Human Nature, Ancestral Instincts, and the Image of God

For more than a century, the study of human behavior has been steadily rewritten under the influence of evolutionary theory. What began as an attempt to describe animal instinct was soon applied to men and women. The result has not been a more honest science. It has been a smaller view of man.

The claim is now treated as settled in many classrooms and journals. Human beings, we are told, are ruled by ancestral instincts. Our loves, our violence, our marriages, our parenting, our worship, even our sense of right and wrong are said to be leftover programs from a long animal past. Man is simply an evolved ape who learned to talk. That idea is not a modest scientific inference. It is a degrading story about who we are, and it has trained generations to excuse what God calls sin and to diminish what God calls holy.

Scripture tells a different story, and the observable world agrees with Scripture. Only man is created in the image of God. That image is not a slogan. It is the guiding principle of human nature. It sets humanity apart from every other living thing God made, and it does so in ways that can be seen, measured, and tested. That is the nature of science: data and observation. When we actually look, science confirms mankind’s uniqueness.

The Whisper That We Cannot Help Ourselves

Evolutionary psychology has become one of the most effective vehicles for this smaller story. It takes ordinary observations about hunger, fear, attraction, and conflict and wraps them in a deep-time narrative. Men compete because their ancestors competed. Women nurture because their ancestors nurtured. Aggression is an adaptation. Infidelity is an adaptation. Selfishness is an adaptation. Even kindness is recast as a disguised strategy for genetic advantage.

Notice what the story does. It does not merely describe behavior. It relocates responsibility. If we are only acting out ancestral programs, then the will is an illusion and repentance is a misunderstanding. The person is no longer a moral agent standing before his Creator. He is a clever primate running old software.

That is not a new idea. It is an ancient whisper with modern vocabulary. From the beginning, the adversary has worked to convince image-bearers that they are less than God said they are. In Eden the first lie was not merely about fruit. It was about identity and authority. If man can be persuaded that he is only an animal, then the commands of God become optional, the Fall becomes a myth, and the Cross becomes unnecessary. Why would an evolved ape need a Redeemer? Why would a creature ruled by instinct need to be born again?

The behaviors we call human nature are not leftovers from an ape ancestry. They are gifts of God: reason, language, conscience, creativity, dominion, the capacity to love, the capacity to worship, and the capacity to choose. After the Fall those gifts remain, but they are bruised. Satan’s constant whispering is that the bruise is the original design. He tells us we cannot help our animal behavior because that is all we ever were. The Word of God answers him. We fell from glory. We did not climb out of the trees.

Created in His Image, and in No Other Kind

Then 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. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:26–27)

No other creature receives this declaration. The plants bring forth after their kind. The animals bring forth after their kind. Man is formed from the dust and then receives something no beast receives: the breath of God, and with it a living soul (Genesis 2:7). Dominion is not given to the lion or the eagle. It is given to the image-bearer. After the Flood the same distinction is repeated with solemn force. Murder is forbidden because man is made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6). The apostle James later warns that we must not curse men who are made after the similitude of God (James 3:9).

That image is the reason human life has a dignity the rest of creation does not share. It is also the reason human behavior cannot be reduced to instinct without doing violence to the data. An image is a representation. Man represents God in the world. He names. He builds. He judges. He prays. He remembers the past and plans a future he has not yet seen. He writes laws and then feels guilt when he breaks them. He composes music that has no survival value in the evolutionary sense and then weeps when he hears it. He asks what his life means. Animals do not do this.

We have written elsewhere that consciousness itself is not an accident of neural complexity. It is breathed by the Creator. The same is true of the whole cluster of capacities that make human nature human. They arrive together on Day 6. They are not assembled over imagined ages by death and selection. Adam is the first man of all men, fully human from the first breath, and every child since then has carried that same image, however marred by sin.

The Genetic Gap Is Not a Rounding Error

Evolutionists have long treated the chimpanzee as our closest relative and have repeated a familiar number: humans and chimps share about 98 or 99 percent of their DNA. That figure has done enormous cultural work. It sounds scientific. It sounds humble. It sounds as if the remaining sliver of difference could easily explain speech, science, worship, and the moral law.

The number is misleading. It was produced by comparing only those stretches of DNA that can be lined up reasonably well and by counting only certain kinds of differences. It leaves out large insertions and deletions, rearrangements, sequences present in one genome and absent in the other, and regions so different they cannot be aligned at all. When more complete comparisons are made, the gap is far larger than the popular slogan admits. Differences on the order of 10 to 15 percent of the genome, and in some chromosomal comparisons even more, represent hundreds of millions of nucleotide positions. That is not a rounding error. That is a chasm.

Even the shared portions do not mean what the slogan implies. Similarity of sequence is not identity of design, and it is not identity of being. A builder may use similar materials in a cottage and a cathedral. The materials do not make the buildings the same. God designed living things to operate in the same world. We breathe the same air, drink the same water, and metabolize related fuels. It is therefore expected that the chemistry of life would overlap. Shared metabolic pathways do not prove common ancestry any more than two houses on the same street prove they grew out of each other.

Biological similarity is exactly what a common Creator and a common environment would produce. Behavioral and spiritual difference is exactly what the image of God would produce. The first is not evidence against the second. It is the stage on which the second becomes visible.

No One Confuses a Child with a Chimpanzee

If the evolutionary story were true at the level of behavior, the difference between a human child and a young chimpanzee should be a matter of degree. It is not. Place them side by side and no honest observer is confused. The difference is dramatic on the first day it can be seen, and it only grows as time progresses.

