I always love when people bring up the Adam and Eve story, because it gives me a chance to copy and paste an essay I had already written on it long ago...
Here you go...
In regards to the Adam and Eve story...
I find that to be more a tale of God's supreme injustice.
"Of every tree in the garden, thou mayest freely eat. But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat. For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die."
- God (to Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden)
I was brought up to believe that the Genesis account in the bible was literally true. But the story of Adam and Eve always had major problems for me. My biggest question was: "How could a God justify his punishment of two people for something they did before they had any knowledge of good and evil?"
Now, parents often tell their children, "Don't take sweets from strangers."
As adults, we're aware that it can easy for strangers to gain the confidence of children by offering them treats. And children, with little or no experience of adult deception aren't well equipped to make reliable judgments about the intentions of strangers. God never warned Adam and Eve not to take fruits from serpents, and at the time that the serpent told Eve that she wouldn't die if she ate the fruit, contrary to what God had told her, Genesis indicated that neither she nor Adam had the insight to even know they were naked. God had clearly not equipped them, in terms of intellect or experience, to handle situations such as this complete contradiction between what he and the serpent had said about the fruit.
How could he hold them responsible for their decision to eat it, and why, of all things would the knowledge of good and evil be something that God kept from them in the first place? I find that one of the most extraordinary ideas in the bible.
If you can't make any distinction between what constitutes goodness, and what constitutes evil, there would be no moral distinction between saving someone's life... and destroying it.
It seems we're all expected to assume the serpent was evil when it tells Eve they won't die. But why?
Since we're told that Adam went on to live another 900 years after the "apple incident", it was actually God who lied when he said Adam would die the day he ate the apple. All the serpent did was expose that lie, and informed Eve, truthfully, that she would know good and evil.
Now if I heard a teacher tell a child, "The day you study evolution, you'll be struck down by lightning." ... I would expose that lie and tell the child that the only thing that happens when you study evolution is that you're better informed to judge the plausibility of different accounts of man's appearance on the planet.
(By the way, I'm talking about the scientific theory of evolution. Not the "brick turns into man" or the "My grandmother was a marmoset" variety of definition that some people trot out when they want to argue against science.)
I've heard some attempts to explain God's deception.
One is that to God, a thousand years is like a day... So when God told Adam that he would die within the day, it was true in a sense.
I suppose it was true in that sense...
i.e. in the sense of it being untrue... Or at best: meaningless.
Again, God was talking to someone who didn't even know he was naked. How was Adam supposed to know that by "One day", God meant "a thousand years".
Language is about communication. If someone wants to make up their own private definitions of words, they're free to do so. But only on the understanding that no one will know what they're talking about unless they explain those private definitions.
Another defense if that Adam and Eve did die that day, but it was a "spiritual death", a loss of innocence, a tearing away from God.
Again, this is a modification of what was stated. Why didn't God use the phrase "Thou shalt die a spiritual death." if that is what he meant?
Remember, Adam wasn't the brightest crayon in the box, and an omniscient being like God would know that he would pretty much have to spell things out for Adam.
When I hear a warning like, "The day you eat this apple, you'll die." The simplest interpretation to me is that the apple will cause you to die, by poison or some other means. Now, of course, if what I get from Genesis is that if God was telling Adam that the apple itself would kill him, that would be my interpretation.
But this illustrates that if we start making our own interpretations of what's in the bible, rather than going by the actual words used, we can find support for every point of view, even points of view that flatly contradict each other. If everyone is allowed to interpret the bible to fit their point of view, then the bible ends up supporting no point of view.
According to what's actually written in Genesis in bibles used by modern Christians; It was God, not the serpent, who lied.
And what's the first indication we have that Adam and Eve know good from evil after they eat the apple and it is written that their eyes are opened?
Well, they suddenly know that they're naked, and they sew fig leaves together to cover themselves.
What Genesis appears to be saying here is that there's something intrinsically shameful about nudity, that as soon as we know good from evil, we automatically know that it's wrong to be naked. This idea has absolutely no foundation. There are millions of people today who are perfectly comfortable sunbathing naked, swimming naked, and even playing sports naked. Some people have a problem with nudity, others don't.
There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about it. Disapproval of nudity is a cultural attitude, not a moral absolute.
Well, back to the plot...
God calls to Adam, asking where he is, which is another inconsistent point. If God knows everything, as many claim, he would know where Adam was, along with everything else that had happened. While we're on the subject, he would also have also foreseen the entire interaction with Eve and the serpent before it happened.
Well, let's face it... You wouldn't need to be Columbo to see that one coming a mile off.
But anyway, Adam says he's hiding because he's naked, and God says:
"Who told thee that thou wast naked?"
Adam and Eve admit to eating the apple, and then God carries out his rather extreme punishment against them and all human kind. It seems to me that withholding knowledge of good and evil from two people, then cursing the entire human race when those people exhibit behavior that reflects their inevitable inability to make moral judgments, would be about about as sadistically unfair as refusing to show yourself and then abandoning everyone that therefor doubts your existence to eternal torture in hell.
It would be setting people up to fail, which far from indicating a being of infinite intelligence and moral integrity, would suggest to me a being of a much lower level of wisdom, compassion, and basic psychological insight than the average human being.
I suspect that the reason that the God of Genesis is portrayed as a being who employs brute force rather than transparency and understanding, is that the authors of Genesis conceived of the God they were writing about as a moody parent whose unpredictability would inspire fearful respect. Adam and Eve have to sin and be humbled to demonstrate God's awesome power over human kind. Unfortunately, with the particular plot of Genesis, it's authors succeed only in depicting a God of fantastic injustice and callous aggression, whether it's meant to be taken literally, or as a parable.
I was told that the bible was literally true when I was a child. But the more I was exposed to it, the more I wondered why all the grown-ups around me were going along with it, ignoring its blatant contradictions. The questions I asked them about the conflicting statements in the bible weren't met with open discussion in an attempt to find answers. They were met with disapproval and dismissal, and also anger, which for me was another indicator that something was very wrong.
Why were people so insecure about my honest search for answers?
Why was I being discouraged from thinking, when in every other area of my life, thinking had been not only encouraged, but praised and rewarded?
It was like being in some kind of Twilight Zone, where I was expected to admire the Emperor's new clothes, when not only were the clothes invisible... But so was the Emperor.
I think the Bible is a fascinating collection of writings, full of powerful scenes and imagery. It has some beautiful ideas, it has some repulsive ideas. But far from being the air-tight and definitive work one would expect from an infallible, infinitely wise and loving, perfect being, it portrays a God that withholds crucial knowledge, lies to the first humans, punishes the human race for something they had no responsibility for, deliberately wipes out almost all life on Earth... It's a long list of very unstable behaviors.
The vague and contradictory parables contained in the bible, and the messages of changing and questionable moral values, read to me as a collection of exactly the kind of material that would be compiled by decidedly non-divine, human authors, operating within limited knowledge and understanding, and primitive cultural attitudes.
Despite a fairly strong religious background and no apparent adult Atheists around me, I stopped believing in organized religion before my teenage years, but I stopped believing in what was written in the bible much earlier. And the story of Adam and Eve is one of the reasons why.
