On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species

Introduction

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

—

Charles Darwin

,

1859

, On the Origin of Species

Endless forms most beautiful, indeed, but in his ground-shaking, paradigm-shifting publication, On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin chose not to discuss the most amazing of all species—humans and their incomparable mind. Having mulled over the consequences of presenting his theory for more than twenty years, when he finally laid it out, his mention of the origin of humans was reduced to a single sentence: Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. Darwin had an extensive set of notes on the origin of humans and was prepared to write a whole chapter on this topic, but in the end he chose to set it aside. Why did he essentially leave humans out of his story—surely this was the most important question of all? As Darwin historian Janet Browne put it: He knew that anything he said was bound to ignite furious controversy, and anticipating just such a response, he . . . drained his manuscripts of any reference to a Creator or human ancestry.

¹

Sure enough, despite his effort to sidestep the issue, this quickly became the matter that took center stage. As Darwin’s Origin was coming off the press, the British public was just becoming aware of the existence of African gorillas. Darwin’s theory conjured up images of an ancestral lineage that was emotionally disturbing and repugnant to many. The clergy at Cambridge reportedly became concerned that a bestial evolution would cause a loss of faith.

²

Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, participated in a famous exchange about seven months after the publication of Origin. Emotions ran high as the exchange between him and the Darwin defender, Thomas Huxley, began. At the debate, held at Oxford, many students were in attendance and a chant of Mawnkey! Mawnkey! raised the fever of the crowd.

³

This was no ordinary scientific discussion. Browne writes,

Perhaps it was laughter that loosened Wilberforce’s grip. At one point he turned to Huxley . . . Was [he] related on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape? . . . The gibe was understood by every member of the audience. They smelled blood. So did Huxley. The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,

⁴

he apparently whispered to Benjamin Brodie on the bench beside him.

⁵

And, as Browne describes it, with that Huxley apparently stood up and proceeded with his famous reply:

If I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

⁶

Meanwhile, Robert Fitzroy, the former captain of the Beagle, for whom Darwin had served as companion and naturalist in their voyage around the world twenty-five years earlier, was in the crowd. Waving a Bible, Fitzroy implored anyone who would listen to believe God’s Holy Word rather than that of a mere human on the question of creation.

⁷

So even though Darwin had done his best to keep the volatile question of human origins out of his book, it didn’t take long for it to rise to the surface as the most controversial issue of the day.

I begin this book on human origins with that story because in some regards, 160 years later, it seems nothing has changed. In a 2019 Gallup Poll, 40 percent of Americans questioned believed God created man in present form, a percentage that is almost the same as when this poll was first conducted almost fifty years earlier, at which time it was 44 percent.

⁸

How could it be that a theory which in broad outline has been verified in thousands of experiments over many decades and is foundational to the entire discipline of biology, nonetheless be widely rejected by the general public? There is something disconcerting about human evolution that makes it likely the hardest of all scientific concepts to reconcile with day-to-day living. For various reasons, this is especially true for the Christian. Darwin thought his theory closed the door to the reasonableness of Christian faith and far too many have feared that he was right. Emphatically, this book seeks to show that is not the case. Instead, I hope to show that what we are learning scientifically about the specifics of how our species evolved into its current state opens the door to a vista of wide-open, largely unexplored spaces that enrich our understanding of what it means to have been lovingly and purposefully created by God.

•

This book was born out of my own set of personal experiences. I grew up deeply immersed in a church community that placed a great deal of emphasis on living a holy life and doing so within the context of a rich and meaningful personal relationship with God. In my small church, there was a tradition for congregation members to select their favorite song, which we would then sing together. I am sure that little congregation of about forty members grew quite tired of singing my favorite because I asked for it over and over again. Each verse started with the line, Jesus is all the world to me, and concluded with the simple but life-affirming sentiment, He’s my friend. Those words depicted the peace-filled world in which I lived almost all the time. Almost! There was one especially perduring problem from which I could not escape. I had an ongoing fear that scientists had disproved the Bible’s origin story, and I went through periods of excruciatingly painful doubt. I was deeply concerned that all those smart people—the scientists—might be right. We were just people of average intelligence; I reasoned, how could I be sure we were right and they were wrong? Being only a child and then a teenager, I certainly did not know enough to critique their analysis. So, mostly I just tried not to think about it and Jesus remained my best (and hopefully not imaginary) friend.

