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ABSTRACT
We engage Robin Collins' Historical Idealist model, i.e. that the Fall occurred in history though not as a “one-off” distorting our “spiritual substance”. God aimed to bring humans closer to the Gospel vision while granting sufficient autonomy to cooperate or choose otherwise, which distorted human nature. We survey recent work concerning gene-culture interactions suggesting human culture affected the frequency of certain genes and versions of genes. Thus, human free choices have altered the human genome, making humans more likely to engage in sinful actions. The Fall into sin established a vicious cycle even at the level of genetic traits.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Robin Collins, “Evolution and Original Sin,” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, ed. Keith Miller (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 469–501.
2 We leave open at this point what exactly it may require to affirm in one’s mind the spiritual/moral equivalent of “God exists”. Below, in Section 4, we say a little more about this. However, this paper cannot settle this rich debate. We try to carve out a stance that can hold up on various accounts of a minimal knowledge of God to suffice for the moral/spiritual accountability in line with traditional stances on Original Sin.
3 Human nature is obviously an enormous topic of philosophical reflection and debate. We are attempting to speak of human nature in a way that remains neutral with respect to numerous disputed questions. For example, we wish to avoid committing to dualism or physicalism, and we do not intend to carve out an account of the human essence, meaning, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to be human. We also do not assert that, if physicalism about humans were true, genes are the locus of human nature. Our account does rely on two things at least however. One, biological features (including but not limited to genes) are a substantive component of the meaning of human nature. And two, biological features play a role in the meaning of the proposition that sin distorted human nature and that this has come to affect all humans for a very long time—e.g. predating the foundation of the nation of Israel by thousands of years at least.
4 We will focus here on the literature concerning gene-culture interactions as the mode of distorting our biological nature. There is a developing study of epigenetic processes that also may be impacted significantly by cultural practices. We will not attempt to discuss such cases in this paper.
5 For a fascinating and brief overview of recent human evolutionary studies and the complexity of the family tree according to many current scholars, see Razib Khan, “The Human Family Tree, It Turns Out, Is Complicated: How the Story of Human Evolution Continues to Branch out,” Nautilus (June 30, 2021), https://nautil.us/the-human-family-tree-it-turns-out-is-complicated-238239/ (accessed April 7, 2023).
6 We will use humanity usually to refer to members of our species, H. sapiens. Other times we will distinguish between biological humanity as members of H. sapiens, and theological humanity, those who have been brought to some higher mode of being. How that occurred we will discuss but make no effort to settle. Sometimes, as in this section, we use humanity to include our near ancestors and members of the Homo genus, e.g. Homo Erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis. We will try to be clear in context which meaning we intend to express.
7 For a brief discussion of early Christian thinking on the moral maturity of Adam and Eve and thus, by analogy, the moral maturity of the first humans, see Harlow, 188–89; Harlow draws upon the work of: Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006). For a fascinating short discussion of recent work on the evolution of human morality, see Michael Tomasello, “The Origins of Human Morality,” Scientific American, (September, 2018). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-origins-of-human-morality/ (accessed August 11, 2023). Among other things, he discusses the emergence of a mature sense of an adult appreciation of the good of a group with whom one shares interests and responsibilities.
8 Arthur Charles O'Neil, “Sin,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 14 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912). http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14004b.htm (accessed September 3. 2021).
9 The literature on Thomas Aquinas and Natural law is vast. For an accessible and sophisticated (even if controversial) overview, see John Finnis, “Aquinas’ Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2021 Edition) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/aquinas-moral-political/. There Finnis introduces the concept of law thusly, “That account’s [i.e. of Aquinas] main features may be summarized in four propositions about the central case and focal meaning of law. It is a matter of intelligent direction addressed to the intelligence and reason of those whom it directs. It is for the common good of a political community. It is made (positum, put in place) by the ruler(s) responsible for the community in question. It needs to be coercive”, Section 7.
10 For somewhat different views on the role of evolutionary processes in the production of human sinfulness see Daryl Domning and Monika Hellwig, Original Selfishness (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). Daniel C. Harlow, “After Adam: Reading Genesis in an Age of Evolutionary Science,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62, no. 3 (2010): 179–95, and Patricia A. Williams, “Sociobiology and Original Sin,” Zygon 35, no. 4 (2000): 783–812.
11 Gijsbert van den Brink offers the following insightful summary of Karl Rahner, S.J.’s influential thought on the question of the emergence of a new consciousness in solidarity with God among early humans, “Having received—either by divine intervention or (more plausibly perhaps) through ‘emergence’ or in some other way—a (self) consciousness, the scope and depth of which was incredibly enlarged in comparison to that of the higher primates, for the first time in history beings had come about that were in conscious knowledge of what they did. At that stage, moral accountability entered the picture.” in “Questions, Challenges, and Concerns for Original Sin,” in Finding Ourselves after Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. Stanley P. Rosenberg, Michael Burdett, Michael Lloyd, and Benno van den Toren (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2018), 117–29, 127.
