Question from Tim:
LX, I’m interested in your thoughts about something:
I’ve been thinking about crime and punishment lately for separate reasons from religion, but a related religious connotation entered my mind recently that I think needs exploring, and I’d like your thoughts on it.
As it relates to Christianity (and many other religions as well in some form or another) humanity has to suffer on planet Earth because a god was disobeyed by a young couple in a garden. The price of their disobedience was that they became “fallen”. Different definitions of what exactly that means abound, but the basic premise is that they went from a perfect state to the current state of existence that all humans currently find themselves in. That existence is definitely less that perfect, and involves all manner of things like sickness, disease, pain, suffering, heartbreak, bad luck, etc. If you are really unlucky you might have been born Jewish and killed in the holocaust, or born gay and thrown off a high rise in Iran. But no one escapes the wrath of this god, everyone has some kind of bad thing befall them from time to time.
And all of it is due to, from we are told, a couple of young people eating a piece of fruit off of a forbidden tree.
So I can’t help but wonder, in the midst of all this suffering throughout the history of humanity, how much longer people who had nothing to do with the decision of Adam and Eve will be made to pay for the choice of those two back in the day. In other words, when will the punishment fit the “crime”?
Answer by SmartLX:
Ah, the good old Problem of Evil. Trying to wrap my head around the continued existence of evil in a world with an all-powerful, all-knowing and entirely good deity is a major reason for my atheism. I didn’t simply renounce my faith because of the apparent conflict, though; the complexity of the problem caused my tween self to give up thinking about religion at all, and I had other things to focus on. This self-enforced sabbatical from theology went on for enough years that my emotional connections to faith faded completely. When I finally did come back to the subject, faith did not appear justified on an intellectual level, so there was nothing left to support it.
The story of Adam and Eve attempts to shift the responsibility for everything that’s wrong with our lives from God to the imperfect nature of humanity. Though you and I didn’t eat the apple, we’re marked with Original Sin as a result of the act itself, just so that God sees a reminder in all of us. Also, it could be reasoned (within the hypothesis of an actual Adam and Eve) that we’re of the same race as Adam so we are similarly flawed, and therefore liable to do something just as bad. God sees into people’s hearts, we’re told, so uncommitted crimes still count against us.
In a separate discussion over whether an eternity in Hell is justified for any possible sin, one Christian defense of God’s “policy” was that offending an infinitely powerful entity like God carries a punishment proportional to the entity, not the crime, and the punishment is therefore infinite. Whether or not this bit of logic is pure assertion, a Christian might apply this to Adam: as a finite being Adam could not absorb an infinite punishment, so it had to be extended to his descendants ad infinitum.
Speaking practically, Christianity will never allow humanity a clean slate. A large part of its pull is the idea that we all have work to do in order to redeem ourselves, and a relationship with Jesus is the only way to get that done. The threat of Hell is always there, even if Hell is seldom or never mentioned.
Tag: adam and eve
Genesis, Flourishing and Other Course Questions
Question from Jordan:
How might an Atheist answer these questions regarding human nature, purpose and flourishing…what does it mean for humans to flourish, how do they achieve spiritual, emotional and mental well-being? What are the consequences of the Fall of human nature (Gen 3)? What is revealed of human nature (from Gen 1-2)?
Answer by SmartLX:
I answered the first part in a comment because someone asked the same question from the same Christian Worldview course, but I’ll cover it again. My other piece has a lot of material you might also find useful.
To flourish is to grow or develop in a healthy way. Physically, mentally and emotionally that means having the resources you need along with something which provides a challenge. Food, exercise, study, work, art, interpersonal relationships, meditation/reflection…it all has a role to play. To a Christian the essential resource is God, and without a relationship with Him a human cannot flourish properly. I think there is no God and yet lots of people happily flourish in all kinds of ways, so what they need in order to flourish would seem to be other things.
Genesis 3 is where Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, their eyes are opened (figuratively, as they aren’t actually blind before that point), and God curses the living daylights out of them both. The message is that humans would have been better off knowing only what God chose to tell them, not because the other knowledge is inherently harmful but because God is incredibly tough on disobedience. Human nature didn’t change after they ate because it wasn’t perfect before they ate – Eve wanted the fruit before she ate it. They just suddenly knew more, and their circumstances changed because of the curses they received and life got harder in lots of little ways (e.g. labour pains, arbitrary enmity between people, farming difficulties).
Humans don’t show up until the end of Genesis 1, and Genesis 2 doesn’t say anything about Adam’s nature except that God decides he needs an Eve. From the above, even Genesis 3 says far more about God’s nature than human nature. But now’s as good a time as any to say that by the nature of evolution, geology, physics, etc. there’s no way the story of Adam and Eve was real and I’m interpreting a work of fiction here. That said, a parable can say a great deal about human nature, I just don’t think this one does.