What would Teilhard de Chardin say to that?
I think there are different goals here. Yes, it would be great if young-earthers left their anti-science arguments behind. But convincing them of an old earth and common descent isn’t the only issue. My focus is on a different factor that’s present in all sorts of original sin formulations, whether young-earth or old-earth. This factor could be represented as madAtAdam, and it’s the idea that all our problems today come from our no-good dirty-rotten fruit-stealing great-great-etc.-great-grandfather. No matter what else these original sin formulas add on, no matter how they transform it – they could even spell it backwards – madAtAdam still remains a factor.
The only way to root out madAtAdam is to not view sin as a primarily hereditary problem. There’s no denying that people affect each other (whether they’re related or not), or that sin snowballs through time, but that’s not it. Sin is also a matter of our will – a choice. From the beginning of their story, Adam and Eve confront us with our own nature. Adam chose to sin, then got mad at Eve and God for making it happen. The various original sin formulations the church has since come up with don’t so much describe original sin as repeat it.
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Speak what you are writing …. and behold, you have joined a 1,000 year debate which triggered a mutual excommunication (circa 1071 CE) between MILLIONS of Roman Catholics and even MORE MILLIONS of Eastern Orthodox.
The only difference is that you are trying to use Evolution as motivating bait.
What the heck is going on here?
BioLogos is not here to convince people that one denomination is better than another. It is here to convince Christians that their EXISTING FAITH can be reconciled with scientific evidence supporting evolution.
Since I have shown that anywhere from 52% to nearly 2/3rds of American evangelicals are Adult-Only-Baptizers, the task is to show that we can convince the NON-ORIGINAL SIN folks that Evolution is valid.
You and Jay are messin’ about just trying to convince one denomination of Creationist to switch to a DIFFERENT denomination of Creationist…. and you are picking fights with Original Sin Evolutionists to do so!**
Please stop the madness and get over it….
Should we be madAtGod instead for making us with a sin nature?
I request clarification on this point:
Marshall: There’s more that we need saving from than our own past sins. Infants as well as everyone else need a Saviour. We don’t need to show that infants have sinned, or have sin, to affirm that. And we don’t have to limit their chances for salvation to whether they were baptized.
Vinnie: Why would you say sinless infants need a savior though?
Marshall: For one thing, they’re mortal. Eternal life is the Saviour’s gift.
Vinnie: So even though sinless, they need saving from their mortality that God gave them to begin with? I think something is missing here.
Marshall:They (the infants we were talking about) need saving from the mess we’ve made of God’s world. Someday “the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” When those infants are there/then instead of here/now, it will be right to say that Jesus saved them.
Needing to be freed from the mess we’ve made of God’s world is not the same as needing to be saved from the mortality God gave us.
There seems to be tension here or maybe I am adding in a knowledge of what science says to your view. Do infants “need” saving? One way to look at it is the world is good and owes them and us nothing by virtue of their and our nature. Unless we think God purposefully put us in a crappy situation to grow? To be “saved from something” means to be rescued, delivered, or protected from a dire situation, danger, or harm. So God saves us from the mortality and the fear of death that he gave us? God rescues us from the sh*t-show of evolution he fathered?
I think the accounts try to understand death and sin as intruders to God’s good world, not as part of his creation. I think a good view of the garden story should try to alleviate some of these difficulties.
If nothing else, madAtAdam is monumentally better than madAtGod.
Lewis Carroll comes to mind, every time.
Why is teaching this so important to you? Maybe we should focus on teaching everyone how yogurt is made instead. Or maybe how to live ethically (which --amongst other things, means not vilifying those who disagree with us). Maybe we can stop treating God like a commodity or merchandise we are selling to someone. We follow the great commission because we are told to and want to share our joy of salvation and hope of the life to come. The Gospel stands on its own, illuminated solely by the power of God. We just relay it. Beyond that, what anyone believes is on them. If the mistaken science of someone else can cause you to completely reject God, I suspect they were not looking very hard and regardless, everyone will be judged based on what they know and do with it. God is not inept, weak or feeble and neither is the Gospel.
Vinnie
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but when Paul talks about ‘death, where is thy sting?’ he seems to be primarily referring to physical death. His antidote is the physical resurrection of Jesus following his physical death. The whole chapter is about physical death and resurrection, and why Jesus’ resurrection is a guide to our own. And as such he clearly links sin with physical death, as well as being ‘made of dust’. Paul does seem to believe that if mankind’s ancestors had not sinned there would not have been death, in any form. And I agree that it is quite likely that Paul did indeed believe in a literal Adam and Eve (why would he not, given Genesis?), but I would argue this underlies his whole argument, rather than them being simply ‘representatives’ of all of us, even if we do indeed act similarly.
