The more we bring the past to life again by means of science, the less we can accommodate either Adam or the earthly paradise.
It is so impossible to include Adam and the earthly paradise (taken literally) in our scientific outlook, that I wonder whether a single person today can at the same time focus his mind on the geological world presented by science, and on the world commonly described by sacred history. We cannot retain both pictures without moving alternately from one to the other. Their association clashes, it rings false. In combining them on one and the same plane we are certainly victims of an error in perspective.
The reason why original sin eludes our detection is not because its smallness baffles it, but because its very magnitude transcends it.
Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Redemption, those vast universal events no longer appear as fleeting accidents occurring sporadically in time—a grossly immature view which is a perpetual offence to our reason and a contradiction of our experience. All four of those events become co-extensive with the duration and totality of the world; they are, in some way, aspects (distinct in reality but physically linked) of one and the same divine operation.
We must so expand our ideas that we shall find it impossible to locate original sin at any one point in our whole environment, and will realize simply that it is everywhere, as closely woven into the being of the world as the God who creates us and the Incarnate Word who redeems us.