Yes. In his book, The Problem of Pain, popular Christian author C.S. Lewis discusses Adam's sin in the context of Scientific understanding of his time, which included Darwinism. He presents an understanding in which those creatures, guided by the hand of God, became man. Despite Lewis' prominence in twentieth century Christianity, this particular viewpoint of his is not a widely celebrated one:
...The Fathers may sometimes say that
we are punished for Adam's sin: but they much more often say that
we sinned "in Adam". It may be impossible to find out what they
meant by this, or we may decide that what they meant was
erroneous. But I do not think we can dismiss their way of talking as
a mere "idiom". Wisely, or foolishly, they believed that we were
really and not simply by legal fiction - involved in Adam's action.
The attempt to formulate this belief by saying that we were "inAdam in a physical sense - Adam being the first vehicle of the
"immortal germ plasm" - may be unacceptable: but it is, of course, a
further question whether the belief itself is merely a confusion or a
real insight into spiritual realities beyond our normal grasp. At the
moment, however, this question does not arise; for, as I have said I
have no intention of arguing that the descent to modern man of
inabilities contracted by his remote ancestors is a specimen of
retributive justice. For me it is rather a specimen of those things
necessarily involved in the creation of a stable world which we
considered in Chapter II. It would, no doubt, have been possible for
God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed
by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless
He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the
third, and so on forever. If the miracles ceased, then sooner or later
we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did
not, then a world, thus continually underpropped and corrected by
Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing
important ever depended on human choice, and in which choice
itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the apparent
alternatives before you would lead to no results and was therefore
not really an alternative. As we saw, the chess player's freedom to
play chess depends on the rigidity of the squares and the moves.
Lewis refers to this as the "true import of the doctrine that man is fallen."
...Science, then, has nothing to say either for or against the
doctrine of the Fall. A more philosophical difficulty has been raised
by the modern theologian to whom all students of the subject are
most indebted. This writer points out that the idea of sin
presupposes a law to sin against: and since it would take centuries
for the "herd-instinct" to crystallise into custom and for custom to
harden into law, the first man - if there ever was a being who could
be so described - could not commit the first sin. This argument
assumes that virtue and the herd-instinct commonly coincide, and
that the "first sin" was essentially a social sin. But the traditional
doctrine points to a sin against God, an act of disobedience, not a
sin against the neighbour. And certainly, if we are to hold the
doctrine of the Fall in any real sense, we must look for the great sin
on a deeper and more timeless level than that of social morality.
...For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to
become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it
hands whose thumb could be applied to each. of the fingers, and
jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain
sufficiently complex to execute all the material motions whereby
rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed for
ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been
clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would
accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an animal because
all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely
material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God
caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and
physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say "I" and
"me", which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God,
which could make judgements of truth, beauty, and goodness, and
which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past.
This new consciousness ruled and illuminated the whole organism,
flooding every part of it with light, and was not, like ours, limited to
a selection of the movements going on in one part of the organism;
namely the brain. Man was then all consciousness.
... We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor
how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later
they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become
as gods - that they could cease directing their lives to their Creator
and taking all their delights as uncovenanted mercies, as
"accidents" (in the logical sense) which arose in the course of a life
directed not to those delights but to the adoration of God.
