Is The Fall compatible with evolution?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Other examples are easily found. Oh look at all the animals which have this behavior of searching garbage cans for food. No it is not reasonable to conclude that this came from a common ancestor no matter how closely related they are. Again the point is that it is unreasonable to make evolution and genetics an absurd theory of everything. There are other causes for behavior than evolution and genetics.

Leading us down another false trail like the one above having no bearing on the issue originally under discussion.

You’re wrong. That was not explaining the theory of evolution. It was explaining a bit of reasoning sometimes used in phylogenic trees which is a reasonable guess but far from guaranteed. It can in fact easily be wrong, such as when a change in the environment coming later than that common ancestor resulted in the same adaptation by both species.

Do you have a reading impairment which cannot distinguish between “do want” and “don’t want?”

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How you can call yourself a scientist while making such silly comments is beyond me LOL. That isn’t even remotely analagous to anything I said

And if you really understood the Theory of Evolution, then the logic behind the construction of phylogenic trees (which was central to my argument) would have been easy to understand. I assumed you did understand it, but I was wrong. No scientific hypothesis or theory is guarateed to be 100% correct and this wasn’t my claim either, so this point is a red herring

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Haha, I admire your honesty. We are all subject to the same biases and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But admiting that it exists, at least gives us a chance of fighting it.

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I call myself a scientist because of the scientific research I participated in, not because of some delusion you seem to have about what being a scientist consists of. What you say here makes me seriously doubt whether you have any real understanding of science from first any hand experience at all. You confuse science with rhetoric just like a creationist and talk like science is some kind of religion. What are you, some kind of technician or engineer?

It is easy to understand, and I demonstrated my understanding by explaining the flaw in it. A real scientists understands the flaws in procedures he uses. Again I have to ask if you actually have any experience with doing science yourself.

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The answer is that the fall and our human sin nature are difficult to reconcile theologically with Darwinian evolution, or the first Adam being one of many hominids who descended from previous common ancestors. If there was no historical first Adam and no historical fall, there is no need for redemption, no need for a “second Adam,” and no need for Christ’s death and resurrection.

Adam and Eve were not created with a sin nature. They were created with free will, which gave them the opportunity to make real choices with real consequences. When they chose to disobey God’s one command to them, they became sinners by choice and by nature. And all of their human descendants are now sinners, both by nature and by choice. That means that our relationship with a holy and righteous God is broken.

But because of God’s great love, he provided a rescue plan by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, as a perfect sacrifice for our sins. Any person who accepts Jesus’ gift of salvation and forgiveness then has Jesus’ righteousness imputed to them, and their relationship with God restored. That means that, in the words of the old hymn, “God sees my Savior, and then he sees me, in the beloved, accepted and free.”

This whole biblical passage, although a bit long, is important, as it explains the consequences of the sin of the first Adam, and the contrast and result of the gift of second Adam, who is Jesus Christ our Savior.

Romans 12: 5-19 NIV–

Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ (NIV)

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—

13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

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Is Chalk compatible with cheese?

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Interesting question. Chalk is added to food, so has likely been added to cheese, but whether it is compatible with cheese depends on your definition of “compatible.” But faith expressed in love is important.

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So which is it? Not created with a sinful nature, or became sinners by choice and nature? If you choose to be a sinner, is that not your nature? Did they “re-create” themselves as sinners? I am not saying I know the answers, but I find your statements (and of course they are held by many) to be self-contradictory.
As time goes on, I am partial to what I understand is Mitchell’s position that evolution of a selfish nature is the best explanation, and when humans became morally responsible, it became sin to follow that nature.

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Or maybe another way to see this is to recall one view that much (all?) of evil is really a twisted or perverse or idolatrous application of something that was originally good. E.g. sex is a good thing, but becomes rape when it becomes perverted by power imbalance and coercion. Food is a good thing, but there is such a thing as gluttony, and so forth.

So in that vein - self love, self-care, indeed - self preservation are good things that God equipped us with using evolutionarily means. That is all good … until our own self-serving becomes so central to us (in an idolatrous sense) that we will keep looking out only for ourselves even at the expense of others and at the expense of community. Young children are rightly expected to be like that - babies in the extreme, because what else could they possibly do?

But … we are expected to grow up; both physically and then also morally. Perhaps our sin is our failure or refusal to “grow up” and transcend - or at least control and circumscribe our given nature within its proper limits.

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You cant separate the good and bad parts of our nature. The same nature that drives us to care and love also drives us to engage in wars and genocide. We have always had such a nature, long before our physical bodies resembled anything that could be described as human.

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Yep! And that’s kind of my point. When you’re given a wrench or a hammer it becomes your moral responsibility to do good things with it and not evil things. But both can be done.

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Dont you find it weird that an omni-benevolent god would create us with a nasty part to our nature that causes humans to engage in war and genocide? Why couldn’t he create us more like orangutans and bonobos instead of like chimpanzees? And is that nasty nature the reason why “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). If every human has fallen short of the glory of god, doesnt that suggest that this is by design and what God wanted?

