A Progressive Creation theory:
Many in the Christian world view are unaware that it does not have to be in opposition to scientific discovery.
Here is an example of a “progressive creationistic” theory that uses the scriptural account as a foundation. I don’t blame anyone else for this theory – it is entirely mine. I enjoy thinking about this things – and honestly even musing over it…
I used to spend more time delving into the debate with my best friend, but since he died,
I am less passionate about trying to uncover the right answer and now more enjoy just considering these questions of biblical insight and scientific thought. Since very often, this conversation leads to creation questions, I enjoy speculating on that topic.
And it is speculation… I am not trying to create doctrine or even a defense (though I would love feedback and criticism). I just enjoy the conversation. If you find it offensive, feel free to dismiss it and move on to some other article that won’t raise blood pressure.
I came up with it when I was more interested in answering this specific question was an attempt to use the findings of biologists and geologists to explain some of the questions left open in scripture – so let me pose these are questions to you:
Could the origin in the dust (or “soil,” or “earth” Gen 2:7) to man been a lengthy (m/ billions of years) process? If so, could this not reflect the secular thought of the “primordial soup” from which sprang the first single celled organisms? God seems to like recapitulating His ways – maybe He started the first person with a single cell and started it on His loving cultivation path toward humanity.
Could Adam have been the first physical Homo Erectus, Sapiens, whatever, in the sense that he was the first with an eternal “Spirit.” In the Hebrew phrase (Gen 2:7) “breathed the breath of life,” two different words are used for breath. The first one means “blow or puff;” the second is:
neshamah (nesh-aw-maw’)a puff, i.e. wind, angry or vital breath, divine inspiration, intellect. or (concretely) an animal:
KJV – blast, (that) breath (-eth), inspiration, soul, spirit.
(Biblesoft’s New Exhaustive Strong’s Numbers and Concordance with Expanded Greek-Hebrew Dictionary. Copyright (c) 1994, Biblesoft and International Bible Translators, Inc.)
Could it be that the breath of life that God breathed into Him made him human, rather than being the first thing to look human? (aka was the final step to true humanity internal rather than external or spiritual rather than physical?)
The idea would be that God crafted humans starting with the dirt of creating man and then spent millennia moving this life through the stages of development through a process like evolution… which would explain the stages of development of the human fetus as well as the stages of creation in Genesis 1.
The idea of “after their own kind” would represent the genetic changes that God was working into their generations.
The world would have been populated with many different animals and creatures… and over the time, many would have gone extinct, evolved into other species, etc.
I am of the opinion that the “death” described in Genesis 1-3 and Romans 5 is the spiritual death of Eph 2. It is not physical death that was ushered in for the first time at the fall of man (after all, neither Adam nor Eve died immediately) but a spiritual death. It was not the first breath (see above) that stopped for the first time, but the second.
Thus, at the time of Adam, the world would have been populated by many different creatures that looked 
relatively human. Perhaps Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, or Cro-Magnon… maybe something like “Omo1” type creatures would have been around.
If this were the case, it would answer the question of Cain’s concern: Cain could have feared all of these other “people” (animal/humans – “humans” without the breathe of divinity in them) who could kill him without God’s divine protection.
Basically, before Adam, humans were morally no different from animals (is the theory).
This could also answer where Cain’s and Seth’s wives came from, as well as explain why God passed all of the animal by Adam for him to name, but through the naming process, Adam discovered “there was no suitable helpmeet for Adam.” In other words, all the animals did not mean just dogs and lions, but things that looked quite a bit like a person as well. It was not the physical differences that made them “unsuitable,” it was also the spiritual intimacy.
In time, or perhaps after the flood incident, animal/humans would have died out or been competed out by these humans with self-knowledge and a two-way relationship with God, as well as the cultivation He had taught Adam?
I see no scriptural problem with man evolving from single celled organisms – we each were single celled organisms at one point – perhaps the process of growth in the womb is a picture of the original plan? (phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny).
There is an inappropriate emotional response by many Christians to the word “evolution.” This is as inappropriate as the initial response by us to the concept of “The Big Bang.” As mentioned before, both are merely an effort by scientists to describe a process. There should be no moral implications connected (granted there often are, as many “scientists” now treat these processes as a form of religion).
However, we should not be offended by the idea of God making use of a process, like evolution, to create and change His creation any more than of Him using the water cycle to create rain, gravitational pull to create a day, the light spectrum to create a rainbow, or even the process of statistics to guide the rolling of dice! Understanding a process does not steal away anything Divine, but only the superstitious version of religion. These in depth and complicated processes should do nothing more than prove a designer! The more complex a process, the better the proof!
In fact, to dismiss a designer for no better reason than understanding the process makes little logical sense… if I understand the process for how an airplane is built, does that dismiss Boeing from existence? To me, this has seemed similar to finding a murder scene and deciding the more I learn about the murder process, the more I become convinced that there was no murderer. I think investigation should move us in the opposite direction.
