Funny how you can read a text for years, then read it again expecting nothing new but finding something new.

“And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7, KJV).

The Hebrew reads that God formed “the man,” as in one person. The words “his nostrils” reflects the singular again, as does the phrase “and the man became a living being” (NIV). The relevant verbs and nouns and possessive pronouns in Genesis 2:7 show that one man, the man, was created.

In contrast, Genesis 1:26 reads: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in our image, according to our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air’ ” (NKJV). In this verse “man” comes without the definite article “the.” The word “man” refers here to humanity, plural, as revealed in the clause that immediately follows: “and let them [plural] have dominion over the fish of the sea.”

In Genesis 2:7 “the man,” this one man, is created first; then afterward God breathed into “his nostrils the breath of life” and that man became “a living being.”

Now, what good are nostrils without lungs? And human lungs are useless without blood. And human blood demands a heart. And a heart needs (among many things) a sophisticated nervous system, which in a human means a brain. If the man had nostrils, he had a face, and if he had a face, he had a head, which means a skull, and so forth.

Everything about that text implies that the man was created as a whole entity first, but a lifeless one. Only after having a complete human body did he become a “living being.”

Thus, if I take at face value my theistic evolutionary friends’ claims to revere the Scriptures, I ask them in all sincerity, How can evolution be harmonized with this text? Can’t you see an irreconcilable contradiction between it and even the broadest evolutionary scheme?Why would the Lord have inspired the writing of this creation model when, in fact, He used an entirely different one? What good is the text if the opposite of what it teaches is true?

Because science points to the evolutionary model, we have no choice but to meld the two. Yet evolutionary science is at best—what? Twenty percent of hard-core empirical evidence stretched and extrapolated into 80 percent speculation shaped by metaphysical assumptions constructed around culture, peer pressure, psychology, philosophy, and other variables that have little to do with immediate science. Why pit such subjectivity against an explicit biblical text?

Also, evolutionary theory is based on natural selection and random mutation. That’s natural, as opposed to supernatural, selection. And random mutation? How random could that be if God was guiding it along? The names of these processes themselves rule out divine intervention, making the phrase “theistic evolution” self-refuting.

Richard DeWitt, in Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, writes: “So if one adds a supernatural involvement into the account of evolution by natural selection, say by allowing a God to meddle in the evolutionary process, then it is no longer natural selection. One is no longer taking natural science, and evolutionary theory, seriously. In short, taking natural science seriously means that an account of evolutionary development that is importantly influenced by a supernatural being is not an intellectually honest option”(p. 313, Kindle edition).

He said it, not me.

Usually at this point I begin to snort, chortle, and rail. I don’t want to now. Instead, I humbly ask someone to explain to me how you can, with a straight face, meld Genesis 2:7 with an evolutionary model of origins.

We all have to put our faith in something. What I don’t understand is how those who claim to believe in the Bible can put their faith in what is, in light of Genesis 2:7, so contradictory to it.