Dowd explores the idea of sin as going backwards on the evolutionary track and that when we are sinning we let the primitive, instinctual, aggressive, fear-driven part of our brain take charge.

Call it the Devil, or evil, or sin, or whatever, something is not quite right in the world. Read a newspaper or turn on the news. Study history. Study your own history. Live life and you’ll find that out. Mystics from all traditions will say that the problem is the way we perceive the world.

Augustine, a Fourth Century Bishop and a Catholic Saint, is credited with conceiving the notion of “original sin”. He found something not quite right in the human mind and human will. But because we have reason, with the help of God, we can chose to do good rather than evil. Julian of Norwich, a Fourteenth Century Christian mystic who lived in Norwich, England, wrote a document describing a series of visions that she had, called Showings or Revelations of Divine Love. Actually, she wrote it about 20 years after she had the visions. She lived in a small room attached to a church. People would come to her to share their problems and pain. She lived through the plague in her town. She would have seen dead bodies in the streets outside her room. But she wrote that sin is “behovely”, or necessary, and that “All shall be well.”

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who lived in a Kentucky monastery and died in 1968, thought that life was about recovering our true nature that has been lost. I like this idea of Merton because life, it seems to me, is something like a journey home. As we grow, we can become more comfortable with who we are and less concerned about what others think of us. Paul Tillich, a Protestant theologian and contemporary of Merton thought of sin as separation. We are born separated from our real selves, other people, and God. Modern theologians might add that we also think of ourselves as separated from the Earth and that this sense of separation has led to environmental degradation, species extinction, and perhaps eventually it will lead to our own extinction. Some have called the Devil the Father of Lies. In this case the lie is that we are separated from our best selves, one another, and the Earth.

But what do scientists think about sin? I’ve recently read a book that provided an interesting connection between the biological idea of evolution and sin. The book, by Michael Dowd, an Evangelical Christian, is called Thank God for Evolution. In the book, Dowd explores the idea of sin as going backwards on the evolutionary track and that when we are sinning we let the primitive, instinctual, aggressive, fear-driven part of our brain take charge. We stop thinking and words become weapons; our heart rate goes up and the body releases lots of stress hormones into our bloodstream. Like when we are mad at the person who just cut us off in traffic. We’re not our best selves in these moments, or living as full human beings. And we tend to be selfish and inconsiderate when we’re trying to tailgate the person who cut us off; and we don’t notice the child in the back seat of the other car. Later we might say, “I wasn’t myself”.

(FYI: The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley is sponsoring a two-day event, Exploring the Frontiers of Science and Religion, April 23-24, 2010.)

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Over the course of a week of working with concrete,
this landscaping job produced only one bucket
of wastewater. Credit: Ann Hutcheson-WilcoxAs a lifelong Catholic and former Catholic priest, I often find myself wishing that the Church would stick to what it knows best: the Sacraments. I wish the Pope would declare a 10-year moratorium on anyone with any authority in the Church saying anything at all about sexuality.

But sometimes the Vatican gets it right.

Polluting is a now a recognized social sin, along with another act that tends to wreck havoc on the environment, that is, contributing to the growing social and economic divide between rich and poor. The rich contribute inordinately to pollution and the poor suffer inordinately from it.

The Church has installed photovoltaics (PV) on the roofs of some Vatican buildings, and has recognized the scientific consensus that humans contribute to global warming. One of my teachers in the Divinity program at Notre Dame, Fr. Tim O'Meara, said that the Church responds quite slowly to crisis and change. "It spends twenty-five years denying the problem, twenty-five years quietly addressing it, and twenty-five years claiming that this is the way we've always done things." So by historical standards, the Church is moving with lightning speed.

One of my coworkers at Home Energy told me that she viewed the new sin as another tool in the environmental education toolbox. Through her experience as an environmental organizer, policy analyst, and fundraiser, she has learned that individuals are motivated to take action on behalf of the environment due to personal belief or their own unique life experience. While working with contractors on her own home, she has often found it challenging to explain to people in the trades why she feels that it is her responsibility to go beyond business as usual. Last week's announcement that "la contaminación ahora es un pecado" (pollution is now a sin) came just at the right time. The contractors she was working with to rebuild a retaining wall made primarily of reused concrete and found objects figured out how to avoid dumping any wastewater into her gutter, which empties directly into the local creek, a home for native rainbow trout. If pollution were not yet a sin, they may not have been as willing to consider the alternatives. Over the course of a week of working with concrete, they produced only one bucket of wastewater.

The new sins do present a challenge to the imagination of poets like myself. In Dante's Divine Comedy there is no place in hell for unrepentant polluters. Now that the Vatican has named pollution a serious social sin, we may have to invent a punishment, and a metaphorical place in hell for polluters. Let's see-tyrants, assassins, and warmongers swim in a river of boiling blood, and the wrathful tear each other to pieces with their teeth-maybe polluters will have to tread water in that twice-Texas-sized trash dump floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for all eternity, or at least until we decide how to clean it up.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

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