Episode Details

Do we need to update our theology in light of Christian-bigotry toward our genetic cousins?

During the millennia that Biblical characters were living out their lives, Biblical authors were writing their texts, the early Christian church was forming, and the medieval Church fathers were constructing a Christian theology, nobody had any idea that humans had genetic cousins: Australopithecus (“Lucy”), Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo juluensis, and so many more.  But we today DO know about those hominid cousins, and that knowledge raises many, many, huge questions for the Christian theology that emerged during those 4,000 years of JudeoChristian history.  Much of modern Christianity has been in denial of the existence or relevance of those “cousins”:

• Anwers-in-Genesis re-label any new hominid discovery as either human or ape, nothing in between (if the “human” doesn’t quite look human enough, they’ll invoke some kind of musculo-skeletal disease, inbreeding, or a reference to “the Nephilim”);
• Pew Research have for decades been tracking public perception of various things, including human origins: even today, a significant fraction of Christianity insist that we humans have always existed in our present form (rather than evolving over time);
• a new biology textbook written for Fundamentalist high-schools declared the following in its opening pages: “If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.”

Luke described a strategy that Christians typically employ when trying to cope with the new scientific evidence: first try to just extend the timeline (from 6,000 years to a couple hundred thousand years, but otherwise keep all other parts of the Adam&Eve story intact), then start admitting that “God used biological evolution” instead of a potter’s wheel and Adam’s rib to create the first humans, and then finally accepting that the origin of humans was very much a random, unguided thing.

We discussed a wide range of [theological] questions that are raised by these scientific discoveries of our hominid ancestors.  Some of those questions are of the “low-hanging fruit” kind that always come up immediately in any conversation about this topic:

• what then does it mean that we’re created in God’s image?
• what does it mean to “be human”?
• what do we do with the fact that “Adam and Eve” are not literal?
• what about the sinful nature we inherited from Adam&Eve?

But there are other questi