Dr. Loren Haarsma, professor of physics and astronomy at Calvin University, joins the show to talk about his recent book, When Did Sin Begin? Human Evolution and the Doctrine of Original Sin. TRANSCRIPT 0:01 Hey everyone. Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host Mark Moore 0:04 and your co host Rex gurney. 0:05 And Rex on the show. Today, we pulled out the big guns we got Dr. Loren Haarsma. Here is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin University. And his recent book is when did send begin human evolution in the doctrine of original sin. 0:20 And this is not an esoteric discussion, it is something that I actually am very interested in personally, and I found his book very helpful. And so I'm, I'm really looking forward to our conversation with Lauren. 0:32 It's an issue that is important for our students. It's an issue that's important for the church. We hope you enjoy. 0:45 Lauren, thank you so much for joining us on the show to talk about your new book. And we think it's such an important topic. And it's something that hits close to home to our students here at Jessup, and we talk about it every semester. So just thank you so much for joining. And I 0:59 think actually, uh, Mark and I were mentioning that both of us have already used your book, or at least read a couple things from it in our in our classes. So I'm really helpful. 1:09 Oh, well, thank you very much. And thank you for this invitation. I'm happy to be here. 1:13 Wonderful. Well, as we get going and looking at at the book, when did send began, it'd be great for our listeners, if you could just set up the the basic problem here this this tension between the doctrine of original sin and human evolution. 1:29 So there's sort of a core doctrine of original sin, which most of the churches had for most the time and, and sin Augustine, in particular, was really trying to preserve certain core teachings, that God is good and just and holy, that human sin is rebellion against God's will. And that no one can be righteous apart from Christ redeeming work. And I think all that still stands. We're gonna continue to hold all that. Now, Augustine was facing also a number of other questions that were important at that time, like, what is how does God create new each new human soul and his guilt from passed from one generation to the next or not? So Augustine came up with a theory, a way of putting it all together, which worked for him. And for Augustine. He included the assumption that Genesis chapters two and three, were referring to Adam and Eve as literal historical persons only to individuals who lived a few 1000 years ago, from whom we all descend it well, that assumption doesn't fit with what we've learned about human history in the last few centuries. So we want to preserve that core doctrine that theologians have agreed about throughout the centuries now, throughout the centuries, theologians have actually discussed and debated some of those other peripheral issues. There has been disagreement. A few centuries after Augustine, Aquinas came up with another version, which agreed with, uh, with Augustine on many points, disagreed on some other points. And all of this theological history is a really nice treasure trove to sort of use to read from to learn, and and to think about to say, okay, what are we going to do now, to preserve the core doctrine of original sin? It looks like humans didn't all descend from a single pair just a few 1000 years ago. 3:35 Right? I often will will kind of couch it like this. When I talk about the science and faith issues in my Christian perspective class, it's like, there's no like silver bullet here. It's like, if you're a young earth creationist, you sort of have a Genesis one problem. But if you're a theistic evolutionist you sort of have a Genesis two and three problem. So, you know, we can't like stop thinking about these things and the implications of of the