Sin is meaningless to evolution. The closest it gets is ‘fit’ and ‘less fit’.
Free will is for humans. Other living things have less flexibility in modes of interaction. Only humans seem to be able to trigger ‘that is a sin!’ in humans. Humans can be pretty ruthless, poisoning weeds, killing varmits, industrializing cattle slaughter, and herding our fellow man into gas chambers. We classify some of those behaviors as ‘sin’ when we wish to reduce their frequency in the population.
Certainly dogs can love, yet I don’t think we would assert that dogs are capable of sin. Accept that, and you have a counter example that showes CS Lewis was wrong, that potential for sin is necessary for love.
I had a good hamberger a few days ago. I don’t think my hamberger can sin, and so that is another example where something can be good without the potential for sin.
Darwin wrote that evolution as he understood it was to be appled to animals. He also wrote that uniquely human characteristics such as charity to the injured, the poor and the sick would make application of evolution to humans problematic.
Ah...
That was before we humans got downgraded to animals: much because of Darwin's 'understandings'!
Really! “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do…. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from an certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom..” Aldous Huxley, “Confession of a Professed Atheist,” Report: Perspective on the News, vol. 3 (June 1966), p. 19. From an article by Helming, “An Interview with God.”
Free will is for humans. Other living things have less flexibility in modes of interaction. Only humans seem to be able to trigger ‘that is a sin!’ in humans. Humans can be pretty ruthless, poisoning weeds, killing varmits, industrializing cattle slaughter, and herding our fellow man into gas chambers. We classify some of those behaviors as ‘sin’ when we wish to reduce their frequency in the population.
Tell that to Dr. William Provine, who was the leading spokesman for Darwinists until his death. here is what he had to say.
“Of course, it is still possible to believe in both modern evolutionary biology and a purposive force, even the Judaeo-Christian God. One can suppose that God started the whole universe or works through the laws of nature (or both). There is no contradiction between this or similar views of God and natural selection. But this view of God is also worthless…. [Such a God] has nothing to do with human morals, answers no prayers, gives no life everlasting, in fact does nothing whatsoever that is detectable. In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and, indeed, all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism. “My observation is that the great majority of modern evolutionary biologists now are atheists or something very close to that. Yet prominent atheistic or agnostic scientists publicly deny that there is any conflict between science and religion. Rather than simple intellectual dishonesty, this position is pragmatic. In the United States, elected members of Congress all proclaim to be religious. Many scientists believe that funding for science might suffer if the atheistic implications of modern science were widely understood.”
William B. Provine, review of Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution, by Edward J. Larson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 224 pp.), Academe, vol. 73 (January/February 1987), pp. 51-52 Provine was Professor of History of Biology, Cornell University Certainly dogs can love, yet I don’t think we would assert that dogs are capable of sin. Accept that, and you have a counter example that showes CS Lewis was wrong, that potential for sin is necessary for love.
Dogs have instincts, but they do not make a "conscious decision" to love.