In short, there seems no room for A&E in the appearance of Homo Sapiens which now appears to have been some 160,000 years ago. Certainly we begin seeing ritual burials nearly 100,000 yrs ago showing that our distant ancestors already sensed that there was something after this life. Now where could A&E be squeezed in? If 100,000 yrs ago, then we are faced with the conundrum that God essentially ignored humans for 90,000 yrs--a strange situation indeed. If we place A&E much more recently, say 10,000 yrs, we're faced with and enormous amount of time before that when humans knew about God. Thus, qualitatively, we can argue that sometime in evolution there were two humans who first sinned, and society went on from there with this bad example. But quantitatively it just won't wash. There are too many tens of thousands of years involved.

The alternative is to explain what appears to be a fallen nature/tendency towards sin as the result of the evolutionary process. Evolution we know doesn't fashion optimal things. Rather it makes new experiments out of the contingent materials of the previous species. Thus, my bad back, and useless appendix. So too it seems that evolution could give one species of the great apes such a brain that it could become self conscious and capable of perceiving the transcendent, but by no means perfectly. In fact of the 5 great apes in existence we see really big problems. Their large brains require early birth (evolution hasn't yet given us large enough pelvis). All apes but humans are rather specialized and inflexible as regards habitat and so in constant danger of extinction. We have a larger brain and so are finally able to adapt to nearly any habitat, yet one could say that we share with the other apes a built-in disposition to take rather desperate measures to preserve ourselves--nearly constant fertility, over concern for security (food, power, social status). And some, if not all, of these are biologically/ chemically/ hormonally driven making them very difficult to resist. Thus, what appears is a less-than-perfect human nature with a disposition to attempt to succeed at the expense of others (this has all been seen in chimpanzee, orang-utan, and gorilla behaviour), is not due to some original sin so much as it is who we are, what evolution has produced.

This just seems so much more aligned with the observations. Religion need change very little in discarding Augustine's version of original sin. In his time there were any number of excellent theologians who thought his ideas very incorrect and were perfectly comfortable with Christ as our Saviour through redemption, baptism and grace--no need for a fallen nature to correct (in fact Christ didn't fix that!). They did understand that we are imperfect and do tend to fall short of Christ's teachings, but they attributed that to our nature. (If I understand it correctly, Augustine's strongest argument was that human suffering from birth could only be explained as punishment for original sin propagated down through the race by sex. But none of those people knew what we know now. Had they known, I think Augustine would have either changed his mind or lost the debate. Yet we now know better, and it seems high time for theologians to rethink our apparent tendency toward sin in light of the facts now known. There is still room for free will; we still need divine grace, but the God who brought us into this world in this evolutionary manner will deal with us with an understanding that we are flawed. And so I would like your take on this. Doesn't it appear that we are badly in need of some careful rethinking starting from a realization that there simply was no A&E at least in any way that is useful to our consideration of salvation? Once we finally lay aside this poetic myth as perhaps the only way early theologians could reconcile the human condition with the Gospels, will this not breathe fresh air into a long overdue rethinking of how evolutionary humans can expect to respond to their Creator?

Thank you for your email. I'm not sure I fully understand the problem.

We don't suggest that A&E were 'perfect' in the sense of absolutely optimal - only God is perfect in that sense and indeed the more we understand about the wonders of how he has created the world in ways that can be expressed with faithful and beautiful scientific laws such as evolution the more we can share the Psalmists awe and amazement (eg O Lord how glorious are thy works! thy thoughts are very deep!).

Let's define:

• the set AED as the set of human beings that were Capable Of Sinning (consciously turning away from God's commandment in a sinful manner)
• t_ae as the first time that set existed
• the set AE as the members of AED at t_ae
• t_fall as the first time a member of AED actually sinned.

It's clear that t_aed <= t_fall and it's (sadly) only too likely that t_fall - t_aed is << 1 human lifetime. It's certainly not unreasonable that AE has male and female members and that it was one or more members of AE that first sinned. So far so good for Adam and Eve.

I don't see very compelling arguments for putting t_fall at 100,000 BC. Knowing About God is clearly a precondition of Capable Of Sinning but real moral responsibility is also required and that could have taken a long-ish time to evolve. 90,000 years is long compared to recorded history but short in evolutionary terms.

But even if t_fall was 100,000BC I don't see a problem. Of course God was not ignoring Human beings - or any other part of His creation - at any time in the last 14bn years or so, but the work of redemption takes time and pre-conditions - just as we need 2nd generation stars for humans so we need writing for the Old Covenant and some form of global international culture for the New Testament. Theologically we know that God sent His Son at just the right time, and even with the very limited knowledge we have available we can see that the conditions required for the development spread of Christianity didn't exist much before 0AD or after AD70. +70 years in 14 billion isn't bad!

Have I missed something?

