Episode Details

Many Christians will say: “I’m OK with evolution, in general …. as long as you leave humans out of it”.

It’s only been four weeks since we summarized our discussions in this podcast series that began four months ago (episode #74). But during the four weeks since then, we’ve crossed that line: we’ve added humans to the list of evolved beings. For many people, this will raise all sorts of very unsettling questions. For them, it’s a game-changer. A step too far. For them, humans were “created in God’s image”, so they can’t possibly have evolved from ancestors shared by the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans of today… as well as the Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. floresiensis (aka “Hobbit Man”), and many other Homo species of the past.

So we need to carefully pull together the various threads from the last four weeks. We’ve learned that:

• the evidence for our descent from those ancient hominids is undeniable: it’s written in our ancestral bones in the ground, and in our genes (episodes #72 and #73);
• those ancestors began to develop a sense of the future, of mortality, of the afterlife, and became self-aware (episode #77);
• they evolved a mind and soul, or “soulishness” (episode #75)
• they began to work with symbolism, abstract thought, and language (episode

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