It is now many years later, and I have come to know many biologists who are devout followers of Jesus and would testify to the harmony between their faith and science. Indeed, I have become a biologist and my understanding of the magnificent beauty of biological processes only deepens my faith. This is especially true of the beauty of what we are learning about how our species came to be. Still, however, surveys show that almost all leading biologists (as defined by membership in the National Academy of Sciences in the United States or the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Britain) do not believe in a personal God (~95 percent).

⁹

,

¹⁰

I suppose I’ve read hundreds of biology books, many of them on human evolution, and I have seen few, if any statements in those secular books that lead the reader to believe that the possibility of the personal God of orthodox Christianity is still on the table. This contrasts with the scores of statements I have seen that lead the reader to believe that science has shown that an orthodox Christian perspective is no longer viable. These authors all seem to assume that any God that might exist has been completely removed from any aspect of the biological world for billions of years. In an especially noteworthy book, the late Stephen Jay Gould defined science and religion as occupying separate, nonoverlapping magisteria. Religion occupies a separate sphere from that studied by science and it is confined to questions related to how we should live. His foremost rule within this worldview is that God does not directly ordain important events in the history of nature by special interference.

¹¹

This, as I see it, is the assumption in many classroom biology textbooks. As I will show in pages that follow, this is a worldview assumption, grounded not in scientific data, but based on a particular philosophical viewpoint—one that permeates the evolutionary science community. Students are led to believe (directly or by inference) that science has now shown that the existence of divine activity has played no direct ongoing role in the creation of our species. So, just as I felt decades ago, a young person can easily be under the impression that a person must choose between the science represented by evolutionary biology and the Christian faith. It is true that the Christian community now lays out many books and has whole organizations with an alternative narrative, but most of them are grounded in a notion that unnecessarily pits Christianity against core facts in biology.

For the first third of my career, I was a geneticist immersed in the secular research community. I attained tenure at Syracuse University and fully expected to spend my whole career there. But I chose to move into the Christian university setting in part because I was deeply concerned that Christianity was unwisely seeking to put forth a new science, and one that my community considered to be noteworthy for its poor, easy-to-dismiss quality. That was not what was needed. It was the worldview of scientists like Gould that was flawed, not his evolutionary biology. So, for the past two-thirds of my career, I have been on the biology faculty of one or the other of two Christian universities. From the day I was interviewed at each of the two, I tried to make one thing clear. Even though a significant proportion of my students would be coming into the institution from churches and schools where evolution is considered scientifically flawed, as a biologist I strongly disagreed and would not shy away from explaining why. I was convinced that the evidence for evolution was overwhelming, and I would not support the teaching of a scientific perspective outside of the peer-reviewed scientific mainstream. About nine years into my time at Point Loma Nazarene University (the fall of 1997), our provost called and asked me if I would talk with a person who had a concern about how we teach biology. This person had connections to someone with significant resources, so the matter was sensitive—especially in a tuition-driven institution like ours. The provost was totally supportive of my position but felt that it was important that the rationale be explained. So that was my task—please explain what we do and why. I quickly learned that this outsider wanted to arrange for a course in young earth creationism on our campus. It would be taught pro bono by a highly qualified person with a graduate degree and connections to a young-earth organization across town. I arranged several visits with this man, during which time I was hoping that perhaps he, as a nonbiologist, might get a glimpse of why we in biology would not be able to have a course like that taught under the context that it was credible science. When I finally put my foot down and said no, his response was predictable. As he stormed out of my office, he told me that there would be a tsunami coming my way and that it would sweep me and the reputation of our university as a Christian institution into oblivion. His concern harkened back to events a century and a half earlier on another university campus. Accepting Darwin’s theory of a bestial evolution would lead to a loss of Christian faith. The chant of those Oxford students—Mawn-key! Mawn-key!—could almost be heard echoing in the hallways as I watched him leave.

