I understand there is a difference between JW theology and traditional Christian theology when it comes to the doctrine of sin. But I don't see how it relieves the difficulity. Whether you buy into "Adamic sin" as the WT does, or whether you believe that each of us is responsible for our own sinful nature, and its the sarifice of Jesus that covers our individual sin (instead of equalizing Adam's), the fact remains that when you have a literal Adam playing a role in the entry of sin into the human race, evolution becomes a problem - because there was no literal Adam.
Good question. The matter has generated some discussion elsewhere. It is true that Pius was down on the idea that a first man may not have eixsted and that he didn't see any obvious way to reconcile the concept of original sin with it. That said, there have been various attempts to think it through in the last 40 years or so.
On the one hand, if we have horses then it seems there was a first horse. As a practical matter, such an assignment is somewhat arbitrary -- there must be some sliding sacle of "horseness" that most agree is sufficiently met by Horse Zero. With humans, something similar would certainly apply. The difference being that, according to Catholic theology, humans have immaterial souls which are the sorts of thing that do not go out of existence when the bodies die. Since this is a contrast with the relatives of human beings, that would serve as a pretty clear line: humans are those primates with immaterial souls.
That is obviously not a falsifiable claim.
With respect to theologians who are smarter than I, it isn't immediately obvious to me why the concept of Original Sin relies on the historicity of some first man. Others have thought similarly: it may be that our "fallenness" is not the result of a single act by a single man, but a problem of the human race in general, arising from the moment we began to make moral judgments.
So, a chimp rips a rival limb from limb in competition for sexual rights or whatever. This is a chimp being a good chimp, but when a human does it and realizes that the moral universe is different for him than for the chimp, then you have an act that is proper for a chimp and not for a human. I tentatively suggest that the fact we live in a different moral universe and routinely fail to live in accord with this "true" nature is the essence of what we mean by Original Sin.
If this idea is not entirely preposterous, then it doesn't matter whether there was ever a single first man or not. This sin, this brokenness, is something that we all experience by virtue of the fact that we are all humans; it is both shared and inherited in this way. We live in a moral universe that calls us to be something we have great difficulty being: good and virtuous men in harmony with the One who Is (who, I assume, exists).
Anyhow, that's my thought.
