Once again I am soooo sorry I have been remiss in posting, but there’s a certain type of idiocy which is truly compelling to me. Ray has put together a new site where he posts even more ridiculous versions of the ramblings from his blog. Here is an excerpt:

Imagine being there when the first dog evolved. There was a big bang, and millions of years later an animal with a tail and four legs, a liver, heart, kidneys, lungs, blood, ears and eyes evolved into the first dog. Fortunately for him, his eyes had evolved to maturity after millions of years of blindness, so that he could see the first female dog that had evolved standing by him. It was actually very fortunate, because if the female dog hadn’t evolved also and been at the right place at the right time, with the right parts and the willingness to mate, he would have been a dead dog. He needed a female to keep the species alive.

He posts this in spite of the fact that a bunch of people (including real biologists) have tried to explain to him how evolution works, how populations and species evolve, and how sex was an extremely useful development in very early evolution.

So why do I bother? Maybe because it is simply easier to argue with someone who is so extremely wrong about almost everything. I certainly don’t think he represents anything but a fringe minority of Christians. I do wonder what makes him so determined to stick with his "literalist" view of a divine act of creation less than 10,000 years ago, and I think I am beginning to understand why he simply cannot concede that he could be wrong about that (while most Christians are totally fine with an old Earth and Cosmos and the idea of evolution).

The problem is, if you take your Abrahamic religion really really seriously, you can’t reconcile evolution with Original Sin.

If we evolved from apes, monkeys or whatever, then there was no Garden of Eden where everything was perfect, and there was always death in the world. From an evolutionary perspective, there could be no Adam and Eve as the first humans, because there would be no hard line to delineate where a particular hominid became human. Even if somehow they were the first humans (for argument’s sake) due to some freak accident of simultaneous mutation (much like Ray’s ridiculous caricature above) they clearly weren’t perfect, because evolution will never produce perfection; it will merely produce "Good enough".

If humans were never perfect in the first place, then there could be no Fall, because there was nothing to fall from, and so no Original Sin. After all, we were merely intelligent animals, surviving as we could. For God to show up and nominate a couple of us to be His children (thought obviously not in His image, since God didn’t evolve hiding from predators and digging for ants) only to then damn them and their descendants for eating some fruit just seems idiotic. After all, if He just waited a few million years longer before putting us to the test, we might have evolved stronger intellect and reasoning skills, so that a talking snake wouldn’t be able to fool us.

So what are the implications if there was no Original Sin? For one thing I think it means we don’t automatically deserve to go to Hell, and we can’t consider ourselves "corrupted", because after all we are just animals and we’ve done pretty well getting this far, raising families, forming communities, creating languages etc. If anything, God should be impressed with how far we’ve come since He sparked life into existence all those eons ago.

To the fundamentalist Christian, I think this implied absence of Original Sin nullifies the whole point of Jesus coming to save us (from the damnation we deserved). In sending Jesus to us to be crucified, God sacrificed Himself to Himself to save us from Himself; paying our debt (to Him) for Original Sin. Although it could be argued that God doing this makes no sense at the best of times, it just gets worse if you do away with Original Sin by accepting evolution.

Non-fundies seem fine with evolution, and I’m glad of it, but to be honest I’m not 100% sure why they’re ok with evolution, because then you have to wonder what it was that Jesus was sent to pay for exactly. I guess we can just look at Jesus more as a teacher than as a sacrifice, but that whole crucifixion thing is still pretty pivotal to most Christian doctrine isn’t it?

And what of the soul? If man was created out of whole cloth then it’s easy to make a distinction between him and other animals and say that he has a soul, and further that that soul is eternal. But if you believe in evolution AND you believe in the soul (as something beyond our material selves) then you have to assume one of the following:

• God granted us a soul at some arbitrary point in out evolutionary history, perhaps at the moment we ate the fruit? I guess that’s an obvious interpretation; that the soul itself was the knowledge of good and evil, and it made us all miserable the same way Spike’s new soul made him miserable, and Angel’s was given as a curse (see Buffy TV show).
• We developed a soul in the same way we developed intelligence: Gradually. Which means we have to consider the sticky problem of all the animals we share the planet with who must therefore all have some semblance of souls of their own. What happens to them? I don’t think they’ll be going to Heaven or Hell, so will their souls be extinguished? Should we just keep eating them and try not to think about it?

Am I wrong to suggest that there are irreconcilable differences between a belief in evolution and pretty much any flavor of the Christian faith? Obviously I can google this question and probably get some excellent answers but for now I am just trying to work it out in my own head.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 12:17 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.