COLUMN ONE : Rethinking Origins of Sin : Genetic findings prompt religious leaders to take a new look at good and evil. One major question; Should you condemn someone for something they’re predisposed to do?

For most of his 57 years, E.L. Ingram has been told that he is the most egregious of sinners because he is homosexual.

“Every time I’d go to church--and I am a religious person, I am a believer in God--I would be attacked from the pulpit,” Ingram said. “I didn’t choose a gay lifestyle. It was there when I left my mother’s womb.”

Increasingly, scientific studies suggest that Ingram, like many gays and lesbians, may be right. These findings indicate--but do not prove--that there is a correlation between brain structure and sexual orientation.

Similarly, alcoholism, obesity and personality disorders that include wife battering have also been decried as sinful. And, like homosexuality, their genesis in some cases may not be in the willful disobedience of the soul but in human genetic codes.

In other words, if the devil made you do it, the devil may be in your genes.

Such advances in genetic knowledge are posing perplexing questions for theologians as well as rank-and-file believers.

For centuries, Western religions have taught that people have been given a free will by God and that when they choose to turn from God’s ways they sin. But if God created everything, including sexual orientation, how can acting on such a predisposition be condemned?

“It’s not always a matter of free choice,” said Bishop Kenneth L. Carder, who headed the United Methodist Church’s Genetic Science Task Force. “We may have to raise the issue again: Is sin centered exclusively in free will?”

To make sense of a torrent of human genetic studies that may affect their understanding of God, morality and the devil, denominations across the country are funding seminars on genetics, consulting with scientists and convening ecumenical round tables.

The National Council of Churches and the national bodies of the Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church and Presbyterian Church U.S.A. have called for educating their members about genetics--so far without much success at the local level.

For the most part, these efforts have focused on such issues as the morality of fetal tissue transplants and genetic screening of human embryos.

The implications of genetic research on traditional ideas about sin and free will--while potentially far-reaching--have garnered far less attention.

Will churches that prohibit the ordination of homosexuals have to reconsider?

If certain sins are genetically based, will genetic manipulation replace confession and repentance as the means of expiating sins?

Will science offer salvation?

To be sure, other things influence behavior. Family, society, the environment--that panoply of cultural and psychological traits that overlays all humans--are also factors.

Few theologians, or scientists, are willing to concede that people are entirely without choices, even when genetic predispositions are taken into account. People, they insist, still have free will or moral autonomy apart from their physical, chemical and biological existence.

No one has yet found a “sin” gene--what folk wisdom called a “bad seed”--among the estimated 100,000 genes being mapped by the Human Genome Project, a $3-billion, 15-year scientific tour de force to unravel the exact order and makeup of the human genetic endowment.

To blame everything on one’s genes would be to abdicate individual responsibility for actions that are harmful to others and, theologians say, an affront to God.

But never has there been such a body of evidence pointing to as prominent a role for genetics and biology in predisposing individuals toward behaviors that religions have deemed unacceptable.

Especially tantalizing in view of the religious taboos is how homosexuality may be shaped by genetics and hormones.

In August, 1991, neuroscientist Simon LeVay of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla found that a tiny segment of the brain believed to govern sexual activity is smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. Studying cadavers, LeVay, who is homosexual, found that the hypothalamus was only half as large in homosexual men as it is in heterosexuals.

A year later, UCLA researchers found that another section of the brain--this time an important structure connecting the left and right sides known as the anterior commissure--is larger in homosexual men than in women and heterosexual males.

In a third study, researchers at Northwestern University and Boston University reported in December, 1991, that if one identical twin was gay, the chances were better than even that the other would be, too. In contrast, there was only one chance out of five that the non-twin brothers of the homosexuals were also gay. Then, last March, the same researchers reported similar patterns of sexual orientation among lesbian twins.

“I think we’ve got some stuff here that is hard to shrug off--study after study,” said Ronald S. Cole-Turner, an associate professor of theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, a denominational seminary of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and the author of “The New Genesis: Theology and the Genetic Revolution.” “What was taken to be prima facie evidence of sinful behavior seems to not be that at all,” he said.

Since pre-Socratic times, people have debated the relative importance of nature and nurture in shaping behavior. Now the debate has been honed to a fine edge by scientific findings.

“The fact that we can narrow down some genetic-based pieces of human behavior is really quite interesting,” said W. Mark Richardson, an Episcopal priest and theologian at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Berkeley. “It means that a lot of things have to do with the nature of nature, and not just nurture, in what determines human behavior.”

But a chicken-and-egg issue has also been raised. Behavior itself may influence brain growth. Animal studies have demonstrated that the neurites or extensions of nerve cells in animal brains--what might be called the brain’s hard wiring--are far more complicated and densely interwoven in animals exposed to intellectual stimuli than in animals that were not.

“The implications of these animal experiments is that whatever thoughts are going through our minds, whatever interactions we’re having with the rest of the world, affects the structure of our brains,” said David Cole, professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley.

