The Blessing of Original Sin

December 31, 2009 by EnnisP
Filed under: Answering an Atheist, Old Testament, Salvation

Answering An Atheist

Original arguments are found in the post “Top Ten Worst Bible Stories”
On the web site “Not A Potted Plant” (NAPP)
Author – Transplanted Lawyer (TL)

I wouldn’t call myself a debater but I do enjoy a little verbal dueling occasionally. If the discussion isn’t reduced to exchanging personal attacks it can be very useful. For me it stimulates thought.

So I don’t mind it when people of an opposing opinion suggest something totally different to what I understand to be true. If I am wrong I should change and if I am correct then I should develop the ability to articulate my understanding clearly. Discussion serves both purposes.

For that reason I began answering criticisms of the Bible offered by an atheist – pen name “Transplanted Lawyer” (TL). He listed ten of what he considered the worst Bible stories and suggested what he saw as problems with each. Not very original but in his case the attitude is different (more agreeable to discussion) and he does make some fresh observations, interesting. In fact, he is an interesting person in many ways. Despite our differences he seems to be very normal, down to earth and decent. You can check out his profile here.

If you like these types of discussion then maybe you’ll enjoy the read.

Criticism number 5 on his list involves Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Obviously, there are many details to discuss in that short story but he focuses on the original sin or more specifically its after effects. He sees it as leading to improvements in human experience. Actually, in principle, I don’t disagree but our interpretations are quite different. His words are…

Original sin is making up your own mind about good and evil.

His arguments summarized are:

He assumes the injunction not to eat of the tree was a means of keeping Adam and Eve from growing personally, i.e., thinking, experimenting, and learning particularly in regard to moral issues but ultimately leading to “a rejection of knowledge itself — a moral condemnation of learning and education.”
The wisdom gained from eating the forbidden fruit enabled them to recognize the shame of their nakedness and they rightly manufactured clothing to correct this.
God further disparaged their ability to think, act and create for themselves when He replaced their fig leaf clothes with skins from animals, a form of brow beating.
Without elaborating on the issue, TL insinuates God was responsible for the whole problem anyway since He placed Adam and Eve in such close proximity to temptation.
He implies that Satan is implicated but without malfeasance suggesting he was doing what any decent person would do for the oppressed.

The Setting
Before we address the arguments we need to see the picture.

Adam and Eve were perfect physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
There surroundings were perfect and management of those surroundings, their stated responsibility, had not yet become labor intensive. It was a pleasure.
They were vegetarian but didn’t lack variety or supply of things to eat.
There was no disease or sickness. For those who question this, we at least have no reason to believe Adam or Eve had been afflicted. Therefore, they had no reason to complain.
The animal kingdom was neither afraid of them nor a threat to them.
Ecological systems were working well: no severe weather (no rain yet), no infestations or imbalances, no extreme temperatures either way.
They were ignorant (uninformed) but not stupid. They were mentally stimulated by their surroundings and very bright (Adam named all the animals – no mean task)
They were sexually capable but not consumed with sex. As far as we know they had not consummated their marriage yet.
They had direct access to God. He visited personally daily. Their questions were never ignored. They never wondered if God was listening.
THEY ONLY HAD ONE LAW

These are a few of the more obvious deductions we can make from the text and, of course, the point is, this was paradise! And it was all arranged by their benefactor, God. They weren’t imprisoned, chained, or driven. There wasn’t even a schedule. They were exploring and learning every waking moment of everyday. Life for them began as a never-ending holiday in a perfect environment and the only condition to keep it going forever was “don’t eat of one particular tree.”

And what was the point of the tree? Can eating from any tree constitute immorality? I guess it would if the tree belonged to someone else and the fruit represented income they needed but that doesn’t apply here. It was fruit on a tree which happened to be in the garden God had personally developed (created) and given to them. It was right in the middle of their playground and God said everything was conditioned on their not eating from it.

