There’s a bit of discussion going around concerning the ontological status of Adam and Eve — is the story literally true, useful metaphor, not really true but based somehow in reality, or what? For me, it would be hard to think of a less interesting question. But I do have a serious issue with the A&E story, which I rarely see discussed: it’s a terrible lesson on which to found a system of belief.
The story is told in Genesis, chapter two and chapter three. God sets up Adam in the Garden of Eden, and soon takes one of his ribs and makes Eve. For the most part the Garden is a pleasant place, and there doesn’t seem to have been any duties more onerous than coming up with names for the different animals. But for reasons that are not explained, God placed in the Garden something called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and commanded that Adam and Eve not eat from it. (Translational difficulties being what they are, there is a school of thought that argues that “good and evil” should be understood as simply meaning “all things, both good and evil.”) Eventually, of course, they take a bite, with a little urging from a crafty serpent. God gets angry, curses them, and casts them out of the Garden forever — the Fall of Man, as Christians would have it.
The choice given to Adam and Eve was a simple one: (1) obey, or (2) attain knowledge, in particular of good and evil. If those are my two choices, I’m choosing “knowledge” every day. Count me on Team Eve on this one. As far as I’m concerned, this wasn’t the Original Sin, it was the Original Heroic Act.
I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.
Sean,
I’m not sure what you meant, but “knowledge” in this story isn’t supposed to be literal. The story is about the sin of pride:
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_32genesis3.html
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
Whether it qualifies as a “real” religion or not, religious naturalism incorporates empiricism as a guiding value. A recent expression of this relatively new tradition is Unitarian Universalist minister William R. Murry’s book Reason and Reverence, in which he extends religious humanism using the resources of science-based naturalism, arriving at a humanistic religious naturalism, http://www.naturalism.org/murry.htm
Ah, I see: if you reinterpret the word “wisdom” so it means a completely different word, then it all works out! Indeed, though the word is apparently used the same way everywhere else in the Bible, it means something different there, so that the story will work out the way you want it to.
Even with that transparent rationalization, it still doesn’t work. That is, the story states that certain kinds of knowledge are bad, and you should blindly obey those who tell you which is which without questioning.
You can say it’s about the sin of pride, but pride led them to seek this knowledge, and that knowledge becomes their punishment.
Knowledge = bad things happening.
Here is a quote from Sagan’s Dragons of Eden (a wonderful book) that looks at the story of Eden and the casting out of Adam and Eve.
One perhaps can see how over the long development of human consciousness this metaphor became associated to some degree with the acquisition of “knowledge” and painful childbirth:
“So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume. Modern men and women have braincases twice the volume of Homo habilis’. Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent. The American anatomist C. Judson Herrick described the development of the neocortex in the following terms: “Its explosive growth late in phylogeny is one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy.” The incomplete closure of the skull at birth, the fontanelle, is very likely an imperfect accommodation to this recent brain evolution. The connection between the evolution of intelligence and the pain of childbirth seems unexpectedly to be made in the Book of Genesis. In punishment for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God says to Eve, “In pain shalt thou bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex. Even at the time that the Eden story was written, the development of cognitive skills was seen as endowing man with godlike powers and awesome responsibilities.”
This all just goes back to Prometheus. Zeus gave the task of creating men and animals to the titans Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus created men out of clay, in the image of gods. It took him some serious time, and when he finished, stupid Epimetheus had already given all possible gifts to animals. Damn, the only gift left in the world was the gift of fire (aka “knowledge”). But Zeus would not let Prometheus give it to men, who he thought did not deserve it yet. Never mind, Prometheus just waited for his chance, defied Zeus, and stole a branch to give men fire. Big up to Prometheus, but this enraged Zeus and Prometheus did not have a nice ending, with the eagle etc. Poor Prometheus. Well, dont worry, Heracles rescued him later on. In this story, the problem is not fire (or knowledge) but deserving fire (or deserving knowledge). Once men got it in the greek myth, they started using it to kill each other and to destroy nature, and to almost destroy themselves… Zeus finally had to send them Hermes to bring them “justice”, which is a different concept from knowledge. As often discussed here, knowing everything about QFT in curved spacetime doesnt give any clue to a concept like “justice”, so the issue Zeus had in the greek myth was that men got knowledge before moral principles, while they should just have been more patient, learn moral principles such as “justice” first, and acquire knowledge afterwards, with wisdom and patience. I bet the Christian story has (at least partly) the same symbolic meaning.
Heres some advice from Jesus: Follow the Truth and the Truth shall set you free.
Were you alive in the Garden of Eden?? I diden’t think so. Do you know what really happened there??
There had to be more to the store as we see hundreds of years covered in words that thake mere seconds to read(Genesis 1-5).
John 21:25 sums it up good.
You want Gnosticism; its very name is from the same root as “knowledge”. Gnosticism teaches that we can attain union with god through direct experience and knowledge, without relying on doctrine or intercessors. To Gnostics, the serpent is the hero in Genesis.
The only correct translation from the Jewish philosophy perspective [ the source of this, you know]
is ” approach to knowledge as good or bad, (as opposed to true or false)”.
Carefully read Maimonides , Guide for the Perplexed I chapters 1 & 2 .
Of course it’s a metaphor .
Maimonides wants all ideas evaluated as true or false . All falsehood is discarded. Truth is determined by proof or direct sensation .
Sean: “As far as I’m concerned, this wasn’t the Original Sin, it was the Original Heroic Act.”
If so, then Adam and Eve also learned the Original Aphorism: No good deed goes unpunished.
