The Empirical Case for Original Sin: Vice & Human Evolution
While not literally true, the doctrine of Original Sin points to an important, even if disturbing, truth about human nature
The doctrine of Original Sin might be the single greatest concept to have come out of Christianity. As an idea, it runs so counter to the vanity of our species that it’s surprising it ever took hold. Most people find it deeply troubling even now in our culture which has been steeped in Christian thought for more than a thousand years. In fact, quite a lot of people are anxious to leave it behind in the dustbin of history along with every other inconvenient concept inherent in the Christian tradition. According to Richard Dawkins, a vocal representative of this view, “the belief that everyone is born in sin, inherited from Adam, … is one of the very nastiest aspects of Christianity.” I think he’s very, very wrong about that. On the contrary, I think Original Sin is a brilliant idea no matter how disturbing we might find it. I think it points to a deep truth about human nature which we’d much rather ignore, but I think it’s absolutely central that we don’t.
Everything turns on whether one believes in Original Sin or not. T.S. Eliot, that great critic of modernity, held Original Sin to be the bedrock of all of his own personal, philosophical, and political beliefs: “What really matters is not what I think about the Church today, or about capitalism, or military processions, or about communism; what matters is whether I believe in Original Sin.” G.K. Chesterton was similarly adamant about the idea of Original Sin, calling it “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” I think he was right about that. “Modern masters of science,” he wrote in his book Orthodoxy, “are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes.” In what follows, I’ll try to make the case for that fact, and I’ll also offer a naturalistic explanation for its origin. Finally, I’ll discuss what its implications might be for how we should live our lives.
So what is Original Sin, exactly? As the evolutionary psychologist Bo Winegard puts it, it is the idea that we humans are inherently “flawed, fallible creatures”; that we are, as a Christian might put it, inherently prone to sin, to offend God, to do the wrong thing when we think we can get away with it. In short, Original Sin is the idea that people are bastards. And that includes you. Some might be better than others. Some might even approach sainthood in how squeaky clean their conduct is. But the impulse towards doing bad, towards breaking the rules and selfishly going against the common good, is an ineradicable part of the human psyche. It’s not a product of capitalism having corrupted us, or agriculture, or some third exonerating variable. It’s human nature, pure and simple. That’s the doctrine of Original Sin. The church father Augustine, who is often cited as providing the first explicit formulation of the doctrine, thought that we inherited this inherently sinful nature from Adam, the original man.
The story goes like this: Once, everything was perfect. The first human beings, Adam and Eve, lived in the Garden of Eden, where they had everything they needed and could do anything they wanted. Except, there was one single rule they couldn’t break. They weren’t allowed to eat the fruit of a specific tree. So guess what they did. That’s right: Egged on by Satan in the form of a serpent, they ate the fruit, thereby getting themselves and all of humanity expelled from perfect Paradise, condemning us to live out our mortal lives in this demonstrably imperfect realm in which we now find ourselves. This human origin story is illuminating, firstly, for suggesting that even under the perfect circumstances, in the ideal surroundings of the Garden of Eden, Man would still find a way of fucking everything up and making his situation decidedly imperfect; and, secondly, for establishing that our propensity towards doing bad is part and parcel of what it means to be human, a part of our universal human heritage.
None of this, of course, is to deny that we are also capable of doing good; for every cardinal sin, after all, there is a corresponding cardinal virtue. But the doctrine of Original Sin cautions us to be wary of our inner fiend, not to turn a blind eye to the lesser impulses that are natural to us. Nothing comes easier to us than blaming the outside world for all of our misdeeds, anything and anyone but ourselves. That’s what happens in Genesis when God confronts Adam and Eve: Adam puts the blame on Eve, and Eve puts the blame on the serpent, and the serpent slithers away. There will always be temptations, excuses, and bad incentives. The trick is to look within ourselves for the real root of sin. Once, a newspaper asked its readers, “What is Wrong with the World?”. Reputedly, Chesterton wrote a brief letter in response that said only this: “Dear Sirs. I am. Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton.” That is the true lesson of the doctrine of Original Sin.
The True Origin of Original Sin: Evolution by Natural Selection
Obviously, I don’t literally believe in the story of the Garden of Eden. I’m not entirely convinced that the original assemblers of the Bible believed in it literally either. After all, they included two directly contradictory versions of it immediately next to each other. I do, however, think that the story poetically points to an important truth about human nature, namely our inherent sinfulness. What, you might ask, are the sins towards which we are naturally inclined? Well, the Christian tradition conveniently provides us with a nifty list of seven biggies: gluttony, lust, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride. The first three of these are sins of desire: We want things like food, sex, and wealth in the form of status and goods, but this can lead us to overindulge ourselves, taking more than our fair share or seeking to procure them by dishonest means. Gluttony, lust, and greed are simply the unconstrained manifestation of natural desires that were essential in motivating our evolutionary ancestors to survive and reproduce.