At the time, I knew of no book written by a biologist for a conservative Christian audience that I could give to this man explaining the logic of evolution in a manner that would show why it is fully consistent with a Christian faith firmly grounded in the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God. He needed to be able to see the rationale for why almost all biologists think that evolution has occurred, but he needed to see it in the context of how a person’s faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is not impoverished but is actually enriched by this reality. Because of that, I set out to write the manuscript that eventually became Coming to Peace with Science, my first book. As my writing proceeded, a draft got into the hands of someone with connections to my tsunami visitor. Apparently, it didn’t help offset any of his concerns. Indeed, I’m pretty sure he thought to himself: The Lord has delivered him into mine hands, and with that began an onslaught that continued for the next two and a half years. Far from soothing any of his fears, my book provided him and others with the ammunition needed to foment a full-scale attack. Sure enough, the efforts came in waves, each of which was designed to knock me out of my faculty position and rescue the institution from faculty members like me. These challenges would have been personally overwhelming were it not for the strong support of church and university administrators who stood firmly behind the principle of academic integrity despite the successful attempt to draw in some of the most influential persons in evangelical Christianity. Given that Christian universities are tuition-driven, there was much at stake financially if our institution received the negative publicity that was threatened. At one point, I was sent a letter containing a set of false statements that I was told would be attributed to me and publicized widely unless I denied them within a tightly prescribed time limit. I did. At another point, I was told by a leader of the Intelligent Design movement that a major Christian radio program was committed to doing a program to show that faculty at Christian colleges were more interested in accommodating to the naturalistic worldview than with challenging it. This person had written a book showing (in his opinion as a legal scholar) that evolutionary theory was deeply flawed; he wanted Christian colleges to challenge this theory according to his formula. He was not a biologist, and I thought his analysis reflected that. The clear implication was that the radio show to which many of the parents of prospective students listened would focus on my university, with me as the prime example of what we were not doing right. We had always tried to be forthright about our perspective on the evolution question, but this was scary to us all because given the twists that they would put on the story it had the potential to do massive reputational damage. A small team including the chair of our biology department, a member of our university’s administrative cabinet, and I traveled to the headquarters of the organization responsible for the radio program. We also had supportive letters from twenty-eight former students who attested to the faith-strengthening value of their experience in the biology department. Fortunately, there was a spirit of God’s love permeating the meeting, and although we disagreed on how God created, any plans for a reputation-damaging radio program were shuttered.

Finally, after almost two and a half years of these sorts of experiences, the last and potentially most consequential episode was my requested appearance before the governing board of the university. The board was respectful, but they wanted to hear a summary of what we taught in the biology department, and how it impacted the Christian faith of our students. There was much on the line, but I will never forget the peace that came over me on the Sunday morning before the meeting, as the Bible study group I led at my church supportively gathered around. Placing their hands on my shoulders, they prayed for me and the defense I would be mounting before the board. The meeting took place five days later. When it was my turn to speak, I told the story of my own life-wrenching struggle with how to put the theory of evolution into the context of my Christian faith. It included a discussion of how supportive a particular church had been to me and my family as I tried to find my place as both a biologist and a person committed to following Jesus.

¹²

After I explained why I thought it was important to guide biology students through the basic evolutionary principles in a Christian context to prepare them for what would lay ahead, the board members stood and warmly applauded. With that, I felt relieved—a standing ovation no less. However, a bit like Darwin I suppose, I had chosen not to discuss my conviction that humans had arisen through the evolutionary process as well. So, early during the question period, one of the board members described a visit he had taken to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, where the supposed lineage to humans was presented in vivid detail. What do you think of that? he asked me kindly. I responded by telling him that I thought this accurately reflected our ancestral lineage. This is how God has created humankind, as well, I said. With that, the mood changed dramatically and there was a collective, almost audible gasp in the room. Indeed, I was quite certain that many of the board members would have gladly taken back that standing ovation of several minutes earlier if only they could have. In the minds of many, it was one thing to accept that animals arose from more primitive forms of life, but a whole other matter to accept that this is our human heritage too. After I was asked to leave for the closed-door session, there was a frank discussion, I was later told. For me, the standing ovation became a faded memory compared to the impression of those concerned looks on board members’ faces at the seemingly heretical notion that we humans had descended from apes.