A human infant soon points, not merely to demand, but to share attention. He looks where another person looks. He waits to see whether he has been understood. He begins to use words not as signals for food but as names for the world. Within a few years he asks why. He invents games with rules. He tells stories about things that are not present. He accuses and apologizes. He prays, or he refuses to pray, which is itself a moral act. A young chimpanzee, however clever, remains a chimpanzee. He may use a stick. He may learn a handful of signs under intense training. He does not become a person. He does not write a letter. He does not compose a hymn. He does not stand in awe of the holy.

This is not a sentimental contrast. It is an observational one. Human language is not louder animal calling. It has syntax, recursion, and displacement: the ability to speak of yesterday, tomorrow, the unseen, and the imaginary. Human teaching is not mere imitation. Parents and children build a shared world of meaning and then hand it forward. Human culture accumulates. Each generation can begin with the discoveries of the last. That is why a child in any nation can inherit mathematics, Scripture, music, and law. No ape troop does this. No ape troop ever will, because the capacity was never given.

The same is true of morality. Animals can be trained. They can show attachment and aversion. They do not stand under a moral law they did not invent and then feel the wound of conscience when they violate it. A man can betray a vow he spoke before God and know that he has done wrong even if no one else saw it. That knowledge is not an ancestral mating strategy. It is the image of God still testifying in a fallen heart.

Art makes the same point. People cover cave walls, carve ivory, write poetry, and build temples in every age and every land. These are not late luxuries of a well-fed primate. They appear wherever man appears, because man is a maker after the likeness of the Maker. The first chapters of Genesis already show naming, cultivation, marriage, worship, and the beginning of cities, music, and metalwork among Adam’s descendants. That is not the résumé of an evolving ape. It is the résumé of an image-bearer living east of Eden.

What the Behavioral Difference Means

If the body can share chemistry with other creatures while the life of the person remains utterly distinct, then the guiding principle is not ancestry. The guiding principle is the image of God.

That difference means man is accountable. A lion is not summoned to repentance. A man is. That difference means man is a steward. The earth is not his accident. It is his assignment. That difference means man can receive revelation. God speaks to persons, not to instincts. That difference means man can be redeemed. The Son of God did not take the nature of angels or of beasts. He took the nature of man, because only man bears the image that was broken and must be restored.

It also means the study of human behavior cannot be honest if it begins by erasing the image. When researchers treat murder, adultery, greed, or despair as nothing more than misfiring Pleistocene programs, they are not being more scientific. They are being less observant. They have decided in advance that the most important facts about a person (his soul, his conscience, his worship, his guilt, and his hope) do not count as data. Then they announce that the remaining fragments look animal. Of course they do. They discarded the evidence that did not fit the theory.

True science does the opposite. It takes all the data. The data include the genome, the infant’s face, the existence of language, the universality of worship, the stubborn fact of conscience, the creativity that serves no mere survival need, and the historical testimony of Scripture. Taken together, those observations do not whisper that we are apes. They declare that we are men and women, formed by God, fallen in Adam, and invited to be made new in Christ.

Gifts Corrupted, Not Instincts Unleashed

None of this requires us to pretend that people are innocent. The Bible is more realistic about human wickedness than any evolutionary textbook. Genesis 6:5 records that every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually. Paul writes that people became vain in their imaginations and that God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts (Romans 1:21–24). The problem is not that we have too much humanity left in us. The problem is that the gifts have been twisted.

Reason becomes rationalization. Speech becomes deceit. Dominion becomes tyranny. Desire becomes lust. Community becomes tribe against tribe. Worship, the highest gift, is aimed at the creature rather than the Creator. These are not proofs that we are animals. They are proofs that we are fallen image-bearers. An animal cannot blaspheme. An animal cannot commit idolatry. Only a creature made to know God can refuse Him.

This is why the evolutionary story is so pastorally destructive. It offers a false comfort to the sinner and a false despair to the saint. To the sinner it says, You could not have done otherwise. To the weary believer it says, This is all you are. Scripture says neither. It says, You were made for glory. You have sinned. You may be forgiven. You may be changed.

The hope of the gospel is not that we might evolve past our nature. The hope of the gospel is that the last Adam restores what the first Adam lost. “And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Corinthians 15:49). That is not ancestral instinct. That is resurrection.

Science Belongs to Observation, Not to the Story

We do not ask anyone to close his eyes in order to believe this. We ask him to open them. Look at a human child. Look at a young chimpanzee. Watch what each becomes. Listen to language. Read a law code. Stand in a house of worship. Examine the real genetic differences rather than the slogan. Notice that every attempt to flatten man into an ape has to smuggle human categories back in: meaning, purpose, morality, mind, and value. The theory borrows what only the image of God can supply, then denies the Giver.

We keep returning to the same pattern. The rocks, the fossils, the genomes, and the ruins of ancient people all testify more clearly when they are read in the light of the Word rather than in the shadow of Darwin. Humanity is not a late chapter in an animal story. Humanity is the creature to whom God spoke, whom God commissioned, whom God judged in the Flood, and for whom God provided the Ark and, in the fullness of time, the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

Man is not ruled by ancestral instincts. He is addressed by the living God. That address is the most observable fact of human history. It is written on every conscience, echoed in every culture, and fulfilled in Jesus Christ, “who is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). In Him the true measure of human nature is not an ape. It is the glory for which we were made.