Original Sin Only Verifiable Doctrine of Christianity

I read the following in a 3/15/2016 Wall Street Journal column entitled “The All-Spock-No-Kirk President” by op-ed writer William A. Galston

“In a striking phrase, Mr. Goldberg characterizes the president as a “Hobbesian optimist.”  On the one hand, Goldberg says, Mr. Obama has a “tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior.”  On the other, he “consistently....professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice.”

The question is where Hobbesian optimism is a remarkable synthesis of apparent opposites of an elegant oxymoron.  If you genuinely believe, as did theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom President Obama admires, that original sin is ‘the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith,” then you cannot believe that human nature progresses toward justice.  At most you can hope that our species gradually becomes wiser about institutional arrangements that constrain the evils of which we are capable."