And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
—Genesis 2:16–17
You are transported back in time to the Garden of Eden. It’s definitely a nice place to visit. Lush vegetation is everywhere. Look! Over there. To your right. That long-haired woman must be Eve!
A great blue butterfly rises from a trickling stream. It drifts toward Eve, moving like a feather floating in the breeze. Her hand goes to her face as her eyes open wide in wonder. The butterfly, floating at the height of her head, flashes various shades of blue and crimson in the bright afternoon sunlight. At the edges of the membranous wings are little sparkles, as if the light is igniting tiny dust particles in the air when the wings move through them.
Yes, Eve is happy. This is before she and Adam eat the fruit of the tree—the famous tree of knowledge of good and evil—before God kicks her out of Eden and punishes her forever with exhausting pain during childbirth.
As you watch Eve chase after the butterfly, several paradoxes are on your mind. Before Eve ate the fruit, she either knew that obedience to God is good and disobedience is evil, or she did not know. If she did not know, she cannot be blamed for disobeying God by eating the forbidden fruit. (The Bible never specifies what type of fruit it is, although today we often think of it as an apple.) If she cannot be blamed, then God should not have punished her by kicking her out of Eden and giving her pain during childbirth. In particular, God punished Eve in Genesis 3:16 as follows: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
On the other hand, if Eve did know that disobedience is evil, then she already had the knowledge of good and evil, something eating the fruit was supposed to provide her with. If she already had such knowledge, there would have been no temptation for her to eat the forbidden fruit. In addition, an omniscient God would have known Eve knew of good and evil, and He would not have made not eating or eating the fruit (and subsequently not gaining or gaining of the knowledge of good and evil) a test of her morality. Whatever the significance of the tree, the Bible indicates a behavioral change in Eve after she eats the fruit; for example, she and Adam are suddenly ashamed of their nudity: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (Genesis 3:7).
The Paradox of Eden has perplexed philosophers and theologians for centuries. Could it have been unjust for God to have made such a prohibition and given a subsequent punishment? Whether or not Eve knew that obeying God was good and disobeying God was bad, God seems to have acted unfairly. Speaking strictly from a legal or logical standpoint, does this mean God acts unjustly?
The butterfly has alighted on Eve’s hand. You watch her for another few moments wondering if you should warn her. But you don’t want to alter history. It’s too difficult to predict the consequences of your interference. You return to the future wondering if God would have permitted you to warn Eve. If you had been able to warn her, would God have let her avoid eating from the tree of good and evil?
MUSINGS AND SPECULATIONS
One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists. But it has occurred to me that God has Alzheimer’s and has forgotten we exist.
—Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
—James Feibleman, Understanding Philosophy
The premise of the tree story in Genesis is that the forbidden fruit provides knowledge of good and evil. Some feel that in not knowing good from evil or right from wrong, Eve could not be aware that it would be evil to disobey God’s command not to eat the fruit.
This Paradox of Eden is based on Richard La Croix’s paper “The Paradox of Eden,” which appeared in the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion.1 La Croix takes a firm stance: Because God punished Adam and Eve for doing something that they could not have known to be wrong or evil, God acted unjustly. If, before eating the fruit, they already knew that obeying God is good and disobeying God is bad, then they already would have possessed the knowledge of good and evil. An omniscient God would know this and, therefore, God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not a fair test of Adam and Eve’s sense of right and wrong. Therefore, La Croix suggests that being just is not an essential property of God.
