A Ramble About Innocence

My wife really enjoys the Animal Planet channel, and when we had access to it, we would watch program after program on every kind of animal you could imagine. A favorite of mine came to be those programs on the great apes, and especially the ones which displayed their intelligence. I remember watching one about an orangutan which had been taught to use and communicate with American Sign Language. It was truly amazing watching the researcher sitting and “talking” with this orangutan about his love life and actually having an intelligent conversation. I have seen other documentaries on the same kind of experiments being undertaken with chimpanzees and gorillas. There can be no doubt about these animals' innate intelligence, problem solving abilities, and yes, where taught, conversational skills.

Be this as it may, as intelligent as they are they are obviously still, like all animals, innocent regardless of their behavior. It isn't hard to recognize that look in an animal's eye that is so very different from a human being's. I see it every day when I look at our dog, Bel, and the three cats we still have. Bel doesn't know when she's done something morally wrong. She only knows when she's done something I don't want her to do. When she disobeys, she does so because her dominance instincts tell her that I'm somehow no longer in charge of the situation, and as a dog she has to take over to keep things under control. At which point in time, I have to disabuse her of that notion. But to look in her eyes, she has no concept that she's done anything wrong or in error. The same is true of our male cat when he slaps her on her hindquarters when she passes by him.

Another example would be predators in the wild like sharks. When sharks attack, they do so because they're hungry and because that's just what sharks do. They do so, generally, without any intended malice towards their target. Tigers in the wild do the same.

The fact of the matter is that even when chimpanzees form murder gangs or rape their females, they do so without any concept of moral right or wrong. When sharks attack swimmers, they do so because that's what their instincts drive them to do. When dogs viciously attack people, it's because their owners somehow didn't understand the dog's nature and instincts, or because the owners twisted the dog to do so. All of this can be observed just by watching the eyes of the animal.

From my reading and study of both Scripture and science, it is obvious that there was a time, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when human beings were much the same. There is evidence of both brutal savagery, and also great feeling and compassion among our innocent Homo Erectus ancestors, and those ancestors of our which reach farther back. They continued in pretty much the same way along their path of evolution for hundreds of thousands of years.

And then something changed between fifty and a hundred thousand years ago. Our ancestors and their cousins, the Neanderthal and others, started to wear clothing. They started to use more than just the basic stone tools of their ancestors. There is evidence they started to murder in cold blood. Our ancestors began to wipe out their cousins over food and resources. Much later on, between ten and five thousand years ago they started to develop agriculture, towns, metal working, and all the fundamental roots of civilization as though almost out of nowhere and very near the ancient headwaters of the Eupharates and the Tigris rivers, along with the Guyhun and the Uizon, in modern Iran and Georgia.

The truth is that Scripture and science don't disagree about what happened to mankind, just the chronology of it, and that's largely due to the interpretation of either or both. But one thing they do certainly agree on is that at one time, Adam (which just means “human being” in Hebrew) was just as innocent as the chimpanzee that rapes and murders, the shark that rips through swimmers, and my little dog that has the intelligence of a three year old but is also, instinctually, a lethal predator.

Innocence doesn't mean “not guilty” as much as it means having no concept of morality. It means to act on one's instincts alone without the voice of conscience telling you to restrain yourself. It means to act in a certain way because that is what you are, not because it is right. It is neither a “good” state of being, nor a “bad” one. The only beings concerned with “good” and “evil” are human beings who are obsessed with these concepts because of what happened to Adam as a whole, twisting the minds of an otherwise innocent species of primate whom God chose to shape into His image and likeness. And image and likeness which, it should be pointed out, never included a distinction between “good” and “evil.”

The animal world is often characterized as savage, and yet this savage equilibrium which lasted for millions if not billions of years was declared “good” by God. The primitive and at times savage amoral behavior of our ancestors was also declared “good” by God for the hundreds of thousands of years in which they retained their amoral innocence. It was only after they developed the sense that some things were “good” and others were “evil” that everything began to fall apart into a downward spiral, and it has done so in less than one tenth the entire time that our hominid race has existed from the time we walked upright on two legs.

I have heard far too many well intentioned Bible preachers speculate on what Biblical innocence meant. Much of the time it sounds more fanciful than many science fiction and fantasy writers I have read. They often make the Biblical Adam sound as self-righteous and as pompous as themselves. What they cannot seem to fathom is that our sense of “right” and “wrong”, far from being the thing which makes us most like the image of God (which was the original lie to begin with), is in fact a kind of mental and spiritual illness or delusion with which all of Adam's descendants are afflicted. There was a reason why we were declared “good” without it, and why it brought the death penalty on Adam and his descendants when we acquired it. It will in fact be the death of Adam and this whole planet with him as we destroy each other, ourselves, and our habitat because of our twisted sense of what is “good” and what is “evil.”

Our only salvation is in fact Jesus Christ and what He taught. Not singing about Him. Not debating about the finer points of Scripture, or ridiculous, ignorant arguments about whether the Earth is 6000 years old or 4 billion years old. It is only in the person, teachings, presence, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It isn't found in well dressed Sunday preachers teaching someone else's interpretation of Holy Scripture. It isn't found in sitting in a pew on Sundays taking the Sacraments because that's what everyone else is doing. It is in engaging with, experiencing, and obeying Jesus Christ that we may be deified together with Him and escape the self-destruction of Adam.