(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.")

A New Interpretation: Original Sin as Evolutionary Selfishness

Science, through its explication of evolution, has made untenable the traditional form of that doctrine, which is based on a too-literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3. We now know beyond reasonable doubt that the "Adam" of "the Fall" was not responsible for introducing physical suffering and death into nature, nor was any other human being. Neither, as shown, can poor Adam be blamed for all the forms of mayhem that we humans inflict on each other. Those were well established among evolving organisms long before his and our advent.

On the other hand, the essential spiritual insight of the creation account that is revealed using literary and mythic analysis—that humans and humans alone have a moral dimension to their actions, and have chosen to act immorally (i.e., selfishly) from the very dawn of their existence—does not contradict anything that science knows of human origins. On the contrary, it is precisely the behavior that Darwinian theory would predict. This is true regardless of whether we descend from a single couple or from a large population of "first humans."

The reason why the Christian tradition began to insist on some form of monogenism (descent of all of us from a single couple) was not based on any biological considerations, but rather on the simple need to explain why all human beings had to be saved from "original sin" by Christ's sacrifice. The only compelling theological reason to postulate a literal Adam was in order to account for the universality of sin—because, in a static universe, there is no other way to account for it. This is the source of the difficulty. Given what is written in Genesis 1-3, it was inevitable in Western thought prior to the discovery of evolution that whatever was universal to the human race should have been ascribed to inheritance from Adam and Eve—at least whatever stemmed from sin, since only humans among earthly creatures can commit sin.

However, has there not always been an unexamined assumption here: that both the universality and the moral character of original sin necessarily stem from one and the same individual, act, and moment in time? We can define original sin simply as the need for salvation (by Christ) that is universal to all human beings and acquired through natural generation. Might we find any such universal, naturally acquired need in an evolutionary worldview?

What I have sought to show above is that the overt selfish acts that, in humans, demonstrate the reality of original sin (by manifesting it in the form of actual sin) do indeed owe their universality among humans to natural descent from a common ancestor. But this ancestor, far from being the biblical Adam, must be found in the very remote past at the very origin of life itself. It was the common ancestor not only of all humans but of all other living things on Earth as well. However, it is not this ancestor itself that interests us, but the "natural descent" that proceeded from it, the very nature of physical life and the process of natural generation, which, we have seen, are governed by natural selection and the selfish behavior it requires. And this requirement applied equally to the first living thing and to every one that followed it.

In other words, the human acts themselves share a genealogical unity (the common origin of all life), but their sinfulness arises from a development that is logically and temporally separate from their common genealogical origin, much more recent, and not necessarily unitary (since the necessary universality is already supplied by the genealogical inheritance of inclination to perform the acts). The definition of original sin given above requires that it apply universally to all humans, which implies (following the principle of parsimony) that our sinful acts began with some common ancestor of ours. Since this is true of the (selfish) acts themselves (which began, indeed, with the common ancestor not just of us but of all life), the requirement is met, whether or not our acquisition of free will and moral responsibility (which made the selfish acts sinful) happened only once or more than once. This explicit logical differentiation, and radical historical decoupling, of the source of original sin's universality (the common origin of life) from the source of its moral character (human free will) is the key to the problem.

Words highlighted in green appear in the Glossary.