In the end, I survived; the threatened tsunami never arrived, and I was able to continue as a biology professor at my beloved institution until moving into emeritus status many years later.

As mentioned, the manuscript that provided the energy for those tsunami attempts ended up becoming my book Coming to Peace with Science. Like the talk I gave before the board, and indeed like Darwin’s Origin of Species, I chose to say almost nothing about human evolution in that book. In fact, knowing that the word evolution was synonymous with a godless view of origins in the mind of my intended audience, I decided not to use the word evolution. Instead, I chose to call it gradual creation to emphasize that the process was God’s means of creation, and not an impersonal algorithm. It is now two decades later and still, to my knowledge, there is no broad-ranging, theologically oriented book by a Christian biologist that builds upon the mounting scientific data informing us specifically about how God brought our species—unique as it is—into being. The data indicating that our species was created through the process of common descent are well known and will be summarized in chapter 2 of this book, but the key question remains: How did this come about through divine activity? If God created our species through the evolutionary process, how ought we think about this both scientifically and theologically? There is a growing consensus among scientists over the last couple of decades about how our unique human qualities have come about through the evolutionary process, but this understanding needs to be brought into a theological context. The scientific data are summarized in provocative book titles like Survival of the Friendliest, The Goodness Paradox, The Secret of Our Success, How Compassion Made Us Human, The Creative Spark, and Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Survive, by scholars at leading universities like Duke, Harvard, York, and Princeton. These are science books, though, and they do not attempt to address the possibility of how God, if the divine even exists, may have played a role in bringing about the friendliness, goodness, compassion, creativity, and overall success of our species. The fact is that there has been a set of harmonizing advances in genomics, evolutionary genetics, paleontology, anthropology, and archaeology that are making it increasingly clear just how compatible the science of human origins is with core aspects of the Christian faith. The purpose of this book is to show just how theologically fulfilling the scientific advances are turning out to be.

Science is a gift from God to reveal truths about how creation operates. It can be abused, but rather than fear science, it is important for us to recognize that it facilitates our praise as we more knowingly celebrate the beauty of the natural world. Recently discovered details about the origin of our species are no exception. Science, correctly understood, and Scripture, rightly interpreted, exist in a worshipful, God-ordained, synergistic relationship.

¹³

Science also facilitates our divine calling to live into the image of God, to be God’s representatives on this earth. As we grow in our understanding of the way in which creation operates, we can participate in building a better world—one centered in God’s care for all people. In this scientific age, where nontheistic interpretations of the origin of our species abound, it is important to shift those findings from their portrayal that our appearance on earth is a rudderless cosmic accident. This is untrue and the propagation of this narrative will have devastating consequences. Instead, our origin as a species is tied to our vocation which—by imaging God—is to represent the loving care of God for each other and for all of creation. This is the narrative that lies at the center of this book.

One of the premises of this book is that we have been created out of, and brought into, the love of God. God’s love did not begin with Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants. God, by definition, is love and that love has no beginning.

¹⁴

I will develop the thesis that God’s love was being manifest on those African savannahs over 100,000 years ago regardless of how well it would have been understood. This is consistent with the thinking of the great Christian revivalist of the eighteenth century, John Wesley. My colleague Michael Lodahl summarizes this:

For Wesley, there is no human being who has ever existed who was not deeply loved and immediately graced by God . . . Thus, no human being lives without the Spirit’s wooing to live compassionately and justly with (all) others. . . . [Wesley wrote,] Everyone has some measure of that light, some faint glimmering ray, which sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh into the world.