The remaining sins are similarly natural products of human evolution. Sloth is simply a manifestation of the principle of least effort: We are wont the spend the least amount of energy we have to in order to get the things that we want, and this can lead us to fail to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives, to take our rightful place in the human enterprise as productive members of our community. Envy is a product of the fact that the process of natural selection is inherently competitive, with everyone pitted against each other in competition for a finite amount of resources and reproductive opportunities. In its simplest form, wrath (i.e., vengeful anger) is an adaptive emotional response that motivates us to take revenge for a perceived injustice or slight against our person, thereby making it less likely that someone tries to mess with us again in the future. But it can lead us to go egregiously overboard, as with cases of road rage wherein people get out of their cars and batter a stranger to death for cutting them off in traffic.
So far, so good. The six sins I have reviewed so far all pertain to behaviors that are common to most animals, and certainly all primates (Trust me, you don’t want to be in the same room as a wrathful chimp). But humans have a special sin all of our own, namely pride, which is traditionally held to be the original and most egregious, the source of all other sins. Pride is the well-documented human penchant for self-serving self-deception, our tendency towards stressing and overestimating our own strengths and virtues while turning a blind eye to our faults and foibles. Thus, it is what allows us to deny the fact of Original Sin as it pertains to ourselves. Evil is something other people do, something other people are. Our own moral flaws and failings can always be explained away, blamed on the situation or somebody else, anything but ourselves. It is in this sense that pride is the source of all other sins for humans: It allows us to deny our own sinful impulses to ourselves even as we act upon them.
The origin of pride lies in the social nature of our species. The first six sins could all be grouped under the rubric of “selfishness,” with sinners taking more than they need, giving less than they can, or acting out wildly antisocial impulses. But part of the evolutionary strategy of our species involves congregating and cooperating with other people as members of ultrasocial groups, which depend on social norms that prohibit such selfish behaviors. Up until about 12,000 years ago, these groups were mostly small egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, where everyone could easily keep an eye on each other. Does that mean that humans stopped being selfish when we became hunter-gatherers, that all those selfish impulses that we find among all other primates were eradicated from the human psyche? No, of course not. But it did mean that we became great at lying to ourselves and others about our selfish norm violations. That’s what pride is: The remarkably stubborn, self-serving illusion that we’re better people than we are.
The Evidence for Original Sin: Self-Deception and Norm Violations
Human self-deception is an entire field of study, but the upshot is this: We suffer from a deluge of delusions about ourselves, and as a rule, they are bent heavily in our favor. Whatever qualities are valued in their culture, people are almost always reliably convinced that they possess them in droves. This is especially true in the moral realm: When asked to rate themselves on various scales of prosociality, most people rate themselves as being well above average, which is, you know, mathematically impossible. This widespread sense of moral superiority is thought to be “a uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion.” In one illuminating study, psychologists found that this illusion was intact even among convicted felons. When asked, prisoners rated themselves as being above average on every pro-social scale from kindness to morality, with only one exception, namely law-abidingness. And even on that scale, these convicted lawbreakers would only concede that they were… about average.
That’s human pride in all its glory, our rampant inability to accurately assess ourselves, warts and all. Pride is our ability always to tell a story that redeems us, to justify to ourselves anything bad that we have done or want to do even as we are in the act of doing it. Virtually everyone feels justified in their actions, from convicted felons to pedophiles. It’s worth noting that even if you were literally Hitler, you’d probably think you were a good guy. The great evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has argued that our impressive capacity for such self-serving self-deception has evolved as a means of allowing us to deceive others without revealing ourselves to be liars through subtle signs of self-knowledge. As he puts it, “we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.” By always justifying our misbehavior to ourselves, we are better prepared to excuse it to others in case we are caught. Our blindness to our own badness is thus what makes us capable of misbehaving in the first place. Our natural pride allows us to sin.
All of this should make you suspicious that you’re probably not as good a person as you think you are. At least, the empirical evidence suggests that it is unlikely. As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson note in The Elephant in the Brain, we are often indignant about the norm violations that celebrities get away with, but we aren’t that much better ourselves. It’s just that without their money, power, and fame, the things we can get away with aren’t quite as wild. The evidence is clear: In psychological experiments, people cheat all the time for their own benefit when they think they aren’t being monitored. Sometimes, they even steal. Similarly, psychological studies suggest that we lie at some point in about 30% of the interactions we engage in. These aren’t the kind of altruistic lies that only Immanuel Kant would be against either. We primarily lie for our own personal gain, to satisfy our own sinful selfish desires, and we don’t even feel bad about it. There are norms against all of these things, but people do them anyway.
