Similar concerns arise when the doctrine of original sin is discussed. In the Augustinian tradition, all humans are included in the sin of Adam because they were present in his sin by being a part of his body, their potential was physically in his reproductive organs, if you will. The state of sin that Adam gets caught up in is passed on physically in the sperm that generates the new child. Now, of course, this only works if the rest of humans are direct physical descendants of Adam, a conclusion that Augustine quite naturally accepted but which is made impossible through an evolutionary narrative. So, a new understanding of original sin and perhaps of sin entirely is needed, and various attempts have been made to do this. So, Patricia Williams who really started in this sociobiology approach, talked about how sin was actually found in the regular desires of evolutionary development becoming twisted, that what happened with original sin is that we had desires to survive, desires to find shelter, and desires to reproduce. And this is all good and fine, but something in the moral awareness of humans emerging means that these desires which are natural become inordinate, and so she'll place the question of original sin in this twisting of the natural desires. Other people have tried other approaches. Daryl Domning, for example, says that what happens is that instead of having all the good desires turned bad, what you have is this competition between the altruistic desires that are present in evolutionary development and the selfish desires. And so, the natural inheritance that humans have received is both good and bad. But in some ways these end up being too simple. I try a different approach. I want to say that the natural desires that we inherit with evolution are simply incomplete. What we need to become what God would intend us to be, is a transformation of the desires that we've had through evolution. Attempts to reformulate the doctrine of original sin are often also linked to the question of what it means to be made in the image of God. Through much of church history, the image of God language has been taken to mean that humans have rationality. The ability to think rationally has been what sets humans apart from non-humans, and this goes all the way back to Aristotle. So, perfect rational thought was also linked with the sort of original righteousness that was lost with the fall, so that while we retain rational abilities, they are now marred by sin. One of the problems with this is that many recent studies show that non-human animals like chimps, dolphins, elephants, birds, even cuttlefish are highly intelligent, and some of them even score better than humans at certain analytical tasks. So it turns out that rationality is something that we share with other animals along a spectrum of ability. Routing the image of God in rationality also raises the question about those humans who do not have the ability to think rationally. Babies, people with dementia or other forms of cognitive challenge, me when I'm asleep. Am I made any less in the image of God, because I don't have that capacity to think rationally? In order to address these concerns, theologians have largely turned away from what are called substantive accounts that is finding the image of God and some ability we have, or in our psychological or physical makeup towards what are known as relational or also functional accounts of the image of God. So instead of saying humans are in God's image because they are rational, a relational model would say that it is because humans have a unique relationship with God and a unique capacity for a certain type of relationship, particularly, a relationship of love. So, simply by being human, humans are in God's image because God has chosen to relate to the humans in this particular and special way. A functionalist account says, by contrast, the image of God is a particular task given to humanity. In Genesis 1, the proclamation of humans being made in the image of God is followed by this command, "And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle," and so on, overall the earth. It is not a far stretch to think that the image of God is actually this role you inhabit, like being the prime minister where you were representing the higher authority of the monarch. David Clynes expresses it this way. He says, "Man is created not in God's image, since God has no image of his own, but as God's image or rather to be God's image, that is to deputise in the created world for the transcendent God who remains outside the world order." In this view, being made in God's image means that we have a collective task toward the environment, to other people, to other animals and to the world. If either a relational or functional model is used, then evolution is no longer a problem. We don't have to show how humans are different from every other creature or find some unique capacity that humans have that nothing else has. Instead, we can just think of humans having a different job or a different calling, if you like that language. So Joshua Moritz has made the comparison between the image of God and the calling of the people of Israel. So, just as Israel in the Hebrew Bible accounts were called from among the nations to be a special representation of God to the rest of the nations, they were called to be this even though it is repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing special about them. In the same way, humans are called to be in God's image amongst the other animals and plants even if there is nothing particularly special or utterly unique about them. So, although questions about the image of God or about original sin are re-casted in particular ways by the consideration of evolution, they tend to do so in ways I find exciting and constructive.