NY Times and Total Depravity

by Dec 1, 2009Culture, Theology

Yesterday I opened up the New York Times home page and the main article struck me:

NYT

Science has now proclaimed that total depravity and original sin are untenable.

Science, in fact, provides a better answer than Christianity to all of life’s questions, according to Frans de Waal, a scientist quoted in the article:

Biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.

Three good things to read on this topic: Romans 1–3, Alan Jacob’s Original Sin, and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. The first is God’s own indictment against humanity, the second provides  inductive evidence from history for that indictment, and the third is a picturesque literary argument showing the utter pettiness of humanity’s rush to destroy itself.

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