Truth Matters
All truth matters, but some truths matter more than others. What matters most about human beings is that we have been created in the image of God and endowed with an eternal soul. Like God, we have personality, a phenomenon that entails five attributes: (1)Self-consciousness and selfawareness; (2)Self-determination – the capacity (within certain limitations) to think and act independently and to exercise free will; (3)Intelligence – the capacity to acquire knowledge and to think rationally, critically, and creatively; (4)A sense of moral consciousness and the capacity for discerning good and evil; and (5)An innate sense of God-consciousness.
The Fundamental Questions
These five properties are unique to our soul, not to our body. In that respect, it does not matter so much how we got our body, since the crucial element that makes us human is our soul. But to concede the point that how we got our body is of secondary importance does not imply that it is unimportant.
All Christians believe that human beings have been created in the image of God. But when it comes to the issue of human origins, Christians hold to one of three positions: Young Earth Creationism (YEC), Old Earth Special Creationism (OESC), and Theistic Evolution (TE – also called Evolutionary Creationism).
For the Christian, there are three criteria that have to be considered regarding this and other science-related issues: (1)Is a particular position
philosophically tenable (or theoretically possible)? (2)Is it scientifically credible – i.e., is there sufficient scientific evidence for this view? and (3)Is it biblically and theologically supportable?
Regarding the three aforementioned positions that Christians hold on human origins, all are philosophically tenable. After all, if God wanted to create all life forms instantaneously in a single 24-hour day, he is certainly capable of doing so. Likewise, if God chose to use
evolutionary processes to create human beings over a period of hundreds of millions of years, it is no less a miracle. But the question isn’t whether a view is theoretically possible, but does it correlate to our best scientific evidence, and is it compatible with a reasonable
interpretation of the Genesis creation account? For a view to be credible, it must meet all three criteria.
The controversy over human origins may not be the most pressing issue facing the church today, but the truth of the matter nonetheless has important ramifications. On October 3rd the Areopagus will sponsor a forum featuring two of the foremost Christian proponents of Old Earth Special Creationism and Theistic Evolution – Dr. Fazale Rana of Reasons To Believe and Dr. Darrel Falk of the BioLogos Foundation. This is a unique opportunity to hear the best arguments both for and against each position in a civil but uncompromising exchange of views, and to decide for yourself which position best correlates to the scientific facts as we know them and an honest and faithful interpretation of Scripture.