I do have a problem with the secular view that man is essentially no different that animals, and the view that evolution is random – precisely because of what I wrote above, and just from the statistical issues involved. This seems unlikely from a statistical view and from a final outcome view.
But, could there be a designer involved?
Click here for V
The film Genesis Impact on Tubi is worth watching if you haven’t already seen it.
thanks! I will check it out!
“A single cell each time he creates a new human.” This is the same simplistic assertion that Darwin made when he believed that the cell was truly “simple”. The process of bringing the gametes together is hardly simple. The merging of their chromosomes to create a zygote is nothing short of miraculous, borne on enormous and extraordinary reproductive infrastructure in their complimentary male/female vessels.
Did God say he made Adam or Eve from a “single cell”? No, and he didn’t make any of the animals or plants from a single cell either. This is God’s direct and deliberate testimony – to in diametric opposition to the claims of the evolutionary narrative.
The insights in general revelation that have been more recently delivered to us by medicine and biology, confirm God’s testimony and refute man’s testimony to the contrary.
So no, he does not start with a single cell. He starts with two humans who carry the extraordinary reproductive infrastructure to produce haploid gametes that – when they come together through the mating of this extraordinary infrastructure, conceive life “into” a single cell.Let’s keep in mind that the ovum is a cell, and the sperm is a cell. Two cells mating into a single cell. But was only one sperm involved? No, millions of sperm were involved and the system to choose the strongest one practically guarantees that the few strongest swimmers- and thus the most robust of the millions, will get a shot to mate with the ovum. And when the first of these enters the ovum and conception happens, the ovum immediately forms an outer protective shell that keeps other sperm from entering. Where did these lockstep, automatic and detailed instructions come from? Is it all really starting with a single cell, or is it startng with a massively complex infrastructure to intersect to a single cell?
The single zygote cell is actually the intermediate intersection point of a vast array of processes, but is by no means the “starting point”.
And what does this single cell contain? The instruction set to build and maintain a new human. The instruction set immediately takes-off and starts to manufacture the new human. But first, it sends signals to the mother’s body, hijacking her metabolism and completely taking control of it. The notion that the mother is the master vessel is a myth. The baby is in complete control of the gestational cycle and commands the mother’s body to conform to its needs – and is even in control of iniitating labor and managing the conditions of the birth event. The baby and mother are a tightly integrated machine – and the mechanics and interactions of this machine were designed before the “single cell” started using it – it was laid down in the instruction set of the original mother,(Eve) who didn’t even need the instructions for herself – her first offspring was the first one to ever use it.
And the odd part is, once the baby is born, the instructions for building-the-baby go dormant, and the regular instructions for the human remain operational. The build-a-baby instructions are only even necessary in the instruction set if the baby is a female – but are completely superfluous if the baby is a male. Yet both male and female carry a complete set. In every cell of their bodies.
The notion of progressive creation attempts to merge God’s testimony with the specious and peripheral testimonies of humans who were not privy to the intricate medical and reproductive details of humans, animals and plants (the theory has been around a long time).
But now that medical science has enlightened us away from the practically medeival medical knowledge available when progressive creation was first postulated, we can dispense with it. There is nothing simple about a single cell, and God doesn’t start with a single cell to do anything, least of all create a new human. And he said so.
So to your point – let’s do embrace the data and evidence from the general revelation. And let’s not reduce things to “simple” quantities. The evolutionary “way” is to treat such things as very simple when they are truly breathtakingly complex in every aspect.
Ps 139 says:
“I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knows right well. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there were none of them”
In the above, the God tells us that the instructions to build and maintain us were written down in a book (His book) before we were created. Medical science tells us that DNA is a complex database of instructions. And now we know that God has written these instructions in heaven before we are conceived.
So no, God doesn’t start with a single cell. He starts by committing our created being to his book before the process ever starts.
There is an important lesson in the continuum here – God’s spirit overshadowed Mary and she conceived Jesus. God himself entered the creation to walk and talk with humans for a short period. This conception followed the same basic process that God used when he made Adam, to manufacture the necessary parts, and in this case to manufacture the perfect haploid gamete to mate with Mary’s ovum. All of the necessary genetic instructions for the gamete were manufactured by God to support this conception event. This is why Jesus is called the “last Adam”. His genetic instructions came directly from God’s mind.
Josh, feel like you are responding to a different article again. I didn’t say simple. Single cell. And I am quite certain (at least 90%) that you started out as a single cell. That being the case, it is obviously not unreasonable to think God might create a human starting with a single cell.
I do not think Paul was thinking Gamete when referring to Christ as the second Adam… but rather that He was a moral free agent and representative for mankind… like Adam had been. Josh, it seems to me that you need to have your own website if you do not. You seem to have a lot to say about stuff.
It may not be unreasonable to believe that God “might” create a human from a single cell. But this simply isn’t what God plainly said that he did.
God clearly claims that he made male and female of each kind, including humans, with their “seed within themselves” This PERFECTLY dovetails with our modern scientific knowledge of the reproductive cycle for all living things.
