Original Selfishness

Original Sin and Evil in the Light of Evolution

Daryl P. Domning, Monika K. Hellwig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351913188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book defends a startling idea: that the age-old theological and philosophical problems of original sin and evil, long thought intractable, have already been solved. The solution has come from the very scientific discovery that many consider the most mortal threat to traditional religion: evolution. Daryl P. Domning explains in straightforward terms the workings of modern evolutionary theory, Darwinian natural selection, and how this has brought forth life and the human mind. He counters objections to Darwinism that are raised by some believers and emphasizes that the evolutionary process necessarily enforces selfish behavior on all living things. This account of both physical and moral evil is arguably more consistent with traditional Christian teachings than are the explanations given by most contemporary "evolutionary" theologians themselves. The prominent theologian, Monika K. Hellwig, dialogues with Daryl Domning throughout the book to present a balanced reappraisal of the doctrine of original sin from both a scientist's and theologian's perspective.

Part One

The historical and theological background of original sin

Monika K. Hellwig

CHAPTER ONE

The classic teaching on original sin

The Christian doctrine of original sin is a troubling one to contemporary believers or would-be believers who are educated and thoughtful. In order to approach the apparent conflict, however, it is necessary first to disentangle the doctrine from misrepresentations of it. The Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic strands of Christianity are not entirely agreed on the interpretation of the doctrine and have developed their theology of it in somewhat different ways. Hence in setting out the meaning for purposes of this book we want to make it clear that we are situating ourselves in the Catholic strand of Christian tradition.

The doctrine of original sin is rooted, as are all Christian doctrines, in biblical narrative, basically in the third chapter of the book of Genesis. As with all ancient texts, the meaning must be discovered by looking at the story in its own historical, cultural, and linguistic setting. As with all historical texts, this is a task for well-trained experts. Just as the classification, identification, and assembly of scattered remains of ancient bones is not something anyone can do casually by common sense, so ancient texts cannot be classified, identified, and assembled casually by anyone who is devout. In the first place, even the reconstruction of manuscript evidence passed on over the centuries has been challenging. Words in the ancient Hebrew may have become obscure, and manuscripts from which the transmission was made may have been damaged. Hence, often text has been reconstructed from circumstantial evidence, such as comparison with parallel or related texts, other literary remains of the time, knowledge of the history, culture, economy, and so on, of the time, and the place and function of the text in the subsequent living tradition. In the case of a narrative it is important to know the literary genre, whether for instance it is intended as a literal account of something that happened, or an embellished, interpretive account of something that actually happened, or as a moral tale whose worth is not dependent on its having happened, or something in the nature of myth. Myth, not in the popular but the basic meaning of the word, is a narrative which interprets the human situation in general by presenting a particular and very concrete event, image, or story. People who shape myths are not naive, they are using analogical reasoning, and often they use it in very subtle ways. One thing they do not do is ask the question, “Is it literally true? Could a camcorder have made a record of it? Is it in principle empirically verifiable?” Oddly, to our contemporary Western, post-Enlightenment way of thinking, they do not ask those questions because such questions seem to them both irrelevant and uninteresting. In practice they deal appropriately with questions that require empirical verification, though myth-making peoples seldom have familiarity with such vocabulary. It seems quite obvious in practice to more traditional peoples which kinds of statements and stories do not require such empirical verification because they serve a different purpose.

In the light of the foregoing, the Genesis 3 story about the couple in the garden and their encounter with temptation might be retold in non-mythic language (thereby losing something) somewhat as follows. The human person (Adam) finds him or herself in an ambivalent situation. Created by God for fellowship, relationship, community with others, this person nevertheless finds that others also bring temptation and distortion. This is the source of the figure of Eve in the story: her name is interpreted as “mother of all the living,” and she represents society as it relates to the individual. The creation narrative had made it clear that the human being is essentially relational and cannot become fully human except in relationship with others. Yet what we all experience is that our parents, our community, our tradition offer us both good and bad influence, guidance, and empowerment. This is clearly a fact of life. The very tradition that teaches us loyalty to family, ethnic or other group, or country carries with it the tendency to exclude or despise others as outsiders, less worthy of respect, care, and attention. Our mentors teach us a certain amount of mistrust, inherited hostility, cupidity and competition for wealth and privilege, sometimes hatred and revenge, acceptable patterns of bullying others, and much more. The question that arises is this: if we need relationships with others to become fully human, yet we cannot totally trust those others and their values and perceptions, are we not betrayed by the very God who created us?

