Is there any great consensus among christians who believe in evolution as to how the concept of original sin fits with it?

A (very) quick google search brings up the possibility of various theories but I'd be interested in hearing the views of christians on here.

Atheist heathen are also welcome to chip in

Though I don't think human evolution has been established, if it is, one possibility is similar to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Substitute God for the obelisk and you have Adam and Eve - the rest of the evangelical doctrine of original sin follows.

My understanding from 13 years of Catholic schooling (the best training for atheism I could ask for) is that:

1. Evolution is the best scientific understanding of human biological development.
2. Evolution complies with natural law with God as the author of natural law.
3. Original sin as described in Genesis is largely allegorical, but still refers to a real and lasting state caused by human nature.
4. There was no literal "Fall" because there was no literal Eden, but it is in the nature of humans to rebel and to sin, and thus they require spiritual guidance (the Church) and redemption (the sacraments) to enter into a genuine relationship with God and thus receive eternal salvation.

Basically, it's a lot of mental gymnastics to keep the Vatican coffers full.

Out of curiosity, how much of the Vatican's net worth is dependent upon their theology of evolution and original sin?

Original sin is Catholic dogma. It is discussed nowhere in the Bible.
So it's not really fair to ask all other Christians about it.

There are many conceptions of original sin in christianity outside of just catholism...

Um, no it is not. It is basic Christian theology, Catholic and Protestant alike.

Calvinists call it total depravity (the T in TULIP).

Edit: The only one of the 5 points I fully agree with - I think most Arminians do.

Evolution aside, the notion of original sin has certainly been profitable for the Catholic church. It is a doctrine, after all, that makes the believer dependent on the church for his/her salvation.

The real lucky streak was of course that this was a doctrine that came into play a fair bit after the church had attained a position as authority on such matters. A good analogy can be a state arising around the business you are invested in.

That being said, many churches which does not state such dependency as doctrine are also very profitable, and it would also seem that they are better at recruiting outside procreation. But then again: That a shop does not sell soap, does not mean that soap is not profitable to sell.

Well, there are critical differences between the Calvinist and Arminian view of total depravity. The Calvinist believes that man's will was so damaged by the fall of Adam, that he is unable to choose God, and it takes a sovereign work of God in his heart to become regenerated. The Arminian believes that there is some nebulous thing out there called "prevenient grace" that gives every man the ability to choose God. So, if you are an Arminian, by definition, you do not believe in the Calvinist view of total depravity.

With the exception of the sale of indulgences (a practice that I don't believe has been practiced for over 500 years and probably did more to pad the pockets of the priests than the Vatican, and isn't even truly dependent upon a theology of original sin -- I'm just cutting out this potential side-track), how much of the Vatican's net worth is dependent upon their theology of original sin? In general, how do you determine whether a particular doctrine is profitable or not?

Your analogy is weird. Until you declare some sort of way of measuring the profitability of different products, it's impossible to know whether soap is profitable. The mere fact that you sell soap does not in any way make it a profitable item to stock.

I was not talking about indulgence, I was referring to baptism and the requirement to be in the church to obtain salvation.

I have no idea, and I don't think it is very important. It is abit like asking how much of a restaurant's net worth is up to location; the answer depends on your perspective. If "the moon" is on the alternatives list the answer is "all of it", but if it is about blocks...

I use analogies to be illustrative, not definite.

Okay. I was curious because you said:

You have a degree of certitude in your initial assessment that is lacking in your follow-up.

Incidentally (and I think you know this), none of these require a subscription fee.

Then you have my apologies. When you asked "how much of the net worth" I thought you were asking for specifics. What I meant to convey was that I think a specific number is not relevant nor necessary.

The point at hand being...

...not the cost of salvation, but that it is profitable to monopolize it.

I still struggle to make sense of either analogy. Locations can have a negative impact, so simply having a location doesn't imply profitability, either.

It's probably good you're not trying to run a retail business, because your various attempts at business analogies thus far are just awful.