¹⁵

The Bible’s first eleven chapters starts with a discussion of human origins in the context of a relational God. It then goes on to describe the human predicament showing that God is always seeking to restore relationship despite human sinfulness. Biblical scholar and theologian Terence E. Fretheim emphasizes the importance of recognizing the ramifications of this biblical focus:

This relational God of the Old Testament is not, first and foremost, the God of Israel but of the world. The opening chapters of Genesis, for example, make universal claims for this God. These Genesis chapters portray a God whose universal activity includes creating, grieving, judging, saving, electing, promising, blessing, covenant making, and law giving. And we are not yet to Israel! God was in relationship to the world before there ever was an Israel, and so God’s relationship with Israel must be understood as a subset within this more inclusive and comprehensive divine-world relationship. God’s acting and speaking are especially focused in Israel, but this divine activity is a strategic, purposive move for the sake of the world (Gen

12

:

3

, in you all the families [the families" in Genesis

10

] of the earth shall be blessed"). The election of the family of Abraham and Sarah is an initially exclusive move for the sake of a maximally inclusive end.

¹⁶

Similarly, in the New Testament, the most theological of the four Gospels, John, begins by placing the life of Jesus into the context of the creation of all humankind. John 1:4 states, "In Him was life and that life was the light of all humankind. And the ninth verse goes on to say, The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." That light, John is telling us, did not begin to shine with the birth of Jesus. That light, the second person of the Trinity, is eternal. Like God’s love, there was never a time or a place in which the light of God did not shine. It was often ignored and even darkened by the force of evil, but it was always there.

¹⁷

As Jesus said, Before Abraham was born, I am.

¹⁸

If those people living on the savannahs and shores of Africa over 100,000 years ago had the same sort of needs and desires that we do, then would not the love God has for all people have been present in the midst of their daily life, especially when they struggled? Furthermore, would there not have been periods of time when (or even particular people through whom) the light of God would have been able to break through? We will explore these questions more carefully in the coming pages.

That is the overall background behind this book. To summarize:

•There has been a long running disconnect between the science of biology and biblically grounded Christianity stretching back more than 160 years.

•In part, the disconnect is a result of the worldview of the leading spokespersons of the evolutionary sciences.

•In part, the disconnect is the result of conservative Christians trying to pick apart the science of evolution, when the real issue is the unwarranted philosophical convictions of many of its practitioners.

•In part, the disconnect is the result of conservative Christians not yet theologically addressing the nature of divine activity in human creation in a manner that is informed by the scientific analysis of human evolution.

•This book seeks to build a bridge across the 160-year-old gap, by showing how human evolutionary science is thoroughly consistent with orthodox Christian theology.

So that is the book’s purpose. How is the book structured as it sets out to accomplish this task? It is to that matter we now turn.

•

Chapter 1, The Origin of Our Species and the End of Christianity?, begins by addressing the myth that has been propagated by many of biology’s key spokespersons. Indeed, many of my scientific heroes—those who have done fantastic work in showing how living systems function—Francis Crick, James Watson, Jacques Monod, Richard Lewontin, Edward Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould—are atheists or, at least in the case of Gould, effectively atheistic. Francis Crick, for example, became an atheist at the age of twelve and he spoke freely about the fact that his atheism was a factor motivating his scientific agenda.

¹⁹

In The Eighth Day of Creation, historian Horace Judson wrote, An important reason Crick changed to biology, he said to me, was that he is an atheist, and was impatient to throw light into the remaining shadowy sanctuaries of vitalist illusions.

²⁰

Similarly, in his autobiography, Crick wrote, What would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?

²¹

This sort of writing extends into the popular scientific literature. For example, the noted author David Quammen writes: What [evolution theory] challenges is the supposed godliness of Man—the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence . . .

