Just picking up your comments at the end -
> Whence sin? A Darwinian origin for humans makes sense of sin's origin -
> it's a part of the Creation process, a result of the gift of freedom
> that God couldn't do without in order to create, rather than engineer.
> That's been debated here before I'll bet.
A "Darwinian" (as usual I would prefer to say "Darwin-Wallace") understanding
of evolution requires that there be "natural evil" - privation, suffering, death -
involved in the development of humanity but does not _require_ moral evil. It does
suggest that the first humans with such an evolutionary past would be highly prone to
selfish behavior which which be sin for them but not for their pre-human ancestors
(since the latter wouldn't have been moral agents). Thus in R. Niebuhr's phrase sin
would have been "inevitable but not necessary".
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/