Evolution and Christianity and Salvation

[Yonadav]

More literally it would be 'the breath of G-d'.  This discussion interested me because it appears that the Catholics reconciled their beliefs with evolution by lifting from the Jewish tradition. Long, long before Charles Darwin came along, the Sages of the Talmud discussed the generations before Adam. Adam was the first man to have the Breath of G-d breathed into him.

Yes, the Christian rationalization of Evolution is similar to the Jewish concept of 'God breathing into Adam' with others alive.
However, Christianity has the interesting property of Original Sin, meaning that everyone alive today (and at the time of Jesus) was a direct descendant of this "Adam".  No one else was given a soul unless they have this Adam in the ancestry.

My point is that such a rationalization (one human in our past gets a soul, no one else, and we are all descended from him) is not satisfying.  You MUST believe this (or be a Creationist).  Salvation is a core tenant of Christianity.  It is not optional.  It may be THE core tenant.

Therefore, you MUST accept that many people lived on this planet for generations without souls.  Y Chromosome Adam is estimate to have lived  200,000 years ago.  So, if you want to believe in Evolution and be a Christian, God injected the first soul into a human ~200,000 or earlier.   

And, because the population, must have been, minimally, several tens of thousand at the time, there were vast numbers of people that lived for generations, including relatives of Adam (his parents of course) without souls.

This is not optional, like, say, Noah's ark, nativity, or similar.  The above is an essential rationalization of Christianity and Science.  Either accept it, or be a Creationist.

As someone that was raised as a Christian, and has tried to rationalize Christianity with science, the above really bothers me.  You can wiggle around almost everything else.  But the above is essential.  Really hard to accept.

I've asked Christians about this and most ignore it because they don't want to talk about it, others say that's why you can't believe in Evolution at all, and then there are the rare few that say yes, there were many, many soul-less people alive for generation after generation until, over time, interbreeding created a fully souled world, and then Jesus saved them all.  Really strange.

In Judaism, every creature has a soul. Humans have more than one. The breath of the Divine is one of them. The generations before Adam had the animal soul. We have the concept of gilgul, which is basically reincarnation. Many of those who lived in the generations before Adam are reborn in each generation after him. They are reborn with the Divine aspect of the soul in them. A gilgul's purpose is to get things right that they didn't get right in their previous go round. The gilgulim from the generations before Adam are reputed to be a rather unruly lot.