Adam and Eve

[Himalaya]

( this a question which arose from the Alpha thread, but I've taken it outside)

As I understand it a lot of the trickier questions of Christianity - the idea of of sin, the problem of evil and why god doesn't intervene, and the idea that God had to send his son to earth and then have him die to atone for our sins - all go back to 'the fall' I.e. the story of Adam and Eve , the serpent, the apple, original sin inherited down the line etc...

I understand that plenty of Christians don't believe in the literal creation story - but say it is a metaphor...but what I don't understand is what it is a metaphor for? It seems so central to all the other parts of the religion, but it gets skated over in modern times since it is so far removed from what we now know of the big bang, the origins of life and evolution.

What does 'the fall' mean if you don't believe in Adam and Eve etc...What do the different parts of the story - the apple, the knowledge, the nakedness, the garden etc...mean?

Apologies if it's an ignorant question.

I would see it as a story about how humans came to see themselves as moral beings with free will, passing from a state of innocence to having concepts of good and evil and the corresponding experience of temptation, guilt, shame etc, just as we presumably did at some point in our evolutionary history, and indeed just as each of us do at some point in our infancy.

Its quite an interesting part of the creation myth. The internal logic seems a bit flawed:

If, prior to eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve didn't know what was right or wrong, why was it a sin for them to eat it?

I have done a couple of Alpha's, am a Christian with a very strong faith and I still think it is complete tosh if read literally. (and even as a metaphor, the creation and the story of Adam and Eve troubles me somewhat)

To me, the story of Adam & Eve in Genesis is a fairy story - an explanation of how mankind came to be given extent of the scientific knowledge available at the time Genesis was written. I think it was written about 1500 years before Jesus was born, and Moses was writing about a time 1500 years before that - but am happy to be corrected if I am awry on that.

By the way, I rage away and shout at many many parts of the new testament and can barely yet bring myself to read some parts of the old...but I think that questioning a massive part of faith. Himalaya, I do not believe there is such thing as an ignorant question...

• just so I don't misrepresent myself - I am not a Christian or an Alpha attendee, I am just curious about this and didn't want to hijack their thread.

The question is --- am I right in thinking that the Christian ideas about God, Jesus and his relationship to human beings are quite tied up with the idea of the creation and the fall? And if so what does that mean, now that we know it didn't happen like that?

The story is many things. It is how a group of people understood themselves and creation in relation to God and how they understood that relationship to have faltered. It's not a story about "evil" and Adam and Eve choosing evil things over the nice things God had provided, but about hubris and self-assertion and denial of the sustaining relationship with the Creator: Adam thinks he can understand God by placing himself in a more objective relationship to him, rather than by participating in the solidarity and mutual trust of each to the other. They live by responding to God's word and each is mutually enriched by this. Adam and Eve break the trust, the bond, the mutuality of their relationship with God by setting themselves outside his providence and guidance, by considering there is "more" beyond Him. Whereas actually there is less. Adam/Eve looked to themselves for fulfilment in a very material sense, but the Fall is a spiritual fall, a distancing.

Part of this story comes from people's sense that the world can be a marvellous place but that there is a not-rightness about things which should be right, particularly in people's spiritual lives: people fight, are selfish, worry about death, have to work like Trojans in a world that sometimes seems physically set against them (natural difficulties - weather, disaster - and physical, spiritual and mental distress). They intuited that humankind has been repeatedly good at setting itself against the good in things, has arrogantly tried to be in charge and thought they knew best, has rejected a relationship with a loving Creator they do have experience of. The whole story is about our own awareness of our failings - "we absolutely know there is a loving caring God who has given us everything and actually we screwed up, no two ways about it, and walked away from heaven."

I regard the snake as not an evil, or something from "outside" but a stimulus from which a choice can be made. It raises the questions of questions. It is a temptation but not a compulsion. The snake sets up God as a rival and enemy to Adam/Eve and it is the temptation to pursue this that is the choice they make.

It's a good and vital story. The whole notion about free-will which is crucial to an understanding of creation and our response to God (and understanding of evil/disease/accidents/natural disasters etc).

Brilliant post Dandy. Can't really add much but will offer my waffle anyway.

I see the creation story as a metaphor representing rebellion against God and the discovery of free will, and the 'fall from Eden' shows how going our own way isn't necessarily what is best for us in any way.

