* The following is an email response to this article on “epigenetics”: http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi158.html

I don’t really see anything new here. Creationists have always recognized change/adaptation within species. So, there is a new mechanism for this process. Likely, there will be another one tomorrow. That is the nature of science, and why science is not truth, even creation science.

There is something more disturbing here. A person is both body AND soul. By traducianism, the soul is transmitted from the parents to the conceived child. The best theological scholars seem to think that this method is the most logical and Biblical. The competing claim is creationism in which God creates a new soul at each conception which is problematic for transmission of the sin nature.

(1) Almost all Biblical scholars believe that there is nothing sinful about matter… material things in the universe and in man himself… the opposite being a central idea of neo-Platonism. It is the spirit (soul, mind, heart… all designations for the same immaterial substance) that sins and is regenerated to become a member of the Kingdom of God. Since matter does not carry the sin, epigenetics cannot account for sin and cannot account for the reversal of man’s nature in redemption. That error is most major for this article. I find it amazing that, otherwise well-intentioned Christians, and “scholars,” overlook this simple truth.

(2) What turns the chemical triggers on and off? Methyl groups or strings of DNA (p. 3) are inert chemicals… what causes them to appear where they can have epigenetic expression? I wrote some 20 years ago that something had to turn genes on and off… by themselves they are inert. Almost NONE, including Frances Collins, a Christian, who headed the Human Genome Project, understood this first cause effect. And, thus genetic answers to medicine have been stalled for some 10 years. The ultimate question is “What is life,” and what regulates it. Of course, it is not a what but a Who.

(3) Surely, characteristics of parents are transmitted to their children through their souls, as well as their genes. Which is foundational? The spiritual world, and the Spirit Himself, are the hypostasis of the material world. How easily Christians become materialists. In psychology and neuroscience, this focus on the material is getting to the point of denial of the soul… it is an “epiphenomenon,” not a reality of being. I am going to write an article, soon I hope, that this elimination of the soul is heretical.

Likely, this response is far more than you wanted, but issue has to be addressed carefully within a Biblical context first, and a scientific context second.