What Are they Saying About…

Adam and Eve, The Fall, Original Sin, Death, Suffering

and Evil?

If…1. Evolution offers the best scientific explanation of the development of life on earth;

2. the universe began some 13.7 billion years ago;3. all past and present living organisms descended from a common ancestor; 4. hominids appeared 4-5 million years ago;

If… 5. modern Homo sapiens appeared +/- 120,000 years ago; 6. the genetic diversity in the modern human population could not have come from a single human pair but more likely from a group of 10,000+/- human ancestors about 150,000 years ago;7. the locomotion of snakes, predation, deadly diseases, mass extinction, thorn plants and weeds, and violent natural events existed for millennia before the existence of the first humans…

…how are we to understand traditional Christian doctrines like

the perfect garden of Eden, the Fall, death as the result of the Fall, Original Sin, Divine sovereignty/action, and the origin and purpose of suffering

and evil? How are we supposed to read the Bible now?

In the beginning... (according to the Western Christian tradition)

God originally created a first pair of human beings, positioned them in idyllic spiritual and moral conditions so that, when deliberately subjected to temptation, they were genuinely free to obey God or not.

They freely chose not to obey God, and as a consequence, they “fell” from these utopian beginnings, so that they and all their descendants, by heredity, became mortal and enslaved from birth to a natural desire to embrace their disobedience (sin).

Finally, somehow, their disobedience brought about a “Fall” for the cosmos and nature, too. –John Schneider

Eden: And God saw all that he had made and it was very good —

Genesis 1:31

• Everything was finished and in a perfect state —traditional WC tradition

1. Adam began in a state of innocence and simplicity. “He was a child, not yet having his understanding perfected.” It was necessary that he should grow and so come to his perfection” (Irenaeus).

Eden: And God saw all that he had made and it was very good —

Genesis 1:31

2. Genesis itself does not picture the first humans being created in a

state of spiritual maturity and moral perfection.

What Genesis describes is a ‘process whose starting point is not perfection but nascence.’ The first couple’s humanity was not given to them complete but was a work in progress.”

—Daniel Harlow, Calvin College,

Adam and Eve: Who were they? Were they?

Adam & Eve were actual persons uniquely created by God some 10,000 years ago —traditional WC1. Recent research in molecular biology, primatology, sociobiology, and phylogenetics indicates that the species Home sapiens cannot be traced back to a single pair of individuals…. Adam and Eve are strictly literary figures— characters in a divinely inspired story about the imagined past that intends to teach primarily

theological, not historical, truths about God, creation, and humanity. —Daniel Harlow

The Fall and Original Sin

As traditionally formulated (WC), the doctrines of the Fall and original sin have involved three claims:• There was a first couple who existed in a paradisal state

of spiritual, moral, and intellectual rectitude, without corruption or sin, from which they fell by willfully disobeying God;

• Our nature is fallen as a result of this sin, and thus bound over to evil; and

• All human beings are guilty of the sin of Adam, and hence everyone is deserving of eternal death.

The Fall and Original Sin

Original sin is a biologically inherited state, a by-product of billions of years of evolution. Intrinsic to the process of evolution is the inclination toward self-preservation at

the expense of other creatures.Yet selfish behavior did not become sin until the evolution of

their self-consciousness (and God-consciousness) allowed our remote ancestors to override their innate tendency to self-assertion. —Daniel Harlow

The Fall and Original Sin

1. Adam and Eve play two representative roles: a) representing “everyperson”—i.e. each one of us— and

b) representing the first hominids, or group of hominids that had the capacity for free choice and self- consciousness. With this capacity for self-consciousness and free choice,

these hominids also became aware of God and God's requirements, but more often than not rejected them.

The Fall and Original Sin

• They were subject to various temptations arising both from the desires and instincts they inherited from their

evolutionary past and from various new possibilities for self-centeredness, self-idolization, self-denigration etc., that came with their new self-consciousness.

—Robin Collins

DEATH

1. Read on its own, Genesis does not teach that the first human beings were created immortal and that death entered the world only after and as a con- sequence of their transgression.

Mortality is regarded as part of humanity’s original created nature. Expulsion from the garden denies the man and woman access to the tree of life which would have granted them immortality.

DEATH

According to Genesis, then, human death was a natural part of God's created world, not part of the fallout of a fall. —Daniel Harlow2. The result of the Fall was ‘spiritual death….’ We now die eternally when we die physically .

—Tim Keller

Divine Action

As our scientific understanding of the universe expands, it has been increasingly difficult to see how God can purposely act within physical processes. 3 strategies:

1. ‘God banished’—this strategy abandons talk of God acting in the physical world.

2. ‘God before’—God may have started the whole thing going but has not been involved since (deism). 3. ‘God behind’—God acts behind the system of causation at another, unnoticeable level. (primary vs. secondary causation)

Divine Action

Currently, some theologians/scientists are pursuing a fourth strategy: 4. Modern physics sees a system of causation that is open, that contains inherent gaps into which God can effectively work to bring about change. There is a ‘causal joint’ at which God—as a transcendent,

immaterial world cause—interacts particularly with causative factors in the material world.

