Can the ‘fall’ be an actual event in human history? Is ‘original sin’ something real, or just a Christian fairytale?

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

This is the third of three episodes giving a broad overview of the concepts behind Becoming Adam. In the first installment, we identified two controlling metaphors and three “points of contact” in Genesis for scientific exploration. The controlling metaphors were “the man,” ha’adam, as an archetype, and the human journey from childhood to maturity, while our themes were language, morality, and relationship. The second episode outlined the scientific narrative, which showed that the human brain evolved along a path similar to what we see in childhood development, and the same held true for language and morality. What’s more, both language and morality rest upon a foundation of empathy and cooperation, not individual competition. From an evolutionary perspective, this seems odd, to say the least.

Now, we’ll place Genesis and evolution in dialogue and see what results from the conversation. Remember, the goal of this quest is not to allow science to dictate the interpretation of the Bible, nor is it to naively overlay the ancient text onto contemporary science. As William Brown cautioned, the connections are “virtual parallels” between the scientific and biblical narratives. Although these parallels include some historical as well as conceptual “points of contact” between science and Genesis, I assume the ancient author was ignorant of current science. Thus, in addition to these harmonies I’ll also note a few of the discords between science and Scripture.

With those guardrails in place, let’s get started.

The structural metaphor that MORAL KNOWLEDGE = COMING OF AGE is immediately grasped by every human being in every culture, and in Genesis 2–3 it’s applied to the “the man” and “the woman” to create literary archetypes in a figurative text. The same conceptual journey from childhood to maturity resurfaces throughout Scripture, but it becomes especially prominent in the New Testament. There, the Greek τέλειος (teleios) does double duty. It can describe the final state of consummation as “perfect” or “complete,” but it also can describe the partial realization of that goal in “mature” Christian life here and now. [1] By his choice of metaphor in the garden narrative, has the author primed us for an evolutionary understanding of human origins?

Considering the “fall,” our ancestors 300,000 years ago certainly weren’t sinless. When we realize that the “innocence” of the immature human race was ignorance instead of perfection, it’s easy to understand how early humans, like children, could commit sins of ignorance, yet God could overlook those offenses without violating his own justice. Even human societies—imperfect as they are—don’t hold toddlers accountable for breaking the law. Just like the rest of us, “the man” was never perfect. That explains why the serpent appears in the garden without warning in Gen. 3:1. It’s described as “more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” Notice that the serpent is “one of God’s animals,” not a supernatural being. This implies a “natural” origin of sin. It wasn’t introduced from the outside by Satan. Sin has been present with us from the beginning, even in Eden. Evil wove its way into the warp and woof of human culture long before we learned to give it a name.

The “fall” transpired at a literal time and place: somewhere between humanity’s migration to Ethiopia 75,000 years ago and the departure from the Levant and across the globe 10,000 years later.

Such a

scenario does not make God the origin of evil.