I Have a Guilty Secret

My guilty secret is I read web sites arguing positions with which I do not agree. I also read web sites that champion positions I’m sympathetic to but everyone does that. I’m not too concerned about being fooled or bamboozled. I’m well enough trained to avoid the most obvious pitfalls and intelligent enough to VERIFY any claims or arguments.

Specifically I tend to read lots of papers and articles pitching creationism and what I’ll call conservative fundamentalist Christianity. Recently I’ve begun developing some concepts related to the story of Adam and Eve so I’ve been looking at Christian sites which cover Genesis.

They are absolutely unbelievable. Here are a few quotes from a typical page.

“God told Adam that he was free to eat from every tree in the garden, except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

This is true. God told ADAM. The bible doesn’t say anything about God telling Eve. Do you suppose that Adam passed this information on to the little women? That’s hard to say since Eve didn’t even have a name yet. But she does seem to have some inkling since she tells the serpent God said that she’s not allowed to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden.

The key point here is that neither Adam nor Eve understood good and evil. In other words, they couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong. Now if Adam couldn’t tell the difference between Right and Wrong, how the hell was he supposed to know that he was supposed to obey God?

How about a more basic question, what, in the supposedly idyllic environment of God’s perfect creation even comprised evil? Here’s another question, why did God create a tree of knowledge of good and evil? Who was he expecting to eat the fruit?

Last, but not least, would you consider a creation that could not tell the difference between right and wrong perfect or flawed?

“Later, Eve was deceived by Satan speaking through a serpent and ate the fruit.”

Actually the bible doesn’t say anything about Satan. It simply blames the serpent and a talking serpent no less which Eve didn’t seem to find all that unusual. Do you suppose all the animals talked? What do you suppose they talked about?

“She then took the fruit to Adam and he ate it knowing he was doing the wrong thing.”

And how, pray tell, did Adam know he was doing the wrong thing? Had he snuck in a taste of the fruit the night before? Because, as previously pointed out, if one has no knowledge of good and evil, one cannot tell the difference between right and wrong so Adam could not possibly have known that what he was doing was wrong. He couldn’t even understand the concept of wrong. Eve, on the other hand, since she had already eaten the fruit, knew perfectly well that she was going to get Adam in big trouble.

“Because they disobeyed what God had explicitly told them and chose to believe Satan, they began to experience spiritual death, and soon physical death.”

Hold it, slow down a little. They didn’t CHOSE anything. If you know no difference between good and evil then everything appears good. Besides, the serpent deceived Eve into eating the fruit and Eve deceived Adam right?

Actually, one could make a case that Eve deceived Adam but the serpent was nothing but 100% honest. When Eve tells him that God had said that if they eat or touch the fruit from the tree they will die, the serpent replies, in Genesis 3:4, "You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

He got that one right didn’t he? Adam and Eve did learn about good and evil and they didn’t die as a direct result of eating the fruit. As a matter of fact it’s unclear whether Adam and Eve were ever immortal. Since they originally had no knowledge of good and evil, they probably had no understanding of life and death either.

After they eat the fruit however, they would certainly figure it out eventually. God‘s reason for kicking them out of the garden is in Genesis 3:22, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

So here was the deal. Now that Adam understood good and evil he would eventually come to understand that death was something to be avoided and that would lead him to try and obtain fruit from the tree of life so that he could become immortal.

Note that God appears to know, and accept, that Adam would do that even if God commanded him not to. Just as a side issue, one has to wonder who comprises the “us” in the phrase “one of us.”

The counter argument is that Adam was immortal BEFORE he ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, became mortal upon eating the fruit, but could become immortal again by eating the fruit from the tree of life. But the bible doesn’t say anything to justify such an interpretation other than the indirect argument that God said Adam would die if he ate the fruit, God can’t lie and, since Adam didn’t die immediately, God must have meant eventually, therefore Adam must have been immortal before eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

“Adam and Eve sinned by placing their desires above what God had told them.”

And what desires might those be? All that the bible says about desires is in Genesis 3:6 “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.”

So what were Eve’s desires? Was she hungry? Not likely given the supposed abundance of food in the garden. If her desire was to gaze upon something “pleasing to the eye” about the last thing she would want to do is eat the fruit. Chomping on something with one’s teeth tends to upset the ascetics of the thing being chomped on. Or was her desire for wisdom?

Why would she desire wisdom? If she didn’t understand the difference between good and evil, could she even comprehend the concept of wisdom? Why would her desire to acquire wisdom be worthy of punishment?

So if I understand this properly, according to Christianity, obeying what God tells you to do is more important than anything else, which brings us back to the Euthyphro dilemma. Are things commanded by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are commanded by God?

I want to end with the biggest laugher on the page. In the bible Adam supposedly lives 960 years and other patriarchs from ancient times have similar multi-hundred year life times. So how come medical science today can barely keep us breathing for 70 or 80 years?

“Some scholars believe that the length of the life spans of the people of this time was due to a vapor canopy in the atmosphere. This may have made the earth's environment more hospitable to human life and increased life spans.”

And the empirical evidence you have to support this hypothesis is?