Thank you for a most interesting essay. It is a topic on which I have spent a fair amount of time ruminating.

To the central issue you raise, anyone who believes that humans were created by God must acknowledge that our rational capacity is directly from God. That is what we use to explain the world we live in to ourselves as best we can — what we call “science.” The Bible — and all theologies — are the creation of human beings. They are not directly from God the way our rational capacity is. (Believing in divinely inspired human beings is another level of belief.)

I am struck by the sequential compatibility that exists between the scientific account from the Big Bang to the appearance of human beings and the account of Creation that begins the Bible. E.G., “Let there be light” = the Big Bang, i.e. God converting an infinitesimal amount of Spirit into all the energy that has ever existed in the Universe — science’s “conservation of energy” — and including all the energy that has ever existed as mass — “E = Mcc.” [Medium apparently doesn’t do superscripts.]

Also, Adam and Eve are created in the next chapter of the Bible. Perhaps the humans [Homo] referenced in the first chapter were Homo erectus (culminating in Neanderthals and Denisovans), with Adam and Eve being the first Homo sapiens? God put the process in motion then left it alone then saw that what had been created was “good,” then went on to intervene in the process to create us? That would explain the qualitative difference that suddenly existed between the two species despite enough physical similarities to interbreed. [Some scientists say that our RNA posits a biological Eve.]

The Christian Old Testament was the Hebrew Bible. It was written down after millennia of being passed along orally. The account of Creation in the Bible reads like an attempt to explain how it is that human beings are so different from the rest of Creation. Perhaps the reference to other humans in the first chapter was an echo of the time when Homo sapiens were interacting with Homo erectus? [The briefer summation of Creation in Chapter 2 seems to me to be more concerned with the ‘why’ of our creation for us as a species.]