FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Virtually everyone in Christendom is familiar with the Garden of Eden morality play.  On the surface God stars as the benevolent creator who lays down a single simple rule.  Satan plays the heavy as the crafty, evil serpent, enticing humans to disobey God’s rule.  And a naive Eve and a love-smitten Adam play pawns in this battle between God and Satan.

A veneer later layered onto this myth is the idea that Adam and Eve fell because God gave them free will and they just couldn’t handle that freedom of choice.  This concept of free will was added to give a supposedly omniscient, omni-benevolent God an excuse for not realizing that this was going to end badly and preventing it from happening in order to save the world from all of the pain and suffering to which such a fall would inevitably lead.

If this were a live theater production, the program handed out might have God as the uber good guy and Satan as the classic bad guy.  But I see this play differently.  In my view it was God who bungled the whole affair—from the beginning.

Again, it was God who supposedly invested humans with free will.  The argument is that God had only two choices: He could have created humans as complicated automatons without free will who would be programmed never to be disobedient to him.  Or he could have given them free will, knowing that they might ultimately exercise that freedom to sin and thereby suffer the consequences.  God could claim that doing so would be humans’ choice, not his.

But this is essentially a straw man argument.  Surely, a truly omnipotent deity could have devised a way for humans to have free will except in matters of obedience to his rules.  We make all sorts of decisions on a daily basis where none of the choices would be sinful—in ordering off a restaurant menu, for example, we might choose fish over chicken.  [It should be noted that I do not believe that humans actually have free will in any event, but that’s another matter.]  Alternatively, God could have said that it would be OK for humans to be disobedient—after all, they were just, well, human—and that he loved them anyway and would not punish them for their faults.

But God’s failure to make creative use of his omnipotence was not his only problem.  His choice of rules was misconceived.  Essentially, God told Adam and Eve that they could do whatever they wanted with but a single exception: They were forbidden to eat the fruit of one particular tree in the garden.  There was no logical reason for this prohibition.  There was no evident reason why eating the fruit of that tree should be forbidden.  God did tell them that “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” [Genesis 2:17].  But that wasn’t actually true, as Satan pointed out, and in any event God had total control over the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree.  He wouldn’t have to make eating the fruit deadly--or enlightening.

More to the point, shouldn’t God instead have laid down rules relating to moral behavior?  Think of the structure of a moral code.  In general, the rules deal with behavior that has consequences for the well-being of others or of nature, not with whether humans should be able to eat the fruit of an arbitrary tree.

There is yet another problem with how God handled this.  According to the myth, eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil did in fact have an effect.  It actually gave Adam and Eve the ability to understand good and evil [Genesis 3:22].  The clear implication is that until they ate of the fruit, they did not have such knowledge, they did not understand the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong.  Moreover, God regretted that they had attained that understanding.  But in my view that would be supremely unfair.  Why would you grant humans the ability to make free choices and yet deprive them of the understanding of why such choices might be good or poor ones?

And this is why Satan comes off as the hero of this play, since he encouraged humans to seek after truth rather than to be obedient simply because someone in authority lays down an arbitrary rule.

© 2018 John M. Phillips