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Well - I suppose granting us free-will is already one level of “weird” - insofar as we have trouble explaining that. But then on top of that; granting us a free-will inclined toward evil is probably another thing entirely yet. To grant one of those is different than granting the other. And “Weird” is a term that presupposes you’ve got lots of other (presumably “normal”) stuff to compare it with. But since this is the only universe and the only experience we know … “weird” doesn’t really apply.

This also gets at the fatal intersection that you or somebody else compared it to earlier. That if some certain intersection had a 99% crash rate of vehicles going into it, it would get closed down and looked at pretty quickly to see what was wrong with the intersection. Well - humans are even “worse”. We have a pretty much 100% mortality rate. Being born is a terminal condition. So would you want this “intersection” closed down as a result? Terrible things happen in life … so are we forced to conclude that life isn’t worthwhile? You might answer: well, why can’t an omnipotent God just stop the “terrible things” part of that? Or at least the most horrible parts of it. For that … for Job’s challenge to God - I have no answer to give. Nothing intellectual anyway. There is only reality, ‘weird’ or ‘normal’ as it may be.

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Really. Anthony? You think it’s odd that Christians would prefer a God who has populated a relatively very, very tiny portion of an infinitely large Cosmos with chimpanzee-like creatures rather than with ourangatan- or bonobo-like creatures?

Apparently, you haven’t done your homework. Loving bonobos have a carnivorous dark side.

  • "Don’t be fooled by their reputation for altruism and free love – bonobos hunt and kill monkeys just like their more vicious chimpanzees cousins, according to new research.
  • “Bonobos are merciless,” says Gottfried Hohmann, a behavioural ecologist at Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He witnessed several monkey hunts among bonobos living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and says, “they catch it and start eating it. They don’t bother to kill it”.
  • Yet unlike chimps, bonobos live in female-centred societies where sex, not aggression, settles differences and enforces social order.
  • Fruit makes up much of their diet, but the primates aren’t herbivores. Small ungulates called forest antelopes, or duikers, often fall prey to the apes.
    These hunts tend to be fairly simple, with a single bonobo cornering a duiker then quickly feasting on the still-living animal as more apes hurried to the scene. Hohmann says he has witnessed a duiker “still vocally blurting as the bonobos opened the stomach and intestines.”
  • Males and females hunt together, and females tended to share their spoils, which included the young of two species of monkeys.
  • The discovery casts doubt on claims that social aggression and hunting go hand in hand, Hohmann says. Some anthropologists suggest that in the million or so years that separate bonobos from chimps, bonobos lost their appetite for violence.

You think ourangutans are never violent? Check this out:

I wonder if part of your difficulty in reconciling Christian beliefs with your idea of how God should behave is due to a bias in favor of a God who makes Earth a petting zoo and uses stuff to make living things that prevents the living things from getting out of hand.

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It seems that way, particularly if you accept an independent creation of humanity (Adam and Eve) as it is totally God’s work. In a sense, evolution takes that blame for the creation of evil tendencies away from God directly, and replaces it with a natural, amoral process, that God then endows with the capacity for moral choice and gives his image.

It still is a bit problematic to me, but at least seems to take the creation of evil out of God’s willful intent.

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Apparently, you didn’t read my post. I never claimed bonobos

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You didn’t?
Hmmm, …

Screenshot 2021-07-22 at 17-36-11 Is The Fall compatible with evolution - Open Forum Scientific Evidence - The BioLogos Forum
Screenshot 2021-07-22 at 17-36-11 Is The Fall compatible with evolution - Open Forum Scientific Evidence - The BioLogos Forum774×179 16.5 KB

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I started typing a response but got distracted. Somehow I managed to inadvertantly post it before I had finished typing it.

I was specifically referring to that part of human nature that leads us to engage in war and genocide. Animals killing eachother in a fit of anger or mauling their food is one thing, but an attack on a neighboring group that involved killing all males because they belonged to that group (which in human cultures, we call war and genocide) is on an entirely different level. As far as I know, bonobos and orangutans don’t engage in such behaviour - I might be wrong though because I’m not an expert. But this is all besides my point though. I’m puzzled how Christians can claim god is omnibenevolent but at the same time think that he imbues us with a nature that drives us to commit war and genocide. Could god not have made us less aggressive and prone to do evil without compromising our free will?

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I dont understand. If god is omniscient and omnipotent, how can god not be directly responsible for the evil tendencies in our nature. He would have known that if he created the Universe in a specific way, that evolution would produce humans with a tendency towards great evil, but he went ahead anyway.

When a man commits murder in a jealous rage, he might be responsible for not controlling his jealousy and committing the murder, but he is not responsible for feeling jealously in the first place. Without that extreme negative emotion, he would have been less likely to commit the murder? If god gave him this extreme negative emotion (through evolution), is god not partly responsible for his actions? If so, how can anyone claim that god is omnibenevolent?

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What man could not do, God did in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We were slaves to sin but God sent His son Jesus to become sin for us and to die to sin in our place,in our stead, as us. Those who place all their confidence in Him actually die to the Law of Sin that is in the flesh and our spirits become New Creations in Christ. The old passes away and everything becomes new and all things are from God. The spirit of man is reborn which sets us free from our bondage to sin. And all this happens by faith, trust in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
God seperated us from sin.
That is the Good News.