²²

The science associated with evolutionary theory is not capable of addressing spiritual questions, such as whether humans are in some sense immortal. What sort of scientific experiment could address a question like that? So if Quammen is right and evolutionary theory really does challenge the supposed godliness of Man, then he has moved this aspect of evolutionary theory out of the scientific realm and into the domain of religious philosophy. Sadly though, he doesn’t tell his readers what he has done, and his wording implies it is science itself that has pushed the concept of humans having been created in the image of God out of the picture. These subtle switches—back and forth between worldview and science—have made it difficult for the general public to sort through what is a real scientific conclusion, as opposed to one that is really a philosophical assumption. So, what are the limits of science and when are biology’s spokespersons crossing those lines? That is one all-important matter that is the focus of chapter 1.

But it is not enough just to point out the messiness brought about by conflating scientific and worldview conclusions. The question still remains: since science has been enormously successful at explaining natural processes without needing to invoke a supernatural presence, is the worldview that the supernatural really exists still reasonable? Does any well-founded logic remain for thinking the divine exists or is it just wishful thinking? The apostle Paul once wrote that if Christ was not raised from the dead, Christians are of all persons most to be pitied.

²³

The atheist evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne latched onto these words of Paul, claiming correctly that the supposed occurrence of the resurrection is the linchpin of Christian theology.

²⁴

Coyne, of course, thinks that belief in the resurrection is a childish fantasy. But is it? This is the crux because if the resurrection of Jesus Christ really did occur, it would mean there is more to reality than what we are able to see with our eyes, touch with our fingers, and measure with our scientific instruments. Is there any way of examining the reasonableness of this belief or will it always be only in the realm of what is hoped to have been true? Chapter 1 examines this carefully through the work of a set of historical scholars and concludes that not only is it a highly reasonable historical hypothesis, but there is reason to think it is the most reasonable explanation. The chapter goes on to show that it is logically possible to build one’s life around the supposition that we are a purposefully created species, and not an accidental result of an impersonal algorithm.

From there the book turns to what the scientific investigations do tell us about how our species came into existence. This is done in two phases. Chapter 2 focuses on the origin of our genus, Homo, and chapter 3, on the origin of our species, Homo sapiens. The narrative begins with a discussion of why we can be quite certain that we did indeed share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos by examining genetic and fossil evidence. The story then follows the gradual change in the fossils of our family tree as its members came to acquire the distinctive key features that characterize our lineage. Increasing brain size is an especially noteworthy feature, and it began to distinguish our ancestors about two million years ago. The genetic changes that likely played a key role in setting this brain alteration in motion are fascinating and, even though this is a book for nonspecialists, I think the changes can be explained in a way that gives the reader a sense of excitement for what we are learning about how these changes took place at the biological level. Following the chapter 2 overview, we are ready to explore a couple of theological questions that emerge as part of the context of a long, multi-million-year journey to humanness. What, for example, does this enormous length of time imply about God as Creator? Why so long? Could it be, chapter 2 asks, that God delights in the entire long parade of creation through time? After all, Genesis 1 tells us at the end of each stage that God saw that it was good, and John 1 informs us that without him nothing was made that has been made. Creatures—all creatures—have always been embedded in the love that flows from God into creation.

²⁵

It is not all about us.

When our species gradually emerged in Africa about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago there were still at least seven other Homo species in Africa, Europe, and Asia. Many of these species still existed as some members of our species left Africa and entered the Middle East 70,000 or so years ago. However, by 39,000 years ago, all the others had gone extinct. Up until that point, for several million years, there had been multiple hominin

²⁶

species, sometimes even in the same geographical area. As described in chapter 3, many investigators think that something had happened that had given our species a distinct adaptive advantage, and the question for the ages has been what that quality (or set of qualities) was. There is a growing consensus, though, that what set Homo sapiens individuals apart was their highly sophisticated, others-focused, social brains. We, like no other species, have unique skills in understanding the minds of others, and through that quality, we are inimitably capable of working together to accomplish mutually desirable objectives. The key question examined throughout chapter 3 is how this quality came about. The ability to understand that another individual has a mind like one’s own and to be able to form a theory about what an individual is thinking is called theory of mind. Chimpanzees have a rudimentary theory of mind—they can sometimes understand the intentions of another and can gauge their own behavior based on their perceptions of the intentions of another. However, our species takes this to a whole different level and our entire existence