Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An "Aesthetic Supralapsarianism" (Report‪)‬

Evolutionary Science and Protestant Hermeneutics In the last century, theologians of major Christian denominations (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and mainline Protestantism) have managed (not without effort) to find ways of formulating Christian theology to make it compatible with the theories of modern evolutionary science. (1) However, scholars in conservative Protestant (evangelical and otherwise classical confessional) churches (especially in the United States) are still unsure how they could affirm the Grand Evolutionary Hypothesis (as Alvin Plantinga has named it) without compromising the biblical and confessional core of their distinct traditions. (2) In this article, I choose to focus on the most fundamental source of difficulty, namely, that evolutionary science seems to be in conflict with the doctrines comprised by classical Protestant teaching on the historical Fall. These doctrines are firmly embedded in major denominational confessions, and they are master threads in the logical fabric of Protestant theology as a whole. So it is difficult for faithful conservative Protestants to see how to change them very much at all, much less how to reformulate them in ways that would resolve conflicts with science.