Ok. Lets do.
Premise#1: Non-constancy of Species.
This is a hypothesis/theory.
By implication, then, it means that human beings, the species, was another species in the past, and will be so too in the future, something which the evolution hypothesis predicts.
Evolution does not, with
certainty, predict humans will transform to a new species. H. sapiens could go extinct. Also, of course, God could decide to close down the universe before H. sapiens transforms to another species.
What I understand of evolution is that human beings will become a new species in the future, and perhaps you can tell me what this species can possibly be (and it can be a falsibility test for evolution, albeit million of years into the future, if it is predicted and recorded now.)
Evolution is contingent on 2 things: the environment and available variations. We cannot know what changes will be in the environment nor what new variations will appear via mutation or sexual recombination. Therefore it is impossible to predict what the species will be.
We can, however, look at what is happening
now in H. sapiens and see evolution at work.
Most speciation is allopatric: a population becomes geographically isolated and faces a different environment. That (relatively) small population evolves to a new species. The original species still exists, so now we have 2 species instead of one.
H. sapiens is facing disruptive selection. This is a form of natural selection that happens to populations spread over a large geographical area. Subpopulations face different environments and direction selection (what we think of when we say "natural selection") adapts those sub-populations to the different environments. That tends to generate new species. But gene flow between the subpopulations as individuals from the subpopulations interbreed tends to stop the split into separate species.
Directional selection is documented among H. sapiens in at least 3 cases:
1. Himalayan (Tibetan) mountains.
2. Andean mountains.
3. The !Kung in the Kalahari desert.
This paper -- 6: Hum Biol 2000 Feb;72(1):201-28, Tibetan and Andean patterns of adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia. Beall CM -- reviews the work on the first 2. Both populations are facing a hypoxic environment of high altitude. Both have evolved adapations, but
different adaptations, to that environment. Those adaptations are genetic. A major allele for oxygen saturation was detected among the Tibetans that is not present is sea-level dwellers. Now,
if those populations remain isolated, they would evolve into separate species. But modern roads, railroads, and airports make it easier for sea-level dwellers to meet and marry mountain dwellers and vice verse. So gene flow is also operating.
In the !Kung, gene flow is less and the !Kung have several alleles in several genes that are unique to them. When a !Kung marries outside the !Kung, the !Kung must go live with the spouse's people. So there is some gene flow out of the !Kung, but no gene flow into the !Kung. Have you ever seen the movie
The Gods Must Be Crazy? In it a blond Englishwoman and a male !Kung meet. Each considers the other ugly and
not a potential mate. That's well along in the process of reproductive isolation. A major form of reproductive isolation is for members of each population simply not consider members of the other populations as mates. They do not mate, and thus reproductive isolation and new species. So, if the Kalahari remains isolated from other humans and the !Kung retain their mating policy, we will see H. !Kung in several dozen generations.
: Man made in the image of God.
Now I know too, from non scientific sources - science not having the monopoly of truth, unless you disagree (which then renders everything below irrelevant) - that human beings were "made" in the "image of God".
Now there are a few questions immediately arising from this fact and what evolution hypothesize.
The problem is a misinterpretation of "image of God". That misunderstanding has plagued Judeo-Christianity for millenia. Let's go to the verse:
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Notice we have 2 things there: "in our image", "after our likeness" and dominion, or power. It turns out those are the same thing. We have lost an important colloquialism over time. I once had a Biblical scholar explain to me that "in his image" had a definite meaning in that time. Because communication was so poor, an ambassador or representative of a merchant would be given power to negotiate binding treaties or contracts without referring back to the king or merchant. Such an ambassador would be said to be "in the image" or "in his likeness" of the king or merchant. So the phrase "in his image" in Genesis 1 doesn't really refer to either physical or spiritual appearance, but empowerment. God is telling humans that they are free to act on the environment. That what they do to the earth they do "in the image" of God, or with God's full backing.
Now, it's obvious that "image" or "likeness" cannot possibly refer to a physical likeness, because God is spirit and has no physical appearance.
namely that it was the process in which God created all the laws of physics (which is ultimately the basis for all nature processes) which allows organism to change either within itself or induce by its external environment, and to become more complex entities, at the expense of greater entropy elsewhere in the universe.
