The Epigenetic Image of God?

 

At the recent 2021 Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting, William Lane Craig's book, "In Quest of the Historical Adam", was reviewed by several scholars from an Old Testament perspective, a theological perspective, and a scientific perspective. As well, he had a chance to respond to their critiques as well as respond to questions from the audience. This blog post involves the content of the book as well as the discussion and clarifications made by Craig at that meeting.

Craig, in his book, is trying to present an interpretation of the Bible which is maximally harmonious with the available scientific observations while, at the same time, affirming a historical Adam and Eve without having to have people "outside of the garden of Eden" as suggested by Swamidass.  Craig affirms an ontological understanding of the image of God.  He identifies the image with four observable characteristics.  He then observes that Homo Sapiens, Denisovans, and Neanderthals all seem to have these characteristics.  So, he argues that the first Adam and Eve must be a common ancestor, which, as a placeholder, he tentatively proposes as Homo Heidelbergensis. In doing so, Craig assigns the first eleven chapters of Genesis as "historical-myth" where we should not consider them to be literal.  Thus, Craig's book denies a global flood, extremely long aged people, talking snakes, and other things which seem to him to be "fantastic" and out of harmony with the scientific data. As well, he considers the city-building and farming in Genesis 4 to be "an anachronism by the author of Genesis". He does this while affirming that God can and does still do Special Divine Action miracles on occasion. Craig affirms that Adam and Eve received the image of God and a soul by God's fiat creation at 500kya (thousand years ago).  His view is agnostic toward Traducianism vs. Soul Creationism after Adam and Eve's soul creation.

As part of the scientific critique, it was argued that the same genetic process which creates the Habsburg Jaw would seem to prevent, even in theory, the idea that a single pair of humans can be the parents to all of humanity. The royal family of the Habsburgs, because of inbreeding, had a 50% infant mortality rate while the peasants who lived around them had only a 25% infant mortality rate. The high infant mortality rate caused the Habsburg family line to cease within a few hundred years. As an illustration, it was mentioned that when an endangered species is below 100 in population, that species is functionally extinct already because of this.  Thus, it was argued that the behaviors that Craig wants to originate with a single pair of people cannot be done so through a genetic process over DNA propagation.

Instead, the author of the scientific critique suggested that a more viable possibility might be through an epigenetic process, instead of a genetic one. It was a brief statement without further elaboration on what that would look like.  However, if the image of God were epigenetic, it would seem that God is performing a creation of the soul, perhaps at conception, such that the genes will interpret our DNA sequence differently.  The problem with this approach would be that epigenetic changes are reversible and the Bible does not present the image of God as a reversible thing, assuming an ontological understanding of the image.  Still, this does seem like a possibility and maybe something that could be testable and researched.  An alternate option would be to investigate if there were some type of DNA factor which would not suffer the genetic defect that produces the Habsburg Jaw.  That issue seems to be occurring only in species with a male and female sex.  I wonder whether or not starfish or amoebas have that same problem.  If starfish and amoebas do not have this problem, perhaps that could clue us into some, as yet undiscovered, DNA genetic process that would overcome the Habsburg Jaw issue.  Otherwise, our options would seem to be limited to the epigenetic factor, or perhaps simply to another unknown factor altogether.