According to theistic evolution, were human beings created originally good?
Many prominent theistic evolutionists repudiate the idea that human beings were created good and then fell into sin through a voluntary act of disobedience.
Karl Giberson in Saving Darwin directly rejects the idea that “sin originates in a free act of the first humans” and that “God gave humans free will and they used it to contaminate the entire creation.” [Saving Darwin, p. 12] Giberson basically argues that since human beings were created through Darwinian evolution, sin was there in human beings to begin with: “Selfishness… drives the evolutionary process. Unselfish creatures died, and their unselfish genes perished with them. Selfish creatures, who attended to their own needs for food, power, and sex, flourished and passed on these genes to their offspring. After many generations selfishness was so fully programmed in our genomes that it was a significant part of what we now call human nature.” Although Giberson does employ the term “fall” in his book, it is clear that he merely means that humans continue to be sinful, just like they were from the beginning. There was no actual “fall” in his view, as he confirmed at an appearance at Biola University in 2009. Notably, the foreword to Giberson’s Saving Darwin was written by prominent fellow theistic evolutionist Francis Collins.