In Genesis, God gives a pivotal commandment to Adam:
“And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’” (Genesis 2:16-17).
Although Eve had not yet been created when God gave this commandment, she clearly got the message. We know this because Eve recites God’s commandment when questioned by the serpent.
In response, the serpent says, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3: 4-5).
The serpent thus seduces Eve with the promise of wisdom and becoming God-like. Eve, who is (presumably) still very ignorant of good and evil, eats the fruit and shares it with Adam. Adam and Eve then become aware of their nakedness and feel ashamed. God punishes them.
Now, on the one hand, this seems rather harsh. How could Adam and Eve have known better? Until they had obtained the knowledge of good and evil, until they had eaten the forbidden fruit, how could they have known that disobedience to God is evil and that bad things are sure to follow? Did they really understand the meaning of death when God warned them? If Adam and Eve were rebels, they were almost certainly rebels without a clue.
On the other hand, before He metes out punishment, God makes clothes for Adam and Eve. This act of mercy suggests that God takes into account extenuating circumstances, knowing, of course, that our clueless rebels were at a serious disadvantage against the crafty serpent. For, being ignorant and thus innocent, Adam and Eve were like children confronted by a stranger with candy. God is therefore merciful and equips the rebels to meet the hardships imposed upon them as a consequence of their disobedience.
Notice also that God summarily punishes the serpent first, then Eve, then Adam.
However, it is not clear whether or not the serpent acted as an agent of God’s will. God had created the serpent after all. The serpent, we are told, was “more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had created” (Genesis 3: 1).
Now did the serpent merely play the role God intended it to play in His plan for humankind? Did the serpent really have free will to act in opposition to God? Is it possible that the serpent had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? That might explain how the serpent knows that by eating this fruit one becomes God-like. Otherwise, how could the serpent have known? Furthermore, if the serpent had not eaten the fruit, then how could it have known better than to tempt Eve?
This part of the story raises more questions than it answers (that is, if we take the meaning of the story literally).
It seems to me that the story of the fall illustrates the tendency of human beings to learn things the hard way. Here, redemption is possible insofar as we learn the hard lessons of experience and use that knowledge to avoid making the same mistakes (the kind of knowledge that gets passed down from generation to generation). Having thus acquired knowledge the hard way, human beings are capable of self-correction (i.e., adapting), of realizing “the good” through obedience to God.
In this sense, the story seems to represent not only the psychological development of the child who discovers the possibility of rebellion, of acting contrary to the will of the parent, but also the evolutionary history of the species. The fall coincides with that “moment” in human evolution when the pain of having chosen unwisely caused human beings to realize that they could have—and should have—acted differently; that is, when free will became operational and self-conscious human behavior acquired a moral dimension.
I bookend “moment” with quotation marks because that moment stretches across innumerable generations, a period during which ancestral beings gradually acquired the ability to absorb new information and communicate by means of symbolic utterances (language). In the context of evolution, this series of steps amounts to a blink of an eye. It was precisely that moment when Nature loosened its grip on the human animal, when impulse-driven behavior gave way to a new freedom of action following conscious choice.
It is this capacity for self-conscious reflection and moral conduct that causes human beings to stand out in Nature, to be qualitatively different from other animals. And, when you stand out, you become exposed. You feel naked, as it were. Being self-conscious, humans sense their nakedness and hence their vulnerability, their mortality.
Now, having been liberated from the genetic determinism that governs the behavior of other animals, human beings, with their God-given free will, must rely on acquired knowledge and Reason to guide their conduct in a world full of danger, to choose wisely in the face of alternative courses of action, some of which may prove fatal to the individual and to society. Over time the body of acquired knowledge that gets passed from one generation to the next—what we call “culture”—includes rules, customs, social norms, and values that guide human action and thought. This cultural inheritance places extrasomatic limits where once there were biological constraints. Without such limits giving rise to a modicum of social order and harmony (i.e., recurring and predictable patterns of human action), no society could function, let alone prosper, for very long.
A proper respect for time-tested cultural tradition, then, is in order to the extent that the tradition promotes the survival and prosperity of the people who maintain it in the face of rebellion and other disturbances. If tradition had not promoted human survival, then we wouldn’t be here today to talk about it. Cultural tradition, then, is akin to the garments that a merciful God made for Adam and Eve, without which human survival outside the garden would be less certain.
I believe these garments—the symbolic clothing that human beings wear for their own protection—are precisely what C. S. Lewis had in mind when he wrote about fallen Man in his book That Hideous Strength: “…that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed on him as a protection from the full results of his fall” (That Hideous Strength, p. 200).
This limitation of powers is enshrined in what Lewis calls the Moral Law, which has come down to us through countless generations, as if given by a God who wants us to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). God is good: He is that force which selects for ideas and values that best promote the survival and well-being of a self-conscious animal confronted with choice in a dangerous world.
God’s will, then, finds expression in traditional wisdom and values: the time-tested Moral Law which imposes limits on our powers to act in the world. It is precisely this cultural inheritance which guides human conduct and enables human beings to be fruitful and multiply. In this way, human beings regain access to the tree of life, that is, by adhering to tradition (obedience to God) and by choosing wisely in accordance with the Moral law (living virtuously).
We dispense with tradition at our peril, for God judges harshly those who remove the clothing which He, in His mercy, provided. By wearing these hand-me-downs, humans can navigate the world more reliably and safely in their fallen condition, and by doing so, they are in a better position to adapt to their environment and prosper.
Let’s get back to Genesis. God then says something very interesting:
“‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden He placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:22-24).
Here, another question comes to mind: Did the serpent tell the truth?
The serpent told Eve that by eating the fruit, she would not die. She would instead gain wisdom and become like God.
God then confirms this state of affairs when He says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” Notice also that Adam and Eve did not die when they ate the fruit.
Could it be that the serpent told Eve the truth after all?
Recall that the tree of life was not off-limits to Adam and Eve prior to their disobedience. God’s commandment only dealt with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God permitted Adam and Eve to eat of any other tree in the garden, including (presumably) the tree of life. Are we to conclude, then, that only an ignorant (and thus innocent) Adam and Eve could have lived forever?
In a sense, Adam and Eve did die that day. It was their disobedience to God that caused them to be evicted from the garden and to be denied access to the tree of life. In that day, they were doomed to die—certainly their innocence had died. And, in that day, they became self-conscious, aware of their nakedness, and desperately in need of clothes.
The ancient wisdom of Genesis thus warns that the Promethean temptation to become God-like leads to disaster. We see this point emphasized later in Genesis, in the Tower of Babel story: A tradition of thought which rejects the serpent and, with it, totalitarian attempts to build such ill-fated towers would seem to promote human survival and prosperity and thus everlasting life.