody had any other explanation for why birds were adapted to fly, fish to swim and constellations to mark the seasons.

By the time we get to Isaac Newton in the latter part of the seventeenth century, we have the first carefully constructed scientific arguments. Newton, as we learned in high school, explained how gravity from the sun keeps the planets in their orbits. This explanation replaced previous medieval explanations that included the possibility that the planets moved because angels pushed on them. (It also replaced Galileo’s explanation that they moved because of a “circular inertia,” which turned out to be as much a fantasy as the pushing angels.) But Newton’s theory didn’t explain why the planets all go around the sun in the same direction and in almost the same plane. In fact Newton could not imagine any natural process that could produce such elegant design, so he argued that God must be the explanation.

About two centuries later the most famous design argument was developed by William Paley whose Natural Theology Darwin read voraciously as a young scientist. “Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground,” asked Paley, “and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. . . . [W]hen we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. . . . [T]he inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.” Paley goes on to compare the watch to an eye, arguing that if a watch implies a watchmaker, then an eye implies an eye-maker. The eye-maker, of course, can only be God.

Newton’s argument about the planets and Paley’s about the watch have the same logical form: We find something in nature that appears too ingeniously arranged to have been produced by known natural processes, so we infer that a Designer from outside the natural order—God— must be the source of the design. Their arguments differ, however, on the question of purpose. It was not clear to Newton or anyone of his day exactly why the planets needed to be going about in the orderly way they were observed. If the order was indeed provided by God, no explanation for it could be discerned other than the creation of order for the sake of order. In contrast, the designs that Paley highlighted were clearly purposeful. Our eye is remarkably designed for a purpose other than to elicit awe at its complexity. We see with our eyes. We don’t do anything with Neptune’s nice orbit, other than admire it.

Red Flags

Arguments that the universe is designed are complicated. We certainly live in a remarkable universe with many features that inspire awe. Many of those features connect in astonishing ways to the habitability of the universe. The psalmist’s wonder at the heavens has only grown stronger as we have learned more about those heavens. The universe certainly does not become ever more boring and bland as we come to understand it better.

But we also live in a world with earthquakes, plagues and tsunamis. Our sun will burn out at some point, incinerating the earth in the process. The prospects of securing our future by colonizing other planets seem remote. The long-term prognosis of the universe, by the cold logical lights of science, is not good. Its temperature will continuously drop as it expands for billions of years. Eventually there won’t be enough heat left for any form of life, and finally there won’t even be enough heat for atoms and molecules to interact. This sterile icy blackness is frightening to contemplate. No matter what we do as a species, we and our cultural achievements are destined to perish.

No simple overriding explanation that makes sense of everything comes into view as we learn more about the universe. And experience with past arguments raises red caution flags. For example, Newton’s design argument about the planets was an argument from ignorance that now bears the label “god of the gaps.” There was a gap in Newton’s explanation for the planets. He could explain why their orbits were elliptical and what kept them in their orbits. But he could not explain the uniformity of their orbits, so he invoked God as the explanation to plug this gap—hence the label for such arguments—god of the gaps.

A century after Newton, French physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace dispelled the mystery of the structure of the solar system. He showed that a better understanding of gravity and how solar systems originated could explain the things that Newton attributed to the direct action of God. Laplace’s work did not refute the existence of God, of course. But it did dismantle Newton’s argument that the planetary orbits must have been set up by God, thus eliminating an argument that some had been using to argue for God’s existence.

In a similar way, Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for the design that Paley marveled at in the eye. Scholars of Paley’s generation knew nothing of natural selection, mutations or genetics, so they could not imagine how nature might craft something so remarkable as an eye. Paley’s argument, like Newton’s, turns out to be another god of the gaps explanation that disappears with further scientific insights into the way the world works.

So this is the first red flag to note—design arguments are all-too-often based on gaps in our knowledge and will disappear when those gaps are filled.

The second red flag concerns the apparent purpose of any design. “Design” can point in many directions or no direction at all. The science museum in Boston has a grand contraption that does nothing except move balls around to no end. The only possible purpose is to impress a visitor with the juxtaposition of complex design and lack of purpose. There is likewise no significance to the patterns of the stars that we call constellations. The “design” of the Big Dipper is simply interesting. The fine-tuning of the universe for life, on the other hand, encourages us to wonder if life may be important in some way. But it does not specify which life forms are relevant and why. And we must note that some features of our world exhibiting a high level of design—like the AIDS virus or the poison of the rattlesnake—seem to have the purpose to destroy human life. If rattlesnakes could reflect on their existence, they could marvel at the carbon resonance that makes that existence possible.

