Seeds of Sin

Six-month-old babies' minds can show signs of future criminal activity, according to an American scientist.

Psychologist Dr Adrian Raine said it might soon be possible to identify future criminals in the first few years of their life.

Apart from the ethical questions about such predictive profiling (it's the plot of the film Minority Report in real life), what struck me was a quotation from Dr Raine in today's Scottish Daily Record:

"Seeds of sin are sown early in life."

So according to this scientist, you'll soon be able to tell that a particular baby is likely to sin in a particularly anti-social way later in life. Or, to put it another way, the "seeds" of an area sin are in the helpless baby, years before they actually commit that kind of sin.

But how does he know that the seeds are sown "early in life"? What happens to the baby between being born and being six months old that sows those seeds? Is it how quickly their nappy is changed? Or how much TV they're sat in front of? Or how many rusks they chew on?

Or is it that they're born with the seeds of sin already in them? Could it be true of each person that, as King David put it: "I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51 v 5)? That's part of the doctrine known as "original sin": that as humans we sin because we're sinful, rather than that we're sinful because we sin.

For decades, the mainstream view has been that children are born good, and then slowly corrupted and made evil. Our sin is society's fault, or someone else's fault: it's not our fault. Dr Raine is only one scientist, of course, and his views are by no means widely accepted. But perhaps there's a hint here that in this area, what the scientific community says is catching up with what God's word has been saying for millennia. Not that you'll read about that in any newspaper!