Having reduced your position to nothing but an empty assertion with no substantive observation to back it up, I think there's nothing more to say. Simply having a monopoly does not make something profitable.

Well, it's good to have you back on form.

Not having a specific number does not make this assertion empty. Besides, your question was merely a rhetorical device and a transparent one at that.

The Catholic Church is big, powerful and rich organization. I attribute a great deal of that wealth and power to the combination of these two ideas:
a) Everyone needs salvation or they are damned
b) For those who know of it, salvation is only available in the Church

Obviously nobody is going to be able to quantify this, but it seems pretty clear that characteristics which increase the centralized dependency upon the church are going to be good for their business model. Something like evolution seems relatively unimportant and probably plays a small role in making catholism more popular (clearly benefitial for the church) because it is perceived as being less out of date. But the need for salvation through the church? That is very core.

Perhaps a better analogy for this is Apple. Asking how much iOS contributes to their net worth is hardly quantifiable. But it is also clearly very important much like various of the core ideas in Catholicism. For more minor things like evolution, consider something like Apple's attempts to enforce good business standards in China and the like. How much does this contribute? Again, not quantifiable, but one can imagine it contributes some amount of positive good will that makes Apple some amount more profitable (and subtracts various costs related to the enforcement).

Having no specific number and no real way to quantify it does.

So was the original assertion.

I'm actually surprised that you think this. I think the church is a big, powerful, and rich organization because of its expansive history of governmental involvement. [Edit: I think it barely matters at all what theology they hold.]

There are many direct ways to quantify it. Consider any particular device that uses iOS. Some amount of the cost went into the parts and labor (and other overhead) for the physical pieces of the device, and then there's the installed software. The value of the OS is the sale price minus the cost of all these other pieces. There are more and more technical ways to compute the value, and each way will get you a different result, but there's actually *A* way to compute it.

Again, this is readily quantifiable (and I'm pretty sure that this is a calculation that someone in Apple has done). Market surveys can be used to estimate the amount of value of various initiatives by determining a net increase/decrease in the number of users based on various assumptions.

[Edit: Do you believe that Apple's attempts to enforce good business practices are entirely magnanimous?]

The real problem is trying to treat theological positions as analogous to a goods and processes in a retail business model. It's really just a bad analogy.

Consider it a compliment that I'm going to give you an extra post to find the obvious flaw in what you just said yourself.

Presumably you can quantify these assertion of the relative importance of these factors? Remember, having no specific number and no real way to quantify it makes it an empty assertion.

The point here seems pretty obvious: it is more than possible to talk about important factors that contribute without having a precise way to quantify it. We can talk about factors that lead to the success of the catholic church, or factors that lead to the success of apple products, without having to explicitly say that such and such a factor contributes $x dollars of revenue or x number of people as new measures or other precise quantitative factors.

I'd suspect almost certainly not. Sure, there are genuinely good people trying to do the right thing in corporations, but there is also a very clear incentive to be perceived as doing the right thing, and I think it would be naive to presume it is 100% the former and 0% the later that influence corporations.

There are actually lots of flaws, which one did you want to address? Pre-installed OS at the factory vs. after market installation (though I don't know whether Apple does a lot of that); gains due to developers building for a specific platform and other proprietary agreements; I didn't include developer's fees...

The point is that models can be made to assign value to the OS. And I would not be surprised if someone out there has already done an analysis of this type. This one is "close":

http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/30/how...50-every-year/

It would be quantifiable by simply knowing how much financial resources were given through the church by various governments in history. When Constantine officially recognized Christianity, he injected a lot of financial resources into its success. Later in history, Christianity spread through the financial investment of various countries. At least theoretically, there's a paper trail that we can use to track actual dollars (or equivalent value in different currencies) at different points in history. This type of investment can be tracked directly, but finances via theological positions cannot be tracked.

Edit: I strongly suspect that if you were to track the money, you would find that individual donations (donations to the church not through official relationships with governments, corporations, or other entities) constitute a very small percent of the church's overall value. You might even find in the 20th century that the church made more money selling tours and trinkets than it took in from individual donations.