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Hello Vinnie,
I find it increasingly tricky to come up with a coherent depiction of a “potentially immortal” humanity that God chooses put of a world so increasingly full of death before the arrival of humans. Think about a select two chosen to that God makes first contact with. If they already had a family or were part of a community, they would likely be exposed to death both animal and “human”. My one favorite hypothetical situation is what would it be like for God to pluck A&E out of the community one particular day that a community member also died. Just interesting implications there. If God wanted to grant them Eternal life, do you suggest that these humans were gifted the potential of immortality if they didn’t “sin”? What are the implications of that? For one, if God wanted them to be fruitful and multiply, at what point with a immortal species would this earth run out of resources? Secondly, how does this new immortal species relate to the world outside of the Garden, if it’s all subject to death and mortality? How does this animal/natural world with death and entropy interact with a species that’s immortal? How would they be impacted by living in a world that way? How does the natural world, which according to ToE we arrive from, be redeemed from its own “slavery of death”? To me personally, any historical Adam and Eve would have to be already aware of the realities of death and entropy, so I struggle to see how the Garden narrative introduces anything new to them. Of course, I think we can debate eternally what “death” meant to them, but I would argue that even if Adam and Eve were gifted potential eternal life, they would still live in a world infested with death. Maybe not in Eden but certainly outside of it. Controversially, could it be seen as a curse to that original couple to be given potential eternal life, while they’re aware of a death-ridden world outside of “Eden”?
Regardless, unless you take a fringe approach like some Eastern Orthodox scholars have done with a atemporal Fall, death is just as much as a problem to the world whether or not A&E introduced death to humans. If death is death, then animal death is still as much of a problem as human death. The world still needs redeemed. (Just a interesting side note that Scripture does talk about the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world, so death before time even existed???)
To me slavery to death is when we became aware of our mortality and whence we had a decision, do we turn to the giver and sustainer of all (the ground of all being and the source of all life, a la Prime Mover/Uncaused Cause) or do we seek life outside the Fount of all being, moving towards nothingness and non-existence. The Void one might say. Little “d” death to me became “Death” something beyond its place and “role” in God’s creation. Obviously as humans, one day we became aware of our own mortality which left us with that choice. A world that would be entirely different, having a species that is aware of death and non existence. Some speculation there but just trying to bring some helpful thoughts to the discussion.
I do think some part of a historical A&E is important to Christian theology and of course I don’t want to bow the knee to what science says on our origins, but I do want to cautiously consider our posture towards death and mortality.
Liam
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Please clarify?
My concern is not with Original Sin, or Non-Original Sin.
My concern is arguing about is distracting from the task at hand: that no matter
which school you belong to, there is a way to reconcile your Christian Faith with
Evolutionary science!
Obviously there isn’t to a large minority of American folk Christians. They didn’t ask. And you can’t help unhelpable people.
Okay. Saying evidence is consistent with your view is different from saying there’s positive evidence for your view. That’s fine. All of us are trying to find a space that reconciles the evidence of science with scripture, tradition, experience, and reason/logic. It’s the Wesleyan four-legged stool. As a Protestant, I reserve the right to make one leg shorter than the others. 
The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are consistent with ANE mythology in which humans seek “divine knowledge” and immortality. Genesis subverts the “traditional” Babylonian narrative in that humanity acquires the knowledge of good and evil, which is “divine” in the sense that animals don’t possess it and neither did humans until they acquired it, but such knowledge comes at a cost – separation from God and the loss of a chance at immortality. Both 2nd Temple Jewish commentators and Paul himself were ignorant of the ANE mythology that the authors/editors of Genesis 1-11 were writing against.
The “curses” that follow the sin of ha’adam and ha’issah are all anachronistic, with the exception of one. Pain in childbirth has been with humanity since we first stood upright, necessitating narrower hips, and evolved larger brains. The only curse that holds up is the spiritual – being barred from the Garden of God’s presence.
If you read what YEC and Catholic theologians have written about Adam’s “special gifts,” he’s clearly superhuman.
Oh, I’ve thought plenty about it. Way too much, in fact. I’m familiar with Thomistic thought. I just don’t have time to read the Summa at my age. Who does? haha
From a piece I wrote about Kierkegaard’s “The Concept of Angst”:
If that doesn’t sound like the “supernatural gifts” made Adam superhuman, I don’t know what to say.
