A few months ago, I provided an overview of Polkinghorne’s views on natural theology. However, perhaps the best place to get acquainted with his position is to read the title chapter from his book, Belief in God in an Age of Science. First delivered as the Terry Lectures at Yale University in October 1996, this eloquent little book contains five chapters and a short epilogue. Readers are invited to explore the rest of the book on their own. I especially recommend the highly original second chapter (“Finding Truth: Science and Religion Compared”), in which he compares the ways in which physicists struggled to understand the dual nature of light (as a wave or a particle) in the early twentieth century with the ways in which early Christian thinkers struggled to understand the dual nature of Jesus (as divine and human). Unfortunately we won’t be presenting additional chapters here, but neither the print nor the electronic version of the book is very expensive!

In the fourth sentence below, Polkinghorne defines “belief in God” in terms of the proposition “that there is a Mind and a Purpose behind the history of the universe.”  This excerpt presents some evidence for a divine mind behind the visible world revealed to us by science, while the next (coming in about two weeks) discusses some evidence for divine purpose.

My editorial policy for these excerpts is explained at the bottom of this post.

Belief in God in an Age of Science (part 1)

What does it mean to believe in God today? Different religious communities propose different answers to that fundamental question. I speak from within the Christian tradition, though much of what I say in this chapter would, I believe, find endorsement from my Jewish and Islamic friends. For me, the fundamental content of belief in God is that there is a Mind and a Purpose behind the history of the universe and that the One whose veiled presence is intimated in this way is worthy of worship and the ground of hope. In this chapter, I sketch some of the considerations that persuade me that this is the case.

The world is not full of items stamped “made by God”—the Creator is more subtle than that—but there are two locations where general hints of the divine presence might be expected to be seen most clearly. One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year history of evolving development following the big bang. The other is the “thinking reed” of humanity, so insignificant in physical scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself. The universe and the means by which that universe has become marvelously self-aware—these are the centers of our enquiry.

Paul Dirac (source)

Those who work in fundamental physics encounter a world whose large-scale structure (as described by cosmology) and small-scale process (as described by quantum theory) are alike characterized by a wonderful order that is expressible in concise and elegant mathematical terms. The distinguished theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, who was not a conventionally religious man, was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations. [Remember that Polkinghorne was a student in Dirac’s lectures on quantum physics; see here.] It was a fitting affirmation by one whose fundamental discoveries had all come from his dedicated pursuit of mathematical beauty. This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty.

Attempts have been made to explain away this fact. No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have molded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded by pressures for survival. Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life. Remember that Sherlock Holmes told a shocked Dr. Watson that he didn't care whether the Earth went round the Sun or vice versa, for it had no relevance to the pursuits of his daily life!

Even less plausible, in my view, is the claim sometimes advanced that human beings happen to like mathematical reasoning and so they manipulate their account of physical process into pleasing mathematical shapes. [Polkinghorne cites Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks, p. 413] Nature is not so plastic as to be subject to our whim in this way. In 1907, Einstein had what he called “the happiest thought of my life,” when he recognized the principle of equivalence, which implied that all entities would move in the same way in a gravitational field. This universality of effect meant that gravity could be expressed as a property of space-time itself; physics could be turned into geometry. Einstein then embarked on a search for a beautiful equation that would determine the relevant geometrical structure. It took him eight years to find it, culminating in the discovery of the theory of general relativity in November 1915. It was a truly beautiful theory but now came the moment of truth. On 18th November, Einstein calculated the prediction made by his theory for the motion of the planet Mercury. He found that it precisely explained a discrepancy in relation to Newton’s theory that had baffled astronomers for more than sixty years. Einstein’s biographer, Abram Pais, says “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him.” Whilst the great man himself said, “For a few days, I was beside myself with joyous excitement.” [Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, p. 253]. It was a great triumph but, if the answer had not come out right, the aesthetic power of the equations of general relativity would have been quite unable in itself to save them from abandonment. It was indeed nature that had spoken.

There is no a priori reason why beautiful equations should prove to be the clue to understanding nature; why fundamental physics should be possible; why our minds should have such ready access to the deep structure of the universe. It is a contingent fact that this is true of us and of our world, but it does not seem sufficient simply to regard it as a happy accident. Surely it is a significant insight into the nature of reality. I believe that Dirac and Einstein, in making their great discoveries, were participating in an encounter with the divine.

Old French Bible moralisée (c. 1208-15), Codex Vindobonensis 2554,
fol. lv, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (source)

It has become common coinage with contemporary writers about science to invoke, in addressing the general public, the idea of a reading of the Mind of God. [Polkinghorne cites Paul Davies, The Mind of God and Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.] It is a small, but significant, sign of the human longing for God that apparently this language helps to sell books. There is much more to the Mind of God than physics will ever disclose, but this usage is not misleading, for I believe that the rational beauty of the cosmos indeed reflects the Mind that holds it in being. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in uncovering the structure of the physical world (to use Eugene Wigner’s pregnant phrase) is a hint of the presence of the Creator, given to us creatures who are made in the divine image. I do not present this conclusion as a logical demonstration—we are in a realm of metaphysical discourse where such certainty is not available either to believer or to unbeliever—but I do present it as a coherent and intellectually satisfying understanding.

Looking Ahead

We continue with the excerpt on purpose in about two weeks.

References and Credits

Excerpts from John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998), copyright Yale University Press, are reproduced by permission of Yale University Press. We gratefully acknowledge their cooperation in bringing this material to our readers.

Editorial Policy

Most of the editing for these excerpts involves breaking longer paragraphs into multiple parts, altering the spelling and punctuation from British to American, removing the odd sentence or two—which I indicate by putting [SNIP] at the appropriate point(s)—and sometimes inserting annotations where warranted [also enclosed in square brackets] to provide background information. Polkinghorne uses footnotes a bit sparingly, and I usually find another way to include that information if it’s important for our readers.

Many things we have learned contradicts much of what we previously thought about the mind.  For example, it is quite common and sensible to believe that we come into the world with minds that are essentially “blank slates,” and that what we know is written on those slates by experience alone.  But that view appears to be wrong.

The human mind consists of a variety of distinct and interacting mental tools, each of which comes pre-loaded with some quite specific content and some processing algorithms.  For example, it is now clearly demonstrated that human beings are naturally endowed with what we might reasonably describe as innate beliefs and innate cognitive processors.

On the belief side, developmental psychologists have identified numerous domains of understanding that are native to us, such as folk physics, folk biology, folk psychology, agency detection tendencies, and so on. What these discoveries seem to show is that our minds are pre-disposed to come to think about the world in very specific ways—ways that are determined by the kinds of minds we have.

So it looks like from birth, or rather through a regular and maturationally natural process, we have dispositions for form beliefs in the following domains.

“Folks Physics”:

• Objects move on inertial paths
• Objects cannot move through other objects
• Objects must move through space
• Objects must be supported

“Folk Psychology”:

• Agents act to satisfy desires
• Agents have beliefs

“Folk Biology”:

• Animals bear young similar to themselves
• Living things need nutrients

In addition to these innate dispositions toward certain kinds of beliefs, we also seem to have cognitive mechanisms that dispose us to crunch sensory inputs in specific ways. We might call these “innate cognitive processors.” Examples of these would include things like contagion avoidance and agency detection.

Contagion avoidance is a natural aversion human beings share to things like dead bodies, animal waste and vomit, rotting food, etc. These things “gross us out” from a very early age.  Indeed, the aversions we have towards them pre-date any data we might come to possess that would lead us to judge them dangerous.  We are also repelled by them in ways that are independent of other aversive stimuli like smell (that is, you can’t explain this aversion by noting that people are scared off because of an unpleasant odor since studies show that the aversions are independent of that).

A second processor is our Agency Detection Device. Here, psychologists have identified a cognitive processor that seems to pre-dispose us to form beliefs in the reality and presence of (sometimes invisible!) agents under certain conditions. In these cases, when we look for the cause of certain events, motions, sounds, or structures, we are disposed to think that it was caused by a someone rather than by a something. Our ADD appears to be hypersensitive.  It is very good at detecting agency, and in fact is more likely to generate false positives than false negatives.  This is often referred to as our hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD), and may be reflected in manifold attributions of ghosts, fairies, forest spirits, and even personalities of machines!

In sum, psychologists have shown that our initial presumption about the contents of our mind was wrong. Our minds are not blank slates, but processing devices that come endowed with a complex operating system.

Many are quick to point out that this should not be surprising.  When we look across times and cultures and find very similar beliefs concerning the nature of physical, biological, and psychological reality, those similarities cry out for some explanation. Since these diverse individuals have a very wide range of experience, something other than, or in addition to, common experience would seem to account for the similarities of belief. And so it is natural to conclude that there is some fundamental similarity among human minds that explains it. And recent empirical evidence has in fact confirmed this conclusion.

One type of belief that is pervasive across times and cultures is religious belief.  One is thus led to wonder whether those sorts of beliefs are among those that we are naturally disposed to believe.  One New Zealand religion scholar, Joseph Bulbulia, argues that the emerging consensus is yes: “The view of mind expressed by Descartes as composed of innate understandings given in advance of any experience has been thoroughly vindicated after sixty years of cognitive psychology. It may be that Descartes will be shown correct on another score, namely that knowledge of the Divinity is imprinted on every mind [as well]”

Bulbulia’s remark invites us to entertain three key questions:

• Is there any evidence that we are naturally disposed to religion?
• How do we explain the origin of these dispositions?
• What are the implications of such explanations for belief itself?

These will be explored in the next post.