A note of caution. There is a common misunderstanding of evolution here. Evolution happens to
populations over generations, not individual organisms. You and I die with the same alleles (forms of genes) we were born with. We don't change either "within ourself" or "by the external environment". Instead, if we are lucky enough to have alleles that provide traits that do well in that environment, we will leave more descendents than other individuals that were not so lucky. So the next generation will have a slightly greater proportion of those alleles than our generation. If this is continued over generations, the alleles will eventually be in
everyone and the
population will be different than our generation. Questions?
This interpretation is open to the possibility whether God, now and then, or even constantly tweak this innate mechanism, or even not at all, and that Nature runs as a perfect machine. Natural selection seems to say such tweaks are not necessary but does not preclude them either.
Natural selection cannot comment on whether they happen. There are at least 2 ways God can influence evolution and not be detectable by science.
Further, and secondly, it also implies that various species in the lineage of man, evolved over a long long period of time before a particular species, became the man which is in the "image of God". The question is then, when did this happen, or has it even happened yet, ie the present species is not yet the "image" that God intended, and man is still evolving to be the species that will be the image of God.
Humans really started getting power over the environment when they started making stone tools. That would be about H. habilis. But, as I said, the "problem" is meaningless. Humans have power, in contrast to the Babylonian religion Genesis 1 is refuting.
Now, if we take this to when God began making human souls in the course of evolution, Darwin addressed it. Basically he said it was a non-problem: we don't know and it doesn't matter:
"He who believes in the advancement of man from some low organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period in the development of the individual, from the first trace of a minute germinal vesicle, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period cannot possibly be determined in the gradually ascending organic scale."
Literature.org - The Online Literature Library The Descent of Man
Of course if you do not believe in Jesus Christ, you need not read further, and, again, whatever I have to say can be dismissed outright.
You do remember this is Christians Only forum, right? And you have looked at my faith icon, right?
Jesus is God incarnate, rememember? So Jesus isn't about "in the image" even if we are talking the misinterpretation. God became human. Whatever the physical human form was, that is what God became.
I rather hold the view that man, at the latest, attained the perfection of the image of God when Christ was born, and Christ, the Son of Man, was of the same species as each and every single human being since then till now, for all the world, even as I am, ie homo sapiens.
Well, DUH, of course Jesus was H. sapiens. But that has nothing to do with any "perfection" of the image of God. Jesus was
spiritually perfect. Physical "perfection" is not required. In fact, the gospels imply that Jesus was far from a perfect specimen. Most men lasted days under crucifixion. The reason the legionaries were breaking legs was because the crucified had to die that afternoon for the Jewish sabbath. But Jesus did not need his legs broken; he was already dead. The implication is that Jesus was very weak physically.
I have no problem with that. Moses was a stutterer and so bad that Aaron had to do his talking for him. So the spokesman of God was a rotten speaker! God picks unlikely representatives. Jesus was unlikely in several respects. Being a poor physical specimen would fit in the picture of how God works.
Secondly, if man do indeed evolve into another species - million and million of years onwards - are the redemption plan, and the purpose and will of God, originally intended for man, still applicable and valid for this new species?
Why not? Is God so exclusive that the redemption plan is only good for H. sapiens? Look at it this way: there are 100
billion stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Among all those possible planets, you think ours is the only one to have life? As the movie
Contactsaid: "That's a lot of wasted space." Would you think God has no redemptive plan for the sapient species that evolved on those worlds? That's not a very loving God, is it?
But what I know is that at the end of the world, in the new heaven and earth, God will be with men, eg The abode of God is with men [Rev 21:3].
I'm always very skeptical of taking anything in Revelations as "fact". All the ministers I have known refuse to do Bible study for Revelations. The comment is "we don't know what John of Patmos was really saying".
However the most critical and fatal objection to the evolving human species hypothesis is the question does perfection needs to be further evolved? For if perfection needs changing how can it still be perfection?
Since you are 1) misunderstanding "in his image" and 2) conflating physical perfection with spiritual perfection, this "fatal objection" simply disappears. Also remember that God is
spirit. Judeo-Christianity is adamant that God has no physical form; it is one reason that statues or other idols are verboten. So humans cannot be "physically perfect" like God because God is not physical.