"The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it" Gen 3:12
A friend of mine dropped in to Kings yesterday with a copy of the latest BBC focus magazine. It's a really exciting glossy publication packed full of amazing scientific research, discoveries and Q&As. This month they look at anti-gravity machines, super-volcanoes, the point of pain, and why we dream. Good stuff! Anyway, the cover story of this edition was "Born to sin: Why nature wants you to be bad." Inside they explore the science of the seven deadly sins by putting volunteers into MRI scanners and tempting them to sin (for example showing them porn to evoke lust or insulting them to provoke anger). They then watch what parts of the brain light up. From this and a large dose of evolutionary theory they argue that lust, gluttony, greed sloth etc are all, to some extent at least, hard wired into our genes.
Another article asks "Should your genes determine your punishment in court?". If sin is determined by our genes then is it fair to punish someone for murder when they simply have over active anger circuits in their brain? Funny how Man hasn't changed much since Adam blamed God and Eve and Eve blamed the snake in the garden of Eden. Now we can blame our DNA!
The answers to questions like these aren't to be found in science of course as the study of matter will never get you into the domain of mind, morality or meaning. The ultimate answers to why we all sin and whether we will be held accountable for it cannot be discovered by an MRI scan but needs to be revealed to us by God, and he has done just that, not only subjectively in our conscience, but also objectively in the bible.
Here we discover than we sin because we are made in Adam's faulty image. Because we are descended from him we are sinners. How can God still blame us? Well, not knowing the answer to that question doesn't take our guilt away any more than pointing to our genes and saying "they made me do it" absolves us of murder. Even though we are born with a broken will the bible makes it abundantly clear that we are still held responsible for the things we decide to do. It also tells us about the solution but I'll leave that for the next blog.
PS. Just one more interesting bit of info. They rated different countries according to their sinfulness. To do this they measured lust using the national average income per capita from the porn industry divided by the cost of a Big Mac hamburger. Pride was related to the number of cosmetic surgery operations etc etc. So, who was the most sinful country? Australia! That surprised me anyway. Then USA, Canada, Finland, Spain and there in sixth place was us in the UK. It's out of 36 countries so that's not too much cause for celebration. Looks like this nation still needs a revival! Come LORD!