That said, I genuinely empathize with those who are reluctant to abandon traditional theological concepts for newer, still- developing ones. Given spiritual leaders’ biblical mandate to protect their families and congregations against error, a responsibility for which God will hold them strictly accountable (James 3:1), I respect their refusal to expose their flock to ideologies they regard as conflicting with the Word of God.

I further understand pastors and theologians’ resistance to tethering theology—which is meant to provide a solid epistemological foundation—too closely to that intrinsically dynamic endeavor called science. All humans need ideological stability, perhaps especially so with respect to spiritual matters. Recognizing this, pastors rightly ask why they should abandon or substantially revise an internally-consistent systematic theology that has served the church with relative stability for many hundreds of years. Science, on the other hand, is a realm for adventurers, groundbreakers, and ideological athletes intent on not just polishing or expanding today’s body of knowledge, but shattering it when necessary. Resounding with the jousts and clashes of competing ideas and arguments, and the stunning reversals of ideas once widely held, science often appears to be a messy–even tumultuous–business. Spiritual shepherds are insistent that the epistemological dynamism that necessarily characterizes science never become the mainstay of the Christian experience, which must be fundamentally stable and dependable. They see wisdom in maintaining a safe distance between the Church and the choppy waters of science.

The question, then, is whether the waters of scientific thought, particularly with respect to the age of the earth and evolution, have sufficiently smoothed out to warrant conservative thinkers’ taking a deeper look. Of course, the catch-22 here is that this can’t be answered without actually embarking upon an expedition of exploration and investigation, much as I recently did. Once undertaken, however, the conservative explorer will likely be confronted by a formidable problem:

As I can personally attest, navigating the crowded forum of wildly-differing ideas as to how to resolve the faith-science divide can be terribly daunting. Making this especially disconcerting for the conservative is the sobering reality that amidst the chorus of conflicting theories, one finds very little substantive published input from respected conservative theologians. As a result, the conservative seeker is sure to find herself awash in an ocean of seemingly novel theological “solutions” that are fundamentally antithetical to her evangelical sensibilities. This is likely to result in the impression that there is in fact no way to reconcile the findings of modern science with the key doctrines of orthodox Christianity, and hence the termination of the endeavor. Not only was this dynamic a constant challenge to me, but has proved a stumbling block to many would-be seekers that I personally know.

Whence then change? I believe the breakthrough will begin with a particular subgroup of conservative evangelical pastors, elders, and theologians. I know firsthand that there are many who, truth be told, have not been entirely at peace with their fellow conservatives’ summary rejection of—and apologias against—the findings of mainstream science. They have a gnawing sense that devastation looms for the Church and her children unless detachment yields to engagement, and rhetoric to substance. These have likely admitted to themselves that despite stridently asserting anti-evolution/old-earth views, they actually don’t understand these views in depth (nearly every conservative pastor and elder I’ve spoken with has conceded this). To date, these shepherds and thinkers have remained silent about their misgivings, reluctant to be perceived by their congregations and peers as betraying true Christianity. Given the astonishing fruitfulness of modern science and the comparative barrenness of young-earth creationism, I believe these evangelical leaders may now finally regard themselves as justified in stepping forward and publicly questioning whether the latter is in fact the view that a truth-revealing God would have His people believe.

Indeed, if I may, I would exhort these, my fellow conservative evangelical shepherds and thinkers, to set aside all reticence and fear, emerge from anonymity, and storm the forum of discourse, engaging this most pressing matter with vigor, equanimity, and humility. In doing so, know upfront that there will be few handrails to guide; you will not be building upon an extensive precedence of published conservative thought. Rather, you will be pioneers, with the open prairie of contemplation and consideration before you and the Word of God as a faithful, orienting star. The journey will be at times confounding, often scary, and never without challenge. Yet only through such robust, self-critical analysis will you find yourself in a posture where God can correct and refine all that He would, and only after which will you be able to pass on to your flocks a cogent, truly harmonious portrait of our Lord and His Creation that finds rich consistency between His written and natural revelations. I firmly believe that the fuller, more deeply informed portrait of the Lord and His universe that emerges from this investigation will fill your congregations with an unprecedented new sense of awe at our beloved God as Creator, and profoundly enhance their worship of Him. This has certainly been the result of my own journey.

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.

1. We are a world that longs for goodness and beauty, whether we are believers or not.

2. The data from emerging neuroscience and attachment research points us to a world of goodness and beauty.

3. This same data reflects and energizes the biblical narrative. Creation itself points us to the very story God is telling.

4. One of the most integral processes—that helps us get to truth and beauty—involves the changing (and renewal) of our minds. The renewal of our minds is a subset of the renewal of everything. God is on a mission of complete renewal, albeit on his timetable.

In this mission for renewal, one of the most important aspects is the interpersonal experience of being known. We change primarily not by what we know, but by how we are known. We live in a culture that is really good at knowing things, but not so good at being known.

5. Our first reaction is likely to be, “How will knowing this stuff change me?” But the biblical narrative is not just about us as individuals, it is about a world of mercy and justice. In order for us to have mercy and justice, we don’t do it primarily as individuals, we do it as institutions. God’s renewal is not just about changing us, it is about changing everything.

See part 2 for the second half of Dr. Thompson's presentation

Genesis is one of my favorite books of the Bible. I read through it probably once every few months and repeatedly grind my Hebrew language skills on its opening chapters. Unlike Leviticus (at least in the opinion of most people I know), the Genesis narrative is exciting and adventurous. Some of our favorite stories come out of the book: Noah and the Ark, The Tower of Babel, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, and so on.

But no story is perhaps as infamous and well known as the creation account (or accounts) as presented in Genesis 1-2. Almost every Christian or Jew, even those less than devout, know the opening words to the tale: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We know that God created the earth in six days. We know Eve was taken from Adam's rib for a companion. We know that God called the general creation “good”, the special creation of man “very good” and, at the very end of it all, took a day of rest (which I'm sure most of us would call “very good.”)

Of course, we know all of this. Yet we challenge it (and are challenged by it), continually, when we consider the variety of interpretations of how this story intersects the world as described by science. With Genesis, are we dealing with a literal scientific account, where “day” means 24-hours; are we dealing with metaphorical “days” in which epochs or periods of time or even processes are being described; or are we readers of a creation mythology from the Ancient Near East that doesn’t have anything directly to do with material origins? Interpretations go on and on, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying the creation debate knows. By and large, however, we can probably categorize Genesis interpreters into three camps: the Young Earth Creationists, the Old Earth Creationists, and the Theistic Evolutionists.

Now, I have the unique benefit of falling into all of these individual camps at one point or another in my life, sometimes even mixing them up. I have made a strong transition from being a die-hard Young Earth Creationist to being convinced that the evolutionary story is, in fact, the more substantiated and evidenced position. I say this with no pride, since my own transition involved many agonizing questions, a whole lot of reading, and a significant internal spiritual battle: what I believed about when and how the earth was created would not only change the way I read Scripture, it would also change certain aspects of how I viewed the Creator.

While I've certainly learned a lot of information on my journey, it was not an accumulation of facts that has kept me following Christ through all the ups and downs, but Jesus himself, and the knowledge that truth is not something which the Christian should find spiritually threatening. Nevertheless, those same ups and downs—and my internalization of each of these views on creation in turn—has provided me with one simple realization about the debate over scripture and evolution: most of us are not so committed to finding the truth about Genesis and creation as we are to sustaining and maintaining our own interpretive boundaries and the boundaries of the communities which influence us. In other words, the debate is often not so much over Genesis—or even over whether we can all follow the same God when we believe different things about how he created—it's over our own ability to be right. I know this because admitting that I was wrong was the most difficult part of my own transition.

Interpretive communities

While I am pretty convinced of the truth of an evolutionary portrait of reality and an ANE reading of Genesis similar to that espoused by scholars like Peter Enns or Bruce Waltke, I can still make this claim about interpretive communities because my intention is not to dissuade others from debating the issues involved, but to ask that we simply recognize our own limits and check them as often as possible. This is part of following Jesus, is it not? Unfortunately, vigorous debate often deteriorates quickly into screaming matches where proponents of one position or another simply are talking heads, speaking past each other and forgetting our fellowship in Christ. We play into the same interpretive competition that the Pharisee and Sadducee scribes were well known for, each claiming to have a proper interpretation of the Scriptures, but all the while forgetting that interpretive arguments matter exceptionally little if a genuine search for God is not at the forefront. This is certainly not to insist that the discussions cease, but rather, to insist that these discussions can only be propelled forward if individuals—of whatever stripe—step outside of their own interpretive boundaries and communities and humbly present themselves before God, seeking His truth alone. It is to insist that “system maintenance” must die along with the self, because only then can we allow Scripture to interpret itself. Unfortunately (and this is an issue that goes way beyond the Genesis text), too many of us are more committed to a specific model than we are committed to seeking God’s truth, whatever inconvenience to us that truth proves to be.

In 2006, for instance, I heard a popular and well-trained Young Earth paleontologist make the following statement: “If all the evidence turns against young earth creationism, I will still believe it because that's what the Bible says.” I followed up with him in a conversation a year later over lunch and quickly realized that I did not misunderstand his statement. For him, the parameters of his convictions were set in concrete and the truth of the overarching story of Christianity rested on these parameters not being crossed. In his view, the Bible absolutely and fundamentally teaches a universe which came into existence 6,000-10,000 years ago; to deny that is to deny Scripture, and if evidence turned up to the contrary one must not alter those parameters but, instead, search (perhaps in vain) for counter-evidence or be willing to live in blind faith. For this paleontologist, confident Christianity hinged on the stability of those borders of interpretation. Transition wasn't allowed.

