(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "A New Interpretation of Original Sin." Beginning with "Original Sin and its Evolutionary Roots in Animal Behavior," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the "Appendix.")

Original Sin and its Evolutionary Roots in Animal Behavior

In "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World" we saw that our innate selfishness is shared with all other living things—necessarily so, because natural selection requires living things to see to their own needs first as the price of survival. And as we examine those animals that are more closely related to ourselves, such as the great apes, we see ever-more obvious resemblances to our own behavior. These include not only the cutthroat competition usually thought of as "Darwinian," but cooperation as well, and even a rudimentary sense of ethics.

The self-interest that often motivates cooperative and ethical behavior even in ourselves makes it sufficiently clear that natural selection can explain these traits as well as the cruder forms of selfishness—all of which have been further developed by cultural evolution added to our genetic heritage. This course of evolution has had the important by-product of laying the foundations for the "true" altruism that we now hold up to each other as our ethical ideal. This ideal has emerged gradually over the many millennia of human civilization, but it was argued above that it was brought into particularly sharp focus by the selfless life, teaching, and freely accepted death of Jesus of Nazareth.

Given the evolutionary background we have described, seeing the "Jesus event" as a watershed in human ethical history implies that it was also a turning point in organic evolution on this planet. Previously (and to a shameful extent, subsequently!), human culture developed according to Darwinian rules, in clear continuity with the whole sweep of evolution: the highest priority of each individual has been his or her own self-perpetuation. Beginning with Abraham, however, and culminating most clearly in Jesus, it was progressively revealed to us that God wants us now to live by different rules.

According to these new rules, our highest priority should be the Kingdom of God, a state in which we seek above all the good of the other. The difficulty we have in doing this—the tension we experience between the old rules and the new—is what Christians have tried to explain by the doctrine of original sin.