A theological-biological explanation of “the original sin’s transmission”

Faith & Science Conversation
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321

And the admonition of the Apostle to judge all things.

(I once posed the question as to how many Koine Greek verbs end up being translated as “judge”; I don’t recall anyone answering.)

Oh, if only my older brother was still alive! We’d be getting an exposition on n-dimensional geometry and how it solves all sorts of theological issues. In this case, he would point out that if our four-dimensional universe is embedded in a universe with (at least) six more dimensions, and if the initial sin was rebellious plans on the part of an eternal being (Lucifer), then the “pollution” of that sin would have infected our four-dimensional worldline from its very start.
Yeah, it gives me a headache, too; I can envision the “pollution” propagating back through time, but I’m sure my brother would have said, “No, it wouldn’t have to propagate, it would just be there” and try again to get the concept across.

I have trouble with that one, too. I can list for myself all the attributes of ancient near eastern thinking that would make it work, but it doesn’t come as easily as now the same affects the first Creation account (that took me the better part of a decade and thousands upon thousands of pages read to grasp). Even in the Hebrew it’s easy to read it as literal, and I reassure myself with the fact that for the purpose of understanding the point of the story the details can be taken as literal even if they aren’t literal in and of themselves. Though I should note that “metaphorical” is an incorrect term, regardless of how it gets popularly tossed around; it’s an ancient form of literature that, somewhat like the preceding account, just doesn’t match our forms of literature.

Richard can’t get around the idea that people can be pointing out that he is incorrect without making it personal. For example, I have endeavored to straighten him out on evolution frequently, and he accuses me of championing evolution though the truth is that if we all woke up in the morning and read of a discovery that knocked the whole theory down my reaction would be, “Awesome! So how did God really do it?”

As Dale notes,

BTW, here’s an article by one of our own that should help everyone get some perspective:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312087300_Reading_Genesis_in_the_journal_Perspectives_on_Science_and_Christian_Faith_vol_68_number_4_Dec_2016

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322

That woul go against not onChirst, but also Romans 14. Perhaps you are misinterpretating the extent of judgment? IOW We have to judge for our own benefit, not others.

Romans 14:10
You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister a ? Or why do you treat them with contempt?

That is the whole point. It wouldn’t.

Perhaps Original SIn is not a concept from God but from Man? It is only inferred if ou read Paul in a particular way. If you understand Paul he is not talking about the nature f sin but its existence. It first occurred with Adam and it is now totally cancelled with Christ. Tit for tat,
For years the Hebrews had coped with sin with animal sacrifices. The incident at the temple was not just a fit of pique, it showed that the system had broken down and been corrupted. There had to be a new one.

On a purely philosophical note. If Original sin is so important why are there only a couple of obscure references to it (not to mention the three emphatic Olld Testament references that specifically deny it. No longer say our parents ate sour grapes etc)

Richard

323

Thanks for this smart comment!

“What is good” can only be well defined with relation to eternal happiness.

As far as someone reaches holiness and eternal happiness through suffering, death, and temptation, these circumstances involve “a lack of what is good” only transitorily and apparently. From the perspective of heaven, enduring such circumstances is path to resurrection and glory (Jesus Christ is paramount in this respect!):

Romans 8:18:
our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

324

Did your mathematician brother ever publish anything on his geometry-theology? Or have others published on that idea? I’m not asking cynically, but with real curiosity. For those of us who never had a chance to hear his ideas first-hand, the only way to learn and assess his ideas will be through writings.

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325

Excellent comment!

It is rather obvious that there has been a first human sin and a first human sinner in human history.

The crucial question is whether or not this first sin has had consequences that no other sin has.

In the following I show that YES is the only sound answer to this question as far as one assumes that God is merciful.

God could very well since the beginning have sent the sinners to hell and let on earth only pure people.

Evidence shows that God did not choose this option and decided to let the sinners on earth.

The reason for this cannot be other than God is merciful, and lets the sinners on earth to give them the opportunity to repent and reach salvation.

Would it be sound to let sinners on earth as if they had not sinned?

In my view this would be complete nonsensical:

It would coax the sinners to sin even more and thwart the very aim God was looking for by letting them on earth.

Accordingly, God decided to let the sinners on earth submitted to suffering, death, and concupiscence, so that they could experience their weakness and search God’s help.

So, it is rather obvious that, because of God’s mercy, the first sin has necessarily consequences that any subsequent sin does not have.

Or with an even more obvious formulation:

Any sin would have had the consequences of the first sin, if it had been the first sin!

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326

I have never seen such convoluted logic in all of my life.

There is no logic to this question.so the anwers has no meaning.

You are thinking for God.! (as God)

The question was nonsensical so the answer must be.