But I have heard and read statements coming out of the two other camps of thought that share this kind of certainty over interpretation, too. There is a sense of doing injustice to scripture, thereby doing an injustice to Christianity, and, thereby again, doing an injustice to God if one strays from the preferred reading. One Old Earth Creationist remarked in a popular book that an interpretation of Genesis that allows for evolution is a “contradiction in terms” and it's an unfortunate thing to “blame God for it.” Genesis, in the mind of this thinker, specifically precludes any interpretation which leads to the sort of story evolution tells. To think otherwise is to “blame” God for something which he intentionally tells us is otherwise against his nature.

I have equally heard some theistic evolutionists deride—in a very spiritually shallow and personally offensive way—those who do not accept an evolutionary viewpoint. As one who went through an interpretive evolution on biological evolution, I can say confidently that I believe my own transition would have been much easier both intellectually and spiritually if not for feeling as if certain theistic evolutionists accused me of intentionally lying or being mentally ignorant. It seems that all three camps are at least sometimes plagued by the issue of pride—especially in the cases of a few strong advocates. But pride is nothing less than the cement by which interpretive barriers are built, helping them become unmovable walls that protect the interpretive communities within.¹

On the other hand, one of the great benefits of the fall of positivism (or verificationism) and the rise of postmodernism was the realization that total objectivity among individuals is a false conception. And, since individuals make up communities, neither are camps of thought above error and immune from being wrong. Yet way too many Christians continue to approach Genesis as if we can interpret it on its own terms, completely and totally, without reference to our own location in history and culture. We're still functionally positivists. But it is an illusion that we’re above the interpretive fray, and we must realize time and again that we are subjective individuals, affected by a number of factors and people. We are deeply influenced by those that speak into us, those that we trust, and those that we find credible. As W. Randolph Tate writes,

Interpretations...must be consistent with the established interpretive framework of the interpretive community. The worldview of the interpretive community sets the parameters within which interpretations are accepted or rejected.²

The Bible takes a slightly different angle and puts it this way: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, we are not objective data-interpreting individuals but fallen men and women, even as followers of Jesus.

So it’s when groups of folks line up on either side of an issue and make their positions part of their identity that the debate over interpreting Genesis reaches a near stalemate. It's communities against communities, PhDs against PhDs, experts against experts, and—perhaps more internally—interpretive parameters against interpretive parameters. The truth is that as long as we are first and foremost committed to maintaining the community in which we are involved, there will be very little chance of us getting at the real issues and the best conclusions, much less giving an adequate witness to our God, both Creator and Redeemer.

New eyes, fresh air

I mentioned earlier that I spent time in all three major camps of thought on this issue. I was a hard-lined Young Earth Creationist, debating on forums and writing creationist papers in college. I argued for the existence of modern-day dinosaurs, major flood geology, and so on. I was convinced I was right, that defending the truth meant digging my heels deeper into the sand. But two questions plagued my thoughts: first, I asked whether Christianity fell to pieces if I was wrong. Second, I asked whether I was committed to Christ or, rather, to myself and my interpretations. With that as my first major paradigm shift, I eventually came to accept an Old Earth view. I sat comfortably within the Old Earth view for several years, but the Lord was still at work in me, and, once again, brought those two questions to my mind. Back to the books I went, back to the Bible I went, and back to prayer I went.

Through months of extremely difficult and heart-rending transition, I found myself considering a particular reading of Genesis that I would have regarded as unacceptable as a YEC. But then I was confronted with this even more important point about Christianity: often God finds what is unacceptable to us very acceptable to Him! That included me, personally, and I felt the warmth of God’s grace flow over me. In the wake of that change of heart, people accused me of rejecting my background, my Christian education, and my interpretive communities. And, yet—whether I was right or wrong—I knew God accepted my path towards this new reading of Creation as a genuine search for Him. My spiritual struggle—contrary to what I thought while it was happening—was not a struggle to reject bad data and exegesis, it was a struggle to reject myself.

While the “facts” were important, that spiritual struggle was even more so for me. What was God showing me in the midst of it all? Was thinking differently about the creation making me appreciate the Creator less, or more? Did reading Genesis differently mean only that I had been wrong, or that it was somehow less true? What did any of this have to do with my sense of calling to love and serve God and my fellow men? In a way, I’m still figuring this out. But I can absolutely testify that the struggle transformed every single one of these questions. Indeed, for the first time, I believe I saw God as much this-worldly as other-worldly. I saw nature as intimately intertwined with itself, still being woven together by God’s hand. I saw Scripture as a beautiful expression of God’s desire that man should participate in creation. I saw that my fellow men and my fellow Christians were all on a journey, much the way I was. And I saw myself as a flawed, stubborn, and prideful man, yet forgiven for the times I’ve pitted myself and my presuppositions about Scripture against God, its author.

As settled as I am now, I have not forgotten that the common ribbon which ties together all of these transitions is my commitment to keep asking questions within my own circle, too—realizing that God still has much to teach all of us. I have learned the continuing importance of stepping outside of my camp and making sure I haven’t become merely a product of or a willing prisoner to thinking a certain way, unwilling to consider that it and I might be incorrect. I came to realize that everyone (including myself, of course) has stories and life experiences that become the framework in which they read Genesis 1-2. And if I stopped pretending that I, myself, could be perfectly objective, then I also had to stop pretending that those in the community that I trusted were necessarily objective, themselves.

Ultimately, I had to be willing to be wrong and to see that my friends might be wrong, too. That’s not something that any of us are “naturally” very good at, but it is possible when we realize that the world does not depend on us being right, but upon Jesus being right. For me, seeking truth rather than presupposition requires that we all be able to approach the communities that have influenced us deeply, and ask not just “what” they say but “why” they say it. We all have to guard our hearts even more than our heads. Frequently reminding myself to walk back to the edge of my own camp—to follow Jesus’ example and withdraw to a solitary place—has shown me that there is room to breathe outside our familiar interpretive parameters. At certain times, I have found it to be the most refreshing air I've ever tasted.

Notes

1. Though, admittedly, the theistic evolutionists tend to have a greater sense of leeway when it comes to how the claims of Genesis 1-2 affect Christianity as a whole. It would be an odd thing to say that to not interpret Genesis 1-2 as an evolutionary metaphor is to reject Christianity. As far as I know, most Christian evolutionists are very much willing to acknowledge that Young and Old Earth Creationists are still within appropriate spiritual bounds, even if not scientific ones. It seems to me that if individual theistic evolutionists choose an issue about which to be rigid, it’s the Fall and the existence of Adam.
2. Tate, W. Randolpy. Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008, p 222.

Let me be clear. I do not reject dualism on account of any kind of philosophical or other kind of argument. In fact, I find many arguments against dualism—philosophical and otherwise—to be pretty weak specimens. I’m what a friend calls an antecedent materialist. In other words, I come to the discussion assuming I am a physical object, since that is what I have always seemed to myself to be for as long as I can remember. A non-physical soul doesn’t explain anything about consciousness that cannot be explained without it, and it is furthermore a wholly unnecessary hypothesis for many religious doctrines, despite intuitions to the contrary by many religious believers. For example, belief in an afterlife, belief in the peculiarly Christian idea of the incarnation of Christ, as well as the belief that we human beings bear the image of God—none requires belief in a non-physical soul in order to be made sense of. So until I am confronted with some knock-down, drag-out argument to the contrary, or until I am presented with some phenomena that cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms or, yet again, until I have something resembling a conversion experience that forces me to renounce my physicalism, I'm sticking with it.

To go a bit further, let’s consider several theological doctrines that seem to cut against a physicalist conception of human personhood. These constitute perhaps the three most common objections Christian physicalists receive to their physicalism. After I address these objections, I will say a little more about the content of my own physicalist conception of human persons, The Constitution View. Perhaps in a future post I can say a little bit about the science of consciousness itself and address some of the most common objections to physicalism based on that mysterious phenomenon.

Theological Objections to Physicalism about Humans

The Incarnation of Christ

The doctrine of the incarnation of Christ is a central tenet of Christianity, and it may seem that the doctrine is inconsistent with a physicalist conception of human personhood. Yet I believe a physicalist view of human persons—like my own—actually makes better sense of the incarnation than does dualism. Let me explain.

The putative problem for the physicalist is this: if God (or the second person of the Trinity in particular) is essentially a non-physical being, then how could such a being become purely physical without losing an essential property? And if the second person of the Trinity loses an essential property, then wouldn’t he not simply cease to be fully God but simply cease to exist? (An essential property is a property a thing has and can’t lack without ceasing to exist. For example, my dog has the property of being a canine. He can’t lose that property without ceasing to exist—he is essentially a canine.)

Well, according to the Chalcedonian formulation, the incarnate Christ is one Person with two natures, a fully divine nature (that of the Second Person of the Trinity) and a fully human nature (that of Jesus from Nazareth). The Constitution View I hold divides things just where one would expect—between the human nature and the divine nature of the single person. And keep in mind, by the way, that the person of Christ is not human; he is divine, being the second person of the Trinity. But this one person, in the incarnation, had two natures--human and divine. In this understanding of the dual natures, Christ is wholly non-physical in his divine nature and wholly physical in his human nature. Now consider the somewhat-awkward cleavage Substance Dualists must offer. According to Substance Dualism, Christ is wholly non-physical in his divine nature and partly physical and partly non-physical in his human nature. Not especially elegant. To my mind, far from being unable to accommodate the doctrine of the incarnation, my physicalist view of human persons is actually better able to explain the doctrine than is dualism.

Notice that if what I said above is true, the way this objection is often put contains an important mistake in assuming that the second person of the Trinity ceased to be something he was apart from the incarnation. Indeed, the second person of the Trinity did not become purely physical (or even partly physical!). The second person of the Trinity did not give up non-physicality in the incarnation. Remember: one person (Divine and non-physical) with not one but (in the incarnation) two natures—one non-physical, the other physical. How can that be? I don’t have the slightest idea; but, the mystery of the incarnation is not explained away by any account, be it dualist or physicalist.