This predilection towards selfishly violating social norms when we can get away with it isn’t a new thing either. A cornerstone of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the social norm that requires hunters to indiscriminately share the meat they bring home from hunts, but the ethnographic literature makes evident that “hunter-gatherers share only what cannot be hidden.” As Cody Moser notes, “ethnographic reports have notoriously shown that hunter-gatherers hide meat acquired during hunting expeditions from each other in an attempt to not be obligatorily ‘shared out’ of the fruits of their labor.” The noble savage is a myth. Hunter-gatherers have a range of punishments at hand for keeping in line those who are continually found to violate the social norms of the group in selfish ways, including ridicule, ostracism, and even capital punishment. Obviously, they wouldn’t need any of these sanctions if selfish behavior was foreign to our species. But alas, it’s not. Rather, it comes naturally to us.
The Implications of Original Sin: The Need for Humility
In conclusion, you can forget about sin or selfishness having come about as a product of capitalism or agriculture or anything of the like. The doctrine of Original Sin is right: It’s human nature. We know that people are predisposed to act selfishly in ways that violate social norms because otherwise we wouldn’t need those social norms in the first place! There’s no social norm against reciting the alphabet backwards every time you meet a stranger (even though that would be very annoying) because no one is wont to do such a thing. The list of cardinal sins exists to stigmatize the behaviors it does precisely because people are apt to engage in them. It’s not that we’re irredeemably evil or selfish. We’re just worse than we’d like to think we are. Pride makes us largely incapable of seeing just how sinful we are. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once eloquently put the matter, “Original Sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.”
Accepting the doctrine of Original Sin has a number of implications. On a personal level, it ought to evoke some much-needed humility in us. Knowing that pride clouds our vision by presenting our selfish desires to us as justified courses of action, we ought to be more wary of our own impulses, even when they bear the feeling of virtue to us. We are not as good and pure as we’d like to think. We certainly aren’t as smart either. In fact, a great deal of research suggests that reason, one of the faculties in which we take the most pride, isn’t actually a tool for making inferences about the world and the right courses of action at all. Rather, it’s a social tool that has evolved to help us justify our preferred conclusions to others, most often the conclusion that self-interest compels us to believe in. Paradoxically, it may thus be when our position feels most justified to us, most virtuous and reasoned, that we should be most wary of our motives.
The doctrine of Original Sin also warrants humility in how we view the world around us, with its existing structures and institutions. In its most radical forms, the Enlightenment was founded on the denial of Original Sin. Rousseau and his heirs, including the architects of the French Revolution, insisted that human nature was inherently good or at least infinitely malleable. As such, they concluded that man’s current iniquities had to be the product of his given social and political circumstances. Further, they reasoned that Heaven could thus be instituted on Earth by tearing down all those existing institutions currently holding man back to instead erect new ones based entirely on Pure Reason™. Weirdly, that didn’t work out very well: The revolutionaries cut off the head of their monarch and abolished the Christian church, but the reign that they brought in was conspicuously closer to Hell than to Heaven in its blood-fueled tyranny and misery.
The doctrine of Original Sin rules out any such project that proposes to institute Heaven on Earth™. Instead, it shifts our priors in favor of the existing structures, institutions, and traditions that surround us. More often than not, they serve to reel in our flawed natures in ways that we are not capable of fully grasping with our limited capacity for reason. Mostly, they have not come about through any individual’s willful plan, emerging rather by necessity through a slow process of cultural evolution as solutions to the problems of human nature. The meme of Original Sin is an example of one such evolved solution, a doctrine that serves to orient us towards recognizing and reeling in our selfish impulses. The larger memeplex of which it is part, namely Christianity, is similarly one such solution. Granted, they aren’t perfect solutions to the problems of human nature, but we shouldn’t expect perfect solutions in this fallen world. As Kant once put it, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
This leaves us back where we started. The doctrine of Original Sin teaches us, as Chesterton put it, that we are the thing that is wrong with the world. Pride steers us towards blaming all of our problems on things outside of ourselves, on our given circumstances whatever they may be. The doctrine of Original Sin counsels us to be wary of this impulse. Pride is the source of sin, and so we ought to cultivate its opposite, namely humility — both in how we view ourselves and in how we approach the world. For one thing, we should strive to approach age-old institutions like Christianity with a degree of intellectual humility, respectfully assuming that they have stuck around for a reason and that they might have something to teach us. The doctrine of Original Sin is one of Christianity’s first and most transformative lessons, but it’s far from the only one. You don’t have to grant the divinity of Jesus or the miracle of the resurrection to partake in its wisdom. You only have to grant one single thing, and that’s the fact of sin.