Dear Joshua,
These lines of thinking all seem fruitful to me, I look forward to seeing your book. I’ve just been working on Augustine’s Confessions very closely, and he rightly says that we can’t limit what we “think Genesis was about for the author” to one single meaning. It is not that kind of text. It is designed to be accessible to simple people, and rich enough for people thinking about all kinds of things. And there is certainly a story of fall into technique that is on the forefront of the story. You really must read Ellul’s Meaning of the City, as it sounds like your thesis is very close to his.
As for the genealogical descent from Adam and Eve, this seems to me highly likely on both scientific and theological grounds. It offers a meaningful way to link us in one chain of descent. I am mostly agnostic about whether there has been an real scientific proof that firmly establishes the other supposed proto-human species. It seems to me that it is going to require quite a bit more data points to make it incontrovertible that any given proposed upright ape is more than an ape.
I should perhaps clarify that I am not objecting to the claim that humans are rational. I’ve set up my claims, however, to not be undermined if in fact we discover that whales can do calculus. What I object to is the most common way that rationality is set up as the human distinctive: as claiming it is the “highest” trait, proving humans are the pinnacle of creation. For instance, it is not sustainable on the basis of the primeval history in Genesis. if there is something special about humans, according to the text, it is that they are created as man and woman.
Most early Christian theologians were not able to take this textual fact seriously (that the Image of God is related to sexual dimorphism not their higher faculties) because they lived in an ancient world that saw women as weaker and or more connected to the earthy. So they co-opted the Greek thought that some are defending here, that rationality is the “highest” feature of any creature. They simply imported the idea that the image must mean rationality, with disastrous consequences for how the command to have dominion was interpreted. The “rational ones” had to have dominion over the “lower” animals, and this often included women and slaves, who in various epochs of christendom were considered more or less capable of achieving “really rational” status.