The Imago Dei

Now, what of the imago Dei or image of God? If it’s true that we human persons are wholly physical beings—as any version of physicalism must claim—then what does it now mean to say that we have been created in God’s image? Doesn’t having been created in the image of God just mean having a non-physical soul and the features of intellect, will and emotion that characterize soul? I do not believe that our having been created in the image of God means that we are non-physical as God is non-physical. What then does it mean?

Well, there are many ways of understanding the claim that we human beings image God. One might mean that we image God when we care for Creation and contribute to the terrestrial flourishing of the Created order. This, after all, is what the Bible means when it speaks of our having been given “dominion”. We are God’s vice-regents, as it were. To have dominion is to care for others, including non-human “others” like oceans and streams, octopus and salamander; in other words to have dominion is tend to the well being of all the earth. Second, one might mean that we image God when we live in loving relation to other human beings and invest ourselves in their flourishing and well being. For we are essentially persons-in-relation. Since God is a Trinity, it is not surprising that we should image God in virtue of our essentially social nature. The tenor of the relation between the three persons of the trinity is one of a harmonious and free exchange of love and joy. So engaging in acts of mercy, hospitality, love, kindness, etc. is to act like God. In fact, we image God when we image Jesus, who welcomed the outcast, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, hated evil and delighted in doing the work of the Father. Finally, one might claim that we image God in our suffering. God is love. To love is to open oneself up to suffering. And suffering love is God-love.

Now of course none of these ways that I have mentioned that we image God rules out the possibility that we are wholly or partly non-physical beings; but it doesn’t imply it either. The fact that we have been created in the image of God is perfectly compatible with the claim that we are wholly physical beings. Indeed, there is nothing in the doctrine of the imago Dei, rightly understood, that entails a dualist view of human nature.

But even if neither the doctrine of the incarnation nor the doctrine of humanity as reflecting the imago Dei require that we be at least partially non-physical beings, what about the issue of life after death? I’ll address that third challenge to a Christian physicalism tomorrow.

Yet it doesn’t follow that we are mere animals, and our rationality is what sets us apart from the rest of the genus. Indeed, for Aristotle, and for Aquinas after him, rationality is unlike our other capacities in having an essentially immaterial and non-bodily aspect. The reason has to do with our capacity to form abstract concepts, which underlies all our other distinctively rational activities. It is because you can grasp what it is to be a man -- not just this particular man or that one, but any possible man, man as a universal -- that you can go on to form judgments like the judgment that all men are mortal, can reason from that judgment together with the judgment that Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal, and so forth.

There are several arguments that establish that this capacity for abstract thought cannot in principle be reduced to or otherwise entirely explained in terms of brain activity, even if brain activity is part of the story. The arguments have their roots in Plato and Aristotle and have been defended in recent years by Aristotelian philosophers like Mortimer Adler, John Haldane, David Oderberg, and James Ross.¹ Answering the various objections to (and misunderstandings of) these arguments takes some work, but the basic idea can be set out fairly simply.²

Let us take as an example the thought that triangles have three sides. For that thought (or any other) plausibly to be material, it would have to be identifiable with something like a symbol or set of symbols encoded in the brain -- something analogous to the symbols encoded in the electronic circuitry of a computer. But there is no way a thought could be entirely reducible to that sort of thing. For no material symbol could possibly have the determinate or unambiguous content that at least many of our concepts have; and no material symbol could possibly have the universal reference that our concepts have.

Consider the most unambiguous symbol of triangularity there could be -- a picture of a triangle, such as the one to the right. Now, does this picture represent triangles in general? Or only isosceles triangles? Or only small isosceles triangles drawn in black ink? Or does it really even represent triangles in the first place? Why not take it instead to represent a dinner bell, or an arrowhead? There is nothing in the picture itself that can possibly tell you. Nor would any other picture be any better. Any picture would be susceptible of various interpretations, and so too would anything you might add to the picture in order to explain what the original picture was supposed to represent. In particular, there is nothing in the picture in question or in any other picture that entails any determinate, unambiguous content. And even in the best case there is nothing that could make it a representation of triangles in general as opposed to a representation merely of small, black, isosceles triangles specifically. For the picture, like all pictures, has certain particularizing features -- a specific size and location, black lines as opposed to blue or green ones, an isosceles as opposed to scalene or equilateral shape -- that other things do not have.

Now what is true of this “best case” sort of symbol is even more true of linguistic symbols. There is nothing in the word “triangle” that determines that it refers to all triangles or to any triangles at all. Its meaning is entirely conventional; that that particular set of shapes (or the sounds we associate with them) have the significance they do is an accident of the history of the English language. But something similar could be said of any material symbols whatever. Even if we regarded them as somehow having a built-in meaning or content, they would not have the universality or determinate content of our concepts, any more than the physical marks making up the word “triangle” or a picture of a triangle do. But then the having of a concept cannot merely be a matter of having a certain material symbol encoded in the brain, even if that is part of what it involves. Nor can it merely be a matter of having a set of material symbols, or a set of material symbols together with certain causal relations to objects and events in the world beyond the brain. For just as with any picture or set of pictures, any set of material elements will be susceptible in principle of alternative interpretations; while at least in many case, our thoughts are not indeterminate in this way.

We might understand the point by analogy with sentences. If you are going to use the English sentence “Snow is white,” you are typically going to have to express it via some material medium -- ink marks, pixels, sound waves, or what have you. All the same, the meaning of that sentence cannot be accounted for in terms of any of the physical properties of those media. There is nothing in the shapes of the letters that make up the words of the sentence, or the chemistry of the ink in which they are written, or the physics of the compression waves in the air that you generate when uttering them, that makes them refer to snow or to whiteness or indeed to anything at all. A sentence is a seamless unity of the material and the immaterial, and it is created by another seamless unity of the material and immaterial -- a human being.

At this point there will no doubt be those who object that positing ectoplasm or spook stuff is hardly a better explanation of thought than an appeal to brain activity is. And that is quite true. But then, I said nothing about ectoplasm or spook stuff in the first place. When a mathematician points out that it is just muddleheaded to speak of the square root of 25 as if it were a kind of physical object, it would be silly to accuse him of believing that the square root of 25 is made out of ectoplasm or spook stuff. If your picture of reality cannot accommodate numbers alongside physical objects, that is your problem, not his. Mathematics simply provides a powerful example of a body of truths that cannot be captured in the language of physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and the like.

Similarly, to point out that whatever a thought is, it cannot in principle be reduced to the physical properties of brain activity, is simply to provide another example of an aspect of reality that cannot be entirely captured in such language. Only if we assume that all of reality must be so captured will this sound odd, but that we should not assume this is, of course, precisely the point. And if we do assume it, we are doing so in the face of the evidence, and not on the basis of the evidence. For it is precisely what we know about thought from our everyday familiarity with it -- such as the fact that it sometimes has a determinate content, and a universal reference -- that tells us that it cannot be entirely material, just as it is what we know about numbers from our everyday familiarity with them that tells us that they cannot be physical objects.

But doesn’t neuroscience show that there is a tight correlation between our thoughts and brain activity? It does indeed. So what? If you smudge the ink you’ve used to write out a sentence or muffle the sounds you make when you speak it, it may be difficult or impossible for the reader or listener to grasp its meaning. It does not follow that the meaning is reducible to the physical or chemical properties of the sentence. Similarly, the fact that brain damage will seriously impair a person’s capacity for thought does not entail that his thoughts are entirely explicable in terms of brain activity.

Aristotle and Aquinas, though they regarded the human intellect as immaterial, would not have been surprised in the least by the findings of modern neuroscience. Indeed, they would have been surprised had neuroscience not turned up the correlations it has. This will sound surprising if you take Descartes as your paradigm of a philosopher who affirms the immateriality of the human mind. But defending Descartes is exactly the reverse of what I have been doing. For it was Descartes who substituted the real, concrete human being -- a seamless unity of the physical and the mental, the bodily and the immaterial -- with a bizarre patchwork of abstractions of his own devising. Materialists have followed him ever since. Materialism is just a riff on Cartesianism, not its opposite. Tomorrow, I’ll explain exactly what I mean.

Notes

1. See Mortimer Adler, Intellect: Mind Over Matter (New York: Collier Books, 1990); J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 96-109; David S. Oderberg, “Hylemorphic Dualism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2005); and James Ross, “Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992).
2. I provide an exposition and defense of such arguments in chapter 7 of my book Philosophy of Mind and chapter 4 of my book Aquinas. An especially detailed exposition and defense can be found in my article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” forthcoming in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.

What Is at Stake?

What does it mean to be human? In what ways, if any, is our essential humanity tied to body and soul, mind and brain? This is not the stuff of mere curiosity. A host of pressing issues are at stake:

• Is there anything about humans that our mechanical creations, our innovations in Artificial Intelligence, will be unable to duplicate?
• What view of the human person helps us to find what we want to know about ourselves theologically — about sin, for example, as well as moral responsibility, repentance, and growth in grace?
• Am I free to do what I want? Given what we have learned about brain functioning, how might we understand the “free” in “free will”?
• What portrait of the human person is capable of casting a canopy of sacred worth over human beings, so that we have what is necessary for discourse concerning morality and for ethical practices?
• If humans, like sheep, can be cloned, will the resulting life form be a “person”?
• How should we understand “salvation”? Does salvation entail a denial of the world and embodied life, focusing instead on my “inner person” and on the life to come?
• How ought the church to be extending itself in mission? Mission to what? The spiritual or soulish needs of persons? Society-at-large? The cosmos?
• What happens when we die? What view(s) of the human person is consistent with Christian belief in life-after-death?