I think all of humanity naturally rebels against God. Harsh wording I guess but it can be seen anywhere. This does not mean that 'we are all bad' or that humans are only evil and have no good in us, but does mean we all have sin. Sin is different to goodness, we all fall short of God who is perfection, and that is what sin is - the word sin means going the wrong way. But because we are made in God's image I believe we have much goodness in us, and that Jesus in his sacrifice meant that we could be reconciled with God - not by us being good, but by acknowledging his sacrifice.

It is all very complex, but all beautifully simple somehow too. God and man fell out of relationship, Jesus restored it. The Adam and Eve story tells of the relationship fall out and rebellion, in order to set the scene for the whole of kingdom history throughout the bible.

It doesn't need to be true (and pretty certainly isn't!) to be an effective way of describing what is true of us all. I believe.

applause on your post too, madangel - esp about kingdom history. The whole arc of humanity's relationship with God is one of free-will, falling short of what God wants for us, self-exile and the many forms of return, the key essential Return being through Jesus and his sacrifice. It's Jeremiah, it's the Prodigal Son, it's Jacob and Esau, and Jonah, it's the Exodus, it's the whole arc of the OT, and the whole arc of history we live in.

Grimma, as another non-believer I agree the logic is flawed. But I also think that the logic contained in the whole notion of free will is flawed. In a godless universe it must be that at any given point our decisions and actions are nothing more than the result of the total sum of influences, both biological and environmental, that have acted upon us up to that point. And yet it is hard to let go of the idea that our behaviour - and consequently we ourselves - can be "good" or "bad"; indeed we can't function as society without it. The Adam and Eve story seems to me to be a description of exactly this fundamental contradiction in our understanding of ourselves.

ZD - yes. Its hard to escape the conclusion that we don't really have 'free will' ... but it feels like we do and its best to carry on pretending we do.

I had to write that, you know

Thanks all for your explanations. I am still confused though - I find religious language very hard to understand, it seems to slip from story told by our ancestors to metaphor to truth claim without clear boundaries.

What I hear is that the truth claim inside the metaphor is something like this: god created man in his image, for some time humans were in harmony with god and did what he wanted and there was no war, worry, selfishness, disease, hunger, disasters etc.. But then human beings became arrogant and rebelled against god and stopped doing what he wanted and so the world became the more dangerous place we know where women die in childbirth, children are abused, innocents are killed by wars and tsunamis etc...

Is that right?

It still seems to fly in the face of what we know about natural history though - that humans have evolved alongside all other organisms and were not built to a plan, and that the 'cruelties' of the world - predators, disease, hunger, conflict etc... are the natural pressures that drove our evolution.

From this perspective it doesn't make sense to think of humans (smart, toolmaking, empathetic, storytellers,
protective parents etc...) as existing before the 'bad
stuff' happened because it was this bad stuff (the not rightness with the world you describe DandyDan) that shaped humans into being.

"Is that right?"

I don't think so, no.

The story is a story, not a history. The story isn't saying "it was like this for a period of time and then something happened and the world and humanity became all screwed up". It's a story that is describing what seems self-evident to the writers and the people of their time about a) the nature of the world b) the nature of human beings c) the nature of God d) humanity's current relationship and understanding of God.

What it can mean for a Christian today is to do with what our ideal relationship to God should be: it isn't perfect because we screw up all the time, and the world isn't perfect either. Scientifically the world exists as it does with free-will built into it but it doesn't mean that there isn't an ideal that can be aimed at,. Where there are places or times or instances where there is no more crying, where the sick are tended, the hungry fed, the lonely and bereaved comforted, the prisoner given aid, then the kingdom of God thing is happening and some of the rightness is happening; but now we have to work at it.

The inner truth of the story still holds; there's nothing about "smart, tool-making, empathetic, protective, story-telling" in the story that prevents these being attributes of Adam/Eve before the Fall as well as after.

Dandy Dan ? But isn?t the story and idea of the fall important because it explain for religious believers why innocent people suffer? It seems to be an important foundation for Christianity because it reconciles the idea of an all good, all powerful creator god, who loves and has a relationship with humans, with the fact that the world is not perfect and human life is often hard and unjust (we are not even very well designed for the basics of life, like giving birth)?This is the ?not rightness? you talked about, right? . I thought this was why it was important to the people who wrote it and believed in and why it is still used by Christians today to explain the problem of suffering.

Doesn?t this mean that before the fall (not presuming it as a literal drama with a snake and an apple but a process of turning away between man and god over maybe millions of years) things must have been easy, fair, happy, kind (the idea of a garden of Eden) - otherwise how can the idea of the fall be used to explain help why a perfect loving god would have created the harsh world that we see?

[Applauds DandyDan...]

