The Topeka (Kansas) Capitol-Journal’s online site, cjonline.com, has a religion column called Genesis Station, written by Floyd Lee. Today’s column, “So how would you respond to this atheist?” takes up a question raised in an essay by preacher-turned atheist Mike Aus, and which I discussed on this site.
Lee says this (emphasis is his):
Aus used to be a Christian pastor, but now he is an atheist. In fact, as evolutionist Dr. Jerry Coyne mentioned at his WhyEvolutionIsTrue blog, “Aus was, as far as I know, one of the first public ‘successes’ of Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola’s “Clergy Project,” a sort of electronic halfway house to help non-believing clerics leave their faith behind.”
At any rate, Coyne quotes Aus thusly. Consider this carefully:
“Which core doctrines of Christianity does evolution challenge? Well, basically all of them. The doctrine of original sin is a prime example.
“If my rudimentary grasp of the science is accurate, then Darwin’s theory tells us that because new species only emerge extremely gradually, there really is no “first” prototype or model of any species at all—no “first” dog or “first” giraffe and certainly no “first” homosapiens created instantaneously. The transition from predecessor hominid species was almost imperceptible.
“So, if there was no “first” human, there was clearly no original couple through whom the contagion of “sin” could be transmitted to the entire human race.
“The history of our species does not contain a “fall” into sin from a mythical, pristine sinless paradise that never existed.
“…If there is no original ancestor who transmitted hereditary sin to the whole species, then there is no Fall, no need for redemption, and Jesus’ death as a sacrifice efficacious for the salvation of humanity is pointless.”
Ouch. No wiggle room, and no escape hatches. Period.
Especially notice that Aus’s point derives DIRECTLY from the theory of evolution. No escape, baby.
Indeed, and if you want the scientific data showing that the human lineage could never have been smaller than 1200 people in the last few million years, see the Li and Durban paper referenced at the bottom. It simply uses well established population-genetic theory to show that the amount of genetic variation in modern humans could not have existed (even with mutation) had the ancestral population been very small, like TWO. Ergo no literal Adam and Eve, ergo no original sin, ergo no need for Jesus.
This is so vexing to Christians that BioLogos refuses to take a stand on whether or not Adam and Eve were the literal ancestors of humanity: a shameful and cowardly position for an organization supposedly dedicated to converting evangelical Christians to good science.
Lee then puts a poser to his audience:
So when evolutionist Coyne saw Mike Aus’s argument, Coyne’s reaction was a direct “I don’t see any way around this.”
And that’s where you and I come in. If you are a believer in the theory of evolution, and especially if you are a Christian or other religionist/nonreligionist who believes that “there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith,” (as the late Pope John Paul II wrote), here’s the question:
How would you refute Mike Aus’s argument? Are you able to?
Well, first of all, if you believe that “there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of faith,” why are Christians in a tizzy about Adam and Eve? Why does the Roman Catholic church still embrace a literal Adam and Eve; why do many American Christians see their literal existence as irrefutable; and why is BioLogos tying itself in knots trying to reconcile evolutionary genetics with scripture? Of course there’s a conflict! All the readers can do is make up reasons why one doesn’t exist for them.
It will be fun to see the answers roll in, but already some are humorous. Lee calls himself “Contra Mundum” in the comments, and he poses the question more directly. To hiscredit, he doesn’t whitewash the implications of evolution:
And two of the several responses (I haven’t seen a good one yet). The first appears to convey some cognitive dissonance, resolve at the end by a simple declarative sentence that comes out of nowhere.
And I love this one:
Now really, can you tell me that we’re going to win Americans over to evolution by simply teaching them the facts that support it? I don’t believe that for a minute. First you need to remove the God-colored blinkers over their eyes.
I have half a mind to go over there and stir up trouble . . .
_____________
Li, H., and R. Durban. 2011. Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences. Nature 475:493-497.
..
“I have half a mind to go over there and stir up trouble . . .”
Do it!
Seconded!
Well, you folks could do it, too. Do I have to do EVERYTHING around here? 🙂
True, but you do it so well. 🙂
“Don’t just stand there, do everything.”
To quote “Blazing Saddles,””Go do that voodoo that you do, so well!”
Give ’em hell, Jerry!
Yes.
Apparently, half a mind is all you need …
I would take the time to criticize Zorak, but you can’t really expect critical thinking from a preying mantis.