For many, and not least for many Christians, what makes a human genuinely human is the identification of the human person with his or her soul. From the second century on, theologians debated the origin of the soul: Are souls created by God ex nihilo at the moment of their infusion into the body? Are body and soul formed together? Are souls preexistent? Indeed, in the late-second century it was clear to many, as the Letter to Diognetus puts it, that “the soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body” (1.27). Traditionally, systematic theology has discussed the uniqueness of humanity in two theological loci: human creation in the divine image and the human possession of a soul. Often these two are reduced to one, with the soul understood as the particular consequence of creation in God’s image.

For persons of faith — Christians included, but many others besides — the idea of a soul separable from the body is not only intuitive but necessary. We have regularly appealed to the soul as proof that humans are not mere animals, and so as a foundation for our views of the sacredness of human life. Moreover, Christians generally have derived from belief in the existence of the soul their affirmation of the human capacity to choose between good and ill. Further, the existence of a nonphysical soul, distinct and separable from the body, is typically regarded as the means by which human identity can cross over the bridge from this life to the next. Indeed, traditional Christian thought has tended to regard the body as frail and finite, the soul as immortal.

But it is the human possession of a “soul” that science now questions. When, as neurobiology and evolutionary psychology increasingly urge, the attributes and capacities traditionally allocated to the human soul are conditioned at point after point by biological processes, on what basis can belief in a soul be maintained? If science is generating “a radically new understanding of what it means to be human,”³ then those of us in the church must prepare ourselves for searching questions about the propriety of Scripture and traditional Christian thought in our talk about humanity, salvation, the end time, and more.

Before we engage too much in worried hand-wringing, however, we should ask whether our situation is so dire. Do these innovations in our understanding of personhood in fact call into question our deepest beliefs as Christians? Interdisciplinary study — with contributions from neuroscience, but also from biblical studies, theological studies, ethics, and philosophy (see “Further Reading,” below) — are demonstrating that emerging scientific portraits of the human person are neither as novel as we might imagine, nor as threatening to the essential tenets of Christian faith.

Biblical Contributions

In the context of current discussion on the nature of the human person, the Christian Scriptures have two primary contributions. First, taken as a whole, the biblical witness is fully congruent with a view of the person that affirms the human being as bio-psycho-spiritual unity. Neurobiological evidence and/or philosophical arguments favoring some form of monism are not at all hostile to the witness of Scripture. Second, we must recognize that the Old and New Testaments do not define the human person in essentialist but above all in relational terms. Put differently, the Bible’s witness to the nature of human life is at once naive and profound. It is naive not in the sense of gullibility or primitiveness, but because it has not worked out in what we may regard as a philosophically satisfying way the nature of embodied existence in life, death, and afterlife. It is profound in its presentation of the human person fundamentally in relational terms, and its assessment of the human being as genuinely human and alive only within the family of humans brought into being by Yahweh and in relation to the God who gives life-giving breath. This non-negotiable biblical insight is being recovered by some scientists today — e.g., by J. Polkinghorne and W.S. Brown, each of whom has urged that the notion of “soul” be recast in relational terms.⁴

We can press further. First, Scripture outlines a series of qualities of the human person that contrast sharply with the “modern self” derived from dualistic portraits. In his Sources of the Self, C. Taylor finds that, for modern folk, personal identity has come to be shaped by such assumptions as self-sufficiency, self-determination, and self-referentiality (“I am who I am”); that persons have an inner self, which is the authentic self; and that self-autonomy and self-legislation are basic to authentic personhood (Harvard University Press, 1989). Without majoring on the notion of a metaphysical entity of the “soul,” Taylor’s analysis nonetheless intimates how modern, personal identity has been cultivated in the garden of anthropological dualism.

In Scripture, however, we find such emphases as the following: the construction of the self as deeply embedded in social relationships and thus the importance of dependence/interdependence for human identity; a premium on the integrity of the community and thus the contribution of individuals to that integrity; the assumption that a person is one’s behavior; an emphasis on external authority — that is, the call to holiness is a call to a human vocation drawn from a vision of Yahweh’s “difference”; and the reality of dualism vis-à-vis good/evil, resident in and manifest both outside and inside a person. The line from a substance dualism that locates personal essence in the “soul” to this vision of personal identity is not easily drawn.

The point is that the construction of personal identity that pervades modernity is at odds with biblical anthropology at almost every turn, while the witness of Scripture and the findings of neuroscience are converging at significant points.

Second, negatively, we err when we imagine that it is the “soul” that distinguishes humanity from non-human creatures. Aristotle is closer to the biblical tradition in his view that the soul is that in virtue of which an organism is alive (On the Soul 2.1 §§412a-413a10). Given this conceptualization, there is no particular reason to limit the idea of “soul” to the human person. Within the Old Testament, “soul” (Hebrew: nepheš) refers to life and vitality — not life in general, but life as instantiated in human persons and animals. Nepheš is not a thing to have but a way to be. To speak of loving God with all of one’s “soul,” then, is to elevate the intensity of involvement of one’s whole being. Accordingly, the Common English Bible gets it right when it translates “the first and greatest commandment” in this way: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). Morever, in the creation accounts of Genesis 1-2, the Hebrew term used of human beings in 2:7, nepheš, is also used with reference to all sorts of wildlife, to everything “in which there is life (nepheš)” (1:30). This demonstrates incontrovertibly that “soul” (nepheš) is not, under this accounting, a unique characteristic of the human person. Accordingly, one might better translate Genesis 2:7 with reference to the divine gift of life: “the human being became a living person” — or, to quote again from the Common English Bible: “The human came to life.”

Third, thinking still of Genesis 2, it is instructive that the same texts that are silent on the infusion of a human soul into a dust-created body nevertheless distinguish by their use of the term nepheš between a being that has life and lifelessness. This speaks against any dualism that deprecates the body in favor of the soul and against any conceptualization of disembodied human existence in this life or the next. It also contravenes the widely held view that the quality of human life is vested in some thing or quality intrinsic to the individual person and that, in order to speak meaningfully of an afterlife, this “thing” must survive death. The soul does not distinguish human life as human or of particular value, but the graciousness of God does. Scripture situates the human family within the grand narrative of God’s doing; this narrative places a premium on human relatedness to God, humanity, and the cosmos because it is determined by God’s own character; and it is precisely within this narrative that the human creature draws both its value and its reason for being.

Hence, from a vantage point within the biblical narrative, avenues determined by autonomous individualism, interior psychic and/or mental processes, or the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells are mistaken, however well-worn they may have become. Although each of these accounts might appear to support a workable portrait of the human person and of human health, none of these carry us far in our concern to address our deepest human questions about what it means to be fully human.

What does it mean to be human? From a perspective within the biblical narrative, the way forward is marked by an account that rejects the necessity of a separate, metaphysical entity such as a soul to account for human capacities and distinctives; that underscores the material location of the human person in relation to the created order; that refuses to reduce personal identity to our neural equipment but rather emphasizes the personal contribution and relatedness of human beings to the human family and the cosmos; and thus that has as its primary point of beginning and orientation the human in a partnering relationship with God.

Further Reading

• W.S. Brown et al., eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Fortress, 1998)
• J.B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008)
• J.B. Green, ed., What about the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology (Abingdon, 2004)
• M.A. Jeeves, ed., Rethinking Human Nature: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Eerdmans, 2011).

Notes

1. P. Churchland, Brain-Wise. MIT Press, 2002: 2
2. S. Blakeselee, “Humanity? Maybe It’s All in the Wiring,” New York Times, 9 December 2003, F1
3. T. Metzinger, “Consciousness Research at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. ed. T. Metzinger; MIT Press, 2000: p. 6
4. See J. Polkinghorne, “Eschatology: Some Questions and Some Insights from Science,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God. ed. J. Polkinghorne and M. Welker. Trinity Press International, 2000: 29-41 and W. S. Brown, “Cognitive Contributions to Soul,” in Whatever Happened to the Soul? ed. W.S. Brown et al.; Fortress, 1998: 99-125.

But it is also important that we engage believers who disagree with us (on human origins, especially) with charity and humility as a witness to our common identity in Christ—that we may be known by our love for each other in tandem with our demonstrated love for the secular world that does not yet claim Christ as Lord and Savior.

While the BioLogos Foundation is committed to both of these aspects, we are especially pleased that our desire to engage in gracious dialogue with fellow believers who reject biological evolution has been receiving increased and very favorable attention in both the Christian and secular press. More importantly, we are being joined in that reconciling project by those who have often been defined primarily as our “opponents,” rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

First, A Tale of Two Scientists, the cover story of Christianity Today’s July-August 2012 issue, featured the accounts of BioLogos Foundation President Darrel Falk and Todd Wood, Director of the Center for Creation Research at Bryan University. Though Wood does not accept biological evolution on theological grounds, both men recognize its strength and explanatory power. But more importantly, both reject the warfare model between science and faith (and between Christians who think differently) as being, in Wood’s words, “detrimental to the Church.”

Second, our Southern Baptist Voices series has become a model for how such dialogue can be pursued, even in the sometimes no-holds-barred context of the web. Several installments in our ongoing dialogue with Southern Baptist theologians have been covered by the Erin Roach of the Baptist Press (on May 25th , June 6th, and July 3rd) and on on July 19th by Lillian Kwan of the Christian Post. And just this past week, Associated Press reporter Travis Loller highlighted the series in an article picked up by the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets across the country.

