How To Figure Original Sin Into A Non Literal Perspective Of Scripture

[Nihil Obstat]

So, as I thought to myself lately, I accidentaly 'tripped' my own thoughts.

We know through science that the earth is billions of years old. Very very very old. This is proven through the half lives of certain elements, like uranium-236 (I think) or carbon-14 in other cases.
This obviously means that Genesis is not, in the most strict literal sense, not true.
That's not to say that it doesn't contain great religious truth of course, but we can't read it as literally true.
The earth was not created over the course of the week, there was no "Adam and Eve" a week after the earth came to be.

This is all fine though, this isn't where my question lies. I'm perfectly able to see that Genesis includes much more important religious truths within it, like the concept of a loving Creator God, and man and woman completing each other... the list goes on.

The only spot I ran into trouble was this:

Considering that we accept Genesis as *religiously* but not *scientifically* true, we would of course think that there was no *literal* Garden of Eden. Therefore no Adam and Eve literally sinned against God and were sent from the garden.
Ergo, the doctrine of Original Sin cannot be explained through a literal story.
So how do I explain to myself how Original Sin came into the world, considering a literal reading of Scripture is impossible?




*As a side question*
I read a book where a priest mentioned that contextual criticism and non-literal interpretation of the Bible *was not* an 'article of faith'. He said that one can be a perfectly good Catholic and still believe in a six thousand year old world, with Adam and Eve literally as the first people, present after the first week after the world was made. I made reference to this doing some religion homework and was marked wrong. That's fine, it seemed a bit strange to me anyway...
...but who was correct? Is this an 'article of faith', or no?

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' post='1594691' date='Jul 7 2008, 11:37 PM']So, as I thought to myself lately, I accidentaly 'tripped' my own thoughts.

We know through science that the earth is billions of years old. Very very very old. This is proven through the half lives of certain elements, like uranium-236 (I think) or carbon-14 in other cases.
This obviously means that Genesis is not, in the most strict literal sense, not true.
That's not to say that it doesn't contain great religious truth of course, but we can't read it as literally true.
The earth was not created over the course of the week, there was no "Adam and Eve" a week after the earth came to be.

This is all fine though, this isn't where my question lies. I'm perfectly able to see that Genesis includes much more important religious truths within it, like the concept of a loving Creator God, and man and woman completing each other... the list goes on.

The only spot I ran into trouble was this:

Considering that we accept Genesis as *religiously* but not *scientifically* true, we would of course think that there was no *literal* Garden of Eden. Therefore no Adam and Eve literally sinned against God and were sent from the garden.
Ergo, the doctrine of Original Sin cannot be explained through a literal story.
So how do I explain to myself how Original Sin came into the world, considering a literal reading of Scripture is impossible?
*As a side question*
I read a book where a priest mentioned that contextual criticism and non-literal interpretation of the Bible *was not* an 'article of faith'. He said that one can be a perfectly good Catholic and still believe in a six thousand year old world, with Adam and Eve literally as the first people, present after the first week after the world was made. I made reference to this doing some religion homework and was marked wrong. That's fine, it seemed a bit strange to me anyway...
...but who was correct? Is this an 'article of faith', or no?[/quote]

First, a note on what "literal" means when it comes to Biblical interpretation. The literal sense does not mean that what is described "literally" happened as described. The literal sense means "what message did the author mean to convey on the surface." With regard to the Creation Story, we believe it is literal because we believe that the author meant to tell a story (fictional or non-fictional on the surface) to convey certain truths about God, creation, human nature, etc. The literal sense is what the story actually says, but the fact that we call it the literal sense doesn't mean it's not a fable (as it is, the Church doesn't teach one way or another on whether the Creation Story on its surface is fictional). To be clear, there are certain elements we must believe, such as that there are two original persons (our first parents) from whom the human race descended, that these two persons sinned, and that the effect of that sin is passed on to us. Pope Pius XII's Encyclical Humani Generis might help explain.

For a clearer example, look at the Book of Tobit. Hardly anyone would say that the Book of Tobit is not a fable (though I would say it could very well have been inspired by real events). The Book of Tobit is, nonetheless, literal, in that it is meant through a literary form to convey some deeper revealed truth. The literal sense includes the fact that it is a fable; it doesn't try to cover over that fact. The literal sense, in a nutshell, is what the text actually says, whether or not that text is meant to be fiction or non-fiction. From what the text actually says (i.e. from the literal sense) we derive the spiritual senses of the Scripture.

Anyway, you may already know this, but I wanted to make that clear for anyone else reading this post.

The Creation Story still has a literal sense, and that literal sense (what the text actually says) allows us to see into the spiritual meaning behind it. The author of Genesis (I'm of the school that believes it was Moses who started the oral tradition) intended to indicate how God made us and how we fell, but didn't want to explain "dry, boring theology" to the Hebrews, so he developed a story involving some factual details (our two first parents, disobedience, the devil) and made it more interesting like a fable, so as to ensure that it would be passed on more readily from one generation to the next. The fact that we don't have to believe in a 6-day creation doesn't mean that we can't believe in the spiritual meaning behind the 6-days (for instance, look at the structure...how does the first day relate to the fourth, the second to the fifth, and the third to the sixth?). In this case, it's likely that that is more than anything what the author intended for us to get out of the passage. So the actual text doesn't necessary have to be entirely historical or scientific to be "literal," but it can still help us understand the truth it's intended to convey.

Original sin can be understood from the passage like this: God made us good and gave us a choice to follow Him or not to follow Him. Our first parents chose not to follow Him and fell into a state outside of God original intention (Eden) for man. That's the basic story in a nutshell and it helps to start with the basic things we can interpret from the passage so that we can go onto more developed ideas. For instance, starting there, we can begin to see that temptation was involved in the fall. We can also see that our having chosen sin had an ironic effect on our fall (demonstrated in the literal sense by our having eaten fruit and thus having damaged our ability to bring forth fruit, either from the earth or from the loins). A person could then go on to say that the last thing I mentioned demonstrates that original sin is a logical consequence of our sins because when we cut ourselves off from God by choosing fruit in the wrong way, it only makes sense that we cannot get fruit the right way anymore because we are cut off from the grace that allows us to bring forth fruit as God intended. All this can be derived from the literal sense of the passage without sacrificing scientific reasoning (which is why faith and reason are NOT at odds); in my interpretation above, I never said that there was a actual 6-day creation, nor that the actual names of our first parents were "Adam" and "Eve", but I still used the literal sense, what the text actually says, to get at the real meaning of the passage (and I didn't even scratch the surface).

As to your side question, the Church's theology on Scriptural interpretation has developed over the years. In the last hundred years especially, the Church has developed the teaching (without contradicting previous teaching) to state that we need not believe that *certain* aspects of the literal sense are historically or scientifically true. With regard to the creation story, there is no official teaching on how to interpret the apparent scientific claims, but my understanding is that Pope Benedict XVI does not believe in 6-day creation and actually favors a modified theory of evolution.

I hope this helps.

God bless,

Micah