I think that humans and other sentients throughout this universe who have our degree of consciousness and beyond, who have a spirit in the image of God, are in fact the purpose of Creation.
That said, Man's fall never happened, we did not fall, it is really man's ascent that is the basis of all religion.
We are creatures born from, into and emerging from the cut and thrust of natural order, and are progressing from animal to human. We are physically the products of evolution, our bodies are the product of the natural forces exerted upon it. Our spirits are also undergoing evolution.
Physically, psychologically we evolved from forms that were just as instinctive, animalistic and fixed upon self-preservation as any other primate, and primates we are.
So we come to humanhood loaded up on all the instinctive survival traits that any ape might have. We will fight, steal, connive, plot, covert, lie, murder, take sex via force or trickery, in fact we would have likely had a nascent culture not too dissimilar to that of common chimps or bonobos. Even today all these instincts and cultural traits still exist in us, but we now call many of them sins and we are trying to overcome these self-centred traits to produce loving, empathetic, kind, self-sacrificing beings worthy of being called human.
We never fell, we have been gradually transformed from an animal psychology to a human psychology by the likes of Jesus. The advent of Jesus marks a massive milestone in the advancement of human spirituality and laid foundations of behaviour and morality that we take for granted today.
If we look upon humanity with an eye of justice, generally humanity have come a staggeringly long way. It's easy to look at all the worgs in this world and forget to marvel at just how much we have changed and how much we get right.
We never fell, we are emerging as humans, we have a long way to go and we are a work in progress.