That tree represented trust. Not eating from it was the one thing they could do to keep trust between them and God and in this case there were moral implications. Distrusting God would be like the aspiring medical student ignoring existing institutions and attempting to learn every medical truth on his own. Not only will he not learn all the lessons in his short life, his patience will surely suffer (die) while he attempts to do so. We might call that immorality by stupidity.

In the garden, God had the answers, they didn’t and they had no reason to believe anyone else did.

With this in mind let’s look at some of TL’s arguments.

He assumes the injunction not to eat of the tree was a means of keeping them from growing personally, i.e., thinking, experimenting, and learning particularly in regard to moral issues but ultimately leading to “a rejection of knowledge itself — a moral condemnation of learning and education.”

TL repeats several details correctly:

The tree was pleasing to the eyes.
It was good for food.
It could make one wise. Eating from it would bring enlightenment.

The serpent mentioned some of these things and, as TL suggests, he was correct but only in a twisted sort of way.

The real issue involves the word “know” as used in the phrase “knowing good and evil” and the word in this instance is much more than mental awareness.

They were already aware of the tree
They already knew it was beautiful
They already understood it was eatable
They were already aware of the warnings associated with it

Adam and Eve already had knowledge. What they didn’t have was experience and what they couldn’t know without experience was:

What it was like to break the rules (they only had one).
Whether the serpent was a friend or a predator. No effort was made to do a background check, naïve.
What “death” meant and how it would be experienced.
If God would be as consistent with His warnings as He was with His blessings.

In this situation their experience levels would be equivalent to a toddler and no benevolent parent would allow a toddler to learn everything without guidance and strict controls. It is important that toddlers develop a bond of trust with people who will steer them clear of life threatening “experiences.”

The prohibition in this case was protective. It would be similar to regulations that require surgeons to observe and work with skilled professionals before being turned loose with a scalpel. We would rather them learn how to perform heart surgery from others before they perform it on us.

God was allowing them to learn without damage rather than withholding some special privilege as TL suggests.

Admittedly, humans are curious creatures and we like to learn for ourselves – and learning is what we were designed to do better than anything else in creation. We humans have an insatiable hunger for knowledge that makes it difficult for us to take someone else’s word for anything and we love to experiment with things disallowed but there are some things we learn best with the guidance of others.

There are also some experiences from which we never, or only with great difficulty, recover. I would prefer not to “know” what it is like:

To be addicted to any substance legal or otherwise (other than coffee).
To suffer from SDT’s lethal or otherwise.
To spend time in prison for committing a felony.

Parents and authority figures who guide us clear of these things are being benevolent not controlling.

The wisdom gained from eating the forbidden fruit enabled them to recognize the shame of their nakedness and they rightly manufactured clothing to correct this.

This represents a primary point in TL’s arguments and for good reason. What we do today is very much like the tradition Adam and Eve started in their day. We identify with clothing rather than nakedness and there are stiff laws prohibiting this behavior. Before you reject this argument as silly you have to admit there is a thread of logic to it.

God started the naked trend and Adam and Eve stopped it. Initially they had no clothes to speak of, none, and walked around all day long bare as a new born – and God endorsed this approach entirely.

Instead of saying, “don’t go naked,” God said, “don’t eat of this tree.” It was only after they ate the forbidden fruit that they became conscious of their public nakedness and we still reflect that sensitivity today.

So, the question is, who was right? Who was wrong?

Here’s the truth. Nakedness is only a problem because of what it leads to and I don’t need to elaborate. The skin industry is making a lot of money, sometimes illegally, always inappropriately because of the sexual appetite it feeds.

Before the forbidden fruit, however, they were innocent. They were naked but they didn’t care. There was no inclination toward immorality so the appearance of a naked person, particularly of the opposite sex, didn’t entice them to do what they shouldn’t.

After eating the forbidden fruit their nature changed and they experienced guilt for the first time. They became self-conscious in a way they hadn’t been before. They began to see each other in a different light also (a problem rather than a partner) and clothes were used to hide from their fault and avoid responsibility not avoid sexual impropriety. Proof? With no other people around neither adultery nor fornication was possible. This was not a sexual issue.

