That is also my position.
One hole, big enough to drive a Mac truck through, is since God is responsible for the evolution that results in us you could argue that makes God the author of sin or at least responsible for making us capable of sinning.
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Can we get a number 8 where you answer this:
I guess I am curious as why you might think “we are born imperfect and with a tendency to rebel against God” without an Adam and Eve?
I am genuinely curious. The rest of what you wrote is not very controversial to me and hardly novel. Some of it seems a bit irrelevant to the discussion.
Sure. That is the problem the author in the OP is trying to resolve. That is as assumption we all agree on. I do not think it is insurmountable because we need to figure out what is means to be truly human in the Biblical sense and whether or not you think God chose a pair of individuals to give souls (assuming one subscribes to such issues) to or what not are still viable possibilities.
Of course. That is exactly what I wrote to the individual I was responding to in the same reply that included my sentiments to you. Only those who deny the historicity of Adam and Eve have appeared to implicitly imply because the story in Genesis appears mythical in many details they did not exist. As I have stressed, Romans is really the primary reason for attempting to hold on to a historical Adam and Eve that caused a fall from grace for subsequent humanity.
Not controversial and I am not sure anyone has suggested otherwise so I am not sure the relevance.
Sure. Who disagrees with that? it timeless. Shows up in the OT over and over again. Paul goes beyond that however. His view doesn’t negate that meaning but that is hardly controversial.
I think God became flesh to save humans is the defining characteristic of Christianity. Everything else is us trying to understand it. But all other beliefs are not on equal footing in my view.
You are free to hold that view. Many do. I would like to point out the irony of that not being in the Nicene Creed which only has “according to the scriptures.” In fact, the Nicene Creed is a doctrine of a particular set of Churches. It did not fall from heaven. Your view on “Sola Scripture” is also a personal doctrine of yours and it is one neither scripture nor the nicene Creed can be used to support. Disconnecting scripture and tradition is self-defeating. But you are correct. We do not have to believe everything a Church teaches, or what most Christians believed the last 2,000 years, even those who we think were called specifically by Jesus and moved over to write our sacred scripture. Heck, we don’t have to believe scripture, it can be accommodated and outdated. We can view the thoughts of the apostles and even some of Jesus’s teaching in the same light. on some things if we don’t want to I guess. This seems a bit spineless to me. Scripture and tradition both serve as conscience and corrector in my view. This is tantamount to eating the forbidden fruit in my view.
Because no doctrine is safe. And appealing to the Nicene creed, well, that is just as arbitrary as appealing to the authority of the Church. It was the Church who authorized the Nicene Creed. Or appealing to the decision of the Church to canonize whatever version of the canon you are using. For me, I see that as hiding behind a Nicene Creed which is just trading one authority for another and offers nothing new under the sun in this discussion. This is not YECism. The fall and original sin and very significant parts of Christianity, how exactly God created things is not.
Yes, but historical Adam has the same hole, only more directly, as God was his immediate creator and presumably his moral model and educator and provider of his intellect and reason.
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Yes all theology is Swiss Cheese and sometimes the holes align and sometimes they don’t.
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I lean that way as well but you are correct in there being holes, especially the one pointed out by Bill in the first half of this.
I think we might be able to go the freedom route in creation. God has allowed life to evolve with a degree of freedom and it has done so in a direction not the most beneficial to us and one He wants to correct. I think even then, we are still only responsible with what we do. God knows the raw material leach person is working with. The fall could be life gone astray in general.
I actually think God has made it capable for us to sin. He gave us freedom and in my view sin is something contrary to the will of God. I don’t find that expression problematic. But God rigging the deck to lead us to sin is another problem entirely. I think I made a thread on this long long ago about the deck being stacked.
I think Bishop Barron has a nice take on this that resolves that issue quite well.
It’s about humans wanting to be the deciders of good and evil over and above God. Humans “arrogating [fixed] to themselves the divine prerogative.” If you want cliffs, you can start at 6 minutes and go to 7.5 or beyond. That is specifically what I am referencing. I don’t believe that requires an original pair but if we rule them can we still make categorial statements such as “all have sinned?” I mean, how do we know that? Maybe it should be most have sinned or some have sinned. Are we rejecting the veracity of Paul’s “for all sinned” as well when we let go of a literal Adam and Eve? Paul can’t possibly know that.
Vinnie
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That is an interesting question.
One answer would be that we have evolved along a path that tries to ensure a high fitness for us or our relatives. In that case, we could think that God expects us to select what He tells is good, even if that would seem to be against our selfish interests.
