Evolution and the Fall

Last week was a weird week: through no effort of my own, I kept getting pulled into conversations regarding evolution and its relation to the Fall. A handful of the faculty are reading a book on the topic (which means lunch discussions are more contentious than normal); I was asked along with a couple others to lead a lunch discussion on the same topic for students; and my systematic theology class for seminarians focused on hamartiology this week—that is, the study of sin and the Fall. 

On account of these discussions, my mind has slowly been coalescing around a heuristic for understanding the subject. To my mind, there are a few relatively discrete ways for thinking about evolution and the Fall that manage a level of consistency without collapsing in on themselves. And I want to attempt here to articulate what I take those categories to be (as well as the tensions each of them highlights for evolution and the Fall).

The first possibility involves a literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, which necessarily leads to a rejection of macro-evolution altogether. In this way of thinking, the Earth was created in six 24-hour days, making it around 6,000 years old. It holds that, not long after creation, a man and a woman lived in a garden, spoke to a snake, and ate a forbidden fruit. I take this model to be relatively straightforward and familiar to most of us; it is in many ways the default, with many notable Christians subscribing to it, and seems to be assumed in much of the New Testament.

Problems with this position stem primarily from its relation to modern science. The vast majority of scientists, working within a variety of fields like biology, geology, zoology, astrophysics, and others, are of one mind that the Earth (or the universe as a whole) very much shows evidence of being substantially older than 6,000 years. The other major problem is regarding the growing consensus that the genre of the early chapters of Genesis is anything but historical—whether that be poetic, mythological, symbolic, typological, or something else entirely.

The second position is more open to evolution (likely by a more poetic reading of Genesis 1) but maintains that the Fall narrative tells us something of primordial history, even within a more mythological genre. So while it might allow for a literal Adam and Eve, what it is more concerned with is that something happened—an event took place, either in a moment or over millennia, in which the idyllic state of creation was lost and sin entered into the world. In technical terms, there is a prelapsarian phase and a postlapsarian phase to creation.

Depending on how one articulates this position, it may open itself up to the slippery issue of a historical first pair. Within an evolutionary schema, it is hard to delineate what would count as the first human, and even if one could distinguish a first, population models suggest that not all humans alive today would originate from this first human. Additionally, this position generally emphasizes the emergence of moral capacities in humanity by which sin enters the world. But this introduces an additional theological issue: it is hard to say that evil does not pre-exist a first moral agent in an evolutionary framework. The concept of natural evil becomes particularly problematic since part of the theory of evolution is the survival of the fittest, including animal predation and the reality of mutation (which allows for cancer). The entire goal of maintaining a prelapsarian state becomes difficult given the destructive tendencies of nature we are familiar with.

The third position reverses the first, accepting the theory of evolution and rejecting a historical Fall. This approach assumes that the first few chapters of Genesis are not meant to teach us anything about the history of the world, but rather about some sort of theological reality, about our human relation to sin and to God. Specifically, the Fall narrative in Genesis 3 is meant to portray the moral predicament of both the human race and of each individual human.

The most significant problem in this model, to my mind, is a disruption of a central tenet of the doctrine of creation: creatio ex nihilo, that God creates from nothing. This tenet means that there is nothing between the creative act of God and the original state of nature, that God creates the universe exactly how God wants to. The tension here should be evident: if there is no Fall event, this seems to make God the author of evil. Such an implication is unacceptable. (However, I want to note a comment from one of the discussions I was a part of that begins to address this concern: Whereas in some theological schools of thought, in which God does not know that humans will sin and is in some way caught off guard, many Christian thinkers might suggest that the capacity for sin and evil is inherent in creation. In other words, the contrast is not between an idyllic prelapsarian state and a fallen postlapsarian state, but between an idyllic heaven and a fallen creation. This is, in part, what’s behind the supralapsarian-infralapsarian debate.)

My intention here is to frame the discussion, to show coherent categories of thought along with the specific tensions they introduce. I, of course, have my own inclinations, but whatever those are, they come with their own issues. While I don’t think these answers are equally valid in the same way that different understandings of Christ’s natures or of the Atonement may be theologically acceptable, I also don’t imagine that a conclusive view on the relation between evolution and the Fall is within our grasp.