I am thinking of this in the words Paul used in Acts 17. Let me quote:
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’[[c]
As per Paul, Gods purpose for the nations is that they would somehow (however imperfect or ineffective) reach out to him. Whether they actually do so is not so important. What is important is they are called to do so… Just as John Lennon is… This expectation is placed by God only on Adam and his descendants.
Its not important to me whether John Lennon chose not to seek God or not.Its important whether he could be expected to, by God… That’s what makes him “human” in this context. A call to seek God and an ability to choose not to.
What bothers me about the 7K scenario is that,
1.we have people who are human in every way except for the fact that they have no soul. i.e the only difference between a descendant of Noah and someone from say America 5k years ago would be that the person from America wouldn’t have an immortal Soul. No big deal?
Whereas a 50K baseline, would come in a time where human beings had yet to develop unique charecteristics of what makes someone human, like speech, higher cognition etc. So there would be many differences between Adam and his contemprories 50k years ago. (If we are willing to believe in special creation of Adam, we might also believe in some means to create the Genetic diversity required for this in the first couple, or perhaps Adam and Eve interbreeding with advanced hominids with the offspring retaining Adams advantages).
2. there is no reason to think people 5000 years ago did not have “eternity” in their hearts.
So basically the problem IMO is with having such a distinction among modern humans.
Having a Soul or bearing the image of God is different from a vocation such as being called as an Apostle.