Monday School: Adam & Eve

Time for Monday School! Our doors are always open, just like our minds.

Greetings! Today’s lesson: Does The Biblical Story Of Adam & Eve Make A Lick Of Sense?

According to a 2011 Gallop poll, at least one third (33%) of adult Americans believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and that all its claims must be taken literally. The same poll indicates that an additional 49% of adult Americans consider the Bible divinely inspired but is not necessarily literally true in every detail.

Only 17% declared the Bible a book of fables written by people.

(These poll results can be seen here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/148427/say-bible-literally.aspx)

It would seem that some 80% of adult Americans either believe in the literal truth of the story of Adam and Eve or that it contains some important truths that God wants us to know.

Are these Americans right? Is it even possible to reconcile a belief in God with a belief in the Bible’s story of the first two people on earth?

At least 10 significant problems must be overcome:

1) If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere all the time (as the Bible indicates He is), in what sense can the Bible also say that man shares His image (Gen. 1:26)? What could man’s image (which seems to be the result of a slow evolution under the pressure of changing environmental conditions) possibly have in common with that of a being who seems to exist independently of physical reality and change? Of what possible use could hands, legs, a head, and all the other human body parts (which collectively result in our image) be to God? What purpose might male genitalia serve God? Yet without that genitalia, on what basis do the writers of the Bible consistently refer to God as “He” and “Him”? Would DNA testing reveal God to be male? Exactly what is the essence of maleness, and how does essence relate to image? Why does the Bible use the word “image” at all when that word seems best applied to superficial surface appearances? If the Bible meant to say that humans share some essential characteristic with God, shouldn’t it have said so? And shouldn’t it have done a much better job of spelling out what that shared essence might be?

2) If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere, why does the Bible say “Let us create man in our image”? Why would an all-powerful God refer to Himself in the plural? How could there be two or more all-powerful beings? Isn’t one enough? Isn’t it far more likely that this use of the plural form here grew out of the earlier, polytheistic religions of non-Hebrew cultures than that two or more Gods actually exist? Or that an all-powerful being might require the help or assistance of angels? (To learn more about the many words and ideas the writers of Genesis seem to have borrowed from other, older cultures, ask your favorite librarian to show you a copy of Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament by Theodor H. Gaster.)

3) According to the Bible, after God made Adam He discovered that Adam needed a helpmate. This prompts God to make all the animals and birds and bring them to Adam to name and, apparently, interview for the helpmate position that’s open. Not surprisingly to us (but apparently unforeseeable by God), no animal or bird is found to have the right qualifications. At this point, God tries a new approach: He puts Adam to sleep and forms Eve out of one of his ribs. (Why the rib was in Adam in the first place if it wasn’t necessary is not explained. Nor is there any explanation given for God’s not taking out Adam’s appendix while He was poking around in there.) The Bible gives no indication why an all-knowing God would need to go through this tedious trial and error process, nor why a being who could create an entire cosmos out of nothing needs a starter rib when it comes to the creation of a woman. Neither does the Bible do a very good job of conveying just how tedious this trial and error process must have been. There are, after all, at least 4000 species of mammals alone, and 8600 species of birds. Although the Bible says that God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam after all these creatures were named, interviewed, and found lacking, my hunch is that by this point Adam would only have needed divine assistance in continuing to stay awake. Especially if Adam had been naming each individual creature, as seems quite possible given that the Bible doesn’t mention his dealing with either species or types.

4) The idea that Adam needed to name all these animals and birds as God brought them to him seems to make sense only as a primitive myth conjured up by unsophisticated ancient people trying to explain the etymology of words whose actual origins were lost in the mists of time (much as the Tower of Babel story seems a lame attempt to account for the existence of different languages). As a literal account, it seems nonsensical. Naming, after all, involves language, and language exists so that people can communicate with each other. If God and Adam were the only two thinking creatures in existence, and God is by definition omniscient, exactly who was Adam expected to use all these animal names with? The animals and birds were too stupid for language, and God was too smart. We are consequently left to imagine a Paradise in which animals ignored Adam’s names for them, God bypassed language by looking directly into Adam’s mind, and Adam wandered around muttering rather pointlessly to himself. It doesn’t take too much effort to imagine that a great deal of that muttering probably involved cursing as the poor guy struggled to keep those thousands of arbitrary names straight.

5) At the heart of this story is the claim that Adam and Eve were punished by God for disobeying His order not to eat of the tree which gave them knowledge of good and evil. If Adam and Eve didn’t know the difference between good and evil before eating of this tree, however, how could they know if disobedience was good or evil? And if they didn’t know disobedience was evil, how can God justly punish them for being disobedient? Wasn’t God really the one at fault for putting the tree within reach of these innocents, just as I would be at fault if I put the trigger for a nuclear bomb within reach of an infant? Would anyone excuse my behavior (let alone continue to worship me as all-good) if the infant detonated the bomb and all I could say in my defense was that I’d warned the kid not to do that?

