What does it mean in the Bible when it says that God made humans from dust?
Question:
Answer:
No one takes the statement that God made man from the dust of the earth literally–at least not that I know of. As far as I know, no one believes that God literally swept up some dust and miraculously turned a pile of dust into a human embryo or into Adam or Eve. The way I understand this passage is that God created humans our of already-existing “stuff.” Humans are made out of physical atoms. We are physical beings. We come from “dust” and we return to “dust.” Not literally… A decayed body does not become dust literally. It more likely becomes organic matter in the soil. This idea that we come from dust is a kind of idiom. We come from disorganized matter and when we die, our bodies return to disorganized matter. To use the language of physics, our bodies come from a massive reduction in entropy, and when we die, our bodies return to a state of very high entropy.
John Oakes