I don't know if it helps, Himalaya, but I tend to see this as a story not about humanity as a whole, but about individuals. The image of the Garden of Eden is one of potential. Every human being has the potential to have the kind of perfect relationship with God that, in the story, Adam and Eve had before the Fall. But, like Adam and Even in the story, human beings are weak and tend to screw up. In particular, like Adam and Eve in the story, they give in to temptation. We do things that we know to be wrong (in the story God gives Adam and Eve very clear instructions about the tree from which they must not eat) but we do them anyway. When we do that, we are (in a small way) putting ourselves above God ('their eyes were opened and they were like gods'). It is this deliberate ignoring of God's will that is at the root of all sin (and therefore 'original'). I don't use this to explain why 'bad stuff' happens in the world at large, because I don't believe that floods and earthquakes and illnesses and wars are punishments for sin. Christ's death on the Cross is not only a symbolic putting-right of this basic impulse to question and reject God's instructions, but also the ultimate act of obedience, which cancels out the rebellion of Adam and Eve.

But that's just how I see it, not necessarily any kind of 'official' stance.

ZephirineDrouhin - interesting thoughts on freewill. Have you read 'Freedom Evolves' by Daniel Dennet? It is heavy going, but good.

Basically (although he is more eloquent..) I think the argument is that, yes in a godless-souless universe we are just collections of molecules, and that if you could map the location, motion and energy of every one of the molecules you could in principle determine what is going to happen next (and next, and next) for ever - so on a physical level this does seem to rule out free will.

But on a biological level, being human doesn't feel like being a collection of molecules, it feels like being a conscious being with free will. This isn't a metaphysical soul that exists outside of our physical properties (brain function) but an emergent property which evolved because organisms with 'free will', consciousness, conscience, and idea of right and wrong are better at learning, cooperating, surviving etc...

So his conclusion is - it feels like we have freewill, and it is hard to imagine how anything from everyday life to society and justice systems could function without it, so it is at a human level still the most useful way to think about ourselves.

I guess some people would argue that rationally we know that god doesn't exist in any way like the ideas of religion - creation, intervention, immortal souls, heaven, hell etc...but still it is a useful idea for human wellbeing and societies, like free will. I think its a step too far though.

Agreeing with Totally here.

I don't know how many or which Christians use the story of A/E to explain sin/suffering. Some will, some won't. I agree with Totally's comments.

I understand personally from the story that we are created free (as is the universe, world and all created things in it) and because of this, things will happen (some of which we perceive as "wrong" - volcanoes, certain germs combining or mutating) both in the world and with our own behaviour and response to God. We are being called back to that closeness to God, that willing choice to live lovingly in response to his love (not as slavish obedience or guilt-ridden do-gooders).

Re freewill. I have read and discussed some of the Dennett-type arguments but I don't agree with them. Neither the predictability factor (or the arguments that say it can be predicted that I will get up from my computer in two minutes to get a coffee, rather than in seven minutes), nor the arguments about what "conscious freewill" is - whether consciousness exists at all. If the universe and the brain/body is without "meaning", then anything we do with our brains that "feels" like something with meaning (free-will, loving, memories, admiring beauty, thinking logically, indeed thinking at all) is nothing but a trick.

I think not accepting the possibility of God when these other things are accepted and lives based on them, is a very fine distinction. As a Christian, I don't believe we're just meaningless molecules dictated to by our experiences and circumstances: our consciousness is something unique. To live as if life means something when intellectually you think it doesn't at all - that the fact of consciousness itself is ultimately illusory and random and meaningless... that's (to me) a bigger game of "let's pretend" than anything claimed of theists by non-theists.

DandyDan - your last paragraph. Thank you for putting into words what I've been struggling to articulate for years!

Re this thread - I've been following but haven't posted (brain is far to addled this week ) but again agree with DandyDan and Totally.

Thanks again Dandy and Totally too. Would add more but have codeine head today so wouldn't be able to put anything coherently. But wanted to add agreement and applause

Thanks for your thoughts Dandy Dan and Totally, but I am still confused...particularly about whether there is or isn't a link between Christian ideas about creation and how you explain bad things that happen in the world.

Totally - you say that for you the story of adam and eve/original sin doesn't for you explain why 'bad stuff' happens. Dandy Dan you say you agree with Totally, but then you say because we are created free, things happen (volcanos, diseases etc..) that 'we perceive as "wrong"'....which seems then to be explicityly linking the core freewill idea of the adam and eve story with the bad stuff that happens in the world (or are you saying that bad stuff doesn't really happen we are just perceiving it in the wrong way?)