The thrust of the Genesis 3 story is a reassurance that we are not in an ultimately absurd dilemma to which there is no solution. Evil (the serpent of the story) comes from within God’s creation, but is not as such a creature of God. The serpent of the story is really a question mark. We cannot pinpoint the origin of evil. Yet the story also alludes to extra-biblical legend which tells of an earlier creation of pure spirits, in other words, beings of pure freedom, of unfettered power of self-determination. Freedom cannot exist as predetermined, and therefore it cannot be guaranteed a happy outcome. Freedom is risk. The story about a prior creation is really a reflection about the nature of freedom. The serpent comes into the garden as the possibility of misusing freedom, that is of using it destructively, in independence of the creator and therefore of the order of creation. The temptation inherent in human, situated, freedom is to seize it as though it had no limits, as though one person or group is free to ignore the claims of others for sustenance, space on earth, human dignity, and full participation in human society. That is why the story has the tree at the center of the garden which is absolutely and without exception the prerogative of God. But human freedom is in fact not pure freedom in dependence on God the creator. Human freedom emerges slowly from the developing infrastructure of the biological organism, and tests and tutors itself in interaction with others, first parents and authority figures, later peer groups and chosen reference figures, gradually the culture and its traditions and norms. If in fact these are distorted by prejudice, fear, promptings of hatred and revenge, lasciviousness, cupidity, and so forth, the emerging human freedom of the human being is crippled from the outset, though not killed or defeated. It can still develop to great purity and intensity but only by dedication to discernment and asceticism.

What has been set out here so far is an interpretation of ancient text with the help of modern scholarship, that is, careful detailed work on the available manuscript evidence, contextual historical studies, comparative mythology, and so on. The situation for Christian believers is, however, more complicated than that. Most Christians, including many of the clergy and the guardians of orthodoxy, have not been introduced to this type of scholarly search for meaning. Their understanding of the doctrine of original sin is the outcome of an historical development that begins with Paul in the New Testament. Paul wrote “As in Adam all men die, so in Christ all will be brought to life; but each in his proper place: Christ the first fruits, and afterwards, at his coming, those who belong to Christ.” (1 Corinthians 15:22–23) To understand this text properly, it is important to know that the title “Christ” is used by Paul both to indicate the individual Jesus and to refer to the corporate personality of the Risen One, which includes the community of his followers. With this understanding it is clear that Paul is speaking of a common involvement in sin to be redeemed by a common involvement in grace, and he is expressing this by the juxtaposition of two heads of corporate identity.

In subsequent Christian centuries the subtle ambiguity of the figure of Adam was lost, and Adam seems to have become simply an individual at the beginning of the human race, chosen as champion by whose decision the fate of the human race would be decided, while the figure of Eve became utterly problematic as an individual woman who sinned first but was not significant for the fate of the race, being female. This latter point did not trouble Christians for a long time, because the status assigned the female figure in the story reflected the status of women in society generally, especially after the Constantinian establishment of the fourth century in which the structures of the pagan empire were largely reproduced in the structures of the churches. The role of Adam did, however, trouble Christians, as exemplified in the Pelagian movement which maintained that the sin of one man could not implicate others unless they followed his bad example.

As is well known, the opponent of this Pelagian position was Augustine of Hippo, whose sense of the absolute power and freedom of God was such that he accepted, apparently without a qualm, the notion that the great mass of humankind was, through no fault of their own, a doomed multitude. Augustine saw the heritage of Adam’s sin as transmitted by the physical act of procreation, and therefore inescapable for all human beings.

While eastern (Greek, Coptic, and Syriac) Christianity never settled for quite so simplistic an explanation, the Latin West continued Augustine’s explanation with a slight nuance. The transmittal of sin was not to be seen as indicating that sexual intercourse was in itself evil, or even that the transmission of sin was due to a lack of total purity of intention in the procreating couple. In fact, the emphasis seems to have been far more on the notion of an initial decree against Adam that universally embraced his offspring for all generations, than on individual transmission.

