THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

Consider the following story line:  The mother of a couple of curious children announces to her kids that she has to run an errand and is leaving the house for a bit.  Before leaving she places a box of matches on the coffee table in the living room, points to matches, and says, “You can play with your toys but do not play with the matches.  If you light the matches you could start a fire and burn the house down.”

Right after she leaves, Lucy, a neighbor friend, stops over, spies the matches, and says, “Hey, wow, matches.  Let’s start a fire.”

“No, no,” the kids say, “Mom warned us not to play with the matches because we could burn the house down.”

To which Lucy replies, “Not if we’re careful.  Trust me; I know about matches and fire.  Let’s do it.”

Of course, we can imagine the remainder of the story.

The fundamental question is, Why would a parent put the matches in the living room in the first place and then draw attention to them?  Why wouldn’t she put them where the kids couldn’t reach them or wouldn’t find them?  

But, as the story in Genesis goes, that is essentially what God did with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil standing in for the matches.  And that raises a host of questions.  Why would God create a tree of knowledge in the first place if he didn’t want humans to eat its fruit?  What exactly was the point of creating such a tree?  And then why would God place it in the midst of the garden so that Adam and Eve would be continually reminded of it?  Why would God say that “in the day that you eat of it you shall die,” when that wasn’t true?  Why would Adam and Eve believe and obey the serpent rather than God?  After all, the serpent was just a talking animal, whereas God was, well, God.  And why would Eve and Adam eat the tree’s fruit if God had told them that it would kill them?

In truth, the Genesis story reads like the script for the lamest of horror movies in which the characters continually act irrationally in order to advance an illogical plot.

The Genesis story would seem especially embarrassing for those fundamentalists who believe in the story’s literal truth.  But, frankly, I don’t believe it helps much to consider the story as allegorical rather than factual.  Why would an all-knowing, all-loving god put humans to a test that he knew they would fail, especially when the result of failure would mean pain and suffering and death?

I’m familiar with the argument that this was a consequence of God endowing humans with free will.  But God knew that they would fail, so he knew the end of the story.  One must also ask the question of why an omnipotent God didn’t simply give humans free will for most choices but not free will to commit sin.  After all, presumably humans will have free will in heaven and yet will not sin.  Why could this be true in heaven but not on earth?

But here is my biggest disappointment with all of this:  When I was growing up in a fundamentalist Christian environment, I was taught—and believed because I didn’t know any better—that the Garden of Eden story was literally true.  This is what our parents taught us, what our parochial school teachers taught us, what the church elders taught us.  And I guess I would feel more or less the same if I had been taught that the story was metaphorically rather than literally true.  Such an interpretation does not resolve the problem of why a god who is supposedly all-loving would nevertheless set us up to fail, knowing that that is exactly what we would do.  Seems cruel, doesn’t it?

I am not blaming the adults who taught us these beliefs when we were too young to think critically.  They were simply teaching us what they thought was true, just as their elders had taught them a generation earlier.

The fault, rather, rests with a system that favors the uncritical acceptance of received authority rather than the promotion of critical thinking and rational thought.

© 2019 John M. Phillips