Follow-up Question

I am amazed and heartened by your ever-so-rapid response, and I thank you for it. Your response allows me to perhaps focus further. First I have no problem at all with your response largely because it ignores what most Christians take from Genesis, namely that our fallen nature is from one original sin, and that it is a real punishment for that sin and is all pervasive. Only last evening on the news I heard an interview with two Anglican theologians on the controversy of the gay bishop. The interviewer asked the one against that action, "would you change your attitude towards gays if it could be shown that homosexuality was genetic in origin rather than learned?" Without hesitation he answered that he would not because the genetic problem was created by as part of our fallen nature due to original sin.

Your answer suggests that it's more difficult to lead a sinless life when all around us, past and present, have a history of sinning (and a world of sin is far from the paradise it might be without sin). That's perhaps a defensible position and, if it's the only lesson we take from Genesis' A&E story, that's okay. But most take far more from it. They subjugate women, and seek stringent control of the faithful because they view humans as fallen and largely unable to get up and thus in need of coercion. They even go so far as to suggest that genetic predispositions did not exist prior to the Fall. And for us poor Catholics, what are we to think of the, now infallibly defined doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception??? That certainly isn't covered by your explanation.

So I'm still in need of a little help here. It seems, in presenting your explanation, that you need to make perfectly clear what you don't take from the Genesis account, namely that human's physical condition did not change--birth pangs are about the same, toil in the fields about the same (I understand that work in the fields in a sinless world is much more rewarding than in the one we have now, etc. But Genesis gives the impression that A&E (and their relatives!) didn't have to work all that hard before the fall. And what about the enormous number of serpents that have been killed because of their association with the diabolical?? Many still think serpents didn't crawl until after they were cursed.

In short, it's time for theologians to state explicitly what Genesis is not saying and to recognize that Augustine's ideas were just wrong. There was no change in human nature only, as you point out, the deleterious effects of turning away from God. Then we can build a new message based on Genesis similar to the one you have suggested which is full of recognition and hope.

I don't think its that simple. Human nature is not just about genetics. In particular, our ability to rise above our biological tendencies is directly dependent on our spiritual state. So birth pangs are not necessarily the same, they are perceived very differently. Nor does the concept of our fallen nature go away even if the historical basis of the fall is rather different. We now understand that our fallen nature consists of an impaired ability to resist certain tendencies within the nature (a product of our evolutionary history) which, in the absence of divine grace, tend to evil.

If homosexual tendencies are mainly genetic in origin (for which there is v little evidence - of course all human behaviour is influenced by genetics to some extent) it does not follow that it is right to follow them. There are almost certainly genetic differences in the levels of aggression that people are likely to display but even if it could be shown that some people were genetically more likely to murder that would not justify murder. The whole "I am like this, so God made me like this" argument which is often used by militant liberals is in fact radically undercut by an understanding of evolution.

As an Anglican I don't have to defend Immaculate Conception, but I can point out that if the problem is that we have gone away from divine grace it is at least possible that God might so fill someone with His grace that she might be immunised from this entail. My problems with Immaculate Conception are (a) I believe that it must be seen as an optional doctrine - one on which good Christians can legitimately disagree and (b) I think that it tends to undermine the real humanity of Jesus and the fact that Mary chose to cooperate in the incarnation.

John's Comments
I have discussed this in Chapter 8 of my Reason and Reality.  Certainly the Augustinian account needs substantial revision. I believe that we differ from even the higher primates by possessing self-consciousness to a high degree (we can see far into the future, forseeing our eventual deaths for instance) and God-consciousness (so that we can worship or deny the Creator).  Adam and Eve represent symbolically, in my view, our hominid ancestors in which these remarkable capabilities first dawned.  When that was we do not know, and how it happened is hard for us to imagine, though undoubtedly it did happen.  At this time people turned away from God and into the self, so that they became alienated from the One who is the only true ground of our life and fulfilment.  That was the Fall, and its continuting consequence, generation after generation, conveyed culturally and perhaps partly genetically, is what we rucghtly call original sin. Its consequences are clear enough - something is slanted in human nature, both individually and socially, which corrupts good intentions and frustrates hopes. Christ came to restore our relationship to God and so to redeem us from original sin.

Reply from questioner Please thank John for this succinct answer. It seems to be the best we can do on this matter and is perfectly acceptable to me with the possible objection that I don't see how sinning could affect our DNA.

Nicholas's response Sexual selection is the most obvious way.  It's a very powerful evolutionary force.  To the extent that self-control and altruism are influenced by genetic factors one would expect that a society that valued these qualities highly in sexual partners would develop its gene pool rather differently from one which valued aggression, materialism and promiscuity.  And of course practically all aspects of sexual behaviour influence the gene pool and most of the sexual sins have clear genetic and reproductive consequences. So for that matter do idolatory, murder, covetousness.