6) Why did God forbid Adam to learn about good and evil? Why was abstract knowledge so bad for Adam to acquire? Who did it hurt, and who did Adam’s ignorance help? Why is it good for God to have such knowledge but not creatures allegedly made in His image? If God was going to judge Adam for anything, why didn’t He judge Adam on his ability to resist doing evil rather than his merely learning about evil? (Some ethicists, after all, say it’s hardly to our credit if we don’t do evil merely because we don’t know how or are unable to.) And why did God punish Adam so severely for his mere acquisition of knowledge and Cain so mildly for his anger, his jealousy, his lying, his smarting off to God, and his murder of his brother? The Bible seems to be condemning knowledge and excusing hate and violence in its first few pages. In this, alas, Genesis sets a pattern that seems to carry through clear to the end of the New Testament.

7) Do you still believe that Adam somehow sinned and deserved the punishment he received? How can this be reconciled with 1 John 3:9, which says “No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God”? If Adam can’t be said to have been born of God, it seems that no one can be – or that words are being used by the Bible in too sloppy a fashion for us to make sense of them. Which of course is just another way of saying the Bible is nonsense.

8) Supposedly Adam and Eve gained knowledge of good and evil after they ate the forbidden fruit. Their “enlightenment,” however, seems to have been a fraud. Instead of instantly seeing that they had sinned and that confession and repentance are good (or that the serpent had hoodwinked them and deserved to be hunted down and brought to justice), they seize upon their nakedness as the big evil to be dealt with. Can anyone really make the case that it would be evil for a man and his wife to be naked in New Jersey, let alone Paradise? Does anyone really believe that nakedness in front of God is something evil and to be ashamed of when it was God who created us naked? It seems that trying to hide God’s handiwork with fig leaves would more reasonably be considered evil. It also seems logically impossible to hide one’s nakedness from an omniscient being no matter what one wears. Adam and Eve, however, clearly didn’t realize this impossibility – yet unless they realized it, it seems that they couldn’t have really gained the knowledge of good and evil the Bible claims they did. Either the Bible is wrong when it says they did indeed acquire this knowledge or it is wrong when it describes the actions they took after they acquired that knowledge.

9) Supposedly we are all still being punished for the sin of Adam. Where’s the justice in that? We didn’t disobey – Adam did. We haven’t even been able to keep what his “crime” allegedly got him – knowledge of good and evil (the very definitions of which vary from person to person, from culture to culture, and over time). Even God seems to recognize the basic injustice in this, for in Ezekiel 18:20 He says, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son….” It seems that God’s “perfect” justice is perfectly arbitrary and varies over time, or the Bible has once again grossly misrepresented Him and ought to be rejected as a very unreliable guide to the ways of the divine (not to mention the ways of the scientist, the historian, and the logician).

10) Supposedly Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden before they got around to eating of the tree of life next and thereby obtained immortality. If God can – by definition – do anything, however, why would their eating of this tree have been a problem? Couldn’t God just blot it out and expunge it from history? Couldn’t He at least have pumped out their stomachs? Why is He depicted as being so afraid of the combination of two mere humans and a tree? (True to His madness, He also fears that mere humans with a common language and a tower in Genesis 11 will become irreversibly all-powerful themselves if they aren’t immediately stopped.) Why did He put this tree in the Garden to begin with if He didn’t want them eating it? Why didn’t He even warn them against eating it when He warned them against eating the fruit of the other tree? Why didn’t He just remove this silly tree instead of his allegedly beloved Adam and Eve? And if He didn’t want humans to live forever, why does the Bible say that He sent His son to earth so that humans might enjoy eternal life?

Two quick thoughts before I leave the subject of Adam and Eve – at least until I bring it up again.

First, I once heard an alternate version of their story – maybe a Hindu version – which went like this:

The Eve character eats the forbidden fruit. God pops up, yells “Bad woman! Bad!” as usual, but then decides to banish her – and her alone – from Paradise.

The Adam character says, “Wait! Banish me, too. I love this woman. Paradise isn’t a place – it’s wherever we are together.” God obliges Adam and banishes them both.

Yes, this story is almost certainly as much of a lie as the Bible’s story. But if we simply must tell our children lies (or embrace them ourselves), isn’t it better to tell or embrace the lie that man is basically loving, self-sacrificing, and noble rather than the lie that his greater natural tendency is to avoid responsibility at all costs or to turn against his loved ones when the going gets tough?

Discuss.