As someone who thinks of the Adam and Eve stories as symbolic of our existence but not actual history, I am interested in alternative ways of thinking about sin in humanity.
My own views can be see in an article on my website The Fall - Cosmic Scotus and more full in a chapter of my book Cosmic Franciscans: Duns Scotus, Bonaventure and an Evolving World.
If you also do not believe in a history Adam and Eve ,how do you view sin in its origins?
You might find Loren Haarsma’s book of interest
The simplistic answer is that sin is a bi-product of freedom of choice. Sin is the consequence of sentience. Instinct does not sin. The results may be the same but one is driven bythe need to survive and the other is made by a conscious decision.
The only answer to sin is forgiveness. A sin cannot be undone.
The theological question is whether sin matters to God in terms of access and association. The human view is that sin blocks us from God. God appears to accept sin as inevitable and therefore does not allow it to get in the way.
However, this would appear to be too simplistic for humanity. Humans need a challenge or a test. The story of Naaman is the biblical answer to that.
Richard
@cosmicscotus I’ll dialogue with your work a bit. Take this criticism (there will be a lot) as constructive.
The disobedience of Adam and Eve in Genesis, often called “The Fall” needs new interpretation in the light of evolution. An Existential approach like that used by Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner may help.
No it doesn’t need a new interpretation and those will not work. The fall needs an old interpretation. The classical one that sees original sin in terms of privation. This is a good discussion of original sin:
Ed Feser, Modern Biology and Original Sin Part 2
For Tillich you write:
To put this another way, we are a certain type of being that has as our essence the intention of Beings in Communion with God and the world. But in our life of actual choices we become something other than what are intended to be. For me our Essence as humanity is the desire of God to have us be Beings in Communion with the divine and the world. But in the course ion our evolution we have lost that Essence of Intended Humanity and have instead remained as selfish creatures, too much orientated to self-centred motivations that should have been left behind in our evolution. Our existence is instead a self-centred alienation that is only mitigated by our need to have loving relationships.
This starts strong with telos and humans being ordered towards communion with God. That is an excellent starting point. It quickly dives into extreme problems from there. Where you go wrong from my perspective is in how you seem to use sin, evil, essence, evolution, etc., terms which are not defined but should be. I could take this paragraph to easily mean “random mutations make us sinners”. Surely you don’t mean that? There would be category errors there and fuzzy thinking galore to the point where this is monumentally more of a fairy tale than the story with the talking snake and magic tree of immortality it’s based on.
Sin is a product of the immaterial intellect – the rational will of humans.
Evil is privation of good. Selfishness isn’t a leftover acquired trait we inherit. Our physical self or biological passions should be governed by reason which is governed by God. Sin is simply the breakdown of this ordering or hierarchy.
You say: “we have lost that Essence of Intended Humanity.” We cannot lose our essence and remain human anymore than a triangle can lose the essence of triangularity (plane figure with three line-segments and three angles that add up to 180 degrees) and remain a triangle. The essence of a human being is a rational animal. If we lost that essence we would be no more human than a table. A broken eye doesn’t lose its essence as an eye, it is defective and failing to achieve its natural end.
We should not blame evolution for original sin. Our current alienation does not occur because evolution hasn’t finished its job or random mutations went in a poor direction (all these material processes had intrinsic teleology and ends they followed that were fully created and sustained by God). Rather, it is because we lost the divine grace that elevated us above our raw animal nature given to our first parents, that we have the propensity to sin. Without divine grace it seems humans cannot subdue our animal instincts. The fall was a free choice to reject God and it resulted in the loss of the special grace given to the first humans. We are simply living life without that grace (the first parents lost our inheritance).
When you get to Karl Rahner you say things like this:
. We have freedom to think and act and that freedom is the source of our problems of sin. We have freedom to act or not to act. (From an evolution point of view we have acquired such rationale freedom that has then brought about our responsibilities when we crossed a threshold of knowledge that enabled it).
Not being a materialist, I don’t agree with this at all. Mindless atoms and meaningless forces don’t impart freedom or lead to the human intellect which is immaterial. That requires the soul. The analogy here to me is no matter how high you stack bricks in a circle, they will not spontaneously become a sphere (something new). We might deem this the principle of proportionate causality. An effects cannot contain something not present in its cause. Mindless atoms, forces and random mutations (material processes) don’t lead to the human mind or the intellect. (immaterial processes). It is God, not random mutations, who gives us our soul–our spiritual and rational nature.
Calling our freedom to act the source of our problems of sin is fairly accurate but I think could be worded better. You make it seem like that freedom is a flaw. We were not given freedom so we could sin, we were given freedom so we could love. We do need freedom in order to be able to sin but more importantly to love and have communion with God. We are rational beings and our rationality is supposed to subdue our animalistic side. Our freedom to act --our rational nature–is what makes us human to begin with. So free will is a pre-condition of sin but not its source.
Random mutations do not bring about our responsibilities (“that has then brought about our responsibilities”). What could they ever have to do with “oughts”? Surely the material world constrains what goodness looks like in it because of our physical nature but the ends or telos (intrinsic teleology) of things is set by God. Either we have an immaterial intellect or we don’t. That is not something that evolves over millions of years.
You write:
This does not mean (as in some traditional Catholic traditional teaching ) that there was some specific past event that has the been transmitted as some distorted moral quality nor that some event of sinfulness in the past is imputed to us now. We know instead the actuality of Original Sin in its universal manifestation in our lives and in the world.
This completely misrepresents the Catholic understanding of original sin and dismisses it via caricature (see the link I posed above). This is especially evident when you write this:
There is another reason to reject the story as historically; true it also makes God look despotic to inflict such injury on the whole of their descendants because of their individual sin.
