On Rejecting Original Sin

My first impression of Christian Doctrine of Original Sin was pretty straight-forward: “How could a perfect being create beings which are capable of imperfection?”

Perfection begets perfection, I concluded.

If Adam and Eve were without flaw, they never would’ve eaten the forbidden fruit. How could you call someone a sinner for something they couldn’t help? Blaming them for their nature didn’t sit right with me.

Unfair. Incoherent. And yet… correct?

We seem to be born with desires toward love, perfection, and helpfulness. But that doesn’t fill us, we also have bents toward tribalism, selfishness, and rationalizing harm.

The idea of being inherently flawed matches what we find in reality.

The Myth of Fairness

We already accept unfairness as the baseline for conscious life.

With no cosmic referee some creatures are born with speed, others with size, camouflage, poison, or numbers. Some creatures only defense mechanism is to taste so badly that no other creature wants to eat it.

It’s a process of surviving long enough in a pit of ruthless competition of passing on genes to the next generation. Co-operation, kin selection, reciprocity, and domination are equally valid strategies in the blind eyes of natural selection.

This is our amoral inheritance. The factory default setting includes tribalism, status-seeking, and the impulse of exercising power over the weak.

Christians call this fallen nature. Scientists explain our adapting to an environment of scarcity, competition, and aggression with evolutionary psychology.

Christians may be wrong about the origins, but their description holds up far better than any secular blank-state optimism.

We Will Never be Perfect

Most of us, I suspect, wouldn’t characterize ourselves as “perfect”.

But, if everything is describable with physics, we are a small part of its perfect and flawless execution. There’s no room to conclude that we’re anything but perfect. As perfect as physics. The conclusion, though not consciously spoken, permeates the mind.

If one is a collection of atoms all moving along the path of least resistance, how can they truly be wrong? Without error, philosophy is impossible, and therefore disagreement becomes pathology. “I feel compassion, and your lack of it reveals your moral character”.

This isn’t an argument, it’s empathy signaling. Appealing to those who agree with you. This is why many secular spaces collapse into purity spirals and status contests instead of seeking truth. Harm reduction is used as a tactical weapon against anyone who isn’t as hip to what the speaker is sensing.

So, my initial objection is conceded. Lawful physics produces beings that fall reliably short of our higher, professed values. Being born bad, or sinful, is the human default. Bias, shortsightedness, selfishness – just a few of traits we all carry that clash with universal benevolence. We’re optimized for survival and reproduction in harsh conditions competing for scarcity.

It Ignores Our Wiring

Our brains are not blank slates designed for utopia. They are layered machines, evolving over millions of years, with each layer still actively being pulled by the ghosts (or memories) of our ancestors.

The “primate” part of our brain can recognize status, alliance, and reputation determine reproductive success. Hierarchy, authority, coalition politics, preference for one’s own troop is not an accident, it’s the software found on the hardware that’s survived. When we try to remove these boundaries with an artificial and universal kin-ship, or removing all hierarchy and competition, we’re fighting a refined circuitry evolved over tens of millions of years.

The “reptilian” brain handles territory, dominance displays, aggression and rapid threat response. Negotiation and fairness don’t enter the calculations in this part of the software. Survival, territory, and preventing subordination. Labelling these drives “arbitrary” or “social construction” ignores when and why they evolved. We don’t imagine reptiles making moral choices.

Even further back, we find fish and earlier vertebrates with nervous systems seemingly encoded with approach, avoid, compete for resource, and simple domination. Before that, the basic architecture of nervous systems evolved in animals that had to distinguish “self,” “kin,” and “threat” in a world of scarcity. The biochemical machinery of reward and motivation like dopamine pathways and stress hormones is far older than mammals. (Yes, the lobsters.)

There’s no hint of universal compassion anywhere in this chain.

What Follows for Atheists and Secularists

We need to be intellectually honest. Once we accept evolved human nature as our starting point, we can recognize a few things:

• Institutions that restrain our worse impulses are survival tech. Family, community norms, objective moral frameworks can be used, like any technology, by oppressive people for nefarious purposes. That doesn’t take away from the value and necessity of these ideas.
• Societies shaped by Christian ethics, with an emphasis on earned forgiveness paired with accountability, dignity of the weak, suspicion of unchecked power, have a track record of producing higher trust and lower cruelty than purely materialist alternatives.

As atheists or secularists uncomfortable with where pure “empathy + state” experiments are heading, especially on issues like the medicalization of children or the devaluing of inconvenient life, we have a practical choice.

We can pretend that we get to start with rationality, that it’s just a given and self-evident, and flatter ourselves that since we’re oh so rational that we can plan out how to invite lots of very different societies to the same place with everyone ignoring their wiring and get along.

Or we can go with what got us to the dance. Christian ethics, culturally transmitted even among the non-religious, offer a proven way to civilize our inherited flaws. Dickie Dawkins says he misses the Christmas carols. Me too, Richard.

The Fall may be myth. But we still fall far short of perfection. Evolution explains the mechanism. Wisdom and traditions teach us how to strive toward it.