Praying mantis?
Maybe jax was just pleying.
Space Ghost reference. 🙂
We can win the religious, not exclusive to Americans over by teaching them facts? I don’t think anyone can honestly answer that positively. If the religious and the anti-scientific were concerned with facts their beliefs wouldn’t last very long. Isn’t that the whole point of faith, facts are irrelevant to belief?
Stirring up trouble could be fun. Could be a better exercise for your students, it taught me a huge amount of science when I had to dumb everything down for myself and then an extra step for them. Someone needs to tell Zorak about natural selection, he appears to be unaware of it.
Yes and no. Higher education does correlate with less belief – and not just science education, but pretty much any subject across the board (with a couple obvious exceptions, such as seminaries).
So, education isn’t going to eliminate belief, but I think we are reasonably justified in thinking that simply educating people more and better will likely moderate belief as well as reducing its extent.
Maybe Zorak just needs some clarification. It seems this person is just ignorant and is getting confused.
Oh and do it – go over there and stir up a caldron of mischief! 🙂
Zorak is just ignorant. But the good news is that he doesn’t appear to be willfully so. His condition is curable. Now if he refuses to read up on Evolution, then he is a hopeless case.
KansasTruthTeller spouts standard theistic evolution apologetics. But misunderstands evolution actually – hilarious that he can visually detect human evolutionary change over 50 years. Somebody should explain slowly to him that he’s seeing evolution alright but not biological, more like fashion evolution. And btw, he didn’t answer the point about Jesus and Original Sin.
Did you see where he/she said:
If we had conclusive proof evolution wouldn’t be a theory and we wouldn’t need faith to believe in God.
My face is sore from all the face palming. 😉
Oh, theists are too clever and too attached to their worldview to simply go along with the idea that no original sin obviates the need for Jesus’ atoning sacrifice.
For example, here is the 2nd Latter-Day Saints (mormon) article of faith:
“2 We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.”
The idea is that everybody will need redemption because no one will ever be able to live a spotless life according to god’s impossible standards.
It’s a pretty obvious move.
It does seem obvious to change “saving us from original sin” to “saving us from our sins”. Jesus can still add value.
I think the tougher problem has to do with the Christian idea of afterlife and judgement. If there was no first human, just a gradual continuum of changes, then who was the first person to go to heaven? You have to be a dualist and invoke some kind of “at some point God added a soul” or something.
maybe heaven is a continuum, too. So the transitional humans only make it half way up.
The Catholic church will still have a problem because they have an official dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary – she was conceived without Original Sin. If there’s no original sin, what’s the point of the special dogma for Mary – everyone has immaculate conception!
what is the point to the catholic church??
I was brought up a catholic, but I got better.
I always thought the ‘immaculate conception’ referred to the parthenogenetic origins of baby Jesus so thanks for putting me right on that. (Not that it makes anything in the whole biblical story any more credible as an explanation of why and how we are all here!).
Hey, I thought that too. Now I know!
For most of my life I had the same confusion between immaculate conception and virgin birth, until, of all people, Christopher Hitchens straightened me out in one of his debates or speeches widely seen on video.
It suddenly strikes me that “immaculate conception” would be an excellent description of libertarian “free will”.
Mary did not officially become immaculate until 1854, completing the picture of being absolutely virginal and pure. By papal bull. If she is not, there are a whole lot of churches and cathedrals that have to be renamed. Maybe like they changed their minds on limbo, where unbaptized babies who died would flutter around on angel wings for eternity. This was removed from official doctrine in 2007. They can now go to heaven.
Not just churches and cathedrals. There are lots of Immaculate Conception schools, colleges, centers, etc..
So, it’s a load of papal bull?
/@
You sound surprised. 😛
I’ve always thought it was papal bull for 1700 years and more..
Looks like papal poop to me.
LOL…I like your style…..
I’ve never liked this approach for exactly this reason. For all the terrible apologetics out there, this is a perfectly reasonable one.
Why would we expect that the one disobedience of Adam and Eve bear more weight than the countless disobediences of humans throughout their own lifetime? I mean, according to Jesus, it’s a sin to think thoughts of lust!
By what logic would one incident of scrumping hold greater weight than a lifetime of lustful thoughts?
Furthermore, it gets Yahweh off the hook for this one incident of punishing people for the sins of their father.
