April 7, 2018
God Created Man in His Own Image
For years I have been having an on going conversation with my mother about evolution. Her religious zeal is deep and unmoving and in many instances she has shown me what unconditional love is through her faith in the Gospel of Christ. This, I can never show enough appreciation for. I have seen her faith move mountains and I love her. On more worldly matters of less eternal importance however, we drastically disagree. The notion of macroevolution (one species turning into another species) is heresy to her ears. But to mine it is the sound of a greater truth unfurling before a nascent but booming intellectual species.
I have spent hours trying to convince her to no avail. One point I like to bring up is this: the religious tend to shun the thought of evolution based on the authority of the scriptures, one significant scripture being the first chapter in Genesis, verse 27:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
The argument is that humans were made in the image of God therefore evolution can’t be a thing. Well, it is apparent that this verse does not explicitly rule out evolution. That is not to say that evolution is how this verse indicates it must be, but to hang one’s argument against evolution on a verse of scripture that says God created man in his image indicates that there is an underlying unwillingness to accept evolution based on wholly subjective opinions. This scripture nor any other verse in any holy writ that I am aware of ever addresses how exactly God created man. I liken the contemporary denial of evolution based on our current religious paradigm to the denial of the heliocentric model of the universe in the Catholic 16th century Europe. How many of us would deny that the Earth orbits the Sun today? Well, to suggest something as such five hundred years ago could get you exiled on authority of the Church. And it was based on misinterpreted scripture.
I ask anyone reading this to engage in a little thought experiment. Not suggesting that many/any of us can truly imagine how God really did things, I ask you to do your best to image what God creating man looks like. I am split down the middle when tasked with this challenge. I see something along the lines of God snapping his fingers and poofing Adam into existence on one side, and on the other I see something along the lines of evolution. If you want to believe that God poofed humans into reality than that is your prerogative. I am merely saying that it is an utterly biased view to deny evolution based on a verse of scripture that doesn’t say one way or the other whether evolution is how it happened. So, there must be something more in religion that verifies that evolution is clearly false, right? I am not sure there is.
I am interested in any religious evidence that goes against the theory of evolution so I might better understand why there is such pushback on the topic in religious circles. What I think might happen however is someone who denies evolution might attack the “theory” that is in front of evolution and the implications of what that person believes a theory to be will start to be unfurled. That, however is a different discussion, and one we can have, but here and now it is not what I am asking about. I am interested, if you are religious, in why you hold religious convictions that deny evolution. From what I can tell of religion there is little to no grounds to do so. So I am left wondering where this pushback comes from.
In case any of you are wondering, I believe in God. And in fact I would put forth that no one has it right. The theologist nor the scientist. I think God can create man however He pleases. It’s just that He hasn’t explicitly stated anywhere how He’s done that, and it just so happens that evolution gives us something to work with on how it might have occurred. The scriptures don’t give us anything on how it happened, only that it did happen.
Anyway, those are my thoughts today.