WE'RE ALL ORIGINAL SINNERS.

Don't give Adam & Eve all the credit

As a practicing sinner I don't need to be convinced of the reality of personal sin. Whenever I give in to the dreary enslaving powers of sin, it's not a question of ignorance or mental incapacity: I know what God wants of me and choose to do otherwise.

Like most nice people, I specialize in sins of omission. We lukewarm believers choose sloth and selfishness rather than commit mayhem. Only dedicated crusaders for evil reach the depths, or heights (?), of sin. They follow Lucifer's rebellious cry in Milton's Paradise Lost, "Evil be thou my good."

Yet a firm belief in the capacity for sin does not solve the problem of why human beings incline to evil. The human proneness to sin has been explained by the church in its developed doctrine of Original Sin. The catechism explains that Original Sin ensures that each human being, as a descendant of Adam and Eve, inherits "a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice." The church no longer requires that we take the "figurative language" of Genesis literally, but the message remains. The original harmony of creation was lost because of the personal sin of our first parents who abused their freedom and disobeyed God. With their lack of trust in their Creator, "death makes its entrance into human history. After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated with sin."

Now how does a Christian who accepts the scientific findings that support evolution make sense of this traditional teaching? I respond by attempting to construct an account of the human condition that incorporates all the sources of truth available from Scripture, church teaching, scientific evidence, and human experience. To start with the last first, I can say that having raised six children and one granddaughter I am firmly convinced that all human beings, even the most adored and adorable, possess not only a hunger for love and goodness, but innate inclinations toward selfishness. The collective experience of history, especially of the deadly twentieth century, makes the point all too well.

When turning to evolutionary theories of human nature, I find more support for an inherited "mixed motivation" in the human species. On the one hand, humans cannot survive or function as a social species without parental altruism and group bonds that produce sacrifice for others. On the other hand, each individual inherits a strong competitive drive toward self-interest, dominance, and an impetus toward pleasure and survival.

In an evolutionary perspective, the human species is the result of mutations, natural selection, and contingencies that produced an ever more complex organism. Eventually, highly intelligent big-brained social animals appeared. As intelligence and consciousness increased, there came a time in which human self-consciousness emerged. (The great mutation or creation?) With the development of a symbolic abstract sense of self, a human being can reason and feel in ways beyond other animals. Humans are "the self-interpreting animals" because of their evolved capacities of reason, language, and emotional intensity. Humans have the capacity to choose freely and consciously between alternatives.

With the capacity for self-consciousness, rationality, and intense emotions, humans can evaluate their acts by symbolic and moral standards of worth. When the knowledge of good and evil becomes possible, so do shame, guilt, and pride. The freedom to choose between good and evil brings inner conflict and temptation.

In human beings, evolution has produced a human body and brain that are incredibly complex and multistructured. A multitude of different systems and modules must interact for humans to function in space and time. The human mind is modular, with different brain processes and circuits, conscious and unconscious, having evolved for different purposes. Of course there are advantages in having so many different operating systems at work, for if one fails, another can function. But conflict between different systems and motives also becomes inevitable.

In their self-conscious freedom, human beings can choose selfishness or altruism, truth or deception. The push toward selfish dominance and control that fueled successful evolutionary selective processes remains powerful while the pull of goodness, love, reason, and beauty remains potent. Heightened self-awareness brings the further realization that an individual does not have the ability to control the environment or the self. In particular, reason brings the foreknowledge of death with its fears and anxieties over loss.

Unfortunately, the human condition includes built-in inner weaknesses arising from impotence, fear, inner divisions, and mixed motivations. While acts of selfishness that do harm to others for personal advantage, or acts of going along with evils to avoid pain and loss, are not necessarily determined, they are inevitable. Given the evolved inner divisiveness of human nature we can see why the concept of Original Sin is necessary.

As I compare my evolutionary account of Original Sin with the catechism's exposition, I see a fairly good fit. Yes, as evolutionary psychologists and Christianity affirm, we are one corporate body or human race (or species) that through genetic inheritance shares a psychic unity. The human race as one species could be said to fall "in Adam" as well as to be redeemed by Christ. Yes, also, to the concept that a self-conscious knowledge of good and evil is the required prelude for sinning. We could agree too that death truly enters human history when human beings have developed the self-conscious intelligence to fear the extinction of the conscious self.

One difference in my evolutionary account and the catechism's is the latter's claim that our human ancestors personally rebelled against God at some specific time in the past, and thereby destroyed an original harmony among God, humanity, and the natural world. Given the evolutionary evidence, I would surmise that the biblical time line misidentifies the past with the present and future. Humans are by nature wounded. Harmony never existed in the past, but instead lies in the future. Christ's redeeming work is bringing a new creation to birth, a future Eden. Our sense of longing for paradise springs not from the past but from the imprinted image of God in the human creature. The beauty and goodness of the world, the wonders of humanity's innate capacities for thought, language, art, and love create the desire for the company of God.

Christ fulfills our desire. His complete wholeness and integrity, his wholehearted loving union with God wins us salvation from sin. As the firstborn of a new creation groaning toward fruition, Christ transforms human nature. We may disagree over the sources of human sin and woundedness, but not about who heals.