Today’s New Reason To Believe

Kenneth Richard Samples

Arguably the greatest of the church fathers, Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430) is widely considered one of the most influential theologians in Christian history. He is especially recognized as having a profound impact on how Christian orthodoxy defined and formulated essential Christian doctrine. Since the crucial doctrine of original sin has presently fallen somewhat out of favor (pardon the pun) in some quarters of the Christian church, I thought it would be instructive to briefly explore some of St. Augustine’s provocative thinking on Adam’s catastrophic fall into sin.

According to Augustine, Adam in his original state of creation was free, but he was nevertheless still dependent upon divine grace. Augustine saw human beings as utterly dependent upon God’s unmerited favor at every stage of their life and being. Though Adam was created immortal, he was not impervious to death, but he had the capacity for bodily immortality. In fact, Augustine thought that if Adam had remained obedient and not sinned, he would have been confirmed in divine holiness.

Augustine’s Three States of Adam

1. Adam’s original state is characterized by the Latin phrase posse non peccare et mori (“able not to sin and die”). That is, in Adam’s original state of righteousness, he had the capacity and was responsible to avoid sin and the subsequent spiritual and physical death that resulted from it.

2. Adam’s potential state is expressed in the Latin phrase non posse peccare et mori (“not able to sin and die”). That is, if Adam had remained obedient to God then God would have transformed him to where he would be forever confirmed in holiness and therefore apart from sin and the resulting death that necessarily follows it. However, one should not think that Augustine was in any way implying that God was taken by surprise when Adam sinned.

3. Adam’s actual state is reflected in the Latin phrase non posse non peccare et mori (“not able not to sin and die”). Because of Adam’s willful act of rebellion he has become enslaved by sin and cannot of his own will avoid its power and lethal consequence. Augustine viewed Adam’s fallen state as pitiful and damnable before God.

Augustine argued that all humanity was connected to Adam in an organic sense and that his sin nature (including both guilt and corruption) had been transmitted to his progeny. For Augustine, the whole human race was germinally present in Adam, and therefore actually sinned in him.

Augustine also argued eloquently that the only hope for fallen and enslaved humanity is the grace of God that comes in the life, death, and resurrection of the God-man Jesus Christ.

While many Protestant evangelical theologians view Adam as being the federal representative of humanity (Romans 5:12, 18-19), a sizable segment of evangelical theological thought nevertheless sees themselves as being Augustinian in their basic view of sin and in affirming the absolute necessity of grace in salvation.

The doctrine of original sin is a critical biblical teaching and Christians should reflect upon the great divine grace that rescues us from our enslavement to sin.

For more on an evangelical assessment of Augustine’s views concerning Adam’s fall, see Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1937), 131-39; Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 200-07; Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology (England: Blackwell, 1998), 79-85.

Hugh Ross, Ph.D.

One of the cornerstone doctrines of the Christian faith is that humans alone among all life-forms on Earth are created in the image of God. Part of this image entails that humans are spiritual beings uniquely endowed with the physical apparatus to engage in spiritual activity. According to the Bible, this image of God did not evolve within the human species. It appeared fully established and fully functional when God created the first human male and female.

Given how extensively and specifically the Bible describes humanity’s image of God (for example, Genesis 1:26-27; 9:6; James 3:9), it should not be difficult to develop scientific tests to confirm or refute the doctrine. However, little research effort has been devoted to putting the image of God to any kind of scientific test because much of the biological research community has been entrenched in Darwinism. That view holds that humans have evolved naturally from ape-like ancestors and that humanity’s mental capabilities differ from the animals’ only by degree and not by kind.

A team of European and American anthropologists unwittingly provided dramatic evidence for the Bible’s image of God doctrine. The evidence arose out of a comparative study they performed on the mental capabilities of adult orangutans and chimpanzees with human children aged just 2.5 years.¹ In selecting children aged 2.5 years the team eliminated any possible benefit from education or literacy from the human test subjects.

The researchers discovered that the human toddlers manifested no significant advantage over the adult apes in their ability to learn from their physical environment. However, their capacity to share and gain knowledge, understanding, and comprehension from their social interactions was far superior to anything manifested by either adult chimpanzees or adult orangutans. As the researchers put it, “Humans are not just social but ‘ultra-social.’”²

Without an extraordinary capability of interacting, communicating, and learning from social interactions no spiritual activity would be possible. The fact that even the most intelligent non-human animals lack the social interaction capability necessary to support spiritual activity while even toddler humans do provides evidence for the biblical doctrine that humans alone among all life on Earth are spiritual creatures.

The lead authors of the research team work for the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and in the title of their paper they state, “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition.” However, nowhere in their paper do they provide any evidence that present-day humans manifest a higher social interaction capability than do the earliest humans. Nor do they show that the hominids that preceded human beings (Homo sapiens sapiens) demonstrated a level of social interaction capability adequate to support spiritual activity.

In fact, archeological evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the first humans were just as capable of practicing spiritual activity as are humans today. Thus, the biblical doctrine that the first humans possessed a fully functional capacity to engage in spiritual activity has gained scientific support.

1. Esther Herrmann et al., “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis,” Science 317 (September 7, 2007): 1360-66.

2. Herrmann et al., 1360.

David H. Rogstad, Ph.D.

In 1980 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter Alvarez proposed a provocative theory. They suggested that the Earth had been struck by an asteroid in its past to explain the unusual amount of iridium in what is called the K-T extinction boundary of the Earth’s fossil record. Iridium is an element that occurs only at low levels on Earth, but is present at high levels in meteorites. The K-T boundary is dated at 65 million years ago and the suggested impact is believed to be the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Ten years after their proposal, evidence was discovered suggesting that a huge crater off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America was the place where this impact occurred. While their theory and the impact evidence are now well-accepted in the scientific community, until recently finding the source of such an impactor had not been as successful.

In a paper published in the September 6, 2007 issue of Nature, scientists have presented a remarkable study of a cluster of asteroid fragments referred to as the Baptistina asteroid family (BAF). The largest member, 298 Baptistina, was discovered in 1890. This new study concluded that the family formed approximately 160 million years ago when a collision occurred between a very large 110-mile-diameter asteroid and a smaller body in the inner region of the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

According to the numerical simulations done in the study, this breakup event, together with its location, age, and the size of the remaining fragments, provides a remarkably well-suited scenario for explaining a surge of near-earth objects about 100 million years ago. Fragments from this breakup were slowly delivered by the gravitational interactions of the rest of the solar system into orbits that eventually led to collisions with the inner planets. One such fragment accounts for the Earth being struck (with 90% probability) by a projectile 65 million years ago. In addition to hitting the Earth, the authors believe that the same process is responsible for the Tycho crater on the Moon.

What does this have to do with RTB’s creation model? Well, one key aspect of our model is that the Earth and the solar system are a few billion years old. Plus, the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago fits with the notion of a Creator who created life-forms, allowed many to go extinct, and then created new ones (Psalm 104:29-30). In this study, we find a compelling correspondence between events that occurred in the asteroid belt 160 million years ago and those that occurred here on Earth 65 million years ago. The more consistent evidence we find for various aspects of the Earth’s history, the more we can be convinced our model is correct.