It is true, however, that the creation account in Genesis does not prepare us for the discovery that man has about 98 percent of his DNA in common with apes. In his Descent of Man, Darwin writes that “man … still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Our resistance to this is not religious; it is because we sense a significant chasm between ourselves and chimpanzees.
Of course Darwin is not saying that man is descended from chimpanzees, only that apes and man are descended from a common ancestor. Whatever the merits of this theory, there is no reason to reject it purely on biblical grounds. Christians since medieval times have agreed with Aristotle that man is an animal—a “rational animal,” but still an animal.
What makes man different, according to the Bible, is that God breathed an immaterial soul into him. Thus there is no theological problem in viewing the bodily frame of man as derived from other creatures. The Bible stresses God’s resolution, “Let us make man in our image.” Christians have always understood God as a spiritual rather than a material being. Consequently if man is created in the “likeness” of God, the resemblance is clearly not physical. When Jared Diamond in his book The Third Chimpanzee refers to humans as “little more than glorified chimpanzees.” he is unwittingly making a Christian point.’3
We may have common ancestors with the animals, but we are glorified animals.
But didn’t the main opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution come from religious people, specifically Christians? Actually, no. Hindus, Jews, and Muslims have never really had a problem with evolution because they have always understood their creation stories as parables. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb writes that when Darwin published his Origin of Species, one group rejected the theory of evolution because of the perception that it undermines Christianity, and another group embraced it for the same reason.
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