Another relevant opinion can be found in Rabbi Allen Podet’s article “La Croix’s Paradox: An Analysis” published in the same journal.2 Podet suggests alternative ways of looking at the paradox. First of all, the paradox assumes that Eve’s being kicked out from Eden was a punishment for disobedience. (To me this assumption seems warranted, but perhaps the Bible allows some room for interpretation here.) Podet also says that simply knowing that it is good to obey God and bad to disobey Him is just one tiny facet of “knowing good and evil.” For example, eating the fruit may convey additional knowledge and additional ways of knowing. Lastly, the paradox assumes that God was testing Eve’s righteousness, but God might have been testing all kinds of things such as obedience, attitudes, gullibility, or even nothing at all!3
* * *
There is probably no episode of the Bible that has been subject to a greater variety of interpretations than the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Few interpretations seem to account for all the information in Genesis. Given this, the Paradox of Eden is ripe for further debate. Some of my colleagues have asked whether Eve was competent to resist the serpent who coaxed her to eat of the tree. Again, because this was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the implication is that before eating it, Eve did not know right from wrong. How could Adam and Eve reasonably be held accountable for wrongdoing committed before they truly realized what wrongdoing was? Interestingly, the immediate effect of Eve’s new knowledge of good and evil is that she knows that it is immoral to be naked. For example, the story says nothing about her eyes being open to the wrongdoing of murder or cruelty.
A related paradox, called the “Paradox of the Fortunate Fall” focuses more directly on the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace.4 If Adam and Eve had not eaten the forbidden fruit and been cast out of Eden, then humans would not have had the wondrous fortune of Jesus’s redemption story. If humans had not erred, they would not have needed salvation.
In modern times, the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall has been discussed in depth by American philosophers Arthur O. Lovejoy and Herbert Weisinger.5 Lovejoy writes,
Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit, many theologians had observed, contained in itself all other sins; as the violation by a rational creature of a command imposed by infinite wisdom, and as the frustration of the divine purpose in the creation of the earth, its sinfulness was infinite; and by it the entire race became corrupted and estranged from God. Yet if it had never occurred, the Incarnation and Redemption could never have occurred.
For centuries, scholars have also suggested that it was fortuitous that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and subsequently fell. For example, consider the following anonymous medieval hymn that has been debated for centuries:
Adam lay ibounden [bound]
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter [years]
Thought he not too long;
And all was for an appil,
An appil that he tok,
As clerkes finden
Wreten in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
A bene hevene quene [heaven’s queen].
Blessed be the time
That appil take was
Therefore we moun singen [may sing]
Deo gracias [Thanks be to God].
English poet John Milton (1608–1674), in Paradise Lost, also raises the paradox.6 When the archangel Michael explains the plan for Christ’s redemption to Adam, Adam cries out with happiness:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By mee done and occasion’d, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,
To God more glory, more good will to Men
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. (XII. 469–78)
In particular, the angel Michael explains to Adam that the final paradise will be much better than Eden as a result of Christ:
His faithful and receive them into bliss,
Whether in Heav’n or Earth, for then the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days. (XII. 462–65)
Do you think the Fall was happy or a disaster for humans? Some of my Christian friends tell me that they would prefer that Eve had not fallen and that Jesus Christ had not existed or been needed for salvation. If you take the Bible literally, how do you think humanity would have evolved had Adam and Eve not fallen?
