Adams Sin Was An Emergent Behavior

The best way to understand something is to build it.

In my recent articles I have been facilitating discussion on Adam and Eve and I have been collecting explanations about how Adam came to disobey god. This article identifies the parts of those arguments and diagrams one of them, and tries to tease out whether Adam could in any reasonable way be held accountable by his maker for his transgression and the resultant overall negative result that emerges from Gods Creation. However if we take Adam and God out of the equation, then the properties that emerge from nature are what we should expect once we understand them, and labeling them "good" or "bad" outside of any context becomes meaningless.

Emergence

Wikipedia says that the term “Emergence” was coined by G. H. Lewes. Its an old concept recognized as far back as Aristotle.

Basically it is self-organization or a property or behavior of a thing that results from the combination of all its other properties and its interaction with its environment.

Some examples of Emergence from Wikipedia and some I thought up.
Feel Free to suggest some more in the comments.

NATURE
- Hurricanes
- Termite "Cathedrals"
- Patterns in plants in nature
- Color
- Patterns in Clouds
- Friction
- Classical Mechanics
- Statistical Mechanics
- Weather
- Patterned ground
- Temperature
- Convection
- Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology
- Flocking
- Herds
- Patterns that birds make when they fly together
- Fractals

CULTURE
- Traffic Patterns
- Forming Lines
- Cities
- Political systems
- Economics
- The Stock Market
- The World Wide Web
- Placement of pathways in building complexes

MATHEMATICS
- Mobius Strip
- Chaos theory
- Clustering in Probablity

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [link to an AI Lab where they depend on emergence to build robots]
- Self-assembling robots, [video] [more links]
- Morphological properties of components for locomotion

HUMAN BEHAVIOR
- Emotions, Fear, Joy, etc
- Some actions, scratching and itch, catching a ball,
- Unconscious Decision Making (AKA Intuition)
- and in my opinion, the SUPERNATURAL emerges from the poor reasoning schemes of an untrained mind.

Emergence is highly efficient and economical. That is exactly what should be expected from a perfect being. If a perfect being created something, we could reasonably expect the perfect being to build is so that it would be self-organizing, efficient and economical meaning that additional properties would emerge from the raw material.

If that is the case then the way the world is, is the only way it could have turned out, which means that Adams transgression emerged out of the way he was made.

While I haven't yet got a Christian to put any culpability on God for anything that supposedly went on in "the fall of man", they do accept every premise up to the conclusion, and circle back to the fact that "Adam made the choice" while affirming that God knew what was going to happen and the fact that it was predestined.

Comments from an article accumulated from two Christians

In the discussion below, the components of the arguments are labeled with initials.
HP. stands for Hidden Premise. A Hidden Premise is a premise that the argument depends on but is not explicitly stated. The commenters did not state these premises but they were understood as a dependency.
P. Stands for the premise. Premises are effectively data, or conclusions of other arguments used to support the inferrence to the conclusion.
C. The conclusion is derived from the inferrences made from the premisses.

xxxxxxx said...
Yes, I agree, that according to scripture,
HP1. God is omnipotent
HP2. God is omniscient
HP3. God made adam
HP4. God has a plan
P1. God knew that Adam would disobey,
P2. and not only knew it, but predestined it.
C. Scripture says that this happened so that the second Adam (Christ) would come into the world to accomplish what Adam failed to do and to redeem his people from the curse of sin.

