Replies

I believe in the theological truths revealed in Genesis and I am persuaded by the cumulative record of evidence in favor of evolutionary theory. How the two are to be reconciled is something I do not claim to have worked out to every last detail. One thing I am pretty certain of: the universe was not created within the last 6000 years. It just doesn't add up. The empirical evidence does not support young earth creationism. Beyond that, I am fairly open to a variety of possibilities.

Nevertheless, I have some ideas about how one can conceptualize original sin within the perspective of theistic evolution (these are speculative in nature, but can be shown to have a lot of support from a wide variety of converging empirical evidence from a variety of fields of investigation):

Sin and death enter the world through the first human beings, Adam and Eve, through the evolution of the mimetic desire, which is the origin of culture. (There is genetic evidence suggesting that the entire human race can be traced back to a single male and single female, most likely originating in Africa around Ethiopia).

Mimesis is the ability to imitate others. In psychology, we call it "modeling." Evidence suggests that this ability, and also the ability to recognize one's self as distinct from others -- to have a distinct "ego" -- and to engage in symbolic language and thought, when combined, are unique features of human beings that distinguish us from the animals. This ability to imitate, or model, the behavior of others is rooted in our neurobiology, and can be explained by what are now called mirror neurons.

This ability to model is the basis for culture, because we can use it to learn new behaviors without having those behaviors hard-wired by genetic engineering. We move beyond stereotyped, 'instinctive' behavior, into more purpositive and adaptive behavior. Because this ability is so adaptive, once it appears on the scene, the brain begins to evolve very rapidly -- so rapidly, in fact, that human skulls becomes increadingly larger and pregnancy for women more painful (and potentially deadly) as a result, because women's hips, in order to allow for ambulation, can only get so wide to accommodate the bulbous skull needed for the human cortex.

The ability to model creates mimetic desire. This means that we develop the ability to desire what others desire -- to learn to desire by adopting the desires of others. This mimetic desire is evidence in the Bible for example in Adam's temptation to follow Eve -- he adopts her desire for the fruit of the tree as his own desire. Eve, prior to that, had adopted the desire of the serpent.

Why would God creates us to have mimetic desire? So that we could model ourselves after Him and His desires for the Good. In this sense, we are made in His image. However, the serpent, or Satan, was also present in the garden, and so our ability to adopt Satan's desire for evil is also a temptation. When Eve and then Adam adopt Satan's desires to be like God, and eat the fruit, then original sin enters the world. Original sin results when human mimetic desire adopts the desires of Satan rather than the desires of the Lord. Those desires are then passed along to each new generation, causing a wound at the heart of the human soul that we are incapable of healing ourselves-- all further human development is infected by it. The wound is concupiscience, by which we continue to desire things that are evil, and therefore it takes effort and will power to adopt for ourselves the Good that is the Lord's desire for us, which is to model our desires after His. Instead, with Cain and Abel, we see the emergence of envy, and this envy leads to violence -- a violence that results from mimetic desire gone astray. And, from the story of Babel, we learn that sin also results in a disconnection between language and reality, so that humans can no longer speak to one another intelligibly -- the result of a loss of the Holy Spirit that, following it's arrival, gives us the 'tongues' to speak to one another again, as on Pentecost.

These are along the lines of how I take Genesis to be revelation of theological truth, but not a science book. And yet when read in conjunction with science, science and scripture can mutually illuminate the truth. But whereas scripture involves deductive logic -- going from the general principles to application to particulars -- science moves in an inductive direction -- moving from the particulars to identify general principles. We can have faith that with patience, the two movements will and must meet each other in the middle, because 'truth does not contradict truth.'