12 Collins, “Evolution and Original Sin.”
13 Ibid., 470.
14 Collins here cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church, art. 404.
15 This established the conditions for humans to struggle with what theologians have called concupiscence, i.e. the mismatch of our desires for earthly goods such as food, drink, sex, and the like with our desire for our unrestricted good. Prior to the coming to reign of sin, early humans had a chance, under God’s guidance, to live in a kind of harmony of these two levels of desire. Collins does not discuss the concept of concupiscence, as such; but he is talking about what concupiscence as a topic concerns.
16 Nicholas Olkovich “Reinterpreting Original Sin: Integrating Insights from Sociology and the Evolutionary Sciences,” The Heythrop Journal LIV (2013), 715–31, also rightly notes that this third part of the story of the transmission of sin through the generations needs to be appropriately embedded in evolutionary dynamics. His article provides a helpful picture of how to do so in terms of engaging reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and group selection in addition to the now well-trod territory of transmission of sin via cultural practices and institutional structures. These are all important, but as we’ve noted, the pre-human evolutionary features should not be counted sin, neither as sinful acts nor as a state of sinfulness. Even after the advent of fully theological humanity (imago dei), these evolutionarily generated features aren’t counted sinful states as such apart from their relationship to human activity that constitutes a betrayal of friendship with God. So, for example, if violence had been a common cultural practice to punish “free riders”, it was not sin prior to achieving full humanity. And it may not have been after, but if God had called humans to a new mode of such punishing, or holding community members accountable, and humans chose not to cooperate, then such choices and embedded practices would thereafter count as sin. We will explore how the cultural traditions, emerging after the existence of full theological humanity, may have played a significant role in distorting our nature.
17 Collins, “Evolution and Original Sin”, 472–3.
18 Ibid., 473.
19 Ibid., 475–8.
20 Ibid., 475.
21 Ibid., 477–8; Richard Swinburne, Revelation: From Analogy to Metaphor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). For a similar argument see Harlow, “After Adam”, 189–91. These issues have been the subject of many studies. Two interesting recent ones are: John Walton, “Human Origins and the Bible,” Zygon 47, no. 4 (2012): 875–9; and Christopher M. Hays, “A Nonhistorical Approach: The Universality of Sin Without the Originating Sin,” in Finding Ourselves after Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. Stanley P. Rosenberg, Michael Burdett, Michael Lloyd, and Benno van den Toren (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2018), 187–202.
22 Ibid., 480.
23 It might take an entire paper to defend these specific criteria, but they are inspired by numerous reflections on original sin such as Domning and Hellwig, Original Selfishness, Oliver Crisp, “On Original Sin,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 17, no. 3 (2015): 252–66, Stephen Duffy, “Our Hearts of Darkness: Original Sin Revisited,” Theological Studies 49, no. 4 (1988): 597–622, Harlow, “After Adam,” Olkovich “Reinterpreting Original Sin,” in addition to Collins “Evolution and Original Sin.”
24 Some definitions of culture strongly emphasize information—basically defining culture as a kind of information, e.g. on p. 138 in an article foundational for this paper: Kevin Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Sean Myles. “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome: Bringing Genetics and the Human Sciences Together,” Nature Reviews: Genetics 11 (February, 2010), 137–48. We do not aim to dispute that here. But it seems plausible that beyond what information can capture, some embodied practices and realities essential to living cultures go beyond mere information. The performing of the cultural practice itself is part of the culture. For example, there is a lot of information contained in a major league baseball game. The rules, the statistics, the dimensions of the field, and so on. However, these are not all there is to the event itself as a cultural practice. The same could be said of songs deep within a cultural practice. Their actual performance is something over and above the information contained in that practice.
25 Helpful discussion of the intricacies of defining a pre-lapsarian friendship with God can be found in Olkovich “Reinterpreting Original Sin”, Domning and Hellwig, Original Selfishness, and Duffy, “Our Hearts of Darkness.”
26 Some of the issues here concerning what access humans have to God are significant in the recent Divine Hiddenness debate. The debate centers on the status of an argument such as the following: (i) If a perfectly loving and just God exists, then there would be no non-culpable, non-believers (in God, so conceived). (ii) There are non-culpable, non-believers. (iii) Thus, there is no perfectly loving and just God. In short, if belief in God, so conceived, means clear access to a large subset of God’s attributes as understood by theists then the problem seems more serious. If access to God can be genuine and available to all people even if it’s concerning a smaller subset of attributes (e.g. moral truth and power or beauty, but maybe not personhood or unity) then the problem is less severe. For a concise formulation of the argument, see: John Schellenberg, “What Divine Hiddenness Reveals, or How Weak Theistic Evidence is Strong Atheistic Proof,” 1–10. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/john_schellenberg/hidden.html. For a more detailed presentation of the Hiddenness Argument, see John Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1993) and also his Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell, 2007).