The move to ‘save you from your own sins’ not only neatly sidesteps the problem, but it removes some of the tangles and illogic from christian dogma.
Given that Christians can look at “Kill gay people” and think “Well, he must have meant rapists”, this change of dogma is barely even worth a footnote.
Yes. Unless you’re arguing with a Catholic, there are better arguments to be made.
I find trying to analyze it all tiring. It’s a myth so meh. It’s like when I spent too much time trying to figure out if LL Cool Jay really went back to Cali in his song “Going Back to Cali”. 🙂
At least LL exists….
I would find that idea (‘all peeps are sinful’) way more credible than Adam & Eve. What the hell does Adam & Eve have to do with me and why should I need to be forgiven for anything they did? I refuse to accept any responsibility for what somebody did before I was born. (This is quite aside from the unbelievability of A&A).
Now, a saviour who could excuse *my* sins, now that would be handy.
(It still doesn’t work for me, but it’d stand a lot better chance than the A&A myth).
There’s a lot of appeal for many Christians in the idea that Man (and the world) was perfect once and has been steadily declining in morality throughout history, and soon, God is just going to end the process and start over with the true believers club only. Without Adam & Eve you don’t have the initial start of perfection. To justify their own attitudes toward the modern world and toward their fellow humans not of their faith, many of them need the past to be better than the future, people to be fundamentally evil and getting worse, and efforts to reduce suffering and remedy ignorance to be ultimately futile.
Evolution does not have a direction or goal, but once self-awareness arrives humans can strive and have striven to make the world better for ourselves (with plenty of mistakes along the way). Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature gives solid empirical evidence for this, but observations on improvements in infant mortality, democracy, literacy, etc. also tell a story of rough and ragged progress. Taken together this factual account is not one that suits the way Christians want to tell the story of human virtue and humanity’s future.
I think losing the Eden myth to the facts of man’s evolutionary origin does more damage to the whole Christian viewpoint than just the loss of the Original sin doctrine.
An interesting take that I can imagine some buying into.
Still, the ‘all men are sinful’ is a fairly simple defense that I hear surprisingly little from liberal Christians.
Interesting phrase “doing damage” because, while it is true in the sense that evolution undermines the Christian view, there is an important sense in which evolution corrects or heals a sickness in the Christian viewpoint of decay and degradation, rather than growth and creativity.
Looking at human social evolution, the behaviors Christian’s call “sin” don’t need to be seen as caused by a mysterious cancerous plague slowly consuming what is good in the world. The seven sins and seven virtues enumerated by the Catholics can be seen as adaptive behaviors, where the virtues promote harmony and survival within the cooperative tribal group, and the sins become a kind of virtue when directed toward competitive “enemy” groups.
Of course that is a flawed over-simplification, but it certainly has more explanatory power than sin as historical plague. We seem to have older emotion based behaviors and newer cerebral behaviors that are often in conflict in a variety of complicated ways as we move forward into larger civilizations and leave behind our hunter gatherer origins in the deep past.
But to see our tendencies and behaviors rooted in biological causes is simply so much more positive and optimistic than the pessimism and fear of facing dark mysterious forces, which could only be countered by adopting equally strange and unknowable magic remedies.
Then I suggest you actually read a book or two about evolution. (“Why Evolution is True” comes to mind as a good example!)
This has been explain a gazillion time .. but if you just sit there humming, with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears …
Let me give you the ‘elevator pitch’ answer: Changes are brought about by random mutations . No conscious decisions necessary there. Then natural selection starts working on those modifications. No conscious decisions there either. Got it now?
Until interbreeding between the split populations do not occur (for whatever reason) and then they are free to diverge without limit. Voilà, new species.
The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable are excellent books explaining the mechanism evolution too.
I followed the comment threads on the cj site a few years ago and recognize the commenter handle’s up there. Those are the sharpies. The hard-head red state loons who dominate on the threads are as ideologically intractible as can be found anywhere and boorishly wearisome. Please drop in and fire them up — it’s the only incentive I have to return to that rag for one more visit.
Look, there really is only one possible explanation. Original sin had to start with the Big Bang and Adam & Eve are just ways to refer to matter and anti-matter. That would also explain the on-going war between the sexes!
So, they eat the fruit of the tree, then realise they’re naked, get all horny, they have sex and annihilate each other in a flash of radiation.
What a way to go.
