Theistic evolution, generally defined, is the belief that natural
processes sustained by God’s ordinary providence were the means by which
he brought about life and humanity. It often entails a common ancestry
for all living things, macro-evolution, and some version of polygenesis.
William Dembski explains:
For young-earth and old-earth creationists, humans bearing the divine image were created from scratch. In other words, God did something radically new when he created us–we didn’t emerge from pre-existing organisms. On this view, fully functioning hominids having fully human bodies but lacking the divine image never existed. For most theistic evolutions, by contrast, primate ancestors evolved over several million years into hominids with fully human bodies. (God and Evolution, 91)
According to some proponents of theistic evolution Genesis 2:7
is a reference to God’s work in history whereby he made Adam into a
spiritual being in the image of God, instead of the lesser sort of being
he was before. This approach still insists on the historicity of Adam
and Eve and their real fall in the Garden. But, on this view, Adam may
not have been the first human:
According to [Denis] Alexander’s preferred model, anatomically modern humans emerged some 200,000 years ago, with language in place by 50,000 years ago. Then, around 6,000-8,000 years ago, God chose a couple of Neolithic farmers, and then he revealed himself for the first time, so constituting them as Homo divinus, the first humans to know God and be spiritually alive. (Should Christians Embrace Evolution?, 47) Continue at Kevin DeYoung
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