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Original Selfishness: Original Sin And Evil in the Light of Evolution (Ashgate Science and Religion)

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Daryl Domning has written one of the most important books I have ever read! Having wrestled for 30 years with all the religious questions raised by the Creation/Evolution debate, I can honestly say that this book has finally brought resolution. I now understand why our Universe has to be autonomous. Domning shows why and how natural selection, chance, mutations, God's selfless love, our free will, "physical" and moral evil, selfishness, and salvation are inextricably linked. I have not read a book that has given me more ah-ha moments...ever! I was thrilled and exhilarated at the strength of the intellectual arguments that allowed my emotions to follow unreservedly.
Having grown up in a young-Earth creationist family, I have known the intellectual and emotional struggles that exist when a believing Christian who also loves to explore God's Creation is faced with this (and as I now understand artificial) dilemma. Domning's contribution is no less than epic.

Stephen J. Godfrey
Curator of Paleontology
Calvert Marine Museum
Solomons, Maryland

This book, in so far as I have understood it, sets out mainly to reconcile the Christian doctrine of original sin with the science of evolution. Its two authors situate themselves in the Christian tradition. Daryl Domning is a paleobiologist and an anatomist and the late Monika Hellwig was a theologian. The book is dedicated to the memory of the Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom the authors regard as a pioneer in evolutionary theology.

Professor Domning takes issue with the traditional Christian outlook which regards the human propensity to moral malfeasance (or sin) as the consequence of a first or original sin committed by Adam and Eve, the first two human beings on our planet.

As Domning sees it, the human inclination to act immorally arises from an original selfishness, an innate inclination to benefit oneself no matter what the cost to others. This original selfishness, he tells us, has been legated down to us humans as an inheritance from our biological ancestors who have preceded us, on the planet, through a duration of roughly four billion years.

With the appearance of humankind, though, something new emerged upon the evolutionary scene: conscience. It is conscience that urges us to move away from such selfish ways as those involving violence, greed and deceptive manipulation, and to move toward such altruistic ways as peaceableness, contentment with sufficiency and honesty.

Original selfishness, Dr. Domning seems to be saying, was once functional in that it helped biological evolution survive until it reached the level of thinking life endowed with conscience, but is now dysfunctional in that it leads to such evils as military conflict, extreme poverty and toxic environmental conditions. One of the evolutionary tasks of humankind, at present, is, as it were, to convert evolution (in so far as this is possible) from its erstwhile selfish orientation to a new altruistic orientation.

To be sure, the book deals with several other themes related to the topic of original sin and, in my opinion, does so in a thought provoking way. Thus monogenism (the view that all of humankind has descended from a single first couple) is rejected. Also there is discussion of suffering and death, of the role of Christ as regards human salvation, and of the relationship of God to the evolving universe. And so on and so forth.

We may, or may not, agree with each and every proposal made by Domning and Hellwig. In my view, however, the issues which they deal with merit our serious consideration and their findings and reflections can prove helpful to us as we endeavour to make sense of various issues surrounding the traditional doctrine of original sin. From my perspective, these authors do shed light on what for some is an obscure doctrine.

Brian Cowan,
Ottawa, Canada.

Original Sin and Selfishness is a brilliant exposition of evil, both ontic (physical) and moral, in light of Darwin's theory of evolution. Based upon the dynamic view of cosmogenesis rather than the traditional static one of cosmos, Daryl Domning offers the fascinating thesis that amoral evil in the form of selfishness is essential to the creation of a non-preprogramed creation through evolution until the dawn of self-consciousness that accompanied the appearance of humanity; with self-consciousness and conscience selfishness is revealed as morally evil. He demonstrates that the real significance of the Christian term "original sin" is not to be sought in a historical past event but in the challenge of today. Salvation history that burgeons into the Christ event is the only way for humanity to find release from the selfishness of which it is a natural product through the natural selection process of evolution. Baptism represents a radical conversion as it redefines what is good in the divine image of selfless love.

Two minor deficiencies of the work are the identification of the book's audience and an overstatement of his arguments for theodicy. The text spends quite a bit of time demonstrating the impossibility of the existence of two individuals named Adam and Eve; scholars who read this work already accept this reality. Considering the unfortunate inordinate price of the text, few casual readers will purchase it. Secondly Domning argues that Darwinian evolution is not only the way God creates, which is a fascinating proposition, but the only way God could have created. That God does create through evolution seems absolutely plausible; that God could not find another way of creating seems unnecessarily to limit the divine imagination to human epistemology.

Domning's work is an important contribution to the theology of creation and salvation based upon clearly expounded data from the natural sciences.

Associate Professor of Theology
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY

With the recent opening of a so-called creationist museum in Kentucky which displays dinosaurs in Noah's Ark and the Grand CAnyon created in the forty days of that mythological rainfall drawn from Babylonian legends, with twenty percent of present GOP presidential candidates publicly declaring they do not believe in evolution yet supporting billions for furthering genocide for resources no matter who gets hurt in Iraq or the Afghan or Colombia, this book is necessary for today's believer who remembers the central commandment in both the old and the new testament is to love and to do good to others, not to kill them while claiming belief in archaic and irrelevant oddities which do nothing to help you love thy enemy and to live the central message and meaning of Christianity.

The late, great Professor Monica Hellwig is well known and respected as a Catholic theologian, a prolific, popular and authoritative writer of Christian dogma and beliefs. Her welcome presence here guarantees both clarity and orthodoxy, both reason and Faith. All of her many writings are rich and nourishing spiritual food, and this one no less. Especially recommendable are her Guests of God: Stewards of Divine Creation, and Understanding Catholicism, etc., all available here on the amazon.

But greatest of all is this late work in which she finds acceptance of the latest scientific discoveries compatible with our faith in Jesus Christ, in which she discovers the hypocrisy of those who claim to believe literally in certain poetical sections of the Bible whose reality has now been further revealed (and is not the evolutionary process as great a miracle as any?), and yet who, hiding behind this political shibboleth of a false view of creationism blithely send thousands to their horrible deaths and damage in distant unholy war.

See especialy the final chapters of Prof. Hellwig's Eucharist and the Hunger of the World: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded for greater explication of this modern pharisaical heresy. There is greater contradiction with our Faith by those who send us to war to kill families overseas than by those who discover the wondrous evolutionary links and record and proofs. Our Faith is not shaken by seeing the reality of God's Creation around us, and realizing its great present fragility as a result of our selfish and short sighted and sinful acts.

God's greatest commandments as declared in the New Testament are to Love God and our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus expands us to love our enemies. Nowhere does it read that we believers must blind and lobotomize ourselves purposefully to the clear evidence before our eyes in order to believe in the details of a certain translation of a tale of a seven day creation, measured by our present solar days and beginning from a time when there was by its account no sun. God rather commands us to act in love for the good of all people and creation, with compassion. Thou shalt not kill takes precedence over the modern definition of creationism, and by this shall we be judged.