And clothing doesn’t diminish sexual excesses anyway. Today, clothes are a means of stimulating sexual responses (and offenses) rather than avoiding them. In fact, clothing manufacturers have figured out ways to make us look more alluring with clothes than without. And, clothes or not, promiscuity isn’t going away which is to say, we may have covered our nakedness but we haven’t avoided the problem. We are worse off with clothes than Adam and Eve were without them.

God further disparaged their ability to think, act and create for themselves when He replaced their fig leaf clothes with skins from animals, a form of brow beating.

There is actually a lot of theological significance in this action. We don’t have space to explore all biblical references but suffice it to say:

Redemption is secured by the sacrifice of life through the shedding of blood.
In this case this principle was only symbolically represented through the sacrifice of the animal.
And the clothes represented a covering for their sin not their nakedness.

This action does not prohibit the use of a other materials in the manufacture of clothes nor does it place restrictions on the design of those clothes, other than decency.

Without elaborating on the issue, TL insinuates God was responsible for the whole problem anyway since He placed Adam and Eve in such close proximity to temptation.

The obvious implication is; all the problems could have been avoided had God made it impossible for us to transgress. Or could they have been?

Several thoughts:

Maybe we should see this as a compliment. If God had barred our exposure to wrong doing we could say He didn’t trust us, i.e., He thought so little of us that He wouldn’t even put us in a situation in which we could prove ourselves. In fact, if He had completely eliminated the possibility of failure we would complain about that also. We aren’t happy either way.

Maybe God wanted us to connect with Him by free will, personal choice, so He allowed us to be volitional beings in the moral sense of the word but what good is the ability to choose without the opportunity.

If we stayed in communion with God only because we had no capacity to choose wrong we would be robots. The relationship would be cold and distant, like loving your favorite car.
If we stayed in communion only because we were barred from the opportunity to choose wrong we would be oppressed, like loving a a dog on a chain.
If we stayed in communion only because we weren’t allowed to walk away we would be prisoners, like loving a kidnappee.

None of these situations describe much of a relationship.

Maybe God knew we would gain invaluable experience from making the wrong decision and prepared a remedy, at great cost to Himself, to overcome the resulting condemnation. Which means He loved us in spite of the failure and planned our rescue.

From that we learn that real love is undaunted by our failure and the strongest relationships are the ones that survive it. Maybe this is what God was after. For that reason, maybe we should see original sin as a blessing.

He implies that Satan is implicated but without malfeasance suggesting he was doing what any decent person would do for those who are oppressed.

In truth, Satan has figured prominently in various significant events: Insurrection of the angels, resisting God’s angelic messengers (Daniel), testing of Job, temptation of Christ and generally he attempts to confuse or discourage God’s people always. He has never been a person of good will. He is mean and his intentions are always bad toward saint and sinner. His involvement always results in human misery. He is the Grinch and scrooge rolled into one.

But, although he is quite powerful, second only to God, he is not allowed to act at will. He can do only what God or we allow. He can fool us into doing what we shouldn’t but only if we are ignorant or willing. If that wasn’t true we would all be dead.

Satan will never be anything other than God’s tool. He misled Eve but God was still in control. God knew where this was going and He organized it for the benefit of humanity.

After convincing Eve and Adam to act contrary to God’s stated will Satan had nothing more to say or do. He recedes submissively into the background. He can’t even help the serpent he so cleverly used and only watches as the serpent is relegated to eating dust from that point onward.

No, in this tragedy Satan is not the good guy trying to help the poor guy. He is a troublemaker whose only use is to cause trouble. Thankfully, he is not in charge.

So, the next question is, what do you THINK!AboutIt?

Please feel free to leave your comments or send your questions.

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Comments

10 Comments on The Blessing of Original Sin

Transplanted Lawyer on Sat, 2nd Jan 2010 2:59 am

My response here is much briefer than my response to the passover article. Simply put, you have not addressed my core argument about the core moral lesson here. Is it morally wrong to decide for yourself what is morally right and wrong? Is attaining enlightenment — particularly moral enlightenment — a sin? The Garden of Eden story tells us that it is, and therefore it is intended to deter us developing our own individual moral judgments.