Floyd Lee is a frequent poster at The Panda’s Thumb.
He is a virulent homophobe.
He professes to believe that before the Fall,
all carnivores ate plants and nothing but plants.
He claims that plants are not alive.
Floyd Lee asserts that an episode of Unsolved Mysteries constitutes incontrovertible evidence for faith healing.
And all that is only the beginning.
“…He is a virulent homophobe….”
I did notice in one of the comments for the article that when someone made reference to “Adam is just homo sapiens.” it came out as “Adam is just {filtered word} sapiens.”
Hilarious.
I’ll bet he’s a bibliophile, too!
+1
Wow, that filtering of “homo” would take all the specificity out of homo milk 🙂
Well, I’m just a “to each his own” kinda guy, so I will still get the Homo milk (osteoporosis and all that…), but the separation of foods at grocery stores these days has me confused. Now there is the ‘organic’ food in one section and the rest in a different one. Have I been buying inorganic food for all these years? And if it’s all been inorganic, how did it cause me to gain all this weight? What we really need is for someone to come down from ‘heaven’ or wherever and make whatever sacrifice that could wash away all my fat. I can deal with my own misbehavior.
Is there any free access to the Li and Durban paper? What is the assumption made for the mutation rate as it is applied to the Markov coalescence model? Wouldn’t a higher estimated mutation rate allow for a lower effective population size?
Full pdf version of the article:
http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Welcome_files/2011_Li_Nature.pdf
The genetic argument against Adam and Eve is a useful new tool in the box for showing Christians yet another reason why their beliefs are silly, but it is sad that it comes to that, because the concepts it is refuting are so silly to begin with.
Putting Jesus on the unemployment line because science can show there was no genetic bottleneck of 2 individuals is great, but how about putting Jesus on the unemployment line because the idea of blood sacrifice to propitiate an angry god is repugnant and such a god concept is not worthy of respect much less worship.
How about the fact that if you believe the scripture, Jesus preached in great detail of hell being a real place of eternal torture. Even if the worst human that ever lived was the only person to ever end up in hell, that would be an infinite punishment for a finite crime and thus only an evil, unjust god, not worthy of worship could set up such a system.
I feel you, but ‘repugnant’ seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Its not a good argument from a tactical perspective because the only ones who will agree that it’s repugnant aren’t in the audience you’re trying to convince.
It’s almost like the kind of story you’d expect from a primitive, superstitious people convinced that wrathful deities demanded human and animal sacrifice.
Yeah, almost exactly like that to a degree of precision that ordinary human powers of observation are unable to discern a difference. 🙂
It’s simple logic to anyone
No Adam & Eve, no original sin
No original sin, no need for redemption
No need for redemption, no need for a redeemer
No need need for a redeemer, no need for Jesus
No need for Christianity.
This sums it up perfectly!
Well…even w/out Adam and Eve you still have the sin problem (maybe not original sin.) I think Adam and Eve as mythological hits more at the reliability/authority of the Bible.
Yes. There are a few christian denominations that don’t subscribe to the doctrine of original sin. See my comment above.
If I remember correctly, the concept of “the fall” is mostly a post hoc Christian invention to make sense of the death of Jesus. There are much fewer Jews who have a problem with the ToE than Christians since Adam and Eve don’t fit into their entire scheme of soteriology.
There might have been pre-Christian Jews who believed in some sort of heritable sin from A&E but I don’t remember this offhand.
I seem to recall that there are some Christian sects that don’t make a big deal of “the fall”.
And certainly, there are a lot of liberal churches that are willing to concede that Genesis is mythology. “The Fall” is a mere metaphoric tool to explain human separation from god…and all that sophisticated theology stuff.
Still doesn’t explain requirement for the water-walking, death-defying god avatar to come down to Earth and be tortured in the most inhumane way possible. So that the real-god-not-avatar can forgive the human race of its transgressions…
Wait…what? You’re saying that the “real” god was required by some fact of nature to have a human sacrifice in order that the sins of humans be “forgiven”?
Well…isn’t that primitive. And gruesomely sadistic.
If I were a god, I could have thought of a thousand better ways to demonstrate both my forgiveness and my presence (permanently, FWIW).
The entire New Testament is a nightmare of anti-logic. It’s no wonder theologians stay up late thinking of new ways of explaining it.
This whole issue of compatibility of religion and evolution is fouled up because it assumes that the problems flow both ways. They don’t.
