It's time for the Soterology 101 podcast, where God is most glorified by his love and provision for all people.

Welcome your host.

The director of apologetics for Texas Baptists, an adjunct professor of theology, and a local teaching pastor.

Dr. Layton Flowers.

And welcome back to Sociology 101. Today we're going to get a quick

overview of the doctrine of the nature of man. There's a lot of confusion on this particular issue,

and I want to go over it in a real simple, easy to understand manner. First of all, we know that

Adam and Eve were created by God as in his image and therefore having the ability to reason,

to think, to make choices. They weren't perfect. They were mutable, mutable meaning able to fall.

In other words, they were able to make choices. Most mainstream confessions of faith acknowledge that Adam and Eve were created with the liberty of the will, the ability to choose one way or another, the ability to sin or to refrain from sinning.

So they're not perfect in that they're like God, because obviously God cannot sin. He's a perfect being. And so Adam and Eve

aren't perfect, but they were innocent. And therefore, they were able to sin. And therefore, when the

law came, when they were given a rule, do not eat of this fruit. They were given the freedom of

the will. They were given the ability to make choices. And of course, we know

the consequences. We know what happened. They sin. And that's where the fall enters in. And therefore,

the fall has consequences with it. But we have to acknowledge first and foremost that God did

create humanity with a free will. Some would call this a libertarian free will because it's the ability to

refrain or not refrain from a given moral action. Now, some people get this confused because

they'll say things like, well, God knew that Adam and Eve would fall, and therefore, he must have

determined for them to fall. That's a modal fallacy.

It's a logical fallacy.

It's confusing and conflating the concept of necessity with certainty.

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