Engaging God's World: Chapter 3

The third chapter of Engaging God's World, is about the fall and how it has corrupted man and society. Evil is what has corrupted the world, not just sin, because evil is more than sin. Plantinga says that evil is any spoiling of shalom, and all sin is evil but not all evil is sin. A natural disaster would be an example of an evil that is not a sin because there is no one responsible for it. A sin would be an evil that someone commits. As humans we can be corrupted more than animals because we have more initial good to be corrupted. "The better stuff a creature is made of--the cleverer and stronger and freer it is--then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse ti will be if it goes wrong." Humans can be better or worse than animals and supernatural beings can be better or worse than us, that is why the fall of the some of the angels was such a huge change. When we sin we are corrupting ourselves but we also need to remember that we may be corrupting others as well. This gives us a greater responsibility not to sin because we are affecting other people, as well as ourselves, when we sin. We need to be careful who we surround ourselves with because if they are sinning they are likely corrupting you. I think this can also work to some extent in the opposite direction as well. If we are doing good around people we can help make them less corrupt and less inclined to sin.

One of the questions that Plantinga brought up in the book was whether there were carnivores in the Garden of Eden. This kind of confused me because it was something I had never really thought about before. If there weren't, then either animals like lions became carnivores after the fall or they didn't exist before it. If they became carnivores at the fall though, it would seem that a lion could hardly have the strength of a lion without meat. The best explanation that I can think of for this is that perhaps the different fruits in the Garden were more strengthening than the fruit we have today.