27 We have been using “friendship with God” because it is used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which we find in some ways congenial here. But of course this raises questions. We recognize that friendship typically refers to relationship between persons with a mutual recognition of the personhood of each party as a necessary condition. If early humans did not recognize God clearly as a person, could they have had a friendship with God that could be either honored or betrayed? Without exploring this in the depth it merits, we argue that it would be enough to call it a friendship if ancient humans were able to have some sense of the existence of a reality that calls them to honor certain norms and priorities, to which they owe honor and gratitude, and on whom their existence depends.
28 Domning and Hellwig, Original Selfishness; Duffy, “Our Hearts of Darkness”; Harlow, “After Adam”, Collins, “Evolution and Original Sin”, among others.
29 For a discussion of various strategies used by groups to achieve evolutionary advantages see David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).
30 This claim has been argued by many, e.g. Harlow “After Adam”; Kenneth W. Kemp, “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2011): 217–36 and Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, OP, “Defending Adam After Darwin: On the Origin of H. sapiens as a Natural Kind,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92, no. 2 (2018): 337–52 argue that monogenism is not biologically implausible.
31 For a recent review, see Groucutt, et al., “Rethinking the Dispersal of H. sapiens out of Africa,” Evolutionary Anthropology 24 (2015): 149–64.
32 A clear and careful recent discussion of this question of various scenarios of early humanity and the Fall into sin can be found in Loren Haarsma, When Did Sin Begin: Human Evolution and the Doctrine of Original Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2021); see chapter 10 especially.
33 Alleles are versions of a genomic sequence. Here is the concise definition offered by the National Research Genome Institute, “Glossary”: “An allele is one of two or more versions of DNA sequence (a single base or a segment of bases) at a given genomic location. An individual inherits two alleles, one from each parent, for any given genomic location where such variation exists. If the two alleles are the same, the individual is homozygous for that allele. If the alleles are different, the individual is heterozygous” https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Allele (accessed April 6, 2023).
34 There is an extensive literature on this set of claims, but these are core sources laying out the arguments: Laland, Odling-Smee, and Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome”; Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2009); Kevin Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
35 Cochran and Harpending, 10,000 Year Explosion.
36 Laland, Kevin, John Odling-Smee, and Sean Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome,” 137.
37 Ibid., 139–40; there they survey and document the recent literature concerning the mathematical modelling of gene-culture interactions.
38 Ibid., 143.
39 Laland outlines a range of cultural activities and the ongoing work showing their selective effects on the genome in chapter nine of Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. See especially pages 215–31.
40 Laland, Odling-Smee, and Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome,” 145.
41 Ibid., 145.
42 Ibid., 145.
43 Ibid., 141.
44 Ibid., 141.
45 Ibid., 141.
46 John Alcock, Animal Behavior, 9th Ed (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2009), 551.
47 Laland, Odling-Smee, and Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome,” 141.
48 For support, see K. N. Laland, “Exploring Gene-Culture Interactions: Insights from Handedness, Sexual Selection, and Niche-Construction Case Studies,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B 363 (2008), 3577–89.
49 See also K. N. Laland, “Exploring Gene-Culture Interactions.”
50 Ibid.
51 Loren Haarsma, When Did Sin Begin; and Benno van den Toren, “Original Sin and the Coevolution of Nature and Culture” (Rosenberg et. al. 2018), 173–86.
52 See Haarsma, chapter 4; compared to Kahn, “Human Family Tree.”
53 Van den Toren, “Original Sin”, 178. There he cites K.N. Laland, J. Odling-Smee, and M. W. Feldman, “Cultural Niche Construction and Human Evolution,” Journal of Evolutionary Biology 14, no. 1 (January 8, 2001): 22–33.
54 Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, 232.
55 Acknowledgements—thanks to many people for helpful feedback, but especially to colleagues Steve Layman, Leland Saunders, Rebekah Rice, and Matthew Benton. Thanks also very much to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments have allowed us to significantly improve the essay.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Phillip Goggans
Phillip Goggans was formerly Professor of Philosophy at Seattle Pacific University. He currently practices mental health counseling in Paintsville, Kentucky.
Patrick McDonald
Patrick McDonald has been a Professor of Philosophy at Seattle Pacific University but is on leave. He is currently teaching at Seattle University and resides in Seattle.