I can not grasp the fact on how sin enter into the world without the fall of Adam and Eve (Or rather their existence).
Dose anyone care for elaboration?
Most evolutionary creationists don't deny the reality of the Fall. However, there need not have been a literal Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden for humanity to have become sinful.
__________________ "There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well." -- creation scientist Dr. Todd Wood
I can not grasp the fact on how sin enter into the world without the fall of Adam and Eve (Or rather their existence).
Dose anyone care for elaboration?
I think that Adam and Eve were either:
A.) The first individuals to reach sentience, or self-awareness and cognition on levels that would be considered human today.
B.) Adam and Eve were allegorical and represented the first communities of primitive Homo sapiens.
Either way the Fall still occurred. It probably was just groups of people instead of individuals.
I can not grasp the fact on how sin enter into the world without the fall of Adam and Eve (Or rather their existence).
Dose anyone care for elaboration?
Here's a thought.
About 350 years ago, Blaise Pascal, a great thinker, an early scientist, and a Christian, wrote this in his famous Pensées (translation by W. F. Trotter):
It is a perverted judgement that makes everyone place himself above the rest of the world, and prefer his own good, and the continuance of his own good and fortune and life, to that of the rest of the world!
Pensées is a defense of Christianity. In a lot of it, it is hard to make sense out of what he is saying (at least for me). But it is full of nuggets, like this, that make the slog through it, well worth the trouble. The quotation here led to an "aha" moment for me.
Think of it. Throughout our evolutionary history, from slug to modern consumer, we looked after ourselves first. We had to. We could not survive without it. But we were not, at first, sinners. We were not sinners because, to be a sinner, you have to have knowledge of good and evil - you have to have a conscience.
So, whether you view Eve's eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil as something that literally happened, or as a metaphor for the awareness of morality which humans acquired, and which animals do not have, it makes sense that the fall was synonymous with understanding good and evil.
I can not grasp the fact on how sin enter into the world without the fall of Adam and Eve (Or rather their existence).
First, the Adam and Eve story is an allegory. You have 2 characters -- Dirt and Hearth -- who get cut off from God. They are meant, like most allegorical characters, to stand for a much larger group. In this case, all humans.
Second, how did Dirt and Hearth get cut off from God? By disobeying Him. Why did they disobey? Because they placed their desires above God's desires. IOW, they were selfish.
Well, guess what? Natural selection leads to selfish individuals. Remember, the unit of natural selection is the individual and natural selection picks individuals that do best in the competition for scarce resources. Any cooperation must also result in a benefit to the individual. Any individual that only does what other individuals want, to the detriment of itself, cannot be selected. Instead, helping other individuals will cause that individual to do less well in the competition for scarce resources and it will die without offspring. Any alleles for pure altruism are going to be weeded out of a population.
The "Fall" -- selfishness -- is embedded in our very genes by the process God used to create us. We are programmed to put our interests and needs above those of God.
__________________ "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890
I personally believe that Adam and Eve were the first two people to reach sentience. Therefore, they were the first to sin since they were the first who were capable of sinning. The fall of mankind really did happen, just not exactly in the way that Genesis says it happened. You have to realize, the Genesis creation story is just that, a story!
First, the Adam and Eve story is an allegory. You have 2 characters -- Dirt and Hearth -- who get cut off from God. They are meant, like most allegorical characters, to stand for a much larger group. In this case, all humans.
Second, how did Dirt and Hearth get cut off from God? By disobeying Him. Why did they disobey? Because they placed their desires above God's desires. IOW, they were selfish.
Well, guess what? Natural selection leads to selfish individuals. Remember, the unit of natural selection is the individual and natural selection picks individuals that do best in the competition for scarce resources. Any cooperation must also result in a benefit to the individual. Any individual that only does what other individuals want, to the detriment of itself, cannot be selected. Instead, helping other individuals will cause that individual to do less well in the competition for scarce resources and it will die without offspring. Any alleles for pure altruism are going to be weeded out of a population.
The "Fall" -- selfishness -- is embedded in our very genes by the process God used to create us. We are programmed to put our interests and needs above those of God.
Wow, I have never heard it put like that before. Good point...it's possible I think.
__________________ "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." - Philippians 1:21
"If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." -Galatians 1:10
"Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland." Isaiah 43:18-19
Wow, I have never heard it put like that before. Good point...it's possible I think.
Thank you. Jesus is asking us to rise above our selfishness and "love our neighbor as ourself". However, he also couches that in "selfish" terms when he wants us to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Your altruism has a self-interest component in that version.
Also, Jesus is asking us to go beyond our evolutionary programming in extending our altruism to those not related to us. There can be altruism under natural selection, but that works only if the altruistic gene is saving copies of itself in relatives that are saved by the action of the altruistic individual. IOW, if a mother sacrifices herself for her offspring, if there are 2 children, one of them is going to have the altruistic allele that just caused the mother to sacrifice herself.
But Jesus wants us to be altruistic to complete strangers. We are to use our intellect and relationship with God to go beyond what evolution has programmed into us.
__________________ "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890
I can not grasp the fact on how sin enter into the world without the fall of Adam and Eve (Or rather their existence).
Dose anyone care for elaboration?
Adam's flesh was the same before and after the "fall". What changed is his consciousness of his flesh. When he realized his flesh was hostile toward God, he fell from fellowship with God. Whether Adam and Eve truly existed as such is not so important. The spiritual understanding of the story is, and it fits perfectly with evolution. Evolution compliments Christianity and serves to explain our sin problem. I am a being of spiritual understanding, trapped in the body of a primate!
Consider that Adam became "sinful" after receiving the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The knowledge of Good and Evil most likely represented the commandments of God manifesting in his conscience. By the commandments of the Law, I understand what is good and what is evil. This was one of Paul's central tenets when discussing original sin.
Romans 7:7: . . . Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. Romans 7:8: . . . apart from the law, sin was dead Romans 4:15: . . . for where there is no law, there is no transgression Romans 513: . . . sin is not imputed where there is no law. 1 Cor 15:16: The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. Genesis 2:17: " . . . but of the tree of the knowledge ofgood and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Romans 5:12: . . . Therefore just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, Romans 7:9: I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. Genesis 3:7: Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they werenaked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. Romans 7:18: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells. Genesis 3:22: “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil" Romans 7:10: And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bringdeath.
Before Adam ate from the tree and gained the knowledge of good and evil, he had no consciousness of any law against his flesh. How could his mind be seared with sin, with no law? When he ate from the tree, he received consciousness of the law, but the commandments that were to bring life, he found to bring death, because of the natural enmity of his own flesh towards the commandments. He was then trapped in sinful flesh, and trapped into an evil conscience before God, unable to meet the requirements of the good found in the newly revealed law, but only to be enslaved to the evil.
This understanding is the precursor to understanding Liberty. Jesus, representing the perfect man in the flesh, was sacrificed. He was the commandments in living form. To accept that he was given up by God is to lose consciousness of law against your flesh.
I can not grasp the fact on how sin enter into the world without the fall of Adam and Eve (Or rather their existence).
Dose anyone care for elaboration?
Linear Mode