A third red flag we must note is bad design. If marvelous design in the universe motivates reflection on the possibility that God created the world what do we do about the counterarguments? Consider asteroids. A gigantic asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and so disrupted the ecosystems and the atmosphere of the earth that the dinosaurs went extinct. Absolutely nothing prevents the same thing from happening again. We are protected today largely by the vastness of space and the structure of our solar system with large outer planets that “vacuum up” a lot of stuff that could hit the earth. These various protections make collisions of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs unlikely. But they offer no guarantees. If the Goldilocks features of our universe are intended to make it habitable, then why does the universe also have anti-Goldilocks features?

Many such issues complicate the process of figuring out why the universe is the way it is. And as we have learned somewhat reluctantly in the last few centuries, the great explanatory power of science disappears entirely when questions of purpose enter the conversation. Science is quite extraordinary at telling us how the world is but quite unable to tell us why the world is like that. Science illuminates the remarkable features of our universe that make life possible, but it goes silent when we ask whether any particular life form is the reason why the universe is the way it is. That deeply religious question has to be explored somewhere else.

These challenges caution us against naively selecting—cherry-picking we call it—a few Goldilocks features of the universe, assuming the friendly design work is for our benefit, and jumping to the conclusion that everything points simply and unambiguously in the direction of God as Creator.

Since this post, and those that will follow it, depend on an accurate representation of the argument for irreducible complexity (IC), I will take some time to clarify exactly how Michael Behe, the biochemist and Intelligent Design (ID) proponent who has most extensively developed the IC argument, uses the term. For Behe, the argument for IC is a critique of gradual evolutionary processes, of the kind that Darwin saw as necessary for his theory to hold. When Behe introduces and defines IC in his book Darwin’s Black Box, he has a key quote from Darwin on gradualism explicitly in view:

Darwin knew that his theory of gradual evolution by natural selection carried a heavy burden: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

It is safe to say the most of the scientific skepticism about Darwinism in the past century has centered on this requirement… critics of Darwin have suspected that his criterion of failure had been met. But how can we be confident? What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications”?

Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39)

The definition of an IC system is thus straightforward: it is a matched group of components, where all the components are necessary for the function of the system. The necessity of each component can be demonstrated by attempting to remove it – if the system no longer works if even one component is removed, it is by definition IC. Since an IC system requires all the components to be present for its function, it is not possible for the system, in its current state, to have been produced directly from a non-functional precursor. If one grants this premise, it leaves two options: that the IC system was derived indirectly, from a system that is not IC, or that the system was assembled by fiat and thus represents the actions of a designer. Behe’s criterion for distinguishing between these choices is based on evaluating the probabilities of these competing options:

Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can not definitively rule out the possibility of an indirect, circuitous route. As the complexity of an interacting system increases, though, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously. And as the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 40)

As we will examine in an upcoming post, Behe attempts to determine the precise limit of what evolutionary processes can (and cannot) achieve in a second book, The Edge of Evolution. For our present purposes, however, it is enough to note that the strength of the argument from IC depends on the perceived implausibility of the opposing explanation – that of an indirect evolutionary route that produces an IC system from a non-IC precursor system.

Building IC, one step at a time?

The presence of IC systems in biology as Behe has defined them is not contentious: there are many biological systems that cease to function when parts are removed. Indeed, the success of classical genetics in “dissecting” which genes are needed for certain functions largely rests on the ability to see some effect on function when a gene is removed from a system by mutation. What scientists dispute, however, is Behe’s claim that identifying IC systems is a hallmark of design. The evolutionary model for building IC is quite simple, and Behe has set it out as an option: an indirect route where non-essential parts are added to a system, and then over time the system comes to depend on those parts. We can diagram this model as follows:

The key to the model is that new parts can be added to a system, and that these parts are not essential when they are added. The resulting system is thus not IC, since it has parts that are not essential to its function, even if the new parts are advantageous in some way. If the new component is taken away at this stage, the system merely reverts to the precursor system. The second part of the model is that these intermediate, non-IC systems then may become IC if small changes make the new parts essential.