You are basically saying that our only point in life is to be saved! And that our life is just a trial for the next and therefore has no intrinsic value. What a waste of creation!

This life is not just about sin.

If God wanted us to automatically worship and take notice of Him (Get saved from sin) life would not be as it is. And He would be visible to all.

You are laying the burden of sin onto all humanity. That is not the sign of a Loving God (even if it was the sign of a merciful one - which I dispute)

Original Sin is not of God or part of His creation. Sin is a byproduct of freedom of choice, but freedom of choice negates any sort of onus to always make the right decision. (or the wrong one!) And if the choice is “free” then there cannot be consequences (right or wrong)
Nor can there be any sort of intrinsic tendency to do one or the other.
Richard

327

Does anyone not admit that it is possible that our genome evolved to incorporate a degree of selfishness in us all, simply because it conferred a survival advantage? If so, then those of us who see varying degrees of this may call it sin. Then others read Genesis and relate that (perhaps) metaphorical story/myth to current day behaviors that are hard-wired into our DNA. Having said that, how is it “so obvious” to you, other than your beliefs chosen?

Surely everyone believes in degrees of sin. Such references are in the Bible, but common sense must tell us that murder is worse than telling a lie. So consequences must vary as well. And regarding the “first sin” that had more severe consequences, a metaphorical rendering moots the point.

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How did original sin arise? If you will pardon making allusion to a movie, Sin is like a Catch-22. God’s purity required payment for sin in blood. God’s pure mercy requires MAKING that payment in divine blood, hence Jesus comes to earth in the flesh to make that propitiating payment.
The task then is to reverse-engineer our sinful natures to see where it arose.
We evolved.
Thus every ancestor back as far as you care to imagine it [[ 3.5+ billion years, if you try hard enough ]] did two things that are contrary to God’s purity. They survived in a competitive environment, and they reproduced ditto. All of our ancestors, all the way back, evolved. One part of that is being pre-programmed, pre-wired, pre-stereotyped to survive come what may, and to reproduce ditto. The evidence for these is lust. We lust to continue drawing breath, to avoid starvation - - and in so doing guarding our neighbor’s wellbeing alongside our own is never perfected. We are imperfect. We sin.
Explaining it in this way sidesteps the spiritual and theological emphases which are rightly dear to Christians.
At the same time, facts are of Creation. The test for the accuracy of an interpretation, a reaction, an inference, drawn from Scripture, includes whether it manages to clash with reality.
Reality: the Universe is 13.78 billion years old, the Sun 5 billion, Planet Earth 4.5 billion First Life more than 3.5 billion, eukaryotic life ~2 billion, organized (multicellular) life ~.8 billion, cascading complexity of fossilizable forms >.5 billion, colonization of land by an air breathing fish ~1/3 billion - –
I’ll stop there. Evolution is simple fact. Our ancestry as a species does originate with the first primates at least 20 million years ago. We did not evolve from monkeys or apes - - we are part of that evolutionary tree.
The above is not a reverse-engineered but rather a traced path from First Cell to First Human. God knows who that First Human was, but the distinction is vastly more precise than what human science can ever refine. God knows; we have vague ideas; full stop.
The spiritual hints in Genesis are worth a lifetime of study.
ADAM AND EVE
There was no Garden. There was a mitochondrial Eve; all women alive today descend from that single female or a member of her line; she lived many tens of thousands of years ago. There was a Y-chromosome Adam; all men live today descend from that single male or a member of his line; he lived many tens of thousands of years ago.
The likelihood that mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosome Adam were alive at the same time is non-zero, but so small as to be meaningless; ditto whether they might have lived in the same tiny patch of earth.
The facts of Creation are devoid of spiritual hints. Yet they are a vessel into which spiritual statements must fit, insofar as a spiritual statement touches on material fact.
Hence evolution is real, and Genesis is theological; it has no need to be simultaneously fact and God’s great spiritual self-reveal.
Genesis provides themes which can absorb the likes of Aquinas, for a full lifetime. This humble post aims solely at that clay vessel off fact which must restrain theologies that require reality to differ from Creation, or creation to differ from Creation.

329

I fully agree with what you state:
“our genome evolved to incorporate a degree of selfishness”, which is “hard-wired into our DNA” and inclines us to sinful behaviors.

This means:
evolved illness, death, and selfishness were hard-wired in the DNA of the Homo sapiens creatures which God formed into the first human beings in the image of God and ordered to share eternal divine life.

To avoid that these first human beings were inclined to sin by urges encoded in the very flesh God made them from, God endowed these first humans in the image of God with original grace. Thereby they were absolutely free from any concupiscence or lust: They transgressed God’s commandment by pure pride, i.e.: they wanted to be “like God” and reach endless life on their own, without God’s help.

