FIRST REASON TO EMBRACE DARWIN
In this post we'll discuss the first of five reasons why Christians ought to love Darwin and the Big Bang Theory. In each case, the reason actually has something to do with the Christian Bible. Moreover, it helps reinforce things that Christians already believe.
The first reason is that Darwin actually seems to provide an explanation for the basic doctrine of Christianity. When introducing this idea, I always like to begin by asking Christians, what is the most basic doctrine of Christianity. You'd think I'd get the correct answer at least 80 to 90% of the time. In fact, I get a correct answer less than 10% of the time. What??? How can that be?
The answers I get tend to fall into one of two categories. In the first, people say that God created the heavens and the Earth. That's a reasonable answer, but there is nothing uniquely Christian about the answer. Most other religious traditions maintain that God, or some Godlike agent, created the world. So what beyond this is uniquely Christian?
In the second category, most of the answers are somehow related to Jesus and salvation. The responses tend to be perfectly reasonable, except they almost invariably beg the question, why was it necessary for Jesus to appear on Earth? In response to almost all of the answers I hear, I ask the follow up question, "Why?" Most of the time, but definitely not always, I finally get to the correct answer: the most basic doctrine of Christianity is that mankind is sinful. The story of the Garden of Eden recounts the "Fall of Mankind".
What exactly is supposed to have happened in the Garden of Eden? An original pair of humans, one named Adam and one named Eve, were instructed by God to do pretty much whatever they wanted, except they were not to eat the fruit of one particular tree. The Devil tries to deceive them by saying that God really didn't mean that they should not eat the forbidden fruit. Eve and Adam then eat the fruit, the thing they weren't supposed to do. God, as punishment, bans Adam and Eve from the Garden.
It would be one thing if the story ended there, but it doesn't. In fact, Christians believe that because of what Adam and Eve did, all human descendants bear the stain of their sin. In the most extreme cases, Christians believe that all humans born after Adam and Eve have inherited this stain, and are marked by it from the moment of birth.
It's the most fundamental Christian doctrine because the entire rest of the Bible actually deals with the problem of sin, as well as how to overcome it. Christians believe that humans themselves cannot overcome sin on their own. Instead, they can only overcome it by having faith in Jesus Christ, whose death atoned for it. It was a gift that was freely provided and could not be earned.
So what's the problem? The problem is that while this is the most fundamental doctrine of Christianity, Christians have never provided a truly satisfying explanation for what I'll call the "mechanism of transmission.": how did an act of two individuals, who lived who knows how long ago, cause everyone else to inherit the same propensity to sin? What is the nature and evidence of the mechanism? Traditionally, two different doctrines have been used to explain this – one called traducianism and the other creationism. Both describe some type of mystical, non-material means of transmission. In the highly rationalistic society in which we live, these explanations sound like so much hocus pocus.
This, I believe, is where Darwin comes in to play because evolution provides the missing "mechanism of transmission." To understand that, however, we need to take a side excursion and look at our nearest genetic relatives – chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and similar primates. We share about 97 or 98% of our DNA with them. The other 2 or 3% obviously makes a huge difference! In the next post we'll explore how we're related to these other primates, then use that as a jumping off point to look at the Garden of Eden.