The addition of new, non-essential parts can be accomplished in several ways, such as a change in an existing protein that allows it to bind to a “precursor system”. More extreme would be the generation of a new protein that then adds to a precursor system as a non-essential component. Brand new genes, by definition, cannot be essential when they arise, since they arise in an organism that, up to that point, had no need of them. Looking to see if new genes then later become essential would be very good experimental support for the evolutionary model for how IC systems arise.

In practice, it takes a lot of scientific effort to tease out changes to an existing protein that allow it to become part of an intermediate system and then progress to an IC system, though we have examined one such example in a previous post. Looking for brand new genes, however, is much easier – and some recent work in several fruit fly species (Drosophila) has done just that.

The Young and the Restless

So, how to go about finding genes that are new? We have already discussed, in the context of duplicating an entire genome, how duplication of genes may lead to the two copies picking up new functions over time. While duplication may happen rarely at a whole-genome scale, small-scale duplication of small numbers of genes happens quite frequently as an error during cell division. At the time of the duplication, the two copies are the same, and therefore functionally equivalent. Over time, however, the two copies may become different and acquire distinct functions.

One way to look for genes that have arisen due to a recent duplication event is to compare the genomes of closely related species and look for genes that are present in one species but not another, or in a subset of related species. Duplicated genes will show up in a nested hierarchy, much like how pseudogenes appear in the same nested pattern, as we have discussed previously here.

The complete genome sequences for a number of fruit fly species are available, so researchers used this method of comparison to look for new genes that mostly arose “recently” (over the last 35 million years) within flies. Since the speciation times for the various fly species are known to a good approximation, the time of the various duplication events can be estimated as well.

Putting the argument for IC to the test

Using this method, researchers identified 195 recent, “young” genes that arose through duplication events. (Note: this finding, in and of itself, is problematic for the ID argument that significant amounts of new information cannot arise through evolutionary mechanisms). More problematic for the argument from IC, however, is that just less than one third of these new genes are now essential for development in the species that carry them. This fraction is approximately the same for “old” genes – about one third are essential for development.

The implications are easily grasped: many new genes have arisen through duplication, and a sizeable fraction are now part of IC systems. When they arose, they could not have been essential, but now they are emphatically so. As such, they must have been added to previous systems, and become IC over time. Moreover, this effect is not a rare, one-off event, but rather has been repeated time and again in recent evolutionary history.

In the next post in this series, we’ll delve into some of the details about how these new genes arose, and what sort of functions they have.

For further reading:

Behe, M.J. Darwin’s Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Free Press, New York, 1996.

Behe, M.J. The Edge of Evolution: the Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Free Press, New York, 2007.

Chen, S., Zhang, Y, and Long, M (2010). New genes in Drosophila quickly become essential. Science 330; 1682-1685.

Today's video features biologist Kerry Fulcher and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Kerry Fulcher discusses the idea of viewing creation as a constant, evolving process in which God is intricately involved, rather than a single explosion of creation a long time ago. When we get stuck on the idea of having biological ancestors, Fulcher says, we can miss the point that being made in the image of God is a relational quality, not a biological trait. It means that we can communicate and have a special relationship with God, and we can reflect his character and represent him to the rest of creation.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures and features physicist Ard Louis.

In today's video, Oxford physicist Ard Louis discusses the famous debate between renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould believed (and wrote in his book Wonderful Life) that if the "tape" of evolution were rerun, the chance that anything like human intelligence would emerge is essentially zero. In other words, humanity is here through random accident. Gould pointed to the work of Morris and fellow scientists in their research of the Burgess Shale as evidence for this view.

However, Morris himself disagrees, pointing to what is called evolutionary convergence. As Morris notes, there are numerous examples of identical features evolving multiple times throughout the history of life independently. Morris believes that if the tape of life were replayed, we would see something like humans emerge. A Christian might say, it looks like we were planned.

Some Christians might find Simon Conway Morris' viewpoint, with its implicit teleology, more attractive. Others, perhaps motivated by a high view of providence, may find Gould's emphasis on contingency equally congenial to their faith. What do you think?

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Rev. John Piper, author and Pastor for Preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Click above to hear an excerpt. Below, is a brief summary written by BioLogos editorial staff. The full sermon, which we highly recommend can be downloaded here. Finally, if you know a sermon or podcast related to science and faith that has especially spoken to you, please let us know.