In this regard, God didn’t use a single cell, but two multi-cellular humans, each contributing a single cell (sperm and ovum) that combine to a zygote, which is an intermediate step – not the first step – toward making a new human. Looks like a lot of cells are involved in this process – especially when we consider that millions of sperm cells are initially involved from the male human.
So while it may “seem” reasonable to speculate how God “might” do it another way than the way He plainly asserts how he did it, it is not reasonable to assert that God “actually” did it another way than the way he describes.
Case in point, if I tell you that I built a house on a hill using a specific method that allowed me to finish in half the time of a normal construction project, you may think that it’s not unreasonable to suppose that I “might” have constructed it another way. Sure, it’s okay to speculate other ways I may have built the house. But it is unreasonable to assert that I ‘actually’ used another method than the one i plainly described.
Please review my prior post again. I think you missed that I directly addressed the difference between a single-cell origin of man and the Scriptural origin of man, that God describes his method and reasoning. He created man in his image. He is not a single cell.
Chris this whole page is something of a train wreck. Are you aware that Ernst Haeckel was censured for fraud in his Recapitulation theory? He contrived the drawings to make them look similar, but it was declared fraudulent over 100 years ago.
Death has a scriptural place – it was not part of the original creation (plants don’t have Biblical “life”)
The Scripture very clearly teaches that mankind arrived first, followed by sin, then death.
1Co 15:21 “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.”
Rom 5:12 “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:”
If God found the process of evoluton so useful, and that it includes death, struggle and cruelty yet he still called it very good? Why then is death called an enemy and something to be destroyed? It is not welcome in the creation and never has been:
1Co 15:26 “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
We are told that Jesus is the “lamb slain from the foundation of the world” – that the provision of substitutionary death for humans was in-play at the foundation. When Adam sinned, God immediately invoked this provision by slaying two animals and covering them with coats of skins. He showed them that sacrifice would be necessary for remission of sin. The very next scene we have Cain and Abel performing ritual sacrifice, and we learn that Abel’s was acceptable because it was a blood offering. Cain’s was rejected because it was not.
Why would you call Adam’s death a “spiritual death”? Jesus died for the sins of Adam, and it was a very physical death. God never relented on the need for blood to pay for sin, and death as its penalty:
Heb 9:22 “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.”
Rom 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The only reason to say that there were “pre-humans” is to bow to the evolutionary narrative. Evolution has never been observed. The Big Bang is not settled science either.
I don’t have an emotional response to poor science. Evolution just poor science and the people who practice it are atheists and predisposed to hate God and disprove his existence. Why on earth would I take side with anything they say, especially since evoluton and the Big Bang have both been falsified many times over?
The end of it all, is that you apparently cannot accept that God told the simple truth about how he created the heavens and the earth. You would apparently rather listen to the musings of atheistic scientists who seem to change their minds with the shifting winds. The scientists weren’t there. God was there to witness what he did, and told us what he did.
If we attempt to “come up with” a new story to supplant the existing rendition, then we are simply rejecting the authority of Scripture. In other words, we are not authorized to supplant the original account with another that we might like better. Either Genesis One means exactly/precisely what it says, or it means nothing at all.
I do not need Haeckel’s drawings, I have seen the photos of the fetuses and in some cases, fetuses, with some of the traits listed here. However, of course I know there is debate about the interpretation of some of the traits. That is why my references to this were clearly supposition. Is this not a rational option? It is a rational option that God might have created progressively. Further, I know for sure that He starts with a single cell every time He creates a human. Of course I believe that God told the Truth about creation. However, as a student of Scripture I know the necessity of good hermeneutics… and the argument that I am making in this series of articles is that I do not think it is wrong to adjust our understanding of specific revelation when there are new insights into general revelation.
I don’t think that anyone “practices” evolution…and of course there are many Christians who accept it as a theory who are neither atheist nor any more predisposed to hate God than any other fallen human. However, if such an atheist claimed that 2+2=4, I would take their side, since they would be telling the truth. Truth transcends sides of an argument… which is exactly the point I am working on in this series.
Very insightful. Thanks for putting reason and logic to reality and still connecting it to the creator of all, God!
It is supposition, but it is still intriguing.
This is awesome stuff Chris! I’ve enjoyed each post in this series. Do your theories in this part IV fall into any of the categories you listed in part III, or any other theory out there?
Also, with these theories in part IV, does one have to part with the traditional creationist view (i.e. 6 24 hour literal days) or is it your thought that it would still be possible that God created in 6 literal days but used evolution over the course of billions of years thereafter?
There are some theories like that too – there are so many different perspectives. I do not know that my own personal perspective falls into anything but the huge swimming pool of “I think some kind of progressive creation makes sense.” It is partially intriguing to me because of my love of study and nature and the natural sciences AND the love I have for scripture and theology.
There are also many views that indicate that the movement of time as we understand it might have not started until day 4, for example… and I think the idea that He created in 6 – 23 hour,56 minute and 4.1 second days, and THEN started evolving the creatures He had created would be interesting to investigate. It would be tough to reconcile, but probably not impossible.