A Philosophical Argument For the Fall
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!”
— Alexander Pope
What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how
paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository
of truth, sink of doubt and error, the glory and refuse of the universe!”
— Pascal, Pensées 131/434
Mankind, Pope contends, is a ‘riddle’. On the one hand, we are capable of unspeakable evil. The pages of history are stained with horrifingly evil deeds [1]. We comfort ourselves by making believe that we are nothing like the Nazis or the Pol-Pots of this world; and yet, the greatest perpetrators of evil throughout history have been ordinary people like you and I. Whether we succumb to our passions [2], complicity [3], or societal and advantageous circumstances, we are easily bent towards malice. Do you think the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews did not start off as ordinary, working-class Germans? [4] Do you think people will not commit the gravest of injustices if it served their own self-interest and they knew they could get away with it?
On the other hand, mankind is capable, not only of radical acts of selfless and self-giving love, but also of pursuing and finding great value in living and making sense of the world. We care for the poor; we give our lives for the sake of others; we develop technologies to improve our lot; we produce great works of art; we push the limits of reason through philosophy; and so on and on.
What explains both the glory and depravity of man — the conjunction of the best and worst of mankind? The best account, I propose, is one according to which our fudamental nature is corrupted, such that, despite our best efforts, we are bent toward evil, toward error [5], toward devaluing our existence [6]. But this is precisely what the Judeo-Christian notion of the Fall predicts. The greatness of man is a vestige of what we were originally intended to be; but, as a consequence of a ‘rupture’ in our nature, we are now plagued by an intractable — or perhaps seemingly intractable — wretchedness.
If this is true — that is, if the conjunction of the greatness and wretchedness of man is best predicted by the doctrine of the Fall — then we have an argument for a very specific kind of theism. The doctrine of the Fall not only accounts for the paradoxical nature of human beings; it also makes sense of the perception that there is something intrinsically wrong with us, that what we are does not quite match what we are supposed to be, on account of our nature being other than its original intent. [7] Finally, and most importantly, the argument makes possible a way out, since not only does it diagnose the riddle of the human condition accurately; it also offers a cure, so far as the argument is evidence, not just for theism, but for Judaeo-Christian theism.
[1] Consider the incalculable mass killings committed under 20th-century communist regimes; the genocide of 6 million European Jews, Slavs, Poles, people with mental and physical disabilities, and other groups under Hitler’s regime; the Nanjing Massacre of 1937; the ongoing conflicts in Sudan and Darfur; and the Armenian Genocide, to list but a small sample of atrocities.
[2] Jeremiah 17:9
[3] See the famous ‘Milgram Experiment’, as well as Milgram’s summary of the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience.”
[4] Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. 2017.
[5] “Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought… Yet what does the world think about? …about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man.” — Pascal, Pensées 620/146
[6] Think of the many sad ways in which human beings seek to bestow meaning to their existence.
[7] Maybe some types of liberalism affirm that man is ‘basically good.’ But this strikes me as an untenable view. The truth lies, not in complete optimism or pessimism regarding human nature, but somewhere in the middle.
