Dear Greg:
I am being thoroughly irresponsible by writing. I should be reading in preparation for a public lecture I
have to give in two weeks-but I won't be able to write again till tomorrow evening.
If the Ivy League paleontologist said that evolution is the fruit of "God's love," then I applaud you for
challenging him, and I wish I could have been there to challenge him alongside you, albeit from a different
perspective.
If you go back and read your description of the world (parasites, etc.), then you pretty much have
described my view, and you may be surprised to know that your view is (it seems to me) much closer to a
biblical "perspective" than the one apparently pronounced last week at the lecture you attended. (Pardon
me for a second as I turn on The Gray Race.... )
The traditional Christian view is that all the world-all of nature-is warped as a consequence of the
Fall, i.e., man's rebellion against God.
INQUIRY BOXWhen Christians refer to the Fall, they are usually referring to an event described early in the book of
Genesis: Adam and Eve lost their moral perfection as a result of their disobedience to God. They ate
from the one tree in the Garden of Eden that God commanded them not to. Paradise was lost.Some Christians interpret this story literally. Others say that the story of the Fall describes, in a
literary way that is still divinely inspired, a basic truth about human beings: You can put them in
paradise, give them everything they want, and they will wreck it.C. S. Lewis, a professor of English at Oxford and Cambridge, wrote that as a result of the Fall,
people have become "ill-adapted to the universe." Another scholar, David Lyle Jeffrey, suggests that
the story in Genesis points to the "fragmentation," "alienation" and "estrangement" that people often
feel. They feel this way because they are out of sync with the way things should be and the way God
wants things to be.Does it seem to you that people are "fallen"? Does life seem alien to people? If very few people
like being lonely, why is loneliness so common? Does it seem to you that people do things to
sabotage their own plans? Why would people do such things? Why do people want the world to be
better but do things to make it worse?I know you don't believe that, but at least that view takes the nature of the real world seriously.But the longer I live in American Christendom, where anxieties are medicated with TV, junk food and
political slogans, the more I realize that American Christians don't really want to take the idea of
fallenness seriously.
The view expressed last week in your lecture hall comes from a well-fed, upper-middle-class Western
Christian apparently cut off from the tradition he purports to stand in. I don't know him, and I can't