Gene Splicing, Adam, and the Inherited Desire to Sin
Gene splicing is a powerful tool that allows scientists to take specific instructions from one creature’s DNA and insert them into another. For example, scientists can take the gene responsible for the thick, warm fur of a woolly mammoth and splice it into a mouse’s DNA. The result is a mouse that grows up with fur like a mammoth, even though it is still a mouse. The inserted gene becomes part of the mouse’s very being, something it naturally carries and passes along.
Interestingly, this process offers a useful way to understand what happened to the first man, Adam, after he disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. According to the biblical account, Adam was created without any inherent desire or tendency to sin. You could say, in modern terms, that Adam’s “genetic instructions” contained no “desire-to-sin gene.” He lived in perfect harmony with God’s rules, without any internal pull to rebel against them.
However, when Adam chose to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—something God had specifically forbidden—his very nature changed. It is as if, at that moment, a new piece of genetic material was spliced into his being. This new “gene” introduced the desire and ability to sin, to oppose God’s order. Adam’s act wasn’t just a one-time mistake; it fundamentally altered who he was. The knowledge of evil, once external to him, became part of his internal makeup. Like the mouse carrying the woolly mammoth’s fur instructions, Adam now carried within himself the inclination to sin.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Just as a gene spliced into one generation can be passed down to the next, Adam passed this altered nature to all his descendants. Every human born after him inherited this “spliced-in” desire to sin. It became part of the human condition—something natural to us, something we cannot escape by our own efforts.
This analogy helps us visualize an otherwise abstract spiritual truth. Gene splicing shows how adding a small piece of information can have lasting, generational effects. Likewise, Adam’s choice introduced a change into humanity’s “spiritual DNA” that reshaped the entire human story.
Thankfully, the biblical account also points to a solution—another “insertion,” so to speak. Through Jesus, God offers a way to reverse the effects of that spliced-in sin nature, not through science but through faith and spiritual rebirth. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Understanding the depth of the problem makes the solution provided by God’s grace all the more profound.