You claim, for instance, that the “skin industry” is wrong. But I find nothing inherently morally wrong with pornography — if it is created through the use of force or fear, that is one thing, and I won’t pretend such things don’t exist. But if we’re dealing with something created by, and then consumed by, consenting adults, I just don’t see a moral problem at all. Pornography, without anything more, is morally neutral.

In making that conclusion, I reach my own moral conclusion rather than taking guidance from some authority external to my own conscience. The ethic embodied by the Garden of Eden story would condemn my moral judgment of pornography as lacking moral significance not because I reached the wrong conclusion, but rather because I have the arrogance to search for a conclusion in the first place.

Lastly, this isn’t a case of God allowing Adam and Eve to “learn without harm.” They had one rule to obey, and they broke it. There was harm. God did take away special privileges. He took away their immortality. He took away their immunity to disease. He took away Eve’s ability to painlessly bear children. And He went further, and punished them; he sentenced them to live out their lives in toil and hunger and thirst and to never again see or taste paradise. That’s at least a quantitatively different attitude towards an innocent, naive mistake than a parent who allows a child to touch a hot oven.

EnnisP on Sat, 2nd Jan 2010 2:54 pm

I understand your complaint but you did insinuate that the actions Adam and Eve took following their choice to eat was an improvement on God’s original plan. You said…

“Sure enough, as soon as they eat, Adam and Eve realize that they’re naked, realize that this is a problem and something to be ashamed of, and take action to clothe themselves and solve the problem of their nudity on their own.”

Which sounded like you were comparing the quality of A & E’s choice to God’s, pitting one moral choice against another. My point (thought off target) was that the choice didn’t really change anything. Whatever we are without clothes is not made different with clothes.

And clothes in this case was a reponse of fear. They were hiding.

Regarding “punishments” the trtuth is, moral laws are as much a part of the spiritual order as the law of gravity is of the physical order. Do we “choose” what is moral or “learn” what is moral and can we expect to avoid the consequences if we make a wrong choice.

Was God punishing A & E or was He stating the natural outcomes following the bad choice they made? Every human since has been struggling with the same problems: death, illness, childbirth pain and labor. Is God being unfairly condemning or are the sins of the parents projected onto the children? Childern of abusive parents become abusive.

Two consenting married adults may agree to commit adultery against one another but the “natural” consequences will still be in force. I’m not suggesting any particular consequences and people do have a tendency to makes things worse than they should be but there are consequences.

Did A & E have the liberty to choose? Yes, the tree was in plain view and people complain about that too. The real question is do people want to make their own choices or their own rules?

People are NOT asking “do I have the right to make the choice” but rather “do I have the option to make the choice right.” To the one question the answer is yes. To the other the answer is no.

In this case God made the consequences clear, “in the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die.” He did not say in the day you eat thereof “I will kill you.” A big difference between the two.

People make their own moral choices all the time, some right and some wrong. Both gain wisdom from the experience. Right choices make for progress and wrong ones set us back. Fortunately, God makes it possible, in spite of the consequences, to recover.

Transplanted Lawyer on Sat, 2nd Jan 2010 6:46 pm

I suppose my issue with this response is that you cast God as a benevolent sentinel, who warned A & E about the consequences of a bad choice, and then, sadly, chose to respect their individual autonomy rather than exercise his potentially limitless authority and power to prevent the consequences of a situation that, it seems, he had inadvertently walked into.

This ignores God’s role in the story as the creator, the architect of A & E’s situation. If anything, your exposition leaves me more confused than clarified as to what exactly A & E did wrong and how they wound up punished. You make it sound like they made a natural enough sort of mistake, the exact nature of which is somewhat hazy and indistinct, and they did so despite a fair and benevolent warning by God that bad things would happen if they did it.

Genesis, though, is clear and direct in its identification of both what was wrong — attaining knowledge of good and evil — and God’s role in both making it wrong and personally and directly punishing A & E for doing so.

