The Five-Stage Map

A map of the proposal

1. Original creation. God creates an order that is genuinely “very good.” Adam and Eve belong to this original creation and live in communion with God.

2. The Fall. Human disobedience introduces a real rupture involving humanity, creation, and death. The Fall is not merely a private moral mistake.

3. The fallen order. A creation marked by decay, conflict, suffering, predation, extinction, and death comes into being. From inside this order, its history may be described by cosmology, geology, and evolutionary biology.

4. Entry into fallen history. Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden into the fallen order. One possible version places this entry thousands of years ago, after biologically human populations already existed within the fallen world’s internal history.

5. Redemption and new creation. Christ enters the fallen order, defeats sin and death, and begins the restoration that culminates in resurrection and new creation.

This map separates causal order from measured chronology. FEC proposes that the Fall is responsible for the fallen world’s total history without requiring the Fall to appear as an event billions of years ago on that world’s internal clock. That distinction is the model’s central conceptual move and also one of its most important points for philosophical scrutiny.