It is a question of selecting between who to obey, God or myself (‘flesh’)? Obeying God even when it seems to be against my selfish interests shows trust, faith/faithfulness towards God.
I am interested in the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. Those teachings were mainly told orally and there are no recorded voice messages. That leaves us the scriptures. I assume that the commonly accepted scriptures that were judged to be authoritative by the majority of churches (ecumenical and catholic in the ecumenical sense) during the first-to-second century were the scriptures that are the most reliable sources in matters of faith. For me, it is not a question of something ‘dropping from Heaven’ but an attempt to find the most reliable witnesses of the teachings of Jesus and his apostles.
Whether a somewhat controversial book, like Revelation, should be included in the core canon or left as a supporting book is not essential for me. The core teaching can be found from the bulk of the scriptures that form the canon. And I do not think that canon was decided by a council. Rather, the council(s) just confirmed which books were already used as authoritative texts, or read during the services in the majority of the churches. That set of scriptures were inherited from the earlier Christians, those living during the first-to-second centuries [I support early rather than late dates for the scriptures in the canon].
Apostolic succession suggests an uninterrupted chain of oral and written teachings since the time of the original apostles, transferred from one bishop to the following ones. Unfortunately, I do not trust that the chain of ordained bishops kept the original apostolic teachings as they were originally told. The chain of bishops includes all kinds of persons and chaotic conditions. The list of bishops and popes included bad apples and rivalling political ambitions. It seems that new teachings and interpretations were added during the centuries, to the extent that the current load of doctrines has traveled far from the original teachings. That is why I return to the canon to check which doctrines have remained faithful to the original teachings. The first ecumenical creeds help in seeing how the early Christians interpreted the scriptures, what they considered to be central. Creeds as such are otherwise not ‘the word of God’ for me.
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In ANE thought it could; the king was the land and was the people, however weird that seems to us.
Paul also saw sin as an entity with power, something to be slaves to on par with being slaves to Christ.
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It’s what I find I’ve been trending towards.
More properly, in modern English, “in accordance with the scriptures”.
Specifically, it was a council of the whole church, something very rare in history. As such an argument can be made that its authority falls under the promise Jesus made to the Apostles that the Holy Spirit would guide them into all truth.
I was just listening to a video about quantum mechanics where “degrees of freedom” was mentioned, so my first thought on reading this was “Only one?”
Oops – that’s “arrogating”. 
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Historically that is accurate.
Except for one word, the Nicene Creed is all lifted from the scriptures. It isn’t an interpretation except insofar as it’s an organized list of the essentials.
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And you are happy with this?
I am not a slave. Not to Christ, nor to Sin. Sin has no body or form. That is a false view., and if that is Paul’s view as you see it, then one of you is wrong. Take your pick.
Sin is not an entity.
Richard
That may be true for ANE people but did the fall of two persons put an inherited corruption and tendency to rebel in all the thousands of humans apparently living during that time?
I strongly doubt it.
I also question if the other humans would have considered A&E as the royal couple that had the right to represent all living humans. Whatever the possible other humans were thinking, did God think it was justice to doom also those humans that potentially lived during the same time but did not participate in the acts of A&E?
There are lots of uncertainties in my thinking but it is problematic to assume that all humans living during that time were doomed to carry the so called ‘original sin’ just because of what A&E did.
So some was put in and some was left out. That makes it an interpretation.
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I don’t see it so much as fitness but survival of my offspring or close relatives. So we sin because the drive to survive is so strong we don’t always do what is best for others. Which is why we have to be told to “do unto others”.
The biological concept of fitness includes both the survival and the reproduction. It is a term comparing the relative amount of reproducing grandoffspring, both own grandoffspring and those of close relatives that carry similar genes (that is not the official definition but this definition captures the essence of what ‘biological fitness’ tries to represent).
To get a relatively high fitness (high relative to the other individuals in the population), there is a need to survive to reproduction and the offspring needs to also survive. Yet, survival is not always the most important factor. If you can maximize the relative number of grandoffspring by sacrificing yourself, then it is better to put all resources to reproduction, even if it kills you. There are many plants and animals that die after the first reproduction (so called ‘big bang’ reproduction or semelparity). In some animals, the male sacrifices himself to ensure a maximal amount of offspring - in such cases, often the female eats the male after the copulation).
In humans, dying in warfare to protect the children and other relatives might serve as an example that sometimes it may be beneficial to sacrifice yourself. Depends on the case, as in many cases dying in the war does not improve your fitness.
