The Innocence of Children

     I reject St. Augustine's opinion that children are not born innocent, that they are born with "original sin" and are thus unable to control their desires.  What he has failed to consider is the evolutionary advantage of infants and children screaming and scratching for what they need and want.  Without such base communication tactics, the species would struggle to survive.  Extra attention is needed for them, so one would expect them to act out, particularly when they can't communicate on the same level we can.  Their brains also struggle to reason when they are young, through no fault of their own but the requirement of anatomy.  Therefore, by his own logic, they have not fully developed souls and cannot be expected to act with a purely moral intent.

    In fairness, he couldn't have known about evolution or anatomical development, as it was not generally taught in the 5th century, nor was the Christian faith particularly engaged with natural philosophy.  The cultural zeitgeist that brought in the Middle Ages rejected it for pure creationism, something that manipulated the innocence of youth into a mythological corruption, generated by the tasting of a forbidden fruit in a utopian garden: the Biblical story of creation in the Garden of Eden, when Eve tasted the apple, inadvertently cursing all the children of mankind.  Because it is based on pure belief, this line of reasoning hardly makes sense philosophically.