God does not inflict a positive punishment on the whole of their descendants. Adam and Eve rebelled and put themselves outside the state of original grace. Imagine a rich person gambles away all their money and thus their children do not inherit what otherwise would have been theirs by nature of their birth. Original sin is a privation, not a positive punishment by God (see the article). It’s as if God gave Adam and Eve a vineyard to tend and let them reap its rewards as long as they maintained communion with Him. Once they rebel He takes the vineyard back–the same vineyard which would have passed on to their children had they not rebelled.
From an evolutionary point of view there was probably never a perfect relationship with the natural world,
“From an evolutionary point of view” literally means “if I restrict my view to entirely material and biological process.” Why are we talking about sin in purely these terms? Can we dig up a skull and test it for grace? Can we sequence DNA to find original sin? Can science ever give us oughts, purpose or meaning? Claiming there was never a perfect state of grace for our first human ancestors via “evolution” is like claiming wood doesn’t exist because a metal detector doesn’t find it. This probably one of the biggest flaws in your thinking. You treat spiritual questions from the lens of modern materialism.
You are correct in the gist of what you are trying to get at is true (the world has always been filled with cycles of death predation and a harsh biological environment). When the first humans sinned they were not biologically degraded. They were spiritually stripped of God’s preternatural gifts and grace leaving them subject to the natural world that was there all along.
We should not see the Genesis story and things related to it as historical reports. Instead we should think of the story as descriptions of our realty in the world, representative of our existence and what we do and do not do. When it comes to consider the mythical curses that follow sin we may see them as facts of existence that may be made worse by our individual and collective acts of misused freedom.
I agree it’s not literally true in all details but why can it not contain history and why should I not see it that way? Paul did. Scripture does (Genealogies in the Bible don’t work with made up names). I’d rather see the issue in the same way as:
I would go with all five of those over individual, modern literary critics on the internet armed with sola scriptura. Especially when they don’t usually understand what has classically been taught and seem to describe things from a materialistic perspective. This dilution of scripture essentially trades what it sees as an ancient fairy tale for a modern one.
Vinnie
(A) seems fairly evident to me unless we want to distinguish between sin and culpability on the basis of natural law. We can certainly do something objectively wrong without knowing it is wrong. But sin is something that is limited to rational beings because we have an intellect and can choose. Rocks and caterpillars cannot sin. But if we adhere to objective morality, people can absolutely do things that are objectively wrong without knowing them to be as such. But a choice is always involved is my caveat.
Vinnie
Naaman wanted to “pay” for his healing and also to “earn” it. Neither was necessary. He only had to ask.
Religion is full of human rituals and means of cajoling or beseeching God. Repentance, accepting forgiveness, always we need to be a part of the solution.
God’s forgiveness is unequivical and graceful. It is not of our doing nor can we change it.
As for unintentional sin?
I see no backing other than human writing. Adam’s sin was a decision. That is the sin that the Bible bases sin on. Furthermore, Adam tried to deny his sin. That is the second No. No.
If you are going to claim that any sinful act is a sin then God made the world sinful. The consequences of that are beyond contemplation, involving creating a problem only He could solve. If that is the God you worship, fine, but it is not how I see Him.
Richard
I think to blame Gods creation for the sin was actually the sin. To eat from the tree of realisation is part of puberty to become a self agent and necessary to being free from God as to freely decide to come back towards him and recognise his authority consciously.
All sin is sin by definition. Sinful acts are sinful acts by definition. Maybe it’s better to distinguish between what is right and wrong and our moral culpability.
As an example, running a scheme and lying to defraud the elderly of social security money is a tremendous evil. A woman lying to the gestapo at the door to protect her children is still wrong per most formulations of natural law, but her moral culpability is next to nil because this lie is being coerced by the threat of harm to her children. If something is an objective part of reality (e.g right and wrong) then it is an objective part of reality whether someone believes it or not. So as an example, if lying is wrong then it’s wrong whether it’s to steal money or to dupe your kids into thinking a jolly old fat guy in a red suit gives them presents on Christmas.
Vinnie
Ergo, the difficulty of the traditional account is not, by itself, evidence that any of its proposed replacements is or will be less debatable.
Whose definition?
Human or God?
That is half the problem. we think we know it all.
Scripture says otherwise.
Richard
This blog about Jim Stump’s book may be of interest.
https://biologos.org/post/the-origin-of-original-sin-and-the-fall
As may this podcast.
https://biologos.org/podcast-episodes/loren-haarsma-four-approaches-to-original-sin
I first read comicscotus 
Just having had a discussion with AI on the subject you might find interesting in how to interpret it. It hopefully might shift a number of assumptions
The law of identity. A = A. You can’t say sin is not sin without a lot of qualification on what you mean. I attempted to help you along culpability lines. The law of non-contradiction also says something cannot both be sin and not sin at the same time.
When someone quotes scripture to you, you dismiss it as proof-text hunting or their interpretation. But then you resort to the same in defense of your views. I’m not even at scripture yet. More how words and definitions work in communication. Sounds like nonsense to me. But maybe it is helpful in discussing abstract theological concepts to keep our terminology consistent within our own views. So what do you mean when you say some sin is not sin?
Vinnie
There is no such law.
Stop thinking in human terms and with human values.
Richard
Then you are using some-one else’s account.
Maybe you would be better off just talking with yourself if you cannot recognize basic laws of logic and common sense.
Vinnie
Logic? whose logic?
Common Sense! I thought that was banned from science!
“My ways are not your ways!” (Says God, not me!)
Leave your science in the lab.
Richard
I do not think you wish to go there.
Richard
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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