To make it easier for readers to find the entire Southern Baptist Voices series and join in the conversation themselves, we’ve launched a new landing page here: Southern Baptist Voices. It is our hope and prayer that this initiative will set the stage for future dialogue between evolutionary creationists and those who hold other perspectives, as well.

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).

I am using the term in the same sense. Like Ramm, I don’t regard theistic evolution as a concordist view, even though some TE proponents like to say that evolution can be “harmonized” with Genesis. At the same time, Ramm completely rejected Price’s recent creation and Flood Geology, and he obviously did not consider that view to be a type of concordism either. Why not? On first glance, the YEC view might seem to fall within Ramm’s definition of concordism, and the authors of one of the books recommended in the first column in this series classify it as a type of concordism. However, the harmony sought by YEC proponents comes at the cost of entirely rejecting the standard geologic record, which they replace with Flood Geology. That isn’t what Ramm had in mind by seeking a “harmony.”

Often the concordist view is called “progressive creation,” another term that Ramm used with much approval: “We believe that the fundamental pattern of creation is progressive creation,” he wrote prominently in italics. Indeed, it is sometimes assumed that Ramm invented both terms, “concordism” and “progressive creation,” when in fact he did no such thing. If anything, the latter term is even older than the former, having been used to refer to an OEC interpretation of natural history for about two centuries. The first American author to use it may have been Benjamin Silliman, an evangelical who was appointed the first professor of natural history at Yale by another evangelical, Yale’s president Timothy Dwight. Silliman was the single most influential figure in American science during the nineteenth century. In his Outline of the Course of Geological Lectures Given in Yale College (1829), Silliman spoke of “the progressive creation, life, death and sepulture [fossilization], of animals and plants.” On another occasion he noted how the Bible describes “a successive creation of plants and animals, ending with man,” and that geology “proves this history to be true.”

Clearly, then, the concordist or progressive creationist view has been around for a long time. Let’s examine its main components.

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Concordism

(1) The Bible and science (mainly geology and astronomy) are BOTH reliable sources of knowledge about the origin of the earth and the universe. God has written two “books” for our instruction, the book of nature and the book of scripture. Since God is the author of both “books,” they must agree when properly interpreted.

If this strikes you as worded deliberately to sound like Galileo, you’re right—but only because so many proponents of the concordist view also have Galileo very much in their minds. The basic scheme is neatly depicted in this diagram:

Recall Galileo’s belief that the book of nature, written in the divine and unambiguous language of mathematics, should be used to help interpret the book of scripture, written in the richer but more ambiguous language spoken by the ordinary persons for whom its vital message of salvation was intended. When they accept the evidence for an ancient earth, Silliman and many other evangelical scholars right down to our own day believe they have merely applied Galileo’s logic to a different set of biblical texts.

(2) Scientific evidence, when properly interpreted, is consistent with the Bible, when properly interpreted.

Galileo again: because both “books” are written by the same Author, they must agree. As he said in his Letter to Christina, “the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error.”

What about those who interpret the book of nature? Can they ever be mistaken? Should they ever yield to those who interpret the book of scripture? Evolution was not the source of Galileo’s concerns, but concordists today would give the nod to scripture mainly when it comes to evolution—especially human evolution. Regardless of how much evolution they accept for other organisms, concordists hold strongly to the separate creation of Adam and Eve as the first human beings. They believe that Genesis 1 was intended to be at least broadly historical, even though it does not provide detailed scientific information.

Mainstream conclusions in geology and cosmology, however, are almost always accepted; indeed, Hugh Ross and some other OECs not only accept the “big bang” theory of the universe, they actively promote it as central to Christian apologetics, because it presents us with a universe that is not eternal and that appears to be exquisitely designed as a home for living creatures, including ourselves.

(3) The Bible does NOT tell us the age of the earth.

Two main concordist approaches to resolving the tension between Genesis and scientific dating of the earth have been popular since the mid-nineteenth century: the “day-age theory,” which still has numerous advocates (including Ross), and the “gap theory,” which is now nearly extinct. One hundred years ago, however, the gap theory was probably the more popular option among conservative Protestants, and it remained so until the 1960s and 1970s, when the rapid spread of Scientific Creationism all but relegated the gap view to the dust bin.

The Gap Theory

The gap theory posits a “gap” of untold length between “the beginning” of Genesis 1:1 and the first “day” of creation, starting with Genesis 1:3; the formless void of Gen 1:2 corresponds to this “gap.” Verse 1 refers to the original creation of the earth and the universe “in the beginning,” not to world as we now find it. The fossils represent creatures that populated the original creation. Current living creatures come from a second creation, after the “gap,” when God made them in six literal days, culminating in the creation of Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago.

Although the creation of humanity matches the traditional biblical chronology—a major reason for the popularity of the gap theory in its heyday—the original creation cannot be dated from the Bible. Whether it happened 100 million years ago (as scientists thought around 1900) or billions of years ago (as scientists thought for much of the twentieth century), does not matter one bit to the Bible. Geologists can say whatever they wish about the age of the earth. The Scofield Reference Bible, originally published by Oxford University Press in 1909, taught the gap theory to generations of conservative Protestants in the English speaking world. The headings alone indicate Scofield’s endorsement of the gap theory, and he waited no longer than the second footnote to spell it out: “The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.” (NOTE: the date “B.C. 4004" in the middle column refers to the start of the six days, not to “the beginning.” I’ll elaborate on that date in part two of this column.)

As Scofield’s third note shows, the gap theory was usually placed within an elaborate theological structure about the fall of Satan and the angels, based on certain prophetic texts (see below). A full discussion would take us far afield, but something should be said about how gap theorists interpret Genesis 1:2, the crucial verse for their model. Scofield sticks with the King James Version, “the earth was without form, and void,” doing the exegetical work in his notes, but others like to render it as, “the earth became a waste place,”, drawing out the implication (in their view) that God destroyed the original creation, laying waste to it in an act of judgment, leaving us with fossils of the pre-Adamic world.

In some versions of the gap view, the original creation included pre-Adamite people—that is, humans who were not descended from Adam and Eve. This idea that took many forms, some with racist overtones. Perhaps this strikes you as a bit surprising, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a commonplace conception among Protestants, and not unknown to Catholics either. A prominent example would be The Pre-Adamite Earth: A Contribution to Theological Science (1846), a very popular book by the English Congregational minister John Harris. Historian David Livingstone has written the definitive history of this fascinating idea. For more, see this interview, but there is no substitute for reading the book itself! Let me make an invitation: who wants to borrow a copy and provide their own commentary here?

In all versions of the gap theory, however, fossils are vestiges of the pre-Adamic world, produced when it was destroyed; they are not a record of evolutionary history. All modern animals and many plants were created recently, in six literal days. Despite what YECs often say, there is just no way to see the gap theory as an “evolutionist” interpretation of Genesis!

The "Day-Age" Theory

The day-age theory takes the “days” in Genesis 1 as periods of indefinite length, such that neither the age of the earth nor the duration of any particular period in creation history can be determined from the Bible. The basis for this view is that the Hebrew word “yom” (day) can also mean an indefinite period of time. According to Hugh Ross, the leading advocate of progressive creation today, if the Hebrews had wanted to refer to a long period of indefinite length, they would have used the word “yom.” Thus, he claims to be giving a literal interpretation when he upholds the day-age view.

Numerous varieties of the day-age view have been proposed since the eighteenth century, too many to review here. They all teach that the major kinds of plants and animals were created separately, over the eons of earth history; the fossil record shows reliably which came earlier and which came later. Thus, the creation was accomplished “progressively,” as Silliman held in 1829 and Ross holds today. Ross thinks God performed millions of acts of special creation, but concordists differ substantially among themselves on the magnitude of the number for this.

Concordists mostly agree, however, that the first true humans were Adam and Eve, and that they were created ex nihilo—but, how recently were they created? Can the biblical 6,000 years be stretched far enough to encompass fossils of modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) dating back perhaps to nearly 200,000 years? Can the biblical picture of Adam’s children living amidst cities and agriculture be reconciled with extensive evidence of humans who lived long before either existed? I’m no anthropologist, but anyone can see the relevance of such questions for this position.

(4) The Flood was a real historical event, but it was not responsible for producing the fossils; rather, fossils are relics of organisms that were mainly here before humans.

The last of the four basic assumptions shared by concordists is that they reject Flood Geology and accept the standard geologic column. Hugh Ross and some others believe that the flood was geographically localized, covering part of the ancient Near East but not the whole globe. This is called the “local flood” view. Biblical scholar Paul Seely briefly assesses this view in light of current knowledge here, but a full discussion of the issues goes well beyond of the scope of this online course. Anyone with appropriate expertise is invited to place comments below. The main point is that the flood has no geological significance for concordists, whether or not it was geographically “local.”

Looking Ahead

Our look at concordism concludes on July 3 with some conclusions about the OEC view and further historical comments. I’ll pay attention to your comments in the meantime.

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 am glad to have the opportunity to dialogue with Dr. John Hammett. In addition to our shared Christian faith and our shared lack of expertise in evolutionary science, we have in common one of our teaching and scholarly foci: the nature of human persons. Dr. Hammett approaches this topic as a trained theologian, whereas I approach it as a philosopher. However, on a topic such as this one, those disciplinary boundaries can get smudged a bit when the discussants approach the matter from the standpoint of a biblically-rooted Christian faith. Indeed the issue is of such importance and complexity that I would welcome continued conversation with Dr. Hammett beyond this initial exchange.