I think what you are saying is that because we have free will, that explains why bad things happen because god cannot intervene? Is that right?

I guess that could explain why bad things are not fixed, but it doesn't explain why the world was created by god to be such a harsh place in the first place (where the garden of Eden story does offer an 'explanation' for that...only it is one that has been completely discredited by science).

I don't the actual story as presented explains all the bad stuff in the world, no. It mentions pain and death and toilsome labour. However, something of what I understand about the nature of God comes through this story, and that something is about how God allows us freewill.

God doesn't intervene, because we and the world have free will. Therefore we will do wrong things, not only to ourselves but to others. We will affect the world in ways that have a negative impact on humankind (as well as other life on the planet) eg. burning too many fossil fuels. A perfect world would not exist physically in this universe because it has to be free to work. The earth is "not created to be a harsh place" but because it has freewill, then harshness will naturally arise. (Some of this harshness is perceived to be harsh only because we see the effects on creation: eg. a volcano doesn't always cause harm unless there are people and forests and wildlife in the way. In and of itself, it is not "Bad". Neither are two germs mutating "bad" unless they happen to affect the healthy working of a human body that the germ happens to attach itself to.

Part of the problem, I suspect, in this thread, is holding the idea of the story and seeing it as a story, a metaphor, picture-language to explain how people understand a relationship, and not imposing that on a historical frame. God did not create the world to be harsh, he created a universe with freewill built into it. Without freewill we would be puppets. But the story imagines a state of being with God where we are not puppets but we desire completely to be with him and live his way, so that no other course is desirable or imaginable. That is what we might believe we are called to do and be, and in particular, to do it via the example and person of Jesus, and whilst in a world and with personalities that are flawed and frequently screw up at it.

OK, but even at its most metaphorical there are some truth claims here- God created the universe, God takes a special interest in human beings, the purpose of the universe is to do with our relationship with God, God didn't create the earth to be a harsh place) and they just don't seem to be backed up at all by what we know - which is that 99.9...% of the universe doesn't involve us, 99.9..% of time went on without us and human beings evolved to be smart, cooperative, inventive, loving etc... precisely because the environment was harsh where these qualities turned out to lead to better survival.

Sorry if I sound like a cracked record, but I can't work out how religious folks who know about evolution ad space reconcile this with a theistic explanation for the world. Doesn't this contradiction bother you, or is there a way out of it?

The Adam and Eve story is not a once-for-all theistic explanation for the world. It was written in a context that was pre-scientific (in the terms we think about science now). It was written with many ideas and purposes in mind, and the least of these (as far as I have read) is "an explanation for the world's existence". The truth claims as you put them, are there, yes, but they don't correlate in concrete ways to bits of the story and what C21st thinkers consider the "facts" of evolution and the origin of the universe.

Also, not everyone agrees about why humans are smart, co-operative, loving, inventive etc. That they are, is obvious; why they are, is less certain.

I'm finding it frustrating that this "story" is being taken as something more than a story: the people who wrote it, knew there wasn't an Adam and Eve or a Garden of Eden, but the story was saying something crucial about what they felt to be true about how things should be between God and humanity. It doesn't mean they thought something like Eden and the Fall really happened. There is meaning and "truth" in the story nethertheless.

There is no contradiction in my mind with evolution and a theistic belief in God being the Creator-Sustainer of everything. Darwin was okay with that, as were most later C19th clergymen.

Agree with DandyDan. I have to say that my knowledge of evolution has absolutely nothing to do with my lack of belief. I was brought up with a pretty thorough religious (Catholic) education, and never for a moment was there any suggestion that Genesis was to be understood in a literal sense - quite the opposite in fact. This literal interpretation seems to me quite a new idea, or at least one that has recently arrived here via religious groups in the States and elsewhere. I'm not sure why it should have gained such currency, but perhaps it is bound up with the fact that our media are now very much better at transmitting simplistic headline-type messages than delivering lengthy or complex arguments.

But surely the Adam and Eve story, and the rest of the old testament is not just viewed as the pre-scientific ideas of some ancient people (like Zeus on Mount Olympus) but as part and parcel of the Jesus story? I mean Jesus's coming and dying is linked to the idea of original sin, is a seen as fulfilling prophesies made in the old testament etc...

The Adam and Eve/Garden of Eden story does seem designed to answer a critical question that bedevils any theistic view of the world i.e. if god created the world, and loves human beings why did he make life so hard, brutal, painful and unfair for them (we don't notice these things so much nowadays since we have medicine, central heating, mechanised agriculture etc...but these contradictions must have been painfully obvious to ancient people).