But you have to have a reasonable way to measure it if you're going to meaningfully talk about what factors lead to the success or failure of products. Even if those numbers are loose, they need to be there if the analysis is going to be meaningful.

But let's go back to the original claim:

Do you agree that this analysis is correct? That the particular "mental gymnastics" laid out in that post really has some meaningful connection to the net worth of the Vatican? That if there were no argument that was put forth to defend the theological position of original sin [edit: as it pertains to evolution] that somehow the Vatican would take a meaningful financial hit?

It was just a silly off-handed comment that I replied to in a silly off-handed way to point out the silliness of it. We can continue with the meta-argument about assigning value to theological position, but I want to stop to see whether the original statement is something you wanted to try to defend or if it's a matter of defending the idea that theological positions can be assigned a value.

You just assigned 100% of the profit to the operating system (and oddly forgot to consider the costs of making the operating system). Why not assign 100% of the profit to the hardware, where the value of the hardware was sale price minus costs to make software and everything else? Or any other arbitrary combination. See the error? Apple devices are appealing for a range of reasons, and they combine to some amount of profit but it is hard to say how much the value of any individual piece really is of that collective package. And your particular way of assigning it is obviously horrible.

Nope, not remotely close. That is a measure of the value of an iOS user. It's saying how much does apple make per iphone/ipad buyer per year. It doesn't explain how much of the value comes from the hardware, the operating system, the services, the brand, etc.


"Assigned a value"? Probably not, I doubt it quantifiable. But I think the theological positions are important in the following sense: they influence people's behaviour, and that behaviour can mean more or less money for the church. Those positions make people more or less willing to support it, to spread it, to donate to it, to come together into a centralized system, etc etc etc.

For instance, in islam zakat is a central theological doctrine that instructs muslims to donate and that theological position results in muslims donating more money than other religions in western countries (large portions of which are donated to islamic institutions). In our case, contrasting protestants and catholics, the former has much less emphasis on the kinds of centralization that the catholic church does including doctrines in salvation through church procedures. That influences behaviour.

Why do you think the catholic church does modernize positions from time to time? Do you not think there is any part about making catholism more attractive to people and thus more successful?



Apparently the US catholic church is a 170 billion dollar a year industry and while I couldn't find an answer (it isn't disclosed) as to what percentage of that is from donations in the last couple generations or even the last year, talking about constantine doesn't seem to be all that useful.

Right. As I stated:

Yes, it's obviously horrible because I'm shooting from the hip. But there are real ways of computing these things that can be used for various ways of assessing the value of different projects and so forth.

Right... "close" in quotes as opposed to close without quotes. My point was to show that there are ways to assign values to things based on various calculations. It's the same thing that happens in virtually every business setting. Did your company run a newspaper ad? How much did you spend on it and how much was it worth to you? Would you run it again? There are ways people calculate it. I'm not saying that one way or another is right and the others are wrong. But it's clearly a quantifiable problem.

Sure. Everything influences everything else. But it takes more than this if you want to meaningfully discuss what's going on. Even having a relative sense of value would be helpful. (See below.)

Sure. I never claimed that theology had no influence on behavior. But the central claim that this particular theological argument is the one is almost certainly an error. If it had been a theology of tithing (as in your Islamic example), then you would have a more meaningful argument.

Among other things, it's because they think they were "wrong" in some way or another. Either in the particular language that was being used or the emphasis of that language (this is something that Pope Francis is doing a lot). But this opens up a different discussion about what "success" means. Do you believe that they change their theological positions in order to make more money (or at least maintain their current state of wealth)?

I used Constantine because I talked about the expansive history. I believe that this was the first time that the church could actually be considered to be "wealthy."

But given that in today's world most of that money goes to health care (hospitals and such) and higher education, I would suspect that most of the revenue comes from those sources as well.

http://www.economist.com/node/21560536

My reason for saying that they might make more selling trinkets is because I think Catholic Charities USA is consistently among the largest charitable organizations in terms of revenue.