Science cannot confirm any purely religious doctrine; whether original sin or the Trinity. To even seek such a thing is to demonstrate ignorance, foolishness, or weakness of faith.
Religion, on the other hand can adjust to new information about the natural world. Rediscovery that the world is round did not upend religion; discovery that humans and apes are related need not upend it either. The idea that God made us and evolution’s how he did it is a perfectly fine religious idea. Some will reject it, but then some theists reject the trinity too; which is not at all a scientific idea.
From the standpoint of science, original sin cannot be supported. From a religious standpoint, evolution does not annihilate original sin, it merely requires some fine tuning. I see some comments in which this is demonstrated.
Science and religion only come into conflict when their proponents over-reach. Science must ignore God because God is entirely outside the Scientific Method. Religion must accept that science has proven its ability to explain the natural world and that a religion that ignores truth about nature soon finds itself in history’s dustbin.
sean s.
NOMA? Really? Please, no mo’ NOMA.
The problem with NOMA is that religion actually is science, in the sense that it is a theory of the way things work that includes — and its explanations are utterly dependent upon — a number of very specific, unambiguous, and eminently testable statements of fact.
It’s just that religion is bad science, because it holds to those positions long after they’ve been overpoweringly emphatically demonstrated laughably absurd.
The unnatural histories in every religion are faery tales, each and every one of them, no more and no less. There’s no “there” there.
And all the rest of it is yet more embarrassing bullshit — there are no miracles, no providential agents, no souls, no afterlife, and it takes no more to demonstrate any of those obvious facts than it does to demonstrate that unsupported objects near the Earth’s surface accelerate towards the center of the Earth at about ten meters per second per second.
There’s nothing about religion that anybody with a double-digit age should take seriously. It’s all magic spells and monsters and heroes — and it’s not even disguised, let alone thinly. How anybody can even pretend to grant it the slightest bit of respect is utterly beyond me.
(Note: I’m all for fantasy as entertainment, and enjoy it hugely, myself. I’m just perplexed by those who so are so unbelievably gullible to think that any of that stuff is real. Getting lost in a book or a movie theater is one thing, but staying lost when you put the book down or step outside? Please, people — grow up!)
Cheers,
b&
God has always been loving. There was some confusion about this until Jesus came along and cleared it up.
Of course one has to wonder how it is that a being so powerful that he could create the entire universe out of nothing with the sheer power of his will, and who can hear, understand, and respond to every prayer, could allow such confusion to exist. And it is even more peculiar that to remedy the situation he would be reduced to the desperate act of sending a single flesh and blood carpenter to one of the least significant flea-bitten backwaters on the planet, only to have him tortured and murdered. He works in mysterious ways indeed. In fact, if the whole story is considered from an honest and detached viewpoint, he works in ways that are entirely crazy, irrational, ineffective, and ludicrously inconsistent.
Of course you can invent unlimited self-serving rationalizations from within the Christian closed system of meaning, all of which are clearly designed to preserve and defend the faith for its own sake rather than to get at the truth. But if you extract your mind from the closed system of historical culturally enforced contingency and relativism, and take a broader view of reality that encompasses all human knowledge of nature, the absurdity of claiming these folk tales are in any real sense “true” becomes pretty obvious.
If religion has such deep insights into truth, why was it unable to see the world is round thousands of years ago? Why was it unable to understand that diseases are caused by microorganisms?
It may be that the stubbornness of faith is such that even when religion is clearly wrong about reality, its followers circle the wagons and close their ears and eyes to reality. If this is what you mean by saying that discovering the world is round did not upend religion, then it’s true.
But in fact discovering that the world was round, and that the earth is not in the center of the Universe, puts every single religious claim in serious doubt. Religion was totally upended as an authoritative source of truth by these discoveries, and by evolution. Religion has no more evidence for God, heaven, the soul, or any other metaphysical claim than it did for a geocentric solar system, and so all of its claims are equally dubious.
My understanding was that early church councils just decreed that many Aristotelean ideas were ‘true’ in order to avoid wasting time on what they considered trivial questions about the world, in favor of more important questions about eternal salvation, etc. It was a typical authoritarian move: Because I said so, dammit! When more & more of their fiat ‘facts’ were shown to be untrue (like the Heliocentric cosmos), they were forced to torture people or burn them at the stake, until that began to be frowned upon.
