Thoughts on Evolution and the Sin in Eden: A New Christian Synthesis (1998) 13

A complication comes by way of the sacraments, particularly, Baptism.

If Baptism removes a Sin transmitted through generation itself, then one can understand why a mother would be desperate to have her dying child baptized.  How can she allow her infant to die already stained by sin?

If Baptism re-establishes the opportunity for the child to become like Adam and Eve before the Fall, then a mother might not be so distraught.  Baptism speaks to a potential to avoid the same fate as Adam and Eve through the intervention of Jesus the Christ.

So why insist that infants and children get baptized well before their phenotypic developments are complete?  If you wait until children are developed, you might was well start with an exorcism.  Wait.  Baptism does start with an exorcism of sorts.  That must be for the parents and God-parents, who may have already become like Adam and Eve after the Fall.

Here, An Archaeology of the Fall may serve the theologian. Perhaps, Baptism is like innoculation against the dark principalities that reify the symbolic orders that we are immersed in.  Baptism could be like giving the little one a boat instead of leaving her to tread the choppy waters.  After all, even with Baptism, we often “eat the fruit” (now popularly replaced by, courtesy Jim Jones, with “drink the kool-aid” (see Ann Coulter’s book Demonic for seamy details).