Ms. B and the First Cave Man Sinner

Here, dear reader, continues the conversation of Mr. A and Ms. B from "Ms. B hammers the fall of Adam":

Mr. A: Ms. B, your questions disturb me. It seems like whatever the fall is, it must be reconciled with the presence of a whole lot of prior suffering in the world. It seems like creation was groaning long before there was any Adam and Eve.

Ms. B: Suffering and groaning yes, and as the philosophers say, natural evil as well.

Mr. A: Natural evil?

Ms. B: Yes, suffering and evil that arises from natural processes rather than the intentions of any agent. For instance, if a person is swept away in a tsunami or a baby dinosaur is eaten by a T-Rex, that's a case of natural evil. This contrasts with moral evil, the kind of evil that arises from a willful choice on the part of an agent to do wrong.

Mr. A: So if I reject young earth creationism I guess I have to accept that when God created his world millions of years ago, it manifested a striking level of natural evil, even before human beings came on the scene.

Ms. B: It would seem that you have to argue that. In light of that point, how then do you understand the nature of the fall of Adam and Eve?

Mr. A: I'm not sure. How do you handle it Ms. B?

Ms. B: Well here's one possibility. We could say that human beings are the first species who act with a will in such a way that we commit morally evil actions. When a lion kills a gazelle, that event is a case of natural evil, for the lion is not acting as an intentional agent that desires to commit an evil act. But human beings are different. We are moral agents and thus we commit acts that can be moral or immoral.

Mr. A: Where does the fall come in?

Ms. B: How about this: at some point in evolutionary history, our pre-human ancestors were just on the threshold of evolving a moral nature. At that point their actions which caused suffering and evil were still instances of natural evil. For instance, some pre-human cave man, let's call him Grog, stole his neighbor Zorg's flint knife. This may be a natural evil, but if Grog still does not have a moral nature evolved, then his crime is only a natural evil.

But at some point one or more mutations occurred, bringing one individual over that threshold to the point where they became a moral agent. Maybe that individual was Grog Jr. Suddenly at this point the same actions of stealing Zorg's flint knife which was once only a natural evil has now become a moral evil. And for the first time, with Grog Jr.'s first action as a moral agent, sin has entered the world. With that, actions which had once been merely natural evils were now moral evils.

Mr. A: So you're saying that the story of the garden could represent the point in our evolutionary history when our ancestors moved from being agents of natural evil in the world to being agents of moral evil?

Ms. B: Obviously that wasn't the original human writer's understanding. But for those of us who understand the text to have been appropriated into a divinely authorized mode of authoritative, revelatory discourse (aka the Bible), that could be part of the "sensus plenior" or deeper meaning of that text.

Mr. A: Interesting. It seems like there still is an Adam of sorts on that view (aka Grog Jr.), though it is very different from the Adam I learned about in Sunday school.