Well, this is slightly out of order, but I guess I should introduce myself.
Hello everyone! I’m the author of the blog posts in question. Thank you all for your interest, especially to Daniel who found and posted my blog articles!
@swamidass:
I’m currently working as a data scientist at a major tech company. My background is in physics, but graduate school was troublesome in a lot of ways and I dropped out of my PhD program. In church-related matters, I’m just a layman who’s serious about studying the Bible. And yes, I’ve just now read the post you linked, and the article linked from that. It’s amazing how similar our thoughts are! The fact that we came to much of the same conclusions independently gives me greater confidence in my (our) thesis. But then again, once one gets the idea of a recent common ancestor, I think the rest of the thoughts follow pretty naturally. And yes, I would certainly be interested in a citation in your book - let me know about what the context is and what’s involved.
But would they have made the proper response? After all, they were sinful. This does not seem to be a reliable form of transmission.
This is a non-issue, given that any number of people may have made the proper response over any number of generations. And you obviously don’t need a 100% transmission rate for a condition to spread throughout a population.
@dga471:
Well, this is going to be full of speculative theology, but here goes.
I think that there’s good Biblical evidence for the position that ALL significant spiritual conditions are transmitted via relationships rather than parentage. Obviously the parent-child relationship is one of the most important, so functionally, tracing this is a good substitute. If you think of “original sin” as a kind of corruption of the “image of God”, it makes sense that it’d be transmitted the same way.
And it terms of a imparting the “image of God” to a dog or a chimpanzee, I don’t think this can be done because they’re not structurally capable of fully receiving it. But, we still have the obligation to impart it to them to the extent that they’re able to receive it. And I think it’s pretty clear that we can be quite successful in this endeavor: our dogs can be really good, or really bad. The same mandate which requires us to emit the image of God to other humans demands that we do the same to our dogs, that we should try to make our dogs “good boys” or “good girls”.
Perhaps more interesting still is how this requirement plays out with AI. If we do eventually make a “true AI”, whatever that means, my line of thinking would require us to impart the image of God to them as well.