Did we evolve from apes or did God create us? Let us look and find out. The Bible is very clear about human origins. Genesis lays out who made us. We call the Creator God in English or Elohim in the Hebrew. God made us from dust. The Creator made us in God’s image. Our role in creation is dominion over God’s creation. The Bible says God created us during the Creation Week on day six. The time in history was likely less than 10,000 years ago, according to the genealogies in Genesis chapters 5 and 11. The Bible is consistent about this historical account. The Bible in both the Old and New Testaments Scriptures holds to the same description of how we came to be. This history finds support in all 66 books of the Holy Scriptures, which spans over 1,500 years, written by 40 writers, and in 3 languages on 3 continents.
However, DNA research shows our genome dates back tens of thousands of years far out reaching the biblical timeline. Recent research into mitochondrial DNA mutation rates gives the answer. This is unique because it comes only from the mother’s egg making it useful for tracing maternal ancestry. Since scientists sequenced DNA in 1981, researchers have been studying the mutation rates in mtDNA to estimate when different groups of people possibly diverged. Evolutionary researchers have based these timelines on their assumption that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. Scientists derived this date when counting the mtDNA and protein differences between all the great apes and timing their divergence using dates from fossils of one great apes ancestor. Their evolutionary assumption counts on the mtDNA mutation rate of about one mutation every 300 to 600 generations or one every 6,000 to 12,000 years.
However, do their evolutionary assumptions hold up? Actually, recent studies have shown that the actual mutation rates are much faster than the rates assumed by the evolution theory causing researchers to rethink the mtDNA clock they depend on for forensic investigations. Researchers published the discovery. Dr. Parsons and his colleagues made this discovery after investigated the mtDNA f3 and 57 individuals from 134 different families representing 327 generational events, which scientists count for the number of times that mothers passed on mtDNA to their offspring. Parsons team showed that mutation rates actually occur at a rate of one every thirty-three generations, which was twenty fold higher than the estimates based on the theoretical five million year timeline between chimps and humans. They expected to see about one mutation in every three hundred to six hundred generations or one every six thousand to twelve thousand years. They published their study in Nature Genetics and the faster rate has stood fast even as the number of families in the study has doubled. Other studies have confirmed these findings. Since Parsons’ discovery, Howell’s team analyzed mtDNA from 40 members of a family with an overall divergence rate of one mutation every 25 to 40 generations. According to Howell’s remarks, both of our studies, his and Parsons, came to a remarkably similar conclusion based on these findings. Howell warns that filler genic studies, which are studies that try to estimate the evolutionary branching between animal kinds, have substantially underestimated the rate of mtDNA divergence.
Today, evolutionists are concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate because faster mutation rates would discredit the evolution timeline. For example, researchers have calculated that mitochondrial Eve, the woman whose mtDNA exists in all modern living women, lived one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago in Africa. Using the new faster mutation clocks, she would be roughly six thousand years old. This of course fits well within the Bible’s timeline. Studies have also confirmed that there was a massive DNA variability explosion that happened on earth just thousands of years ago within the timeframe of Noah’s Flood and the Babel dispersion that occurred afterwards.
Finally, if there was no real Adam in history, then there is no gospel. If Adam and the fall of humanity was not real history, then Yeshua died for a mythological problem and he is a mythological Savior offering us a mythological hope. The truth is humankind never evolve out of some primordial mud pit around 3.6 billion years ago. We sing worship have ceremonies pray educate ourselves and do so many other things that refle
PRIMARY SOURCES: Genesis Apologetics Videos on Human Evolution