Looking at that picture of A&E, I just wonder who has been shaving Eve’s armpits 🙂
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
You could dabble in a bit of Luciferianism as well I think. I think it’s kind of the cleverer big brother of Satanism, presenting Lucifer/the snake as a humanist hero helping man stand up to God’s authoritarian demands for ignorance. Anti-authoritarian, pro-knowledge. I don’t know whether you have to get up to any funny business with chickens and whatnot.
#8 @nachumj: Really? Jewish philosophy is the _source_ of Genesis? I’m afraid it was written long before any systematic Jewish philosophy. Maimonides is simply one of a number of commentators 1500 years or so after the composition, albeit a highly influential one.
#8 + #1 @Phil: It is a great fortune bordering on suspiciously convenient that those parts of scripture which make truth claims that are disprovable by modern science, patently ridiculous to modern common sense, or whose literal implications are offensive to modern sensibilities intersect perfectly with those parts of scripture that are obviously (“of course”) to be interpreted metaphorically. One wonders whether, as man’s knowledge grows and his values mature, one day we find that all scripture is only to be interpreted as a metaphor?
I’m with ya. Adam and Eve, the serpent, Icarus, Prometheus, all more deserving of acclamation than a god who would lock you in a garden with those two choices.
I contend that this story is really “about” distinguishing monotheistic Jahwism from the broader polytheistic Semitic paganism. AFAWK, in ancient Semitic pagan tradition, Yahweh was a “demiurge,” a creator god only, and the serpent is the hero of the Genesis story. And Yahweh is the one cast out of the garden, not the other way around.
In order to turn Semitic polytheists into Semitic monotheists, you’ve got to rewrite the mythology to put Yahweh at the center of the story. Which is why so much of it makes no sense to people unfamiliar with the earlier versions.
(Of course, very little real knowledge of Semitic polytheism has survived three millennia of iconoclasm; most of what we do know comes from Phoenician/Canaanite archeology and the study of minority Semitic religions like Yazidi. So it’s mostly speculative. But it works for me.)
But Sean, if you were inventing a religion to control people, wouldn’t you also discourage them from seeking knowledge? Informed subjects are more likely to defy authority. You want them to think knowledge is evil and that the safest thing to do is to keep their heads down and toil. Of course, you have to imagine yourself not as a theoretical physicist but as a tribal leader who wishes to live off the labor of gullible people.
A couple details of the story commonly overlooked:
God lied to Adam:
Gen 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
The serpent told the truth to Eve:
Gen 3:4-5: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
They ate the fruit, and they did not die that day, in fact they lived several hundred more years, and they knew good and evil.
Templar,
“Were you alive in the Garden of Eden?? I didn’t think so. Do you know what really happened there??”
No, but neither were you.
I’ve never been to the center of the Sun either, but our best explanations tell us to a high degree of precision what the temperature is.
I prefer to rely on our best explanations for how knowledge comes about — and not on fiction and miracles, which can be invoked to explain everything and nothing.
I especially like how Templar 7 attempts to verify what the bible says with something else the bible says.
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
Buddhism. Or, I don’t know if there is a religion based on Jesus rather than on followers of Jesus, but that would work too. I like to say that I’m Buddhist because it’s what Jesus would’ve wanted.
I always had a problem with the A&E story but on a different avenue. Say I am a designer and I design object “X” Then obect “X” does not perform the way you thought you designed it for, so who do you blame yourself for the faulty design or object “Z”? Most humans would go back and see where the design was wrong but not GOD he blames the object.
Phil O, I’m not sure what version of the greek myth you’re referencing, but the versions I am familiar with has nothing about “waiting” to get fire later, after anything. Prometheus gave man fire because man was freezing to death, and man needed something to defend himself from the animals, and all the nifty gifts, like teeth and claws and speed and size and power, that Epimetheus gave them. Fire was man’s salvation – without it man was about to die a mass, grisly death. Fire in the greek myth doesn’t directly represent knowledge or wisdom, it represented technology.
And Zeus said no. Not “not right now,” and not “No, but we’ll give man something else to protect him from the elements and the wild animals that is safer for him”, but “No. Not now. Not ever. Fire is MINE and I’m not sharing. Ever.”
And this is how religions that believe in Genesis should teach it– mine does. I don’t believe we could have true joy without both the fall and the savior. It was all part of God’s plan all along. I like that phrase, “Original Heroic Act.”
I, on the other hand, think that it is a *great* way to find a belief system, if your goal of a belief system is to enable it to survive for a long time. I mean, what can be better than to declare from the get go “Stop seeking knowledge, and start listening to me.”
A religion based on disobeying authority will be popular among teenagers everywhere. At least, until they grow up.
@10. Felix,
Going out on a limb here, but it might be theologically consistent that body hair was one of the punishments for disobeying. Or maybe the artist equated innocence with youth (or thought that the audience would), and therefore wanted to portray Adam and Eve as physically youthful.
What I want to know is what condition causes leaves to shelter the groin??
The story of Adam and Eve is clearly fiction, but does give us an interesting probe into the human intellect of several thousands of years ago. What stands out is that our ancestors recognized the significant difference between man and animal. It tells us that they could identify our similarities with beasts, but could not explain the intellectual gulf between us and everything else.
Remember, the recordation of stories like adam and ever occured several thousands of years after the bottlenecking of the gene pool. Modern man had existed for tens of thousands of years with nearly the intellectual capacity as we have today. Some two to three thousand generations passed from the population that spawned our most human ancestors to the one that wrote adam and eve. Whether adam and eve is a recordation of a traumatic event in the evolution of man is a very tantalizing thought.