Evolution and Imago Dei/Original Sin

Regarding evolution's implications for our belief that humans are created in God's image, Matt Donovan writes:

When I was a grad student at BC and studying under some of Bernard Lonergan's students, we were often referred to Lonergan's notion of "naive realism" -- the prevailing modern bias of equating the real with the material. There seems to be a lot of naive realism going around these days, perhaps inspired by the recent publications from Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, among others.

To be sure, that we are made in God’s image is an important teaching in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it is perhaps not as anthropomorphic as one might suspect. The most obvious scriptural source for the teaching, of course, comes from the two creation stories in Genesis. The first story uses the language of "God creat[ing] man in God’s image." But the second story gives us more detail about the process of that creation. And according to Gen. 2:7, that process is two-fold.

First, "God formed man out of the clay of the earth"; that is, one could say that he created our physical, chemical, and biological make-up out of the earthly matter he had already created. (By the way, for a fascinating evolutionary account of creation in the Genesis stories, see Leo Strauss's "On the Interpretation of Genesis" and "Jerusalem and Athens" in part VI of Kenneth Hart Green's collection, "Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity"). But second, and perhaps more importantly, God "blew into his nostrils the breath of life" such that "man became a living being"; that is, one could say that man becomes distinctly human only after being directly enlightened with the immaterial spirit of the divine.

This accounts, in part, for the traditional Judeo-Christian anthropological construction of man as mind or spirit embodied. And as Aristotle noted, it is intelligence or rationality that distinguishes human beings from other biological beings. In other words, being "created in God’s image," seems to be intimately connected to being endowed with his spirit; that is, being endowed with intelligence -- the pure immaterial intelligence that God is. Put another way, unlike the reductionist (or naive realist) anthropology of, say, modern scientific materialism, the Judeo-Christian doctrine regarding the "Imago Dei" puts forth a more transcendent anthropology that takes into account -- perhaps emphasizes -- the immaterial, spiritual, or rational element of man’s make-up.

Today's conversation around these latter realities of the human condition seems to me rather inadequate for the most part.

On my related question regarding evolution and original sin, Matt Festa recommends Edward Oakes' article, Original Sin: A Disputation, along with helpful follow-up questions and comments from First Things readers.

And another (anonymous) reader recommends Peter van Inwagen's work on evolution and the Fall.  The reader believes that, in van Ingwagen's view, "God caused an ape or some other sort of non-human animal to be distinctively human, and that was Adam."  In the reader's view, "for my money, just give up on evolution." 

Rob