A voice far ahead of its time was raised against this in the twelfth century by Peter Abelard. Deeply committed to moral rather than ontological or judicial explanations, Abelard pointed to the ways people are observably drawn into either destructive or redemptive behavior by complex moral causality of which example is one, but other lines of influence also come into play. This was bitterly contested in his time as giving too little credit to God’s absolute power and freedom in judgment or to God’s grace in redemption. Even in the midst of this struggle and for many centuries after, the whole matter was always discussed in terms of the individual and in what ways individuals were morally disadvantaged by the sin of Adam.

The way this disadvantage was and continues to be discussed (at least in the Catholic context) is interesting and insightful. The question is put: what is it that is lost by the sin of Adam? The answer is that there are so to speak two levels of loss: the first level has to do with the relationship to God as source, meaning, and destiny of human life; the second level has to do with the integrity that rightly belongs to human existence. The language used is technical. At the first level it is sanctifying or habitual grace that is lost, and it has been maintained that this is recovered by faith and baptism into the community of the risen Christ. At the second level it is described as a fourfold loss or diminishment: a loss of the clarity with which the truth of situations, relationships, and options in human life are seen; a loss of the appropriate operative hierarchy of values by which choices and commitments are properly directed to their ends; a loss of freedom from unnecessary and unprofitable kinds of suffering; and finally, a loss of that quality of life which is not threatened or defeated by death.

There is an assumption underlying this inventory (which we inherit from medieval times), which bears reflection. It is assumed that for a human life to be ultimately coherent it has to be focused to a transcendent goal, God. Furthermore, it has to be lived unflinchingly in the light of truth; its choices and decisions have to be in a hierarchy of values fully consistent in themselves and fully expressing what it is to be human; it should be a life that does not create unproductive suffering for itself or others; and it must be lived free of the constant shadow of fear – fear of one’s own mortality and vulnerability. This is, of course, a modern and rather abstract way of presenting what has been known traditionally as the loss of preter-natural gifts, but it may help to clarify what it was that preoccupied medieval and subsequent theologians.

In the traditional presentation, the story line of Genesis was preserved. Hence this theology proposed that at a more basic level people are created with finite ends, the risk factor of human free will, and the prospect of muddling along, by no means guaranteed freedom from ignorance, prejudice, and self-deception, or freedom from confused motives and inappropriate hierarchy of values and choices, or from causing themselves and one another a lot of unnecessary suffering, or finally from living lives distorted by the fear of death and all sorts of injury. The theology then supposes that a general human discontent with this situation is due to the fact that at the beginning (perhaps simultaneously with creation) there was an enhancement of human nature, which the theologians called the supernatural state, and which consisted of such intimate relationship with the source of all being that it drew human lives into a higher and privileged integration. This line of thinking was used to interpret the story of the garden: in the narrative God walked and talked with the people in the cool of the evening, a privilege that was more than natural, and God had provided a garden, a place of harmony, that preceded any effort on their part to organize their lives or make sense of their world.

Basic to the interpretation supplied by traditional theology is the understanding that this heightened (supernatural) mode of existence did not and could not remove freedom. Such a removal of freedom would not lead to a supernatural but rather to an infranatural existence. But because freedom remained, risk remained, for the two are inseparable. Therefore the theology continues to follow the Genesis 3 story: the risk of freedom has in fact been realized in destructive ways, and this does not remain an individual matter but is communicated across the generations because we realize our freedom relationally. We all become the heirs of what theology came to call original sin – the sin or state of sin in which each human being originates, not because of the immediate parents but because of the whole deeply entrenched flawed use of human freedom from the beginning.

Again, this is a contemporary and abstract way of explaining what the medieval theologians and their successors were expressing in their more technical language and with a kind of realism which our contemporary sense of reality does not allow us to adopt. One aspect of this realism is that they seem to have assumed without critical question that what they were describing was really a historical, or rather pre-historical, unfolding of events in the past. Contemporary analysis of biblical narrative and imagery has pointed out that there is a kind of symmetry in the way that the beginning and the end are described. A golden era is projected into the remote past to justify and explain what it is that is hoped for the ultimate future. As will be evident from the way the theology has been set out here, we can readily see a reflection on what is actual human experience in history as compared with the conditions that would need to be met if the promise inherent in human nature were to be realized.