Which just goes to show that any institution or authority that priviliges imaginative supernatural concerns over keen emperical observation of reality is doomed to make enormous errors.
For example the enormous error of not frowning upon torture and murder in God’s name, even after, as the story goes, his son came to show everyone how loving he was.
Nor can anything else.
They require your actual address and phone number in order to register at the site. I went ahead and gave it to them and got an automated email saying that they’ll get back to me if they decide to deign to grant me an account.
It’ll be most interesting to see if they do, in the first place, and how many posts they’ll let me make in the second….
Cheers,
b&
One of the ignorant comments did, however, include a great little joke:
“The discussion reminds me of the scientist who cried out, God, I have found out how to create life just like you. God responded, show me. So the scientist gathered some dirt into a pile. God interrupted and said to the scientist – whoa there, get your own dirt.”
As much as I dislike repeating myself, I have to mention again that genetics theory also predicts (surprisingly but apparently uncontroversially) that there’s about an 80% chance of an individual becoming an ancestor to all living descendants of a species, and quite rapidly[1], even in reproductively isolated populations with only occasional gene transfer[2].
So despite there never being only two members of our species, it’s entirely possible to comport with evolutionary data the idea of an individual or couple receiving the taint of sin and becoming ancestors of every living human.
Does this not qualify as a good response? 🙂
[1] Joseph T. Chang “Recent Common Ancestors of all Present-Day
Individuals.” Advances in Applied Probability, 31: 1002-1026, 1999
[2] http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/descent/Random_descent_networks.html
It would…if you could suggest how one is to identify the sin gene….
b&
Presumably it’s a supernatural taint. 😉
So…”taint” ain’t necessarily so?
b&
Nope, ‘taint necessarily so. 😉 I’m only saying that “never fewer than 1200 people” doesn’t imply no possibility of Adam and Eve being the ancestors of all humanity and passing original sin onto everyone (who’s been alive in the past 10,000 years).
I’m not religious, but there does seem to be enough wiggle room left to fit Christianity in there. They just have to say “Well maybe there were some other perfect humans living around the same time as Adam and Eve, but the Bible isn’t about them! It’s about us, the ones who need salvation…”
Again, humanity could not have descended from simply two ancestors. And how, exactly, is the “sin” passed on then? Is it not diluted by the inheritance of the sinless ones? Does it hitchhike with certain segments of the DNA.
Science has spoken and absolutely refutes the notion, held by Catholics, for example, that all humanity descends from simply two people. If you want to make it more complicated than that and still save the idea of “inheritance of sin”, you must specify precisely how the “sin” is inherited.
Obviously, sin is a sort of particulate inheritance, though not necessarily genetic. The blending inheritance argument settles that, in the same way that Mendel provided an answer to Fleeming Jenkin’s argument against Darwin. Wouldn’t you agree, then, that fixation of the (possibly non-material) “sin allele” in the population answers the entire problem?
And of course Mendel didn’t specify how rough and smooth seed coats are inherited; he merely showed that there were certain patterns — “factors” — that assorted independently, were present in pairs, and so on. So why do you demand more of Adam M. than you do of Mendel?
The problem is the definition of “ancestor”. As readers have pointed out, yes, one male and one female could have provided one or a few genes to all living humans (although it’s unlikely that they would have been a couple), but other genes would have come from other people. The fact is that it’s impossible for two people to have been the complete genetic ancestors of all modern humanity in the sense of having provided ALL the genes (or their descendant mutant alleles) in modern humans. So why, then, does the “sin” come from two people while all the other thousand-odd people, who weren’t tainted, did not contribute the “sinlessness.”
In a materialistic worldview, it’s a great objection, and I don’t disagree, but for people who already believe in a supernatural god, I’m sure they’d be quick to say something like “Of course sin isn’t genetic, even if it’s heritable. It’s a taint in our spirit, not a gene in our DNA…”
As for why people aren’t supposed to have inherited sinlessness in much greater amounts than sinfulness, my serious answer would be about the psychology of taints. I think Steven Pinker wrote about it in The Blank Slate. My playful answer is that of course sinful people have more fun and more sex than those chaste, staid puritans, so natural selection must have fixed sinfulness in the population. 😉
(As an aside, I imagine it’s actually quite likely that if one person provided genes to everyone, then his mate did as well, i.e. that a couple could be an ancestor almost as easily as an individual.)