I don't think this answer was repealed by Jesus, or the new testament, and it is still one that many Christians use to make sense of suffering ("we live in a fallen world"etc...)which suggests that there was some time before when god created the world, and humans when there was no suffering.

To anyone who understands evolution rather than just pays it lip service, because to do otherwise would seem uneducated and fundamentalist I think there is a contradiction with a theistic view of the world: evolution works through natural selection (individuals die young through starvation, disease, injury, conflict, disability etc.. or see their children die young through the same means) and through sexual selection by which some males are far more successful in siring offspring than others (sexual rivalry, conspicuous displays of wealth, infidelity, polygamy). These mechanisms explain how evolution happens. They are not nice. Why would an all powerful, loving god who presumably could have chosen some other way of creating us have chosen this mechanism?

I guess its not something a lot of Christians worry about, since many like you say Dandydan don't see a contradiction. And few regulars on the Ph/Re/Sp forum have seen fit to contribute to this thread. Of course no one has to justify their beliefs to me, I am just really, honestly curious about how the 'there is no contradiction' argument really works since it is so widely used and accepted in polite society. Maybe I phase my opening questions wrong?

Hang on, your later paragraphs suggest those who think evolution can be squared with belief in a theistic universe, actually perhaps just don't understand evolution or pay it lip service, or just don't think about it very much. A great many scientists believe in God and also believe in evolution (I think 40% at least from recent polls) - Polkinghorne, Lennox and McGrath, Francis Collins are some of the more famous current scientists writing in this vein of thought - but a good many Christians don't just spout the notion about theism/evolution without thinking about it.

Your fourth paragraph basically restates that there is "waste" and chance and risk in the system of evolution: yes, there is - both in the macro sense (whole species dying out, some animals becoming prey for others) but also in the micro-sense (our bodies' cells constantly dying and being replaced, plants using carbon dioxide and producing oxygen as a waste product, or by-product). This all comes into the frame of "free-will", in my thinking. Some of your examples are human choices - rivalry, infidelity, polygamy-as-power-or-greed (rather than because of shortage of males in a population) and that's human freewill being exerted to the disadvantage of others. Life exists and works through freewill - one particular sperm meeting the egg first, genes being randomly compatible/incompatible for what we deem "successful" life to ensue, the problem of pain when the risks in life meet our fleshly bodies and our human emotions and spirit. If God made a system that was guaranteed to be happy-happy, stuff wouldn't exist really and anything that did, would be living in some kind of Truman Show world. Plate tectonics, for example, allows our world to hold together without imploding/exploding, allowing life to flourish, but also causes earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. If God made a perfect world, he might as well not bother, and really it actually physically would not be possible.

As a Christian, I don't personally believe there was a "time before when God created the world and humans when there was no suffering". That is linear thinking, implies that God "created humans and the world" in a creationist-type way. Adam-and-Eve tells me that as part of a creation that has freewill, I can reject God wholly; but if I chose to be with him, that this current world can be made better - that is what "being with him" means right now. And ultimately beyond life, there is something/heaven/a state where there will be no more pain or crying and what has been faulty and hard here in life will be transfigured.

I ought also to say that in your second para. where you compare "us" not noticing these things nowadays compared to ancient peoples - most of the world actually notices these things all the time, all of their lives, right now. The privileges of Western post-industrial society are extended to a minority of the world's population.

Philo of Alexandria - a contemporary of Jesus and Paul - wrote that the Garden of Eden story was a symbolic fiction, not a mythical fiction, but a way of making an idea visible. St Augustine said much the same four centuries later.

Evolution is a lengthy process, as well as what we might call "risky or chancey" and also what we call "painful" because of the loss of life involved. Some of what we think of this is human sentimentalism, not about suffering which is hard to bear and observe, but about life and how it involves change and decay all the time. If it takes the universe billions of years to evolve to produce oxygen that will produce life on earth that will result in what we enjoy now and what future life on earth will enjoy, why is that a waste? Why should millions of years of fruitful biological growth and life be damned as "naughty" of God? What does pain mean ultimately? Is an organism a waste or meaningless because doesn't exist now in 2010 or because it never got to reproduce or live to a ripe old age? Or because it lived with pain or difficulties? Actually it is more usually the theistic person who puts value and care on those people and things that ultra-Darwinists would imply are pointless in the selfish gene's search for eternal self-perpetuity.

The story is about the relationship, not about the origins of the world - it's the relationship that matters: that's what Jesus puts right, and shows us how to put right.

I hope this helps. I don't mean to be too critical of your phrasing. you're asking interesting questions.