Genesis 1:26-28 states that God created human beings and placed his image within them, both male and female. Although these Biblical statements are not exclusive to Christian belief, Dr. John Piper argues that they point to Christianity. In this eloquent sermon, he examines these related, but distinct truths in Scripture (creation, creation-in-the-image-of God, and creation-as-male-and-female) and demonstrates how they obtain completion and significance in the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Piper begins with a discussion about God’s purpose in the creation of humankind. The assertion that God designed people pleads the question: for what purpose or end have all human beings been formed? The Old Testament indicates that humanity was made to steward the things of the earth and to reflect the glory of God in the world. It speaks of being created to show forth the glory of God (Isaiah 43:7). It also speaks of how the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord. (Habakkuk 2:14). However, the Hebrew Scriptures end with creation utterly unfinished and the hope of glory still to come. Stopping the story there, begs for the rest to be told, and it is, but only in Christ:

For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone this light in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (II Corinthians 4:6 NRSV.)

Then, Piper speaks about how God has created us in his image, and this, he says, must have something to do with why we are here. His purpose in making us must have something wonderful to do with our uniqueness. We, alone out of all his created beings, are made in the image of God. The current state of the world, however, shows what a mess we have made of this dignity. We have marred God’s image “almost beyond recognition.” This causes one to wonder: can a person truly be in the image God when evil abounds? Piper answers this by referring to the words of God to Noah in Genesis 9:6: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image." This verse fully affirms God’s likeness in humanity. Even in a world where sin abounds, humankind is still created in God’s image—badly distorted, true, but still the image of God. Piper expounds:

Do you feel that you are like God in the way you should be? So here again the belief that we were created in God's image begs for a completion—in this case a redemption, a transformation, a kind of re-creation. And that is exactly what Christianity brings. "By grace are you saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God—not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works . . . Put on the new nature created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 2:8–10; 4:24 RSV).

So knowing that we were created in the image of God, our dilemma begs for an answer. And Jesus, he says, is that answer; he begins the reclamation project called sanctification that will end in the glory that God intended for humankind in the first place.

Next, Piper focuses on how God created us male and female. And this too, given the alienation depicted as the story of Adam and Eve comes to a close, begs for completion and points to Christ. How? It does so in at least two ways. The first comes from the “mystery” of marriage. The other comes from the historical ugliness of male-female relationships when sin abounds.

First is the mystery. While Genesis 2: 24 sets forth the institution of marriage saying, “…a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh,” it does not fully explain the significance of it. For this reason, the Apostle Paul describes marriage in Ephesians 5: 31 as a great mystery. Paul then describes how marriage is symbolic of Jesus Christ’s covenantal relationship to the Church. The story of man and woman in marriage begs for completion, and it is only fulfilled in Christ’s covenant with his people, his commitment to the church. So that’s the mystery, and it is only fully realized with the coming of Jesus.

Second is the ugliness that too often characterizes male/female relationships in sin. Piper goes all the way back to the beginning where in Genesis 2:24 Adam disgustingly blames woman, not himself, for his sin. There, Piper says, is the beginning of all domestic violence—man blames woman for his own failures. One consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin is a curse upon man and woman’s relationship in Genesis 3: 16(NASB): “…In pain you will bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Piper makes it clear that the model of a domineering man and a devious woman is the result in marriage when sin has its way. However, Jesus came to reverse the curse and heal the twisted relationship between men and women that has created inequality and oppression. In 1 Peter 3:7, Peter describes man and woman as fellow heirs of the grace of life that is found in Jesus. Therefore, it is in Christ that equality, complementarity, harmony, mutual respect, and love exist between man and woman.

So the fact of being created in God’s image in Genesis, cries out for completion as the Old Testament ends.

1. Humankind is created to manifest the glory of God, but the work is clearly unfinished.
2. The image of God has been deeply marred by self-centered rebellion against God (sin). The work of God cries out for completion
3. The male/female relationship is damaged by the desire to dominate, but it points to completion in the mystery of Christ and the bride for which he gave his life—the Church.

In all cases, creation only moves to completion, as we are “utterly and radically and uniquely devoted to the Lord.”

Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1, 2, NASB)

Full Sermon

BioLogos has dealt fairly extensively with what we thought was the basic premise of Signature in the Cell. I had read the book carefully and I know Dennis did as well before we responded. I sincerely thought that the heart of Meyer’s argument is summarized in the following three quotes from the book:

1. “So the discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source. It follows that the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is that it too had an intelligent source. Intelligent design best explains the DNA enigma” (p. 347, emphasis added).

2. “Since, as argued in Chapters 8 through 15, intelligence is the only known cause of large amounts of specified information, the presence of such information in the cell points decisively back to the action of a designing intelligence” (p. 382, emphasis added).

3. “Because we know intelligent agents can (and do) produce complex and functionally specified sequences of symbols and arrangements of matter, intelligent agency qualifies as an adequate causal explanation for the origin of this effect. Since, in addition, materialistic theories have proven universally inadequate for explaining the origin of such information, intelligent design now stands as the only entity with the causal power known to produce this feature of living systems.” (p. 386, emphasis added).

So we at BioLogos have always thought that if mainstream science demonstrated an increase in “complex specified information” (CSI) without needing to invoke supernatural intervention, Meyer’s assertion that “intelligence is the only known source of such information in the cell” will have been refuted at the scientific level. It sure seemed to me that this is what he said in the above quotes.

With that in mind, we’ve put a great deal of effort into showing a number of cases in the lab and in nature where scientific data have provided very strong evidence for increased CSI which is entirely consistent with how we scientists would define “natural explanations.” All this time, starting with my first essay almost two years ago, we sincerely thought we were engaging Meyer’s book on Meyer’s terms.

But now, in his PSCF article, Meyer states that arguments based on examples of increased CSI don’t count if they occur after life began on Earth.

“Signature in the Cell argues, first that no purely undirected physical or chemical process—whether those based upon chance, law-like necessity, or the combination of the two—has provided an adequate causal explanation for the ultimate origin of the functionally specified biological information. In making that claim, I specifically stipulate that I am talking about undirected physical and chemical processes, not processes (such as random genetic mutation and natural selection) that commence only once life has begun. Clearly material processes that only commence once life has begun cannot be invoked to explain the origin of information necessary to produce life in the first place) (pp. 173-174, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Sept. 2011, emphasis added).

Since I had read the book very carefully, and have gone over it many times since, I was amazed that I could have missed this stipulation. Again, he says: “I specifically stipulate that I am [not] talking about … processes (such as random genetic mutation and natural selection) that commence only once life has begun.”

Did he really specifically stipulate that? Have we been barking up the wrong tree all this time? While we knew the main focus of Meyer's book was the origin of life (not mechanisms of evolution), his argument clearly stated, we thought, that no large increase in CSI (Complex Specified Information) had ever been demonstrated without the need to invoke intelligence. Period.

I went back through my well-marked up copy of the book again, re-examining each section in which he wrote about increased CSI. Despite my best efforts, I could not find the stipulation he mentions in the PSCF article. Still, thinking I had missed it, I spent $15 for an electronic version of the book—one that would allow me to identify every time the word “mutation,” or natural selection” appeared—anything that would help me find his stipulation. I couldn’t find it.

Actually I thought Meyer was pretty clear and highly specific in his book. Consider this scientific challenge on page 429:

If, for example, someone successfully demonstrated that "large amounts of functionally specified information do arise from purely chemical and physical antecedents," then my design hypothesis, with its strong claim to be the best (clearly superior) explanation of such phenomena, would fail.

Find a case where a large amount of CSI has accumulated without needing to invoke intelligence, and his argument, Meyer said, fails. This is a strong statement, clearly worded, and there is no hint of Meyer’s stipulation that it doesn’t count if life has already begun. In Dennis Venema's BioLogos blog series, he showed many cases where there were large increases in CSI (whole genome duplication, for example) without needing to invoke that supernatural intervention was necessary to create it. Chromosomes, the cell division machinery, and nucleotides are “purely chemical and physical antecedents.” The information content in the genome, Venema showed, quadrupled early in vertebrate history through material processes that we know and understand well. Did this not meet the scientific criteria that Meyer specifically called for?

I don’t know how misunderstandings like this happen. I believe that Stephen Meyer, who I consider to be a friend and colleague, thinks the stipulation exists in his book and that he worded it clearly. I assume he thinks it was implied in some overarching statement that I have not been able to find. I also think he believes he was clear. Unfortunately, clear he was not. I’ve looked thoroughly and I have not been able to find his stipulation.