Jerry, you’d be the perfect person to answer this.
Assume some novel gene arose in a species. And even assume that, against all odds (or through “intelligent” design or whatever) it simultaneously arose in a mated pair — and that it was genetically dominant, not recessive. And even go so far as to assume that this couple has lots of great-great-grandchildren.
Under what circumstances would the gene itself become universal within the species, and how many generations would it take?
I’m thinking that, even if wildly beneficial, it’d still take something dramatic, such as speciation or a severe population bottleneck, for it to happen. If merely benign, I’d expect it to dilute itself out of existence sooner rather than later; and if deleterious, that it would vanish in just a few generations — and it’s hard to think of sin as anything other than deleterious.
Are my instincts right on this? Can you offer any insight?
Thanks,
b&
Of course the explanation is that the sin gene confers a very strong survival advantage to individuals having it. Because of this it quickly spreads out and becomes fixed in the population. So that by the time of Jesus he could safely say “Let him who have no sin cast the first stone”, because there is no sinless ones left.
Hey it all makes sense now.
I was going to bring Adam M’s point up if no-one else did, and cite Rohde et al. (2004) ‘Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans’.
If one assumes that “sin” can be transmitted to all descendants (implicitly ruling out transmission in alleles on nuclear chromosomes, or in mitochondria) and relaxes the requirement that A&E were the “first” humans, the lack of a bottleneck becomes irrelevant.
But Jerry also demands a theory of how sin is transmitted. How about a transposon that’s positively selected?
This says Templeton grant all over it! 🙂
I just posted this over there. We’ll see how long it lasts….
—-
Subject: Religion is fantastic
— and I don’t mean that in a “golly gee, innit wonderful?” sense, but rather in the “sword and sorcery” sense.
I could almost take seriously the apologia surrounding the Adam and Eve story if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a faery tale about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard who evicts his own young children, naked and deathly sick, to the curb because they drank the poison he himself left in the ‘fridge in a juice bottle — and the kids only did so because the wizard’s deadbeat brother egged them on.
I know there are those who will take offense at such an observation, but I also see it as a huge disservice to privilege such stories merely because some people have a deep emotional attachment to them. There isn’t a Christian who doesn’t think of Muslims as nutty for believing that Muhammad rode off into the sunset on a flying horse or that Hindus are even crazier for believing in blue-skinned elephant-headed gods with multiple appendages — though I’m sure many lack the honesty of respect to actually say so out loud. Yet they themselves profess to find nothing strange in a story about a man who lived in a fish.
Similarly, I respect too many Christians too much to coddle them by avoiding hurting their feelings by telling them that they’re too old to still believe in talking plants (on fire!) that give magic wand lessons to the reluctant hero, or zombies that tell their thralls to stick their hands in their gaping chest wounds.
None of you believe any of that stuff any more than the rest of the world does; you just profess to out of profound levels of cognitive dissonance — and, in the case of not a few professional and unbelieving clergy, the simple avarice of the confidence artist. You’d do yourselves and the rest of the world a great service to let go of these childish fantasies, no matter how superficially comforting they are.
Cheers,
b&
I guess you’ve proven that adultery and marriage are compatible. 🙂
It’s funny how they interpret the phrase “incompatibility of science and religion”. It’s very simple minded, but it has a kind of logic. The KKK and the NAACP are not compatible because they have no common members (as far as I know). But science and religion have millions of adherents in common, so they must be compatible. Oil and vinegar must also be compatible because they co-exist in salad dressing. That humans can be irrational and make errors doesn’t factor into it. This is a flavor of relativism, that truth is exclusively determined by democratic input. Crowdsourcing reality.
And by this logic adultery and marriage are compatible. This is a kind of reason free empiricism. What they see before their eyes counts, but understanding science and religion as abstract systems of thought, and analyzing the logical contradictions between the two is beyond comprehension, and thus never dawns on them. Trying to reason with this kind of mind will lead to nothing but frustration. They require years of education before they can even join the debate.
Now now, Ben. We’ll have none of that.
It was an abdominal wound. Not a chest wound.
Sorry, but it was in the chest area; spear stab to the general region of the heart to ‘certify’ death before the body was removed from the cross. Similar to the “hang by the neck until dead” philosophy.
Is it even worth the energy and effort?
Can’t we just leave them to their idiocy and ignorance?
