Daily Archives: 19/07/2011

Mainstream Christian belief is that we live in a fallen world, in the sense that the natural creation is dysfunctional and responsible for “natural evil”. Some theistic evolutionists reject the fall as a factor (or reject the fall altogether!), but still see the creation as tainted by death and “sin”, the latter understood as meat eating, parasitism, animal suffering and so on. They sometimes invert the Biblical picture and say that this imperfect creation resulted in mankind’’s sin. I disagree. Either way, this dysfunction would be a pretty key factor in life, and so the corruption of nature ought to be a major theme in the Bible’’s teaching, right? In fact, it … Continue reading →

One of the virtually axiomatic doctrines of modern Christianity is the corruption and fall of the natural world along with man’s moral nature. Natural evil is accounted to be a result of sin, not only in the sense that men suffer and die from disease or disaster, but also in the sense that these exist in the natural world at all. In the controversy over origins, this is a stumbling block to Biblical literalists, one of whose arguments is that if mankind was born into a world already long-established in the business of death and decay, it is a denial of the original goodness of the creation from Genesis 1. … Continue reading →