Genesis 2:4-7 - Moses Recorded the Evolution of Man (Part 2)
In Genesis 2:4-7 - Moses Recorded the Evolution of Man (Part 1), I showed how the following verses accurately describe the world, about 4.4 - 4.5 billion years ago:
4 This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; 6 but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.
However, I stopped short of verse 7, which is perhaps one of the most controversial verses for Old Earth Creationists to discuss with Young Earth Creationists.
The reason this is so hard to interpret is because the verse literally says that man was formed from dust, and then God breathed into him the breath of life. It is quite easy to imagine that God just took some dust, shaped a man from it, then breathed into the nostrils, and the body went from a pile of dust to biological living tissue that can walk, talk, and worship God. However, I do not believe that this is what happened. In fact, now that we can date when verses 4 to 6 occurred, I believe that verse 7 is almost painfully clear.
As I discussed in the post above, there was in fact a time almost 4.5 billion years ago when there was no man, there were no plants, there were no herbs, it had never rained, and mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. The process is known as out-gassing, and it eventually created the deep that God’s spirit hovered over in Genesis 1:2.
Now, get this picture in your head. What is there? What has been created so far? Nothing that grows. Just the earth’s crust and the water that has been out-gassing from it. Now read our next verse, Genesis 2:7…
7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Did you catch that? When there was nothing but earth and water, that is what God worked with. That is it, and that is all scripture records God using to make man. But now, let us add a little bit of science to shed some light on what this suggests.
Humanoid-like beings first appear in the fossil record about 5.5 million years ago. Neanderthals branched off less than 1 million years ago, and then appear to have joined back later on. Modern humans seemed to have appeared a bit more than 10,000 years ago. The fossil record is fairly clear on the order, and shows a definite progression toward more and more capable beings, complete with evidence in our DNA of connections between the different stages. I have written on this extensively:
Does “Full Humanity” Predate Homo Sapiens? (Part 1 - Altars)
Does “Full Humanity” Predate Homo Sapiens? (Part 2 - Neanderthals)
Does “Full Humanity” Predate Homo Sapiens? (Part 3 - Language)
I still have to finish that series. Argh.
For now however, the point is that whether you consider the first full humans to be those humanoid-like primates 5.5 million years ago, or the modern humans that appear much more recently, there appears to be at least 4 billion years that elapsed between Genesis 2:7 and the actual appearance of Adam. And scientifically, that is quite palatable, because that is the time over which it appears all of life, from the first amino acids to the first man appear to have evolved on the earth (when I say “appear to have evolved”, I am leaving it open for God to have been active in what happened). Given the conditions of the earth recorded by scripture and discovered by science under which God created man, scripture only maintains its cohesiveness if there is no break in between God’s activity 4.5 billion years ago, and His results in Genesis 2:7 around 4 billion years later. This means of course, that regardless of what science has revealed, in scripture there is no missing link. What looks like happened, happened. There was a progression that started with the wet ground 4 billion years ago, and continuing until the breathing of life by God into man.
It is too bad that scientists have failed to see God’s presence in the process that they are the chief advocates for… and the Christians have failed to see God’s presence in that process, too. It is nearly unanimous that if things are as they appear, then it was a Godless process, when at least to me, scientists are correct in their level discovery, Christians are correct about the level of God’s involvement, and neither realizes that God was work for 4 billion years. I am glad this is not a salvific issue in general… but for some it is, and my heart aches for them.
This of course begs a very interesting question… exactly what process did God follow? What did God do over 4 billion years to create Adam from the dust of the earth that existed so so long ago? Where does the Bible record that? The answer is Genesis 1. And the first action that God took was to say, “Let there be light!” And, there was light.
Did you catch that? It turns out that Genesis 1 was never the history of how God created the Heavens and the Earth, but of what He did after that. It always was. In fact, it is the history of how God created man, or at least created the earth for man and then man to take care of it. It contributes to the significance that every day in Genesis 1 is described as good, but the creation of man was very good.
If you go back and read Genesis 1, you will see that God’s words do not actually cause the initial appearance of animals, but cause them flourish from what was there:
- “Let the land produce vegetation” — the land itself produced it!
- “Let the water teem with living creatures” — it just wasn’t teeming before, but living creatures were already there!
- “let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky” — the birds just weren’t filling the sky yet, but they were already there!
- “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds” — there were already “kinds”; the land produced others from them.
- “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule” — Man was already there, but not in God’s image, and not ruling.
I can imagine someone objecting to my usage of language above, but it is similar to the usage of language that many Christians Apologists utilize to prove there is a God. For those who argue that man cannot imagine anything greater than what there is. Therefore, because they can imagine God, God must therefore exist. Similarly, for God to make a statement about making man in His image, man must already exist to be made in God’s image… he just isn’t in God’s image yet.
So, to close this post (I’m not done with 2:7 quite yet though), Genesis 1 spans the 4 billion years over which Genesis 2:7 refers, meaning that all of the creation was made for the benefit of man… it is why God made man last. And it means that our fossil record is a real fossil record… whether we interpret correctly or not, it was there to find because it always was. And where scientists cannot see a natural occurrence, yet there it is, they are seeing God… because evolution was indeed a process. It was God’s process for creating man. No randomness per se, but a lot of God.