Earlier this year I wrote on the topic of original sin. Realizing that it may seem a little gloomy to return to this topic at this time of the year, thanks to the publication of a most interesting new paper on the subject, I do nevertheless want to reopen the subject. As background, I take it that the traditional understanding of original sin, stemming from the thinking of Saint Augustine around A.D. 400, is that humans are tainted because of the sin of Adam, eating the forbidden fruit. Although God is perfect and hence created us perfect, we are born with an inclination to sin because Adam freely disobeyed God. It was for this reason that Jesus had to come and die on the Cross. However it worked -- as a substitute, as a sacrifice, or whatever -- his death and subsequent resurrection made possible our eternal salvation.
This position is one adopted particularly by those Christians whose theology goes back in a strong way to Augustine, meaning especially Calvinists. The problem scientifically is it seems to depend on a literal Adam, and this is something made impossible by modern evolutionary thinking. Many also think that there is a problem with this position theologically, because it seems to make the coming of Jesus something contingent on Adam's fall. Jesus did not have to come and would not have done so had Adam done what he was told. In other words, we seem to be living with "Plan B," meaning something cobbled together by God when things went wrong. (Theologically this position is known as "infralapsarianism.")
My argument (one repeated from my book Can a Darwinian be a Christian?) is that we should think of Adam metaphorically, and that we should see humans as the product of evolution through natural selection. In order to succeed in the struggle for existence and reproduction, we had to be good social beings but also selfishness was going to be part of the package. In other words, I argue that we can make good sense of original sin in an evolutionary context, staying faithful to the Christian insight and at the same time accepting modern science. (Interestingly this approach is also very Augustinian, for he stressed that Christian, bible-based beliefs must not conflict with good science.)
I am a philosopher rather than a theologian. If challenged, I would have supposed that my kind of thinking was not original, though I would not have been able to put my position into the Christian theological tradition. But now, John Schneider, a theologian at Calvin College in Michigan, which is the Reformed Church's flagship institution of higher education, has written a fascinating article showing that my kind of thinking (although obviously updated with evolution) has an even longer tradition than the Augustinian take on original sin. Irenaeus of Lyon (around A.D. 200) worried about the Plan B aspect of making the arrival of Jesus dependent on Adam going wrong. He argued that God planned the Incarnation from the beginning, and that the whole drama did not depend on a rather naive Adam falling for the wily arguments of the subtle serpent. Original sin is rather a function of our slowly developing nature and that God fully intended Jesus to come to complete the drama. "O happy fault, that merited so great a Redeemer!" (This position is known theologically as "supralapsarianism").
There is of course still the problem of how you reconcile an all-powerful, all-loving God with so unpleasant a process as natural selection -- so many dying that so few can succeed. My solution is Leibnizian. Agreeing with Richard Dawkins that only natural selection can produce the design-like nature of the organic world, I argue that God had no choice but to allow pain and suffering if he were to produce organisms, including human organisms. Schneider argues rather that God decided to allow pain as part of his overall aesthetic sense of the best kind of universe. In support, he refers to the story of Job as well as to the New Testament:
Paul offers no logical explanation of God's actions. Instead, even if somewhat obscurely (Paul was no poet), Paul, like Isaiah (whose poetic instincts were better), turns instinctively to aesthetics and to the nature of art. God's actions in history are better understood in the analogy of artistic or aesthetic preferences than in analogies of logical perfection (pace Leibniz) and the moral utility of a "best possible world." In Paul's terms, they are choices that simply pleased God. They pleased God in a manner compatible with perfect moral goodness, understood as universal grace to be extended to everyone.
To be candid, I find this all a bit too Calvinistic for my taste. God's sovereignty is being put above everything, including God having a care for the suffering of humans and animals. I don't much like the idea of the gazelle dying in agony in the predator's jaws just to be a matter of God's aesthetics. But each to his own.
Although apparently not! Schneider today is in deep trouble with the president of his college who wants him kicked out for transgressing the standard line. And some of the president's supporters are even more shrill, demanding that he be fired for "heresy." A subscription to Calvinism that is "serious but not uncritical" (to quote Schneider himself) "and which thus allows one to contradict the Reformed Confessions at will is," in the opinion of a writer in the Christian Renewal, "no subscription at all. It is mere hypocrisy. The failure of Calvin College to enforce adherence to Reformed standards belies its claim to be Reformed."