The Christian Scriptures teach that we human beings have been created in God’s image. What does that mean? I am in substantial agreement with Dr. Hammett on this question. While I think that bearing God’s image involves our having or having a potentiality for certain basic psychological capacities that we associate with the term “person”, it has to do even more profoundly with our specific capacity for relationship with God. Indeed, I would go further and say that it is not just our having this capacity that makes us divine ikons, it is also the fact that God has activated this capacity—He has given the precious gift of His self-disclosure to us. Further still, it has an eschatological dimension, based on the revealed promise of a future development and perfection of each of us, and so by implication, of human nature itself, by almighty God. We are in the process of becoming fully human: beyond a descriptive biological or even psychological notion of human nature lies a teleological one—not a telos of nature but of God's loving purposes for us. Despite our unequally born deficits—physical, cognitive, emotional, and moral/spiritual—we are destined for a fuller, supernatural realization of our common nature.

That we are in these ways God’s image bearers is a (wonderful!) teaching of our faith. The Scriptures also speak in various places of the human “soul.” The idea of the soul seems clearly connected to the idea that we are divine ikons. But here we should tread carefully. It is of course not unique to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures to use some such singular term to refer to that which is most distinctively human and that by virtue of which we are able to survive the death and decay of our bodies. But it is one thing to use the term as a kind of placeholder for whatever it is about us that enables us to be, feel, and act in distinctively human ways in this life and to survive death into the next; it is another thing to link the term to a specific metaphysical account of the matter, such as might say whether the soul is a kind of thing or substance, what kind of thing it is, and exactly how “it” relates to the human “body.”

It is (and always has been) very common for Christians to invest the term “soul” as it used in Scripture with such a metaphysical account. As these fellow Christians understand it, when the Bible speaks of my soul, it is referring to an immaterial substance that is, in the final analysis, the thing that I am. I have my body (by interacting directly with it and only with it among physical objects), but I am my soul. Many will add that, after my death and prior to the resurrection of the dead, I will exist in a completely disembodied state—a naked soul, as it were.

However, I believe it is a mistake to interpret Scripture as teaching or implying any such metaphysical account of the underpinnings of our distinctively human personal attributes or our capacity for surviving death. Now, after reflecting on the matter, we might conclude that the only way these Scriptural teachings could be true is for such a metaphysical account to be true, as well—an account in which we are immaterial substances, entirely separate from our bodies. Indeed, many have thought hard about it and have drawn just such a conclusion, and it is not hard to see why they find it tempting to do so. But to do so is to make a disputable philosophical inference; it is not a teaching of the faith.

The general perspective of BioLogos, which I embrace, is that theorizing about the underlying nature of the soul is best done by trying to read God’s Two Books (His Word and His Works) in tandem. Both Books have a great deal to say about us, and, as common products of an infinitely wise and loving Creator, what they say must ultimately be in harmony. As with any attempt to understand something deep and wondrous in God’s Creation, we should proceed with humility and carefulness and be prepared to rethink familiar and received ideas.

Spelling it out just a bit, the common Christian understanding of what it is to have a soul involves the yoking of two radically different things, a functioning human (wholly material) body and an immaterial mental thing that is the direct bearer of psychological properties such as self-awareness, emotions, and thoughts, and is that which chooses in accordance with desires and purposes. In short, a complex biological machine and a pure subject/purposive agent which interface in the brain. I want to acknowledge that this is a very natural perspective to have, quite apart from Christian revelation (hence its popularity among humans generally). It is very natural because our psychological abilities seem, introspectively, to be plainly something more than mere resultants of impersonal physical particle interactions, however numerous and complex these are within the human brain.

We can design highly sophisticated computers that process complex bodies of information with extraordinary speed, but no computer is a subject, or has a point of view. As philosophers of mind like to say, there is nothing “it is like” to be a computer in the way that there is something “it is like” to be a conscious subject. Put another way, no mere computer is a conscious, experiencing subject, having a point of view from which it regards and interacts with its environment. Neither do computers make autonomous choices in the face of competing moral and self-interested motivations, and so on. It seems but a short step from this observation to the conclusion that human persons (and thinking/desiring/choosing things more generally) must be fundamentally different sorts of things: fundamentally distinct capacities must reside in fundamentally distinct kinds of substances (mental and spiritual substances as opposed to physical substances, however complex).

I have just described how matters appear from the ‘first-person perspective’ of conscious experience and self-awareness. Let me be clear that I take such evidence very seriously: I know my own conscious thoughts and experiences better than I know any scientific theory,—even a very well-attested one—as all of our theories are at bottom built on information we derive from our experiences. So awareness of the distinctive character of conscious experience is part of what is given to us in the Book of God’s Works, since we are a part of that Book.

But alongside that ‘first-person’ data, we have had an explosion of relevant information coming from the ‘third-person’ perspective of the natural sciences, specifically evolutionary and developmental biology and cognitive neuroscience. This information, while still incomplete and only imperfectly understood, sheds light on the deep natural history of humans and present-day animals; the processes by which individual organisms of any species develop from inception to maturity; function-specific neural structures and processes that sustain and help regulate the unfolding first-person perspective of conscious agents; and finally, observed correlations between increasing complexity of neural structures and increased psychological complexity. This last correlation between structural and cognitive complexity is evident both when examining individuals as they develop, and when making comparisons across sentient species.

I suggest that this third-personal scientific information does not comport well with the two-substance or dualist metaphysical account of human persons. The fundamental problem is that our sciences point to continuous processes of increasing complexity, but the two-substance account requires the supposition of abrupt discontinuity. The “coming to be” at a particular point in time of a new substance with a suite of novel psychological capacities would seem to be a highly discontinuous development, both in large-scale bio-geological time and within the development of individual organisms.

Since souls as purely immaterial things would lack parts, we cannot make sense of the accumulation or diminishment of capacities by proposing increased or decreased structural complexity within the bearer of such capacities. And it just seems implausible to suppose that all the necessary basic capacities for, say, calculus problem-solving are there in the soul from the beginning, awaiting only physical maturation in the body in order to become activated, but still not directly dependent on that maturation. It seems rather that psychological capacities arise and develop in tandem with the development of the brain and nervous system.

Of course, it is possible for the soul-body dualist to retrench: we might offload to the brain ‘side’ of the divide some of the psychological functioning that, prior to the advent of neuroscience, we might have mistakenly thought belonged to the soul. But that tack risks (as neuroscience progresses) reducing the soul to a simple, immaterial object that is radically incomplete, merely a “bearer of consciousness” that enables personal identity over time and through death.

Despite the fact that such future retrenchment would seem to be required, this kind of dualism remains tempting for the Christian thinker. Why? The obvious answer is that it can seem to be the only way to accommodate our specifically Christian data that human beings are not mere machines: our thoughts, emotions, goals, and intentions are deep, not superficial features of ourselves; they confer a dignity upon us that makes us suitable bearers of the divine image such that human beings, after our skin has been destroyed, will yet see God. (Job 19:26). But is it true that the coherence of Christian theology requires this account? And if coherence of Christian theology does not require this account, which account might be the best one?

Tomorrow, in Part 2, I will address this question.

Humanity is marked by the biological capacity for musicality. Every known culture has something like music. Understanding how we experience and create music in the present gives us clues to why and how music emerged as one of the defining features of human culture (and, therefore, of humanness itself) in the past. But thinking carefully about music and evolution can also help us reassess how we use music now: in the wider culture, collectively as the church, and even within our own homes. In a nutshell, then, this essay will examine how views on evolution impact how one assesses music’s effects and meaning. In many cases, problematic views about evolution and artistic creativity result in problematic views about music, but my argument is that an appropriate evolutionary view of music—one that looks at how music becomes meaningful within social relationships—is a view that actually enriches our appreciation of this most human endeavor, rather than trivializing it. In this first part I explore common discourses about the meaning of music and their relationship to ideas of creation. In part two next week, I suggest that understanding the role that music played in our biocultural evolution helps correct some of the myths that have made their way into popular discourse, especially with the growing popularity of trying to understand music via neuroscience.

Let’s begin by looking at a couple of popular ways of answering the question, “Where does musical meaning come from?” beginning with the idea that “music is in the ear of the beholder.” One thing that is clear from years of teaching classes of first-year university students is that they are musical relativists. They have ‘their’ music that they enjoy and even use to demark their identities, but are perfectly willing to allow others to like other music. After all, music is all about enjoyment, right? Historically, this cultural trope developed out of the post-Kantian argument of musical autonomy, the often-fashionable argument that music’s meaning is strictly musical and does not relate to other parts of the world. It is also reflected in Steven Pinker’s argument that music is ‘auditory cheesecake’. For Pinker, music used to be useful for things like attracting mates, but now we have evolved out of needing music: it’s not necessary, but is a nice extra. I might like cheesecake, but you might prefer ice cream. Either way, it won’t change the survival of the species, so we can enjoy what we like. This argument may have a harder time standing up when music is used as a means of torture at Guantanamo Bay, but it remains popular none-the-less. Like many ideas of creation and the arts, the idea of music as primarily pleasure (determined by individual taste) is a post-Enlightenment development.

This musical relativism takes a slightly more exacting form in another popular idea, that meaning is embedded within the ‘music itself’ not in the taste of the listener. This view of meaning is the starting point of Plato and Aristotle’s disagreement about the effect of certain modes, the disagreements in the early church about the usage of certain musical instruments, and the arguments of the detrimental moral impact of certain forms of popular music (which, by the way, is an argument not just limited to the 20th or now 21st centuries). It is also the foundation of the statement from one of my former conductors that if we played well enough, we would summon up the ‘spirit of Haydn’. In other words, ‘proper’ participation can reveal the meaning of the work—be that the composer’s meaning or another idealized meaning.