In the Diagram below, the Hidden premisses HP1, HP2 and HP3 collectively support the premise that God knew that Adam would disobey. HP4 supports the premise that adams transgression was predestined. The two premises explcitly stated support the conclusion.
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Diagram for the Argument Above
The Best Way To Understand Something Is To Build It

The arguments that follow are restatements and variations of the argument above from Christian comments

xxxx said...
I agree with most of the article.
HP. God is omnipotent
HP. God is omniscient
HP. God made adam
HP. God has a plan
P. I think that God not only knew Adam would transgress,
P. he counted on it and
C. that was part of the plan of salvation.

xxxx said...
HP. God is omnipotent
HP. God is omniscient
HP. God made adam
HP. God has a plan
P. The way this seems is that God had a plan,
P. he put it into action and
P. put Adam and Eve here to start, the first two people out of the gate failed
C. so he had to go to plan B. If it wasn't planned, there would be no need to label Christ as the redeemer from the foundation of the earth.

xxxxx said...
I would disagree that God had a plan B.
HP. God is omnipotent
HP. God is omniscient
HP. God made adam
HP. God has a plan
C. God has one plan and one plan only and it always comes to pass.

xxxxx said...
HP. God is omnipotent
HP. God is omniscient
HP. God made adam
HP. God has a plan
P. Not to mention that it is said that he failed, except he was part of a plan that played itself out.
C. So it seems that the failure on Adams part would have been to not eat the fruit. I never see anyone give him the opportunity to be a part of an infinite atonement.

xxxxxx said....
My intent is to agree with much af what Lee has brought up in his post. I don't think Adam is a villian,
HP. God is omnipotent
HP. God is omniscient
HP. God made adam
HP. God has a plan
P. he did exactly what he was suppose to do,
P. and just like every single other person who makes a mistake,
P. he was forgiven of his sins
C. just like we can be.

xxxxx said....
HP. God is omnipotent
HP. God is omniscient
HP. God made adam
HP. God has a plan
P. Adam's transgression separated us from God,
C. which left us the ability to be able to choose for ourselves between the recently aquired knowledge of good and evil.

Reconstructing Gods Plan From What We Know

1. Gods plan was to make Adam and Eve,
2. give them free will, desire, speech, cognitive bias, but not the knowledge of good and evil.
3. put them in the Garden, wait long enough for Adam to Disobey (disobeying a God that you can have a discussion with is insane in itself)
4. then use that as a reason to kick them out of the Garden,
5. introduce sin into the world,
6. kill everyone in a worldwide flood because they were so sinful,
7. make a covenant with Abraham, who had strong reasons not to disobey
8. impregnate a virgin with his holy seed, without giving her a choice
9. occupy the body of a sinless human who had compelling reasons not to disobey, effectively compromising any free will he had
10. come into jerusalem on the passover,
11. have one of his disciples report him, who may or may not have know the consequences, had no choice since he was key player in the plan and consequently died a horrible death
12. get crucified as a human sacrifice during the passover so that he could meet the ritual requirements,
13. take all the sins of the world onboard,
14. become resurrected in three days,
15. and take off to disappear into heaven.
16. And leave us with the free will to believe all this on meager evidence or not.

So now lets look at the results and see what has emerged from this plan.

Lets asign some values to some things and see how they play out.

God = 0, because he is perfect.
Christ = -1 because he was god but tainted by man
Adam = -2 because he was not perfect and sinned and he was not god

Please follow along in the chart below. The left side represents the values for God, Jesus and Adam and the bottom represents the timeline from creation to 3000 CE. I projected past today's date since Jesus is probably not coming anytime soon.

God Operating In The Red.

Diagram showing the resultant prolonged negative value over the course of 6000 years, projected beyond the current date to 3000 CE.
So now god creates Adam and things go to -2.
That's counter-intiutive in a perfect being.

Now we need a Christ to set things right so we subtract -1 and we are back to -1.

Things aren't perfect but hey, god can be imperfect if he wants to because because he can do anything.

God created just so he could create an overall negative? This is not very efficient or economical. There is a lot of wasted resources built into this plan.

If god was like the Greek gods, which seems to be the case throughout Genesis 1-11, then this would be more coherent. But he's supposed to be perfect which means that he should not need anything, even company. Creating this mess was worse than not creating.

However, if we take Gods plan out of the equation, we can reasonably deduce that it probably wouldn't be any worse than this.