In post after post, we have set out to demonstrate the scientific case we thought Meyer called for. Then in the end, it sure seems to us, that the rules changed, even though Steve feels they were written in his book all the way along.

Still, let’s move on. Let’s play by the new rule and let’s define it carefully.

So here’s the rule as I now understand it: If large increases in CSI can be demonstrated without the need to invoke an external intelligence, “then [Meyer’s] design hypothesis with its strong claim to be the best (clearly superior) explanation of such phenomena, would fail.”

Having stated the rule, we have to make two exceptions (Meyer himself made Exception #1 clear in Chapter 13; Exception #2 is the new stipulation we've been discussing):

Exception 1. We can’t count large increases in CSI which develop as a result of computer programs because minds designthe program parameters.

Exception 2. We can’t count large increases in CSI which develop in the history of life, because DNA was necessary to set those processes in motion.

So what can we count? Until he clarified the existence of Exception #2, I thought any general increases in CSI would count. However, it is now very hard for me to imagine any increase in information that would not be categorized within either Exception 1 or Exception 2². The only thing left that doesn’t fit into one of these two exceptions is the origin of life itself. The point of the book, I thought, was to bring other examples of increased CSI to bear on this very question.

With Meyer’s exceptions and the inability to bring general CSI increases to bear on the origin of life question, we also no longer have “positive³ experiments [which] provide causal adequacy of intelligent design” (p. 335, emphasis added).

So what are we left with? Are we not simply left with the question of whether the origin of life experiments show that information-rich molecules will arise in a test tube from chemicals off the shelf? Dr. Meyer, I think, says no, for reasons that are no longer clear to me other than that he’s given up on the science. I, on the other hand say, “Wait a while. Let the science play itself out before a scientifically based decision is made.” To be frank though, I am a little concerned that even if the right mix of materials is found to produce molecules that can spontaneously assemble in a manner that gives rise to complex specified information, Dr. Meyer or those who follow him will say, “Sorry, you can’t count that because it took a mind to create the conditions and it took a mind to mix them together in a test tube.” And with that we’ll have a new stipulation which most likely was in some manner implied in Signature in the Cell to begin with.⁴

The interesting thing about this is that Steve Meyer and I are probably really in almost the same exact position when it comes to our core beliefs. Obviously as fellow Christians, we both believe that there is a Mind behind the process. We both think that the history of life with its constant increase in complex specified information is a product of the activity of God. We both stand amazed at the majesty of creation and our love for the Creator who is personally involved not only in our own individual lives but those of our families and faith communities as well. We differ primarily in one regard. Steve thinks he has shown through scientific analysis that this Mind we both believe in must have been present and supernaturally active in the creation of information. I think the Mind (God) was present, but I can’t put the existence of God into a scientific experiment to demonstrate God's activity. Furthermore, unlike Steve, I have no pre-conceived ideas about whether God's,supernatural activity was necessary for creation of information. God, as I see it, may have chosen to create information bearing molecules indirectly through God’s natural activity in a manner that is analogous to the development of a baby or the growth of a tree from a seed.

In the end, our difference is simple, he thinks that the test tubes won’t ever deliver information rich molecules and I think it is too early to say. He has declared the matter more or less settled on the basis of scientific analysis. I consider the matter fully unsettled. But the most important thing of all has been settled and on this we both agree. This Mind we speak of is God’s Mind--God's Holy Spirit. That Spirit not only fills all of creation, but more specifically that Spirit fills us with his Presence and envelopes us in his love. This is cause for celebration and, with "sandals off," we each bow our heads in humble worship. Truly, we--all of us--are standing on holy ground.

Notes

1. Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith 62:276
2. Note to Steve: Does not the human brain count within Exception #2? After all, it arose in the history of life and its development depends upon DNA. If so, you might need an exception to the exception.
3. The term “positive” is used 21 times in the book. It is clearly important to the author that the evidence for intelligence associated with the origin of DNA be viewed not as absence of contrary evidence, but rather a piece of convincingly positive evidence that hinges upon the fact that CSI in general, can’t be built without a mind.
4. I’m really not trying to be facetious here. I really do think that’s what would happen. I can almost draft the stipulation now.