Re: [asa] Saving Darwin -- On the "Fall"

At this point I hesitate to comment for fear of being lumped with "militant fudamentalists" but this shouldn't be allowed to pass. The problem with the passage quoted below is not any failure to take the Bible "literally" but just that the theological analysis is inadequate. Language like "God endowed the natural order with the freedom to 'become'" can be understood in an OK way but fails to say anything about how God is actually involved in the evolutionary process beyond that act of endowment. And to say that we are an "ultimately selfish species" comes close to a claim that it is part of proper human nature - to use substantialist language - for us to be selfish, i.e., sinful if sin is understand as a curvatus in se condition.

& again, sin is fundamentally a theological issue & a 1st Commandment one at that, as I discussed in an earlier post here. That is not to say that it has no empirical consequences but a serious theological discussion of it has to start with the idea that the root of sin is failure to trust and obey God.

I agree, OTOH that appeal to "some kind of federal representative view of 'Adam'" is futile - but that is so even before the issue of evolution comes up.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: ASA list ; karl.w.giberson@enc.edu
  Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 11:06 PM
  Subject: [asa] Saving Darwin -- On the "Fall"

  I got my copy of Karl Giberson's "Saving Darwin" today and read through the Introduction, in which Karl briefly discusses the problem of the "Fall." The book, BTW, is a delightful read, and its discussion of the contours of the problem are very valuable, even if one doesn't agree with every conclusion.

  As we've discussed a bit already, Karl finds unconvincing and contrived any effort to "save" the fall through some kind of federal representative view of "Adam". Here is what I think is the key passage of his positive statement of the fall, on page 13:

    If nature, in all its many processes, is 'free' to explore pathways of possibility, then the evolutionary process would predictably lead to creatures with pathological levels of selfishness. Creatures inattentive to their own needs would not have made it. By these lights, God did not 'build' sin into the natural order. Rather, God endowed the natural order with the freedom to 'become,' and the result was an interesting, morally complex, spiritually rich, but ultimately selfish species we call Homo sapiens. This is an entirely reasonable theologcal speculation, at least by my amateur standards. It brings the Christian doctrine of the fall into the larger picture of an extended creation. Humankind did not appear all at once, and neither did sin.

  Queries:

  1. Is this notion of the fall theologically adequate?

  2. Is this notion of the fall open theism or process thought?

  3. Does accepting biological evolution require the acceptance of open theism or process thought?

  A couple of tangential questions as well -- Karl if you're able I'd love to hear about these:

  1. In the Introduction, Karl describes how his undergraduate Bible / religion professors at a Christian college began to dissuade him about taking the Genesis accounts literally / historically. It appears from this description that only the fringe of fundamentalism still took those accounts literally. My experience has been different -- I've reached out to many Bible scholars and theologians from evangelical institutions that I would not consider fundamentalist, and none have been willing to commit to a non-historical Adam -- with the possible exception of Kent Sparks in his book "God's Word in Human Words," and there only indirectly. As I mentioned, even at my more "progressive" alma mater, Gordon College, it seems that none of the theology / Bible faculty are of this view. Are there people who are just afraid to "come out of the closet," so to speak? Or is it just that "evangelical" must equal "fundamentalist?"

  2. Karl also mentions some theologians who are accepting of evolution, including Alister McGrath, and he cites to McGrath's "Scientific Theology" trilogy. Does McGrath take on evolution head-on in that series, and in particular, does he address Adam and the fall? I know McGrath accepts evolution, but I've never been able to find any published reference of his either on exactly how this relates to this central point of tension.

  Also, I'm not so sure that McGrath's version of "critical realism" would be as accepting of the pragmatism of daily scientific practice as Karl is in Chapter 6. And I can testify for certain that the characterization of legal education versus practicing scientific education on page 158 is just wrong. All of the law professors I know -- and I'm one -- would scoff at the idea that "science is different from, say, law, where rules dominate and the prevailing philosophy is that following the rules leads to the truth." (Page 158). Actually, the prevailing philosophy of law is scientific pragmatism / realism, in which nobody really "knows" the law except through lived, experienced adjudicated disputes (or messy legislative or rule-making processes). But more on that another day.

  --
  David W. Opderbeck
  Associate Professor of Law
  Seton Hall University Law School
  Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology

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Received on Thu Jun 12 10:12:55 2008