Mind you, I consider all of these stories to be the stuff of legend and therefore allegory. I entertain no belief that there was literally an Adam and Eve, a Garden of Eden, or even God. But taking the story for what it is — a moral lesson — you can dance around the issue and talk about free will and natural consequences of choices all you like, and the core lesson of the Garden of Eden story is that God is the sole arbiter of morality and it is sinful for a human to decide for himself what is right and wrong.

EnnisP on Sun, 3rd Jan 2010 10:22 am

If you were God (sitting in the position of a loving parent guiding His first children in a world where transgression had not occurred yet) how would you have instructed A & E morally?

Would you have written one volume detailing the moral principles (lets say the Ten Commandments) and then proceeded to write all the possible ways those commandments could be broken warning? The TC’s take up very little space but the multitudinous ways they can be broken are still being discovered and recorded. So, that method won’t work.

Surely you realize there had to be rules of some kind. When rule choosing becomes a free for all it is just a matter of time before one person’s rules impinge on the rules of another.

So the most important rule of all is deciding who gets to set the boundaries. As far as I can tell no individual person or institution is considered THE rule maker even today. It is still a “group think” approach to making and enforcing rules, there is never 100% consensus (which means some are living by rules they don’t agree to) and they are changing all the time anyway.

Which is to say, A & E didn’t really make a decision for themselves and we don’t either.

Also, can anyone explain when the first woman and man came to be? Can they explain how they came to exist in the same place at the same time with just the right chemistry to reproduce? Can they explain how they learned to communicate?

How is it that humans are the only creatures without instinctive life skills? How is it that humans have endless rules which they consistently break and instinctive creatures have no stated rules but deviate rarely?

I can’t prove that Genesis is the answer to these questions but there is a lot of philosophical meat to chew on. Thanks for taking part in the discussion.

Mark Gomez on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 12:59 am

I think I’m going to end up arguing with both of you here. TL, I think you’re going to have to show why you interpret the “knowledge of good and evil” the way you do. You view it as some sort of moral enlightenment by which man is in a better position. You use as an example, that man and woman immediately covered themselves to solve the “problem” of nakedness.
Some conservative theologians, though, take the knowledge of good and evil to mean that now man understands what it is to be in rebellion to God. Man would have been better off without that knowledge. Up until eating the fruit, man knew only innocence and fellowship with God and shameless fellowship with woman (hence the nakedness). Once man rebels against God’s command, he now has a knowledge of good and evil. He knows what it is to be evil and responds in shame and attempts to cover himself.
You didn’t explain why nakedness is a “problem”. Do you mean that it is wrong to be publicly nude? If so, why. Are you the arbiter of morality? On the same point, you say you see nothing wrong with consenting adults engaging in the “skin industry”, but then you add the caveat, unless there is “the use of force or fear” as if those things are wrong, but why are they wrong? Who is the moral arbiter that determines that they are wrong? You are saying it is unjust for Christians to set God up as moral arbiter to determine right and wrong, but then you yourself seem to be labeling things as “wrong”. How do you do that?
Where you are correct, TL, is that EnnisP’s explanation seems to deny God’s role as architect and creator of A&E’s situation. The fact of the matter is that the Bible teaches that God intended for a world in which there was sin. You can not escape that fact. You are absolutely correct in the fact that God could have exercised His power and authority to prevent man from ever sinning. God could have created a world in which all His created beings freely obeyed him. But God chose to create a world in need of redemption. The Bible says that Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The plan for Christ to die as the sacrificial lamb for my sins was in place before God spoke the world into existence.
But to go back to the pertinent argument: “the core lesson of the Garden of Eden story is that God is the sole arbiter of morality and it is sinful for a human to decide for himself what is right and wrong.” You are absolutely correct. Because God has created the world, He sets the rules. Those rules flow out of His personal nature, so that they are not arbitrary, such as God choosing to say that lying is okay and telling the truth is wrong. Part of God’s very nature is truth, so lying is wrong because it goes against the nature of who God is. God created marriage and sexual intimacy as a picture of who Christ is and His relationship to the church. That natural, created intimacy is meant for a specific purpose, the purpose for which God created it. And so, since He created it to fulfill a purpose, it is wrong to seek it outside its purpose. God has created and defined the boundaries.
But it is not wrong for you to seek knowledge as to what is morally right and wrong. It is wrong for you to decide that the knowledge lies within yourself and outside the revelation of God. When we desire things that go against the very nature of God and the purpose for which God has created them, we find we are setting ourselves up as little gods and trying to rob Jehovah of His authority over creation.