Under these assumptions, it seems obvious that the sin of these first humans in the image of God was a matter of black and white (like the killing of someone today). Consequently, there must have been a first sin and a first sinner.

330

He was always too busy with real-world issues to publish. His best friend tried to gather a bunch of his “table talk” material together and organize it into something that could be published but my brother rejected the idea.
I couldn’t even get him to set anything down for those of us whose understanding of what he was talking about was confined to when we were actually listening to him.

331

If I could answer this challenge again, please. The first time I had not carefully thought through what my answer should be. Now it is this:
I have no authority. No authority has been delegated to me at all. And I have no right to correct you.
Sorry for having to list an answer two times.

332

You did not have to answer it at all.

But there are some thqt do

Richard

333

Yes, me too, I believe in degrees of sin.

However, the difference between the first sin and any other sin is not a question of “degrees of sin”, but the very fact that it is the first human rejection of God.

Indeed, before the first human sin there were no human sinners, after the first human sin there are human sinners.

So, the first sin prompts God to decide how to treat the sinners. This obvious fact is what makes the first sin so special!

334

Genesis 3

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock

and all wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly

and you will eat dust

all the days of your life.

15And I will put enmity

between you and the woman,

and between your offspring a and hers;

he will crush b your head,

and you will strike his heel.”

16To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;

with painful labor you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband,

and he will rule over you.”

17To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat food from it

all the days of your life.

18It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

and you will eat the plants of the field.

19By the sweat of your brow

you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

*and to dust you will return.

Yes, really loving.and forgiving!

Richard

335

“First Sin vs. Subsequent sin” as compared to “Egregious sin vs. small sin”:
That statement is, of course, contingent on the belief that “first sin” occurred as depicted in Genesis. I’m not suggesting one belief over another in any way. But if, a big if, the Genesis story is metaphorical, then all sin since mankind’s appearance circa 200,000 years ago must be subject to comparison of bad sin vs. better sins. If that is the case, then what should be the “penalty” for simply eating an apple, especially since they were allowed to eat any other fruit in the garden?

Hopefully we can discuss the logic of both ideas and avoid using a scriptural text as if it were evidence.

336

The scriptural text is evidence – the question is “What type of evidence is it?”

For the first Creation account that’s a bit complex because it fits two literary types at once while also being polemical. For the Adam & Eve stories . . . those are a totally different literary type than anything in the first one, and I haven’t found any convincing argument as to what type they are. “Metaphorical” may be close enough to work with, though.

337

My bad…of course it is evidence. I should have said “avoid using a scriptural text as if it were proof”.

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I would like to clarify that this quote is not my statement: I am not stating that the first sin was a more abhorrent deed than the subsequent sins.

What I state is the following:

Before the first sin there are NO human sinners.

After the first sin there are human sinners, and thus, before any subsequent sin (any other sin after the first one) there are human sinners.

Consequently:

After the first sin God has to decide how to treat the sinners.

After any subsequent sin, God has no longer to decide how to treat the sinners, because he has already decided.

To this extent my statement seems a matter of pure logic!

Further:

Evidence proves that God decided not to condemn the sinners to hell immediately after sinning, but let the first sinner and subsequent sinners like us on earth.

Why?

The reasonable (in my view obvious) answer is:

God is merciful and let us sinners on earth to give us time and opportunity to repent and reach salvation.

This logical answer is largely confirmed by scriptural text, specially by the teaching of Jesus Christ.

But then: Would it have been sound on the part of God to let sinners on earth as if they had not sinned?

The reasonable answer to this question seems to be:

No, this had moved the sinners to sin more and more and so supported rather their damnation than their salvation, against the very aim for which God let the sinners on earth.

This (in my view also obvious) answer is largely supported by scriptural text too.

Accordingly, after the first sin God let us sinners on earth in the state described in Genesis 3. This is the so called “state of original sin”, where in lack of God’s original grace we are submitted to illness, death, and concupiscence. Thereby we can better avoid the delusion that we are like God, feel the need of God’s grace and redemption, and move to ask God for forgiveness.

339

Nope. He had already decided (inasmuch as we can use a tensed verb with respect to God).

This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time…

2 Timothy 1:9

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u still propose a materialistic view of sin and God with the view that physical death is a punishment for sin.
we become like God / out parents e.g. grown up in puberty, e.g. when we assign our own morality. once we identify as self in our physical body we are no longer part of the eternal life but limited to our own temporary life and body.
The fall is the poetic description of puberty and our separation from the past, and only if we grow up we will be able to reconnect with it in Jesus.