Word: sinfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scientifically minded nitpickers have noted, there is a flaw here. The idea that Adam's choice of cuisine somehow affected biological inheritance involves the generally discredited Lamarckian notion that acquired traits get transmitted genetically. Still, a more generic version of Augustine's assertion--that sin results from biological drives passed through the human lineage ever since its origin--makes scientific sense...
...doctrine of original sin says that at birth we all inherit Adam's sinfulness. This is partly a claim about blame--it holds us accountable for Adam's sin even before we've done anything wrong--but it is also a claim about human nature; it says we are inclined to do wrong, that we have a hereditary dark side. As St. Augustine put it in the 5th century A.D.: After Adam sinned, our "soiled" and "corrupt" nature was "already present in the seed from which we were to spring...
...biological roots of sin are not by themselves a news flash from the frontiers of science. More than a century ago, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's popularizer, lamented the fact that evolution has given all children "the instinct of unlimited self-assertion"--"their dose of original sin." But the past few decades have brought a deeper Darwinian understanding of human nature, and some of its pioneers believe Huxley underestimated our badness...
Which brings us back to Eden. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge because they have pretensions of divinity. "Your eyes will be opened," the serpent promises, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Thus the original sin is often described as a kind of hubris--"the pride which sprang from [our] likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall...
Still, to prevail comprehensively--to frustrate all or even most of the subtle selfishness built into us--takes massive, ongoing effort and painful self-knowledge. The difficulty of the exercise lends a kind of credence to what some Christians see as the upshot of their doctrine of original sin: that people are born in need of a salvation gained through repentance. To put it in secular terms: so deeply hidden from natural introspection is our badness that moral reform requires a solid jolt of enlightenment, sharp and persistent awareness of our inherent baseness...