I mean, their god clearly has, so why can’t we?
We could… if they weren’t constantly pushing their religions down our throats.
Other people have already mentioned this, but just to repeat it as someone who used to be a Christian who accepted evolution – not all Christians believe in original sin. And keep in mind that official dogma and doctrine of particular churches doesn’t always represent what the churchgoers themselves actually believe. Many people are fairly ignorant of their religion, while others feel that their own personal interpretation trumps their church’s official position. So, as Musical Beef pointed out, a lot of Christians (even Catholics) believe that the purpose of Christ was to forgive humanity of their sins, not forgive us for the original sin. But as Kevin pointed out, this still leaves the problem of blood sacrifice being required in the first place.
I had to laugh at this automated peice of lunacy in one of the comments: “Adam is just [filtered word] sapiens: the whole collection of them as they advanced.”
I wonder what word could come before “sapiens” that could be so offensive?
Lee had one useful concept in his later comment: “Mike Aus’s buzzsaw”, a specialized replacement for Occam’s razor when facing a long persistent pointless multiplication. Bye-bye Jesus!
I was debating a catholic recently over the historicity of Adam & Eve and he sent me a link to a website that supposedly has genetic evidence that it was possible there was a bottleneck of just two people. Since I’m not an evolutionary biologist, is it possible for someone to check this claim and refute it?
Link: http://socrates58.blogspot.ca/2012/04/dr-dennis-bonnette-debunks-argument.html
It says:
Since the Class II region where HLA-DRB1 resides recombines only rarely, the region behaves as a unit during reproduction. It is inherited as a block, referred to as a haplotype. It is now known that there are only five basic haplotypes (Andersson 1998), and their particular identity is specified by which HLA-DRB1 allele they carry. Depending on the accuracy of the dating and tree drawing, there may have been between three and five haplotypes at the time of the Homo/Pan split. We share four of them with chimps. Since a single mating pair could pass on a maximum of four haplotypes, the most recent studies appear potentially compatible with a literal Adam and Eve.
The point of all this is to show that the science which is so dogmatically employed to undermine Catholic doctrine regarding Adam and Eve is itself not definitive. Catholic doctrine trumps in any event, but even more so when the science itself is far from settled.
Well we already know for sure there is one female ancestor to all living humanity (Mitochondrial Eve.) Is may be even remotely possible (though highly unlikely) she was the female progenitor of all. Due to the factors involved in genetic diversity mentioned (mutation rate, recombination rate, demographics (ie mating patterns, family size, death cycles see John Hawk’s treatment Aug 2011)) effective population sizes are current best estimates based on assumptions (ie mutation rate) upon a theoretical model. I don’t believe any population geneticist has said they’d definitively ruled out a literal ‘Adam and Eve.’ In 10 or so years given more research…maybe.
So you’re saying it’s possible?
While the official dogma of the Catholic Church may be predicated on the existence of Adam and Eve this doesn’t mean every Catholic believes it, not even all the Princes of the Church: http://tiny.cc/6to7ww
Take your biggest spoon, Jerry, and stir, baby, STIR!
People are stupid.
And love means nothing, in some strange quarters.
I suppose love means nothing when one is dedicated to blindly following rules designed to enforce moldy beliefs inherited from primitive cultures. For example in the concerted effort to discriminate against human beings who are fully natural and loving but happen to be attracted to other humans of the same sex. Certainly love matters far less to such people than rote compliance with rules in an ancient book.
Like the Sabbath, rules are made for humans. Sometimes Jesus spoke with plain wisdom, but most Christians seem never to notice it. Humans are not made for the rules, and anyone who feels and understands love should know it is one of the greatest rule breakers ever known to humans.
Those mental prisons known as religious rules are some of the most powerful anti-love forces in existence. Those with the intelligence and insight to break out of those bonds are the ones able to extend love, compassion, and equanimity to all humans, and not be slavishly bound to the norms of a narrow culturally constructed system of thought, which all religions are.
And I heard them banging on hearts and fingers.
Aha. I was too old and stupid to know it was a song lyric. 🙂
It’s called “cognitive dissonance”.
Well, I was going to post The Answer to Everything (42) and explain everything about A&E, Jesus, god and the rest so everybody could play happily together, but my cat keeps walking and sitting on my keyboard. So I guess I must go feed the cat and leave the dogma for another day.