How do the preternatural gifts make us human.
Exactly.
I’m not trying to convert Christians to Christianity. I’m having a conversation with fellow Christians about the best way to reconcile our beliefs to scientific realities. It’s not surprising that we disagree on details. It’s an incredibly complex puzzle to try to put together.
Addendum: One more Kierkegaard note. I love this guy!
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Keep them entirely separate. And metaphorize between the two.
I prefer just to jettison the concept of inerrancy. Paul could get facts of history wrong and still be right about Jesus. It’s one reason I no longer consider myself an evangelical, among many others.
If his guilt ridden psychotic break was actually a close encounter of the 4th kind, then yeah, no problemo.
Hi Liam. I appreciate your thoughts. They demonstrate careful consideration of the material and your questions are very good.
In my view, animals don’t have rational souls and do not engage in abstract thought. Intellectually, I don’t personally find animal death problematic. They are food. Emotionally, it is difficult, however. These creatures are alive and I love animals.
It’s a very good and tough question. I think my response is relevant to most of your post as well. In my view God creates our rational and immaterial souls at conception. So until the rational soul came,immaterial abstract thought was not possible. So I don’t see this complication as damning to that view. And if Adam and Eve were in a community, they probably went back to it after being expelled from the garden. I mean, Cain is worried about those who are going to kill him. It would seem this is the posture we would have to take here. For me there is no way around God choosing to create immaterial rational souls at some point. The exact details of who, how many and when are impossible. It’s feasible a human couple were the first two and I think that provides a solution to the majority of your questions. Would Adam and Eve have truly understood death in an abstract sense before having a soul? I doubt it. But the narrative itself proposes that they do understand death at that point in time when God tells them they would die on the day they ate the fruit.
Adam and Eve needed to understand death to take/understand the consequences of disobeying God. So for this reason, being exposed to animal death and death of biological humans who appeared like them in every way would make sense.
In my thoughts, God has given them supernatural gifts. Running out of resources is not an issue here. God is at the helm. We just don’t know how things would have gone if Adam and Eve had never sinned or how God would have gone about accommodating the spread of humanity. Do you think heaven will run out of resources? The obvious answer is no. Valid question but in my mind, not deal-breakers. The real issue is are we convinced Scripture and Church tradition teaches this? If so then we have to take it seriously at the least. I have faith God would have figured out how to handle an increasing population though.
Vinnie
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To quote a doctor at a Methodist hospital, “You call those little bundles of selfishness sinless?!”
If Jesus’ Resurrection is a guide, then it isn’t just about physical death: that would be so if He rose like Lazarus, to die again, but that’s not what happened – He rose with a transformed physical body, one connected fully to the Spirit.
It wouldn’t – they’d recognize the point at which the “fill the earth” command had been completed (I figure around a billion, maybe two billion, people).
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So in the Genesis version, humans didn’t need those “heroes”/deities to bring knowledge, they were capable of getting it themselves . . . . and didn’t end up any better off afterwards!
Probably true.
Which means the church Fathers were as well.
That’s worth keeping in mind.
Those sources likely assumed Adam and Eve were a real historical couple just as they assumed heaven is above us and Sheol is underground. I think the Bible has meaningful things to say about the afterlife, even if a lot of it is couched in physical imagery that we now know not to take super literally. We can use the same wisdom with Adam and Eve.
For much of history, the idea that every group of creatures came from a first male or a first couple was as blindingly obvious as that heaven was above the clouds. The Bible’s genealogies connect all people to Adam and all Egyptians to Ham’s son Egypt and all Canaanites to Ham’s son Canaan (Gen. 10:6). Jacob/Israel is the father of Israel. But already in the Bible we see how reality is messier than every Israelite coming from one man and his four wives. Rahab and Ruth and Uriah are Israelites too.
Likewise, already in the Bible we see complications in Adam’s family with Cain’s wife and feared enemies. But even as the Bible hints that there are people outside of Adam and Eve’s family, nothing suggests that those people are any less human, whether spiritually or physically.
In fact, the first part of the Eden story defends the husband and wife relationship as being closer than blood, tighter than descent. A man leaves his parents to be joined with his wife, because she is fully his equal, fully his match, flesh and bone. Just as the Hebrew idiom for mortality was acted out with Adam being made “from the dust,” so too the Hebrew idioms for kinship were acted out with the woman being “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” literally the man’s other side.
