The Wind in His Fists

Sin.  That’s the problem with theistic evolution and progressive creationism.  For simplicity, let’s focus on sexual lust.  Sexual lust, defined in the Ten Commandments as coveting your neighbors wife, is clearly a “natural” phenomena.  Just look at the rut of the whitetail deer, some bucks don’t even take time to eat when the does are in heat!  They battle other males and chase does in a frenzy of lust.  Of course, this scenario is repeated throughout the animal kingdom.  Interestingly, the Bible also refers to sin as “natural”:

But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and so lie against the truth.  This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic (James 3:14-15, NAS).

I am aware that there are ways that this can be reconciled with old earth creationism or theistic evolution.  Perhaps the story of Adam and Eve refers to the time when god made man aware of himself and his will, and that is when lust became sin.  

If lust occured before the fall, even in pre-humans, then we lust, not because of the fall, but because of our physiology, and because of millions of years of evolutionary genetic conditioning.  We sin, not because of the fall, but because it has been part of us forever.   We sin, not because we have inherited a “sin” nature, but because we were made that way.  Sin entering the world then refers only to the commandment entering the world.  This hardly seems the Biblical picture.   Did God come to man and proclaim that what he had always done ammorally was now to be considered immoral?  Did God come to already lustful creatures, so conditioned by millions of years of habit, and condemn them because they could not overcome the conditioning, conditioning that he oversaw?  Or did he suddenly reveal to man the immorality of their nature, and proclaim that if he could not overcome it, he would be condemned? 

This is the quagmire into which we plunge with theistic evolution and progressive creationsim.  Only young earth creationism, Biblical literalism, can save us from this fate.  God made Adam innocent, with the true ability to choose, without lust, and yet he turned to it.  And lust, which had theretofore existed only in satan and the demons, entered the world, and spread to the animals.