Evolution does not rule out original sin… It does not pinpoint the origin of anything, but we know there has to be an original even though to pinpoint it gets really murkey. So, Adam and Eve are a represention of the originals in the story.
When was the ground actually first tilled? To make it fertile for a plant to grow? From a science perspective we can say it began with microbes living in the soil, the ground from which Adam was made.
- Gen 2:15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.
This word “tend” (5685 עָבַד abad) is the same word translated as “till” in verse 5. This is the very first task that “the man”, representing the first “living being” was given. To till, to work the soil and make it fertile for the next step in growing vegetation.
- Gen 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Adam was made of “dust” (6083 עָפָר aphar), the smallest thing the mind of Moses could think of when God inspired him to start with something small. We now know that there are smaller things, microscopic living things like bacteria that are smaller than dust… and they work the soil.
After forming man (3.2 billion years ago), God plants a garden.
- Gen 2:8 The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.
The plants in the garden are a representation of the first vegetation, a cyanobacteria formed about 2.3 bya. The word for “plant” does not necessarily mean to fix to the ground, but can mean simply to establish. So the first vegetation was like an algae with no true roots.
About the same time (2 bya), the first eukaryote is formed, represented by the garden itself meaning to “hedge about” like a garden wall. A eukaryote is a cell bound by a cell wall and holds organelles, Adam is now represented by the mitochondria, the first symbiote placed in the garden, and then there are the trees in the midst representing the nucleus with the DNA of life.
Adam is instructed about eating the trees, and needs helpers, so he is multiplied. More single celled organisms are formed from the same ground, from Adam, for naming and one of them was the “serpent”. The serpent is Satan or the devil and he is a shapeshifter, one who can change or transform his appearance.
- 2 Cor 11:14 And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.
We have bacteria, cyanobacteria (algae), eukaryote, and now we have a representation of a shape changer, in the form of an amoeba (about 1.2 bya). An amoeba extends and retracts its shape, using pseudopods, extensions to move about. Yes, Satan, is that serpent, extending and retracting, and wrapping around the tree of knowledge of good and evil - the brain and nervous system. Serpent meanings “to hiss, to whisper”, the desires of the flesh sending little signals to the brain. Satan is that amoeba of old, the first parasite, wanting to suck the life out of us! You know he loves to eat brain cells, sitting up in that tree handing out the fruit of the flesh… here, he say, let me grab a nice juicy one for you high up in the branches… all you need is your imagination. “Here”, he says, “rot your brain on this!”
We are getting ahead of ourselves in the story though. The tree, the brain has not matured yet, not fully grown. What I’m saying is, we being of the flesh nature, all flesh, has a sin nature.
- Gen 2:22 And from the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man, He made a woman and brought her to him.
The “rib” means side (6763 צֵלָע tsela) God took the whole side of Adam, divided him in half, this represents cell division. Two cells becoming one flesh, the first clonal cells as precursor to a true multi-cellular organism (with specialized cells that can no longer live by themselves).
Adam and Eve together now represent choanoflagellates (about 1 bya), and later become inseparable and so he is with her when she later eats from the tree.
- Gen 2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Being naked is a euphemism for sex, and choanoflagellates are the first organisms to reproduce sexually.
The story continues as we continued to evolve.
You are kidding!
Being naked is being naked, It is considered shameful.
I have never read such unadulterated speculation in all my time here. It is bad enough for people to be claiming any sort of reality to the garden narraive but to try and link it to evolution? You really must be joking.
Richard
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Not at first. there was no shame in nakedness. God clothed us with skin and it wasn’t shameful until about 100K years ago.
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That wasn’t the point.
The relevant point is that any euphmism for sex would be much later than the origins of the Garden narrative.
Furtherore if it was sex then God did not need to clothe them with anima skin as opposed to the fig leaves they had covered themselves with.
Richard
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I pick you – I’ll take an inspired Apostle over you any day.
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Unadulterated: not mixed or diluted with any different or extra elements; complete and absolute.
Thanks for your complement!
The time for euphemisms is not in the setting of the story, but in the writing of it, written by Moses we presume. How do I explain this and still let my kid read it?
Well, we have to get the story straight before we can read further in to it. They sewed the fig leaves together but it doesn’t say that they actually put them on. In fact, right after that they are hiding again because they were still naked.
- Gen 3:8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden… 10 So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
God never had a problem with them being naked before:
- Gen 3:11 And He said, “Who told you that you were naked?
He didn’t cover his face or say, “Oh geez! put some clothes on!” No, He only had a problem with them hiding from His presence. There was no shame in sex or nakedness before when it was just Adam with his wife.