The Fall and Sin

In Defense of Aquinas's Adam: Original Justice, the Fall, and Evolution

“…Having briefly canvassed Aquinas's relevant views on original justice, the Fall, and original sin, let us now turn to the first major objection or concern regarding Aquinas's portrayal of the prelapsarian Adam: his purported immunity to suffering and death, which, along with disease and disaster, predate the arrival of human beings within evolutionary history. For example, Ian McFarland (2007) writes, "It is now beyond dispute that there was no point where human existence was characterized by immunity from death, absence of labour pains, or an ability to acquire food without toil…. The geological record makes it clear that natural disasters, disease, suffering, and death long antedate the emergence of the human species.…”

Land Dispossession as “Original Sin”. Can Christian Original Sin Talk Be Used as Diagnostic Tool Within the Public Domain?

“…Nor are the facts of evolutionary biology consistent with the descent of all human beings from a single ancestral pairing and nothing suggests that humanity's advent occasioned any change in the basic conditions of biological existence. 32 The literalist error and historical implausibility of Augustine's doctrine on the origin of sin not only pose a complex set of theological problems, but are also problematic from a public point of view, because the public sphere has to operate with diagnostic tools that are plausible and conform to basic standards of rationality. In a debate as sensitive as land reform, we need to apply moral language with a demonstrable factual basis.…”

“…Biblical language depicts sin and grace as conditions or states that pre-empt human willing, eventually emerging in particular acts. 50 Neither the gospels nor Pauline literature refrain from describing the whole of humanity as captives of sin and as culpable before God, even before their births. 51 Old Testament literature also exhibits no qualms in assigning guilt in a corporate sense to Israel, Edom, Babylon or Nineve.…”

“…For Augustine the unmerited gift character of God's graceso clearly articulated by Paulimplies that all human beings are sinners incapable of redeeming themselves. 52 Human beings stand before God in a state of guilt, because even though the human will is enslaved by sinful desire, it still acts willingly of its own accord and is therefore culpable before God. 53 This Christian approach to freedom stands in stark contrast to secular, liberal and legal understandings of freedom as consisting of human agents making decisions free of external compulsion, and culpability as related to recompenses based on intentional individual acts.…”

Is the Problem of Divine Hiddenness a Problem for the Reformed Epistemologist?

“…But how could there be a reliable belief-forming faculty, the sensus divinitatis, given diverse theistic belief in the world? 41 In an attempt to be faithful to his own Reformed heritage, Plantinga suggests that, with the Fall, sin has had, and continues to have, drastic consequences upon one's sensus divinitatis and that, because of sin-which we can roughly define as 'human resistance to or turning away from God'-, 42 the faculty does not work as it should; hence, there is pre-and postlapsarian human knowledge of God. 43 Reformed theologians have historically referred to the impairment of one's cognitive equipment for apprehending the reality of God as the 'noetic effects of sin.'…”