Theological attention in the twentieth century has largely focused on another aspect of the question. The discussion throughout the centuries had been concerned with the condition of each individual, and had assumed an actual historical event at the root of the problem in which each individual is placed with respect to the challenge to live a fully and responsibly human life. A preliminary clarification allowed attention to be drawn rather to the social situation and acculturation of human beings and to the problem of structures that express distortion of values and goals. This preliminary clarification concerned the literary genre of the stories on which the doctrine of original sin had been based. Through much of Christian history the story of Genesis 3 had been understood quite literally, at least in the West, that is to say in those churches that derived from the Latin-speaking culture of the ancient Mediterranean. With the advance of scripture scholarship in modern times it became possible for theologians to raise the question of the historicity of Genesis 3, given that the original authors do not seem to have intended the narrative in a literal sense.

Once the historicity of the foundation story was undermined, it was possible to search the tradition of the earlier Christian centuries for the meaning of the doctrine of original sin. The position was suggested and in the course of time almost universally accepted among theologians and theologically knowledgeable people that what is meant by original sin is grounded in the common observation that each of us is greatly diminished by what has happened prior to our own decisions and actions.

We are not concerned, therefore, with one event that took place somewhere near the beginning of human history which somehow queered the pitch for all that followed in human history. Rather we are concerned with the cumulative effect of choices and actions which were less than worthy of human freedom and community. Each action has consequences that tend in greater or lesser degree to make it more difficult for others afterwards to act justly, truthfully, compassionately, constructively. Cumulatively many such actions build values, expectations, and whole cultures and societies in which it is very difficult to see the reality of relationships and behavior because there is an elaborate and subtle network of complicity in place. Thus the individual, who is born a bundle of potentialities realized and shaped through relationships with others, is at the mercy of the heritage of confusion of values. It must, of course, be said that each individual is also immeasurably indebted to those who preceded for the good values that have been established, the constructive actions that have shaped society, the progress in culture and civilization that has been made.

Strange though it may now seem to thinking people, there was at first considerable resistance to the notion that the “sin of Adam” or original sin did not refer to one specific action at the beginning but rather to cumulative distortion. There was opposition, as might be expected, from those who for denominational and other reasons were committed to a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. But there was opposition also from those who thought that this suggestion somehow undermined the universality of the need for redemption, and therefore undermined the whole Christian understanding of the human situation. The response to this has been that the need for redemption is even more clearly universal if we are dealing not with some sort of heavenly book-keeping but with the observable facts of life, namely that those growing up within a prejudiced environment of any sort will have great difficulty extricating themselves from the culturally accepted prejudices, that those born and bred among hostile and suspicious people, or among habitually violent people, will with great difficulty establish for themselves a set of attitudes different from their environment and a style of life and behavior that is not like those of the social context.

With this in place, the attention of theologians in the recent past has been drawn to the question of the social expression and cultural embodiment of the distortions due to destructive and evil deeds in human society. The focus has been on the notions of “social sin” and “sinful structures” as the real issue of the traditional doctrine of original sin. What is meant here is that the behavior of individuals in society may be far more destructive than is coextensive with their personal culpability. The complex structures of our societies set limits to what we can see, understand, and choose to do. We are caught in the web of relationships, expectations, economies, cultural activities, acculturation to particular contexts, political and administrative arrangements which seem to take on a life of their own, larger, more enduring, and more resistant than the efforts of any individual or group of individuals to change or act in opposition to such forces. Here, then, is the concrete presence of original sin or the sin of Adam, the force for evil that precedes the choices of those who appear to be choosing, preempts the actions of those who appear to be acting, and tends to crush out of existence any who persist in acting in critical opposition.

In this contemporary interpretation the doctrine of original sin appears to be not only defensible but even self-evident.

Part Two

Why the pre-critical understanding of creation and original sin is no longer tenable

Daryl P. Domning

CHAPTER TWO

The Genesis cosmogony disproven: the...