Musical autonomy in this case refers to the view that music stands apart and has no relations or meaning outside of itself. Many philosophers and musicologists rely on this view in an unreflective way, represented by Peter Kivy’s statement that music “is a quasi-syntactical structure of sound understandable solely in musical terms and having no semantic or representational content, no meaning, and making no reference to anything beyond itself”¹. For Kivy, the heart of the autonomy argument is that music is completely self-contained. Such a view is possible because of the historical development of ‘absolute music’, referring to music without a text or narrative, typified by the development of the symphonic form in the late 18th century. It is no accident that between 1750-1850, the form of the symphony developed, Kant theorized the idea of genius, and Schopenhauer claimed music to be “pure will.” In the 19th century, music came to be considered the highest of the arts, and even at the turn of the 20th century Kandinsky claimed that all art should try to achieve the autonomy and abstraction of music.

The idea of musical meaning somehow residing within the musical work is based on an assumption that the more one can isolate and analyze something, the more can be known about it. We can certainly learn much about a rock or plant by isolating it and putting it under a microscope, and those who take music to be autonomous believe that music can also be known most thoroughly by placing it ‘under the microscope’ through close analysis of a score or recording, or through close listening. It is through such pseudo-scientific analytical acts that knowledge about music is thought to be accessed. This is also the guiding ideology of ‘music appreciation.’ But while much can be gained by close examination of rocks or music, much more can be gained by studying how a rock or (especially) music is used by people—a central point to which we will return.

It is more than a little ironic, then, that a further example of the belief in an intrinsic musical meaning is the argument that music is ‘universal’; that is, that at least some music can cross cultural barriers and mean the same thing to all people. Often this view assumes a primacy of the Western canon, as it is believed that Mozart has a universal meaning but Chinese qin (zither) music does not. In a globalized world where many cultures listen to and value Mozart, people who do not share a common language or view of the world may find Mozart a common point of contact. But finding Mozart a point of contact is not caused by the music having a universal meaning. Rather, it is an example of the way music can become a shared space where people enter into a relationship via art. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a project of Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said) is an example of music being a common ground where people from different views of the world can connect, not an example of universalized meanings of music.

Indeed, there are many situations when music’s meanings are not shared, showing that meaning is most definitely not universal. Martin Lodge recounts the encounter of Dutch explorers and the Maori people of New Zealand in 1642. When the parties got close enough to see (and hear) each other, each group signalled with trumpets. The Dutch, thinking they were successful in making contact, sent a boat of unarmed sailors to shore. The boat was met by Maori warriors who killed more than half of the sailors. This misunderstanding was caused by not sharing a musical meaning: “The Maori trumpeting in this case was the music of war, an invitation to fight. On the other hand the Dutch trumpets played a variety of tunes intended to be welcoming.”² Musical meanings are often shared, but are not universal or ‘in the music’.

As we have begun to see, considering music as culturally embedded lets us recognize something quite different from the arguments that musical meaning is either subjective or encoded within the music itself. Music does allow for subjective response, but not truly autonomous response—our experience of music occurs within the bounds of cultural norms. Since music’s significance cannot be abstracted from it’s embeddedness within social relationships, an attention to culture and human intentionality (not just a reductionist sense of biology) must inform the ways that music is studied, whether in contemporary culture, in neuroscience, and with reference to human evolution. Unfortunately even many Christian views of music have relied upon some of these problematic views of musical meaning, aligning ideas like individual artistic genius and the “meaning in the music” concept with theologies of creation ex nihilo. As Bruce Ellis Benson discusses in an essay in the journal Verge (and in a shortened version here at BioLogos), this combination or paralleling of genius and ex nihilo creation complicates the church’s understanding not only of music, but also about the Creator God, downplaying the essential element of community and interpersonal relationship inherent to both.

Next week, we’ll look at a similar tendency to abstract and quantify the way music makes meaning in the burgeoning field of neuroscience (from the “Mozart Effect” to fMRI scans), and return to the way that thinking about music within the evolution of human culture might give us a deeper appreciation of music—even of worship—within the church. In the meantime, here are some questions to consider:

How do my own assumptions of the way music is meaningful affect the ways I conceive of and use music?

Are there negative consequences stemming from these assumptions?

How have problematic views of musical meaning affected the use of music as personal identity? Or in the church? Or in the media? Or in popularized science?

Notes

1. Kivy, Peter (1990) Music Alone (Cornell University Press: Ithica, NY): p. 202.

2. Lodge, Martin (2009) 'Music Historiography in New Zealand' in ed. Zdravko Blazekovic, Music's Intellectual History (RILM: New York): p. 627.

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.

It is reasonably well known among evangelical Christians that all living humans trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a single woman (a so-called “mitochondrial Eve”) and that all living males similarly trace their Y-chromosome DNA back to a single male (a so-called “Y-chromosome Adam”). These individuals are commonly assumed by evangelicals to be the Biblical Adam and Eve, the first humans alive and the progenitors of the entire human race. While most young-earth and old-earth creationist organizations make this claim, perhaps one of the best-known organizations to do so is the old-earth creationist / anti-evolution organization Reasons to Believe, who have produced numerous articles, podcasts, and even entire books on the subject.

In contrast to this common evangelical understanding, the scientific picture is rather different. Mitochondrial Eve, though the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all humans, was but one of a large population living about 180,000 years ago. So too for Y-chromosome Adam: he was also a member of a large population, and he lived about 50,000 years ago. As has been discussed several times here at BioLogos, there are multiple lines of evidence that indicate the human population has never been below around 10,000 members at any time in its history: we branched off as a large population to form our own species.

When presented with the evidence for human population sizes over our evolutionary history, a common point of confusion for evangelicals is how this evidence fits with Mitochondrial Eve. How can we all come from one woman (and one man) but also come from a large population of 10,000 individuals? Aren’t these two observations in conflict?

The answer is no, these lines of evidence fit together. Humans do come from a large population, and all present-day humans do inherit mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA from specific individuals in the past. The reason for the apparent discrepancy lies in how mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA are inherited, as we shall see below.

Mitochondria are organelles responsible for energy conversion, and they contain their own small, circular chromosome that they replicate apart from regular chromosomes in the cell nucleus. Mitochondria are not passed on to progeny through sperm, but only through the egg: as such, mitochondrial DNA is passed on solely through the maternal line. Consider a small pedigree (family tree) below. Circles represent females, males are represented with squares. In this family, one grandmother (the woman at the top right of the pedigree) has passed on her mitochondrial DNA to her sons and daughter, but only her daughter passes it on to the next generation. All individuals who have this grandmother’s mitochondrial DNA are shown in blue:

Conversely, if we examine Y-chromosome inheritance in this same family, we would see that (obviously) women cannot pass it on to their children. Here, the red lines show all males who have descended from a grandfather of the family (the male at the top left of the pedigree):

Now we are ready to examine how these types of DNA are inherited in a larger group, and compare their modes of inheritance with regular chromosomal DNA. While it is not possible to draw out a pedigree for a population of 10,000 individuals, let’s examine a smaller group to see how a specific mitochondrial sequence can “take over” a population of organisms (note that this effect applies to other organisms besides humans that use an XX – XY system of sex chromosomes).

In the family tree below, three mitochondrial DNA variants are present in the first generation (the top row of the pedigree) and a represented with different colors (green, blue and red). Tracing the inheritance of these mitochondrial DNA versions through the family tree shows that all living members of this population (the bottom two rows) have inherited the red version only. The blue and green versions eventually hit a dead end where they were not passed on (either through females who did not have children, or males). As such, all living individuals can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to this group’s “mitochondrial Eve”, the woman at the top right of the tree with the “Mito 3” variant.

Let’s now examine Y-chromosome inheritance patterns in the exact same family tree. Suppose there are three Y chromosome variants present in the first generations:

Here we can see that the current population has inherited its Y-chromosome DNA from one individual as well (variant 1, the red lines) and that the other Y-chromosome variants (blue and green) hit dead ends through males that did not reproduce or men who only had daughters. All living members of the population trace their Y chromosome DNA back to an individual (filled in with yellow) who lived two generations after their most recent matrilineal common ancestor (the woman at the top right).

Now we are ready to examine regular chromosomal inheritance in this same family tree. Genetic variation on chromosomes other than the Y can be passed through either gender without problem, and individuals can have two variants at a time (one on the chromosome inherited from mom, the other on the chromosome inherited from dad). These key differences (compared to how mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes are inherited) produce a very different effect. In this same family, numerous variants (represented by the different colors) have been transmitted to the present generation without loss:

Notice the middle couple in the first generation in the pedigree. This man’s Y chromosome did not make it to the present day, and similarly his wife’s mitochondrial DNA did not make it either (scroll up to see this if you need to refresh your memory). So, they contributed nothing to the current generation, right? Not at all: both of them have passed on regular chromosomal variation to the present day (traced as blue and black lines).

In other words, it would be incorrect to examine this population, determine (correctly) that they share common mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome ancestors, and then go on to conclude that these two individuals were an ancestral pair that started this entire family. We know that this group descends from a larger population, because genetic variation in the present population is too large to explain as coming from one pair (there are five colors, or genetic variants in this population, and the max any one pair could carry is four, with two each).

While this example examines a small family, the same principles apply to larger groups: mitochondrial and Y-chromosome lineages, though interesting, cannot be used to estimate population sizes over time. For that type of work, regular chromosomal variation should be examined. Present day human genetic variation indicates that though we all share a common mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome source, these individuals came from a population of at least 10,000 individuals, and that they lived over 100,000 years apart. If you are interested in examining the evidence for human population sizes, Darrel Falk and I have discussed it previously.

In summary, anti-evolutionary groups, such as Reasons to Believe, that claim that the evidence for Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam supports an ancestral couple for the entire human race are not interpreting the data correctly. They have failed to account for the unique pattern of inheritance these types of DNA have in populations.

Photo courtesy of Lewis Schofield.