–CTNS, 6

Divine Action

God is ‘before’ in the sense of being the initial cause of all things.

God is ‘behind’ in the sense of sustaining the laws and regularities he established.

God is working through the openness and indeterminacy of the natural order.

Genetic mutations Miracles

Suffering and Evil1. Moral Evils: Human corruption, murder…2. Natural Evils: Earthquakes, tsunamis, disease…3. Metaphysical Evil: Our mortality, threat of nonbeing…

The Bible is most disturbed by moral and metaphysical evil; we are also disturbed by natural evil.

We humans were once called to account before God; today God is called to account before us.

Suffering and EvilMoral Evil:The Free-will Defense: It is better for God to have created a

world of freely choosing beings, with the possibility of their voluntary response to him and to each to each other, as well as the possibility of sinful selfishness, than to have created a world of blindly obedient automata. –John Polkinghorne

Challenge: Why doesn’t God stop humans from perpetrating horrendous evil, e.g. The Holocaust?

Suffering and EvilNatural and Metaphysical Evil: Genesis 2-3 say that suffering, death, and natural evils

entered God’s good creation at a particular time and are consequences of a specifically bad moral decision.

Evolutionary theory says that predation, suffering, earthquakes, species extinction, death, etc., are and always have been integral to the development of life.

How does an evolutionary creationist account for them?

Suffering and EvilIntro:1. Natural evil=oxymoron?2. Christian accountings for natural evil:

A defense (“thin defense”) simply wishes to show that belief in an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God is compatible with the existence of genuine evils in the world. Burden of proof on religious objector.

A theodicy (“thick defense”) is an attempt to show “What God’s reason is for permitting evil.” Burden of proof on one who desires to acquit God of responsibility for evil.

Suffering and Evil1. Denis Edwards:

The evolution of life is accompanied by terrible costs to human beings and other species. These costs are built into the system.

Christian sources do not offer any kind of adequate intellectual answer to the question why God creates in such a way.

God suffers with us and will bring every creature to fulfillment in him.

Suffering calls for action to help others and gives rise to hope for God’s reconciliation of all things.

Suffering and Evil2. John Polkinghorne:

Both the OT and the NT set before us the hope of a world eventually redeemed from suffering…. But they both accept the existence of suffering in this present world as a given fact.

The world’s suffering is not gratuitous but a necessary contribution to some greater good which could only be realized in this mysterious way.• Does this idea turn suffering into a kind of instrumental

good? • And is God therefore beholden to a necessity greater than himself? Cf. Terrence Tilley

Suffering and Evil Natural evil: Tempest & earthquakes, the wastefulness of

evolution, etc. arise from natural processes.Free-process Defense: In his great act of creation, God allows the physical

world to be itself in the independence which is Love’s gift of freedom….

That world is endowed in its fundamental constitution with an anthropic potentiality which makes it capable of fruitful evolution.

The exploration and realization of that potentiality is achieved by the universe through the continual interplay of chance and necessity within its unfolding process.

Suffering and Evil It is inevitably a world with ragged edges, where order and

disorder interlace each other and where the exploration of possibility by chance will lead not only to the evolution of systems of increasing complexity, but also to the evolution of systems imperfectly formed and malfunctioning.

God accords to the process of the world that same respect that he accords to the actions of humanity (the freedom to become itself—H. S).

(Is this respect for creation’s freedom, in and of itself, a great enough good to allow for horrific suffering?)

Suffering and Evil• The open flexibility of the world’s process affords the

means by which 1. The universe explores its own potentiality

which, through its limitation and frustration, gives rise to physical evil;2. Humankind exercises its will

which, through its sinfulness, gives rise to moral evil;3. God interacts with his creation

by which the Creator can exercise a providential care within the evolving history of his creation.

Suffering and Evil• God is not a spectator but a fellow-sufferer, who has

himself absorbed the full force of evil.• Through Christ, God was reconciling to himself all things….

“All shall be well”

Suffering and Evil3. Thomas Tracy The most that can be done is to explain that the world God

has made includes goods that cannot be realized without the creation of a lawful natural order that generates natural evil.

We have an epistemic stalemate that reflects intrinsic limits on human understanding.

God is able to take up any victim’s history of sorrow and incorporate it into the good. Suffering will be redeemed from meaninglessness.

Suffering and Evil

4. Alvin Plantinga: A Theodicy: God permits evil

because he wanted to actualize a possible world whose value was greater than L;

but all those possible worlds contain incarnation and atonement;

Hence all those worlds contain evil.

Suffering and EvilSummary:1. Thin defenses:

Past: We don’t really know why God created a world using an evolutionary process which includes waste, suffering and death. Good will come from it.

Present: We do know that God stands with us in our sufferings

Future: We do know that God will make all things right in the end.

Suffering and Evil

Habakkuk:How long, O Lord, must I call for help but you do not listen? Or cry out to you “Violence!” but you do not save?

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD. I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The cry of the church: Christ has died;

Christ has risen; Christ will come again!