This isn’t just about two people. Jesus uses this story as evidence that God joins every couple together, so “what God has joined let no man separate.” And Jesus was far from the first to recognize the story as primarily teaching human truth, whether or not it also told the history of one couple.
So when Cain gets a wife, Genesis has taught us to see that wife as God’s provision. That woman is fully human, just as Eve was. Genesis 2 shows that descent isn’t the only way the human family grows, and descent doesn’t even create the tightest human relationships.
Marriage relationships are just as real as father–son relationships. Beyond that, adoption is real. The Bible’s genealogies often trace legal descent, treating it as just as real (if not more so) than biological descent. Friendship is real. Business relationships are real. Government is real. There are so many ways humans pass things on to others and are affected by others and inherit from others beyond descent.
Reducing Adam’s effect on humanity to what he passed on to descendants is unhealthy because it removes so many important parts of being human from consideration. In our day it also leads to scientific conflicts. But even if that wasn’t the case, there is good reason to not fixate on descent when talking about sin. Doing so can’t help but turn sin into something like a gene and stop it from being something like a moral fault. When sin descends in Genesis, there’s no indication that it’s through heredity.
So yes, many early sources considered Adam and Eve actual people. Even so, they did not fixate on biological descent from this couple the way modern thinkers do. Even when they did talk about descent, it was rarely limited to biology. Legal/covenantal arrangements as well as following in a person’s footsteps were also real ways to become a descendant. Neither the Bible nor the early tradition agrees with our modern reductions of Adam’s impact to heredity and descent to biology.
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Hello Vinnie,
Plenty of good stuff from your reply so let’s get into it:
Thinking this over, I think my initial problem with having two different forms of death, animal and human, it seems oddly human-centered to suggest that the only species that is redeemed from the powers of death is humankind. To me personally, saying that God is only concerned with mortality in humans is a leap too far for me if the Bible is both discussing a redemption from physical and spiritual death. I think the Bible discusses a variety of opinions on death, and I would argue that the key thing to humans as you’ll say is the fact that we have a spiritual capacity/ potential to us (i.e we’re given rational souls). We are more than this physical body. Even more so that we are capable of dying spiritually. To me, I find that aspect of ourselves most important to our salvation, especially given how much NT language is given to dying to the flesh and plenty of resurrection/new spiritual birth language. Goodness, the language of the second Death is clearly indicative of how much worse a fate we can expierence due to our spiritual being. So thus I’m struggling with a tension when if you posit a historical A&E to explain why humans physically die. I think you can definitely make arguments for Christ saving us from that power of physical death, but I suggest that the power of death and our slavery is due to the fact that we are separated from the source of Life. If we die physically, the greatest danger to us as potential spiritual beings is to be separated spiritually from God, not to the fact that we are mortal. To me from ToE, we can either accept that all creatures and humans were mortal but humans can also die spiritually and could be eternally separated from God OR all creatures except humans were mortal and it is both a problem that we physically die and can spiritually die. The exception for humans I find hard to defend when we have a good Scriptural alternative to our ongoing lives. It seems unnecessary to me to suggest the origins of human mortality coming from A&E.
Ultimately where I was getting at is giving human creatures an exception to physical death is a worse option for me rather than positing that all creature, both animal and human were made mortal, but both will be “redeemed” from it in different ways. Isaiah 11 gives me hope that animals will get a happy ending regardless that doesn’t require death anymore.
As you have discussed this with others, I will simply agree that I do immensely struggle with differentiating between biological and metaphysical humans but I’ll say nothing more on that. This thought above is totally reasonable and I agree on it for different reasons than you. Simply as discussed before, my issue comes down when you suggest to A&E that their potential for immortality in a physical sense. I won’t beat a dead horse dead but I think even God plucking them out a community is difficult position to take. If however, you don’t posit the potential for physical immortality, then I could almost entirely agree with a historical A&E, because a hypothetical historical A&E for me in the human past is about our first contact with the Divine and our wake up to our spiritual potential and how badly we messed up our calling.
Yeah the hypothetical I was positing certainly wasnt insurmountable if we believe in the Divine, though it does make you wonder how that would have gone about and what responsibility those humans would have to manage that problem. I think a more interesting question that people have discussed here on how the people outside of the Garden be redeemed. Not in my wheelhouse to engage that as it’s been discussed already here but some difficulties remain in any hypothetical A&E.
-Liam
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