EnnisP on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 7:59 am

Hey Mark,
Nice to hear from you. It’s been a while. Hope you and fam are well.

No worries about disagreeing. This is a friendly debate/discussion/exploration so chiming in with a different perspective is welcome. Your comment together with TL’s perspective on the tree, however, has sparked a new thought.

You refer to A & E as “rebelling” and TL refers to them as “deciding” what is right and wrong for themselves. Maybe we should see what they did as somewhere in the middle of those two. Rebellion implies premeditation and making a choice for yourself implies deliberation. These are very strong words and the way the story unfolds, even if legend, describes it more as an impulse. They were very much in the moment and they had outside influence anyway. We can’t say they were completely unfettered by peer pressure or public opinion.

A & E may have been curious about the tree before hand, especially E, but I doubt they had thought through all the issues sufficiently to commit to “rebellion” or “deliberate” choice, although she was vulnerable to misleading answers to the nagging questions they had entertained, even innocently, about things disallowed.

You might check out TL’s original remarks on his blog to get his perspective on the issue.

Don’t stay away. I am preparing a post now dealing with three more of TL’s criticisms regarding slaves, rape and gays. It would be interesting to get your perspective.

Mark Gomez on Sat, 9th Jan 2010 6:22 am

I have a hard time making excuses for Adam and Eve when God seemed to take their actions pretty seriously. Plunging all of creation into futility for a semi-innocent act of curiosity? Seems harsh. If I explained the rules of my house to my child and then he allowed his friend to talk him into disobeying me, I would consider it an act of rebellion and he would be responsible for his actions. Same with A&E. They tried to pass it off on the servant and God would have none of it.
Perhaps instead of the term rebellion, we should just use the word “sin”. That’s what it was. That’s what the Bible calls it several times. Adam sinned. And so death passed upon all men.

On another note, I’m interested to see what TL means by “evil” or “wrong”. I thought he was trying to make the case that man is the arbiter of his own morality and then he goes and calls someone’s actions evil. By what standard is it evil? By his own conscience? Why should anyone care what he thinks is evil if we all make our own morality?

EnnisP on Sat, 9th Jan 2010 6:51 am

The use of the word “sin” is technically correct but the common use of the word compared to the actual meaning (missing the mark) is quite different. The word could apply to anything from careless mistakes to pure evil but the unqualified use of the word implies only evil intent. So qualifying it is the right thing to do: sin by rebellion, sin by stupidity, sin by carelessness and so on. Not every sin was treated the same. Satan sinned and was condemned. A & E sinned and got a second chance.

Good point about TL remarks.

Mark Gomez on Sat, 9th Jan 2010 7:32 am

The fact that Satan received no “second chance” is not an indication that his sin was worse than A&E’s sin, but simply illustrates the fact that God is not obligated to redeem. God certainly could, in His sovereign good pleasure, provide redemption for fallen angels. He chooses not to. They have sinned. They deserve judgment. Same with humanity. Adam sinned. Adam deserved and received serious judgment. God took his sin absolutely, deathly seriously. In Adam, all died. But God in His grace provided redemption. Christ died for the ungodly. It doesn’t say Christ died for the people who had kind of messed up and didn’t really think through the consequences of their actions. They transgressed the law of God. You can’t sugar coat Adam’s sin, because God takes it absolutely seriously.

Anyway, this is a side argument. An intramural argument, I guess we could say. I’m still waiting to hear TL’s justification for his moral pronouncements of evil. Should be interesting. Maybe I’ll do some blogging to answer his top ten from a more reformed perspective.

EnnisP on Sat, 9th Jan 2010 9:58 am

Should be interesting. Let us know when you write it up.

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