Greetings and blessings from Canada, Dr. Craig.

Recently, I had a conversation with an atheist who claimed that sin is not a free will choice.

He quoted Romans 323, which says,

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

And then went on to say that if every human being ever born in the normal way to normal parents has sinned,

then sin is more like eating, breathing, or sleeping. It's something we must do in accordance

with the human nature we were created with. This then is the fault of the Creator, not the created.

He then went on to say that the only way to defeat this argument is to give examples of people

who have made a free choice

not to sin and been successful. Even if the number of such people was vanishingly small,

that would be enough to prove that we have a choice to sin or not. But that would then defeat

the claim that Christ was unique in having led a sin-free life, which is not an

option for us Christians. Therefore, sin is baked into our heavenly DNA, as he put it. God made us

that way, in other words. I must admit, I had never heard this argument before, and did not know how to

respond. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Respectfully yours,

Murray from Canada. While I wouldn't expect an atheist to be familiar with Christian doctrines

of original sin and total depravity, I'm rather worried that you as a Christian, Murray, should be similarly

uninformed, theologically. It is standard Christian doctrine that no person who does

not die in infancy has the ability to avoid sinning. The scriptures say that we are slaves of sin,

Romans 6, 6 to 18, and therefore unable to avoid sin completely. We may freely choose which

sins to commit, but we cannot avoid sinning altogether.

But it doesn't follow that, therefore, sin is something we must do in accordance with the

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