One can surely agree that a church-affiliated college has the right (and the duty) to see that its faculty does not presume unlimited license. I think abortion should be a woman's choice, but I can see the point of saying that a faculty member at Notre Dame should not be preaching abortion on demand. If you want to do that, go somewhere else. Having said that, evolution is true and Adam and Eve are at best mythological. The human species never, ever got down to two people only. Nor did it start that way. So one can only welcome it when trained, serious, committed theologians try to reinterpret their beliefs in terms of (or compatible with) modern science. It is a sad day indeed when a faculty member of one of the leading Christian colleges in the nation is threatened with the sack by his president for trying to stay true to the faith of his parents and to the demands of reason and evidence, showing that he is indeed made in the image of God. John Schneider is just the sort of man who makes me, a non-believer, realize that for all its faults there is much good in religion. I hope good sense and Christian charity prevail in Michigan.
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Calvin College - Religion - Faculty: John Schneider
Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An ...
Believers in evolution have been fighting history for the longest time. The Bible is the only serious historical record there is of that time exceeding 5,000 years except now for the recent discovery of the entirely separate tradition of the Magi that goes back to Adam and Eve and their third son Seth, which is also very interesting.
You will find a lot of people trying to explain away actual historical records and genealogies because it does not fit in with their beliefs. The problem is that evolution has never had any real scientific support of any kind since the first time the Sumerians came up with the idea. It makes good fantasy and fiction but it doesn't make good science because everything can only reproduce after their kind. So they need to have millions of years that history doesn't even have. We've been bombarded with all kinds of claims, one right after another while they insist on teaching the ever changing claims to people's children. Even when the claims were disproven one right after another, they'ld come up with new claims all the time to keep the wheel of dis-information turning suggesting that it is more historical than history.
At some point there existed a group of protohumans. One day one of them had a mutation. That mutation affected it so that it was able to think new thoughts in the form of a synthesis of old behavior patterns. Specifically it was able to claim certain behaviors were evil while others were good.
This is a huge jump in the survivability of a social primate. Suddenly tribes of protohumans could pass learned behaviors more efficiently. This tribe flourished and interbred while others didn't do so well because each member behaved semi-randomly. There are of course still throwbacks we call sociopaths, but they are either able to hide their lack of this ability or they are wiped out of the breeding pool by the modern tribe.
Thus the first true human was the first to develop the understanding of good and evil.
But an understanding of good and evil isn't enough to make God happy. He wants us to move beyond the mere survival bonus of labeling some acts as good and some as evil. He wants us to see the underlying motive of helping each other. To do this we need to leave good and evil behind and concentrate on love instead.
You and your readers may be interested to know of this, happening now: "The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity: Conversations at the Leading Edge of Faith:" http://EvolutionaryChristianity.com
Sin structured into the law causes the human to sin. When the law is sinful, immoral, mankind is sinful and immoral.
Law that is unjust is also cruel, unusual, irrational, and shameful to both God and man.
Is it just or even rational to "tempt" mankind into sin? Would we in modern societies call that entrapment? Eve was first tempted by the tempter and then unjustly subjugated, slandered by the tempter.
Can mankind survive and better thrive to his fullest potential if he doesn't know the difference between what is good and what is evil?
No he can't. If man does not "know" that murder is evil, mankind won't develop spiritually, intellectually, graciously, generously, kindly, morally.
Would it be unjust to deny mankind the right to know what it is that we need to know?
Yes.
The original sin was Lord Gods, not the parishioners who were born into the religion. It becomes the parishioners when they fail and refuse to see the sin within the religion and fail to change it.
Wait up, Richard Dawkins view is only a view as a scientist understanding the world as it is. For the universe, as it is, natural selection seems to be needed to produce complex life. But the whole point of the problem of evil is that God is all-powerful. God doesn't NOT have no choice. God is powerful enough to overcome any obstacle. If God wanted life to develop life by a different process with no suffering, he could have done it easily. To suggest that "God had no choice but to allow pain and suffering" is to say that God is not all-powerful, defeating the quoted argument.
So basically God is all-powerful... until we get to free will or suffering in which case God is helpless to do anything. Really?!
wow, a triple negative? :)
I think it is more like, god is all powerful in things that can't be easily explained.....
Okay, I think I meant God does NOT have no choice. That God is all-powerful, he does not have to do anything.
So basically God is all-powerfÂul... until we get to free will or suffering in which case God is helpless to do anything. Really?! "
Exactly. And to suggest that Adam and Eve did, is to say that Adam and Eve were all powerful.
Were they all powerful and God was not? Or, is God just pretending to be innocent when He was not?
Adam sure come out of the deal on top, was he innocent? And, if were to really stretch the metaphors in the story and notice that Adam and Eve each get a fur coat out of the deal one could even ask if they were innocent?