I am going to start two new series on this blog. One is “Things the Bible Doesn’t Say” about things that Christians are taught or commonly believe that are not in the Bible and likely not true. The other is “Stupid Stuff”, my rants and explanations of the many dumb things that are commonly believed or practiced in today’s culture. This should be a pretty limitless source of inspiration.
This first essay is of the first variety. Something the Bible doesn’t say that I hear preached and repeated all the time. It drives me to distraction. I am going to talk about Genesis 2 and 3. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
First some definitions. Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of existence, among other things. What is God? As far as Christian metaphysics is concerned, God is a being necessary to the existence of everything. God is all good, all powerful, all knowing, everywhere, and exists eternally.
The reason we say that God is necessary to the existence of everything is from the principle of causality and the logical statement that an infinite regression of intermediate causes cannot make anything happen.
First, we have a premise that a thing cannot cause itself to exist. Therefore, it is caused to exist. For example, water exists because hydrogen and oxygen exist and because of the strong and weak nuclear forces. Hydrogen exists because protons and electrons exist and can combine such that there is only one of each. Protons and electrons exist because their component subatomic particles exist, and so on. We can’t have a regression of these intermediate causes that goes on forever. It has to stop somewhere with a root cause. In fact, every backward regression of causes stops at the same root cause. We call that God.
In order for God to be the root cause of everything, God has to have the plans for everything in his being. (God is an immaterial being and therefore has no sex or gender but, since we have been referring to God as” He” for a long time, “it” makes for an awkward sounding sentence. Therefore, I will stick with convention and use “He” and “His”. Feel free to mentally substitute any pronouns you like) This makes God all knowing. Since God created the universe, he created space, time, matter, and energy. Since he created time, he has to be outside of time. Therefore, God sees the future and the past in the same way we see the present.
So, God knows everything and sees the future just like we see today. When he creates something, he creates what it is today, what it was before and what it will be in the future all at once. Like an object with a timeline extending in one or both directions. Got it?
Now we come to the story of Adam and Eve. As it is commonly told, God created Adam, then Eve from a part of Adam. He created a garden and placed Adam and Eve in it. His plan was for them to stay in the garden, to only know the good things he provided and live forever under His protection. He told them they could eat from any plant in the garden except one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A serpent convinced Eve that God had given her bad advice. She ate the fruit of the forbidden tree and convinced Adam to do the same. God’s plans were ruined by the rebellious humans he had made, and he threw them out of the garden and sent them off to exercise their dominion over the earth, condemning Adam to have to toil for his life necessities and Eve to suffer greatly bearing children.
I have heard a preacher say that Jesus wept over Lazarus even though He was going to raise him because He knew it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Death wasn’t supposed to happen.
Now let’s go back to what God is. Can an all powerful, all knowing God that exists outside of time, that sees the future just like we see the present be surprised in any way by any event? Of course not. This is not a story of God planning and man doing something else. God knew exactly what would happen in the Garden the instant he created Adam. He had to or he’s not God. God didn’t force Adam and Eve to make the choices they did, but he knew what they would do from the moment of their creation. The so-called fallen world we live in is exactly what God planned. It has to be, or he isn’t God. The Bible doesn’t say God planned a different outcome and man messed it up. It simply tells what happened. The other part we made up.
We Christians call this story “the fall of man”. The scripture doesn’t use this term. It’s not there. Interestingly some Jewish scholars call this the rise of man. It’s when man took the place in history that God planned for him. When he stopped being a sheltered pet in the garden and became a full human with all the powers for good and evil that entails. Genesis 3:22:
And the Lord God said, “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.”
It’s worth mentioning here that many Christian traditions don’t think Genesis is a literal account of creation. They think it is an instructional allegory. Whichever side you take, literal or allegory, there is a lesson. That God created man with a capacity to think for himself. That because of this, man was always going to choose to have knowledge of good and evil. When I was little, I was taught that I was born with original sin because of Adam. Somehow I had to pay for Adam’s transgression. Not really. Had I been in the same circumstances, I would have made the same choice. So would you. It’s part of what makes us human. We live in this world as it is because of who and what we are. God made it so. We wouldn’t know what good was unless we had evil to contrast it to, anymore that we would understand light without darkness or cold without heat.
The Bible story of Adam and Eve in the garden is not a story of God having a grand plan, Adam and Eve messing it up, and God punishing all of their descendants forever because of their rebellion. It is a story of God creating Adam and Eve and putting them into a situation that revealed to them and to us what they were and what we are. God already knew. God made us intelligent and rational creatures that tend to think a bit too highly of ourselves so that we have difficulty taking advice from others, even if the other is God. We chose to have knowledge of good and evil and that makes us able, with God’s help, to choose to do great good. Without the equal capacity to choose evil, the choice for good would be morally meaningless and I don’t think God intended us to live morally meaningless lives. For reasons currently known to Him and not us, God intended us to live these lives, on this Earth, in these circumstances. We are to look to Him and live the best lives we can. Original sin isn’t what Adam did, it’s what we are.