Opinions continue to be sharply divided about the Fall. Arthur Lovejoy himself approves of the concept of the Fortunate Fall. He elaborates:
No devout believer could hold that it would have been better if the moving drama of man’s salvation had never taken place; and consequently, no such believer could consistently hold that the first act of that drama, the event from which all the rest of it sprang, was really to be regretted. Moreover, the final state of the redeemed, the consummation of human history, would far surpass in felicity and in moral excellence the pristine happiness and innocence of the first pair in Eden—that state in which, but for the Fall, man would presumably have remained. Thus Adam’s sin—and also, indeed, the sins of his posterity which it “occasioned”—were the conditio sine qua non both of a greater manifestation of the glory of God and of immeasurably greater benefits for man than could conceivably have been otherwise obtained.7
On the other side of the fence are philosophers and theologians who reject the idea of the Fortunate Fall. Writer Diane McColley strongly argues that
nothing could be more repugnant to Milton’s thought than the idea that disobeying God could be good for you. In Paradise Lost, God’s grace is fortunate, but it does not depend upon human weaknesses to manifest itself. Growth in understanding and in love is fortunate, but it results from obedience, not from sin. Mankind is liberated not by sin but by regeneration; and regeneration, although it takes men and women above the height they fell from, does so by progressively restoring the abilities they lost by falling. If Adam and Eve had not fallen, they would “by degrees of merit rais’d” have “open[ed] to themselves the way” to heaven, and God would have deigned “To visit off the dwellings of just men/Delighted” (VII. 157–58, 57); that is, they would have achieved that “far more excellent state of grace and glory than that from which [they fell]” promises to regenerate.… The Fall was in no way fortunate, but perverted a process of growth and fruition that might have continued through obedience and that regeneration would restore. God’s means of restoration are fortunate, of course, but the disobedience was not.8
Writer Virginia Mollenkott is also firmly against Lovejoy’s position. Like McColley, she contradicts Lovejoy’s opinion that Milton expressed and supported the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall:
Picture redemption as the “ultimate result” of the Fall. Redemption is the result of God’s concern for fallen man; apart from the loving nature of God, there is no necessary connection between the Fall and the Atonement. Redemption is therefore the remedy, not the result.… In other words, Milton demonstrates that once sin is a fait accompli, God manages to do something wonderful about it. There can be no doubt that to Milton the goodness of God surpasses the evil of Satan; but that is not the same thing as claiming that God’s goodness to fallen man surpasses what God’s goodness would have provided if man had never fallen.9
From the standpoint of Christianity, the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall is one of the most fundamental dilemmas. If Adam and Eve had not stumbled, perhaps the world would not need (or have needed) salvation. Did an omniscient God foresee their stumble, and if so, did He in some sense want the fall so that Jesus would one day walk the Earth? There are Christians who would suggest that God was rational in permitting the Fall because this led to redemption and a later reunion with God in Heaven. After all, the Fall and the existence of evil is only temporary. Through the benevolence of God and the wonder of Mary and the resurrection, human beings will find the Garden again.
However we may wish to interpret the Paradox of Eden and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall, many would agree that a literal interpretation of the Bible is not the best way to extract information. Early in Genesis, before the fourth day of creation, we find “evening” and “morning” (Genesis 1:5, 8, 13)—yet the sun has not yet been created. Adam is supposed to “surely die” if he eats the forbidden fruit, yet he lives another 930 years (Genesis 5:5). The Turkish philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 980) believed that the Bible, Koran, and utterances of prophets are expressed as poetic metaphors in order to make the messages of actual truths appeal to and be understood by the people. Alan Dershowitz, in The Genesis of Justice, pays particular attention to God’s promises of reward or punishment that don’t seem to materialize in a literal fashion:
God threatens, in the Ten Commandments, to punish the “iniquity of fathers on children to the third and fourth generation.” He postpones punishment and reward until after the death of the sinner and saint repeatedly through the early books of the Bible, thus making consequences invisible within a given generation. He has learned that by threatening immediate, specific, and visible punishment—such as He did to Adam—He risks loss of credibility when these consequences do not materialize.10
Dershowitz suggests that the theologians of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had to accept the “afterlife” solutions of older religions—namely, the existence of a world after death in which the good are rewarded and the bad punished. Because justice was not obvious in this world, it had to be served in a world no human could see and from which no human could return or report. On the subject of the afterlife for Christians, Professor Marcus J. Borg writes, “If you had been able to convince me at age twelve or so that there was no afterlife, I would have absolutely no idea why I should be Christian. Heaven was what it was all about.”11
Fig. 8.1. Adam and Eve driven out of Eden. Reprinted from Gustave Doré, The Doré Bible Illustrations (New York: Dover, 1974), 3.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
—Genesis 3:2–5
Without transgression there is no knowledge.
—Philip Roth, American Pastoral