Theologians are scrambling to keep up. In Houston last year, more than 260 theologians, physicians, scientists and public policy-makers met as part of the Institute of Religion’s and Baylor College’s three-year, multidisciplinary look at the religious and ethical implications of genetic science.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Episcopal Church Foundation and the Linbeck Foundation, the project focused on the Human Genome Project. Of special concern were the moral implications of genetic engineering, genetic screening and pregnancy termination.

Participants urged religious leaders to consider the implications not only of the Human Genome Project, but all genetic issues.

“They should re-examine both traditional doctrinal formulations in light of scientific advances and these advances in the light of their doctrines,” the participants wrote.

That is exactly what has happened at Temple Israel of Hollywood. Reform Rabbi John L. Rosove wrote to his congregants this year: “Until modern times Jewish tradition has considered homosexuality pathological. Those who engaged in same-sex relationships were thought to have done so willfully and freely. If new knowledge challenges the premise on which formerly sacrosanct beliefs were formulated, don’t we have an obligation to rethink our conclusions?”

Not everyone in his congregation agreed. When Rosove raised the issue three years ago--after Reform Judaism’s rabbinical association endorsed the ordination of homosexuals--some congregants pulled their children out of the synagogue’s school.

Overall, the congregation’s response has been positive, said Rabbi Daniel Swartz, Rosove’s colleague.

Others who hold Scripture to be the inerrant word of God are not budging any more than the Roman Catholic Church did 400 years ago, when it condemned Galileo for suggesting that the Earth orbited the sun.

Orthodox Jews, Muslims, conservative Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants are unwavering in their belief that homosexual acts are sinful.

“God didn’t blow it when he said homosexuality was an abomination,” said Orthodox Rabbi Baruch Y. Hecht, associate director of Habad of California.

For some Christians, homosexuality--even if genetically based--still points to the fallen state of the human race embodied in the doctrine of Original Sin.

Some denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have said that homosexual orientation is not sinful--homosexual acts are. But for many homosexuals, it would be laughable, were it not so painful, to be told that it was permissible to be themselves--but only to a point.

Even moderate to liberal denominations--Presbyterians, American Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians and Conservative Judaism, to name a few--continue to struggle over such issues as whether to ordain homosexuals.

To date, few do so officially. Some Episcopal bishops have ordained non-celibate homosexuals. In the Roman Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, homosexuality is not a bar to ordination, but gay candidates are expected to remain celibate.

New insights into human genetics and hormones are becoming important, although not always overriding, considerations in the ordination controversy.

“I would say what affects the strong debate in our church is less related to scientific data than all kinds of cultural wars going on around issues of sexuality in the wider society,” said the Rev. Karen Bloomquist, who is directing a sexuality study for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Meanwhile, even theoretical suggestions that unwanted genetic predispositions may someday be identified and eliminated are troubling to many.

Theologians and others have widely applauded breakthroughs that have allowed scientists to screen embryos for cystic fibrosis and to develop frost-resistant strawberries. But efforts to rid an embryo of predispositions that could lead to socially unacceptable or “sinful” behavior--something that is not yet possible--would be quite another question.

“The implications of that at the genetic level are fairly sinister,” said United Methodist minister Ernle William Dyer Young of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics.

Aside from the obvious concerns about creating a moral super race, the National Council of Churches has warned of “manifest danger” in an ideology of genetic behaviorism that implies that levels of human action and social worth are genetically determined.

It is not a prospect Cole-Turner welcomes. “Will we shortcut the whole moral predicament of the human being--a creature of ambitious will and limited knowledge trying to make the best of things? Will we try to relieve our offspring of that (sinful) condition and what will we have produced if we try to do that?”

Author Anthony Burgess posed the question in his 1962 best-selling novel, “A Clockwork Orange.” In it, he asks: “Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

Christian theology faces a special challenge, said Cole-Turner. He said that for 2,000 years the church has used sickness as a primary metaphor for sin. “If sickness is sin, then redemption is healing. As you well know, healing becomes more and more a medical as opposed to a spiritual process,” he said.

All of this presupposes that sinful acts are entirely genetic--a claim so abhorrent to the teachings of the world’s great religions that it is rejected out of hand.

“No one would say that because a rapist has it in his genes to rape women that it is OK for him to be a rapist. No one would say that because a man has difficulty controlling himself he therefore is allowed to cheat on his spouse,” Rabbi Hecht said.

Carder, who headed the United Methodist Church’s genetic science task force, said a person with a genetic predisposition may not necessarily act on it.

“We are all a strange combination of freedom and determination. But we must act in every circumstance as though we are free and not use any factors to say I have no responsibility,” Carder said.

Still, new scientific insights should give pause to those who would judge others because of their predispositions, Carder said.

Those who are not predisposed to certain behaviors are also cautioned to guard against the sin of pride.

“The moment one begins to boast of genetic inheritance, at that very moment one becomes very vulnerable to the most odious of Christian (and Islamic) sins--the sin of pride,” said Cole-Turner. “It’s what lies behind all sins.”

For those like Ingram who struggled with their homosexuality, the studies offer hope. Ingram, who has found a church where he feels welcome and loved, said the studies provide additional validation.

“I felt in my heart that (homosexuality) is something I was born with.” The studies, he said, “made me feel good about myself. They made me to feel less a sinner.”