Everyone who has ever been to a christian church, and probably many who have not, has some level of understanding of the biblical story of a paradise called the Garden of Eden. In this place, the biblical god placed the first two humans ever to live. Along with all the food-bearing trees and plants known to us today, there were two "forbidden trees" planted; The Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil and the Tree of Immortality. This is recounted in the first few chapters of Genesis. The following are some questions about this story, questions that draw attention to some sensible inconsitencies.
First of all, the story in genesis recounts that, for Adam and all the generations to come, a route to immortality was definitely needed, as Adam was created as a mortal man. In Genesis 3:22 the "inerrant word of god" says "And the Lord god said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach outhis hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."" This verse clearly shows that the author of genesis understood Adam to have been created a mortal man, one who would die a natural death. Some Christians, however, believe that Adam was created as an immortal being and only lost his immortality when he and eve chose to sin by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This belief does not fit at all with what genesis 3:22 says, it's flatly contradictory. For my part, I just can't comprehend how these christians can assert the "truth" of the bible when their arguments for such claims simultaneously rely on and are in contrast with what the bible says, but I digress.
Who besides mankind would have wanted or needed a tree of life?
God, as he is described in the bible, would not have required it. Immortality is part and parcel of the christian's definition of god, and if it were not, then I suppose christianity couldn't exist as it does today.
Other possible recipients of the fruit of the tree of life were the animals. Since there are no animals that we know of that are 6,000 plus yaers old and still kicking, I think we can safely assume the animals did not benefit from the tree of life.
Tangentially speaking, I wonder if any of the tree of life's fruits ever dropped to the ground after ripening, and were eaten by the animals in the garden. If this did happen, there should be some really old cows out there somewhere. The bible doesn't mention this ever happening, but I think it's a reasonable thought to have. I mean every fruit bearing tree that lives today drops its fruits once they are ripe, in order to propagate itself. Animals eat this fruit all the time. If the tree of life did not behave in this same way, then I think christian's should have to explain this. I'm sure any apologetic would retort with some blather about god's miracles not needing to follow the rules of nature and all that, but we all know what kind of "explanation" that is. Evasion is a tactic apologetics have mastered.
So, since god did not need the tree of life and animals keep dying, that leaves only us as the benficiaries of the flora of paradise.
If god planted the tree of life for us, then why did he forbid us to eat its fruits? Again, I can hear the apologetic saying, god was using the tree to "test" the faith of Adam. This is just stupid, for any number of reasons. Here are a few.
1. God had no need to test Adam's faith because Adam had no reason to not have faith in god, having no one to compare god with, no one to influence him away from having faith in god.
2. God did not need to test Adam's faith in him because he walked in the garden in plain earshot of Adam, presumably physically (genesis 3:8). If, however, he was "walking" in a purely spiritual sense, he was still the only other "voice" there (excepting eve and the talking snake, I wonder if Eve was a parselmouth?), so Adam would have had no reason to "lose his faith", but as we shall see perhaps Adam's faith was rightfully tested to show the error of it.
Perhaps god was using the tree not to test Adam's faith, but his obedience. This is also stupid. Here is why.
God, as the bible describes him, is omniscient (all-knowing). As an all-knowing being, god would not have been in need of a tool (such as a tree of life) to test for an outcome of obedience level. An omniscient god would have already known exactly how obedient Adam was ever going to be. Either god was not omniscient, or the tree of life (or the other tree) was unecessary in this capacity, pick your poison.
But what about the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why did god plant that one there? Remember this is the tree in question at the trial all of us should hold within ourselves, of the truth of Christianity as narrated in the bible. Genesis 3:3-7 says:
"but god did say, "you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die." "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. For god knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like god, knowing good and evil." When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves."
Let's examine this passage shall we? (I feel like a pastor in Bizarro world)
First, god tells eve that she mustn't eat from the tree or even touch it, upon pain of death. So there is a tree that will provide death to Adam and Eve if they touch it, but there is also a tree that will provide immortality to both of them if they eat of it. It seems like a good idea to have an antidote ready in case of an accident, I mean what if Adam and Eve were wrestling one evening and one of them just happened to roll up against the tree of "death"? Wouldn't it be prudent to have that tree of life handy as well? The problem arises when we acknowledge that the god of the bible prohibited BOTH trees. This is perfectly illustrative of how the authors of the bible probably weren't philosophers by trade.
Second, the serpent says she will not die, but only gain the knowledge of good and evil, thereby becoming as god himself. Well, she ate, in fact they both ate, and neither died an unnatural death, so who was right? God said they would die, the serpent said they would gain knowledge of good and evil. Let's look to the unreliable, inconsistent, yet inerrant word of god for our answer. Again to genesis 3:22 " And the lord god said "The man has now become as one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
Survey says..... The serpent wins. God was not just wrong, but pathetically so. The death for Adam, that is described in genesis 3:19 and attibuted to god, "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return" cannot be claimed as fulfillment of god's earlier threat to Adam and Eve, since the tree of life was the only path to immortality ever available to Adam, and neither he nor Eve ever ate from that tree (at least as the bible recounts).
As a last point, I'd like to say that the biblical narrative from above is a fairly benign example of humanity in the throes of pyschological ignorance, being creative, cognitive beings, attributes that clearly seperate us from our more primitively(?) evolved cousins in the great ape family, constructing elaborate but ultimately false stories, in order to explain and cause to discuss two of the most sought after ideas of humanity, namely wisdom and living forever. One we can certainly achieve, the other might be possible, but we are not there yet (keep at it scientists).
Remember, I am an Atheist, I only use the bible to point out its own fallacies as professed in the christian perspective of the biblical story of creation. I criticize from a psychological and logical point of view.
Showing posts with label Adam and Eve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam and Eve. Show all posts
Friday, March 7, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
On Original Sin
As we all know, the foundation of all the Abrahamic religions is the downfall of man in the garden of eden through the commission of "original sin" by Eve and consequently Adam. God forbade them specifically from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They did anyway at the suggestion of the "serpent" and as a result were banished from the garden and forced into a life of grief and toil. Adam and Eve had children and the "sin" they committed when they ate the fruit was inherited by their children, Cain, Abel and Seth, and, I assume, all the other non-named children they must have had.
As an assay, by the logic of its bible, why doesn't christianity recognize that the whole of the human race must be descended from this first necessarily incestuous family. Cain, Abel and Seth had to have successfully mated with females, else we would not be here. It must have either been their mother or their unmentioned sisters. Disgusting.
How did we as the children of Cain, Abel and Seth come to acquire the "sin" of Adam and Eve?
Was it physically? Did we inherit it somehow? If so, this means we must necessarily have a sinful physical nature. What I mean is, if god created us in his image, never once "tweaking" us after the initial creation, then our physical makeup is the same post-original sin as it was pre-original sin, which in turn means that our ability to pass on genes to our children through the process of inheritance has been with us since our creation. Physically, there is only one way to pass on something biological from ourselves to our children. This is called inheritance and involves the replication of DNA sequences of amino acids called genes. Genes are what we inherit from our parents. If this is the case, then what sequence of amino acids would equate to "sin"? Is there also a "meekness" gene which we inherit? How about compassion? The ability to "hear" god speaking, perhaps? Infact, science hypothesises there might very well be certain sequences of amino acids that coorespond to the affects of humanity, although they are yet to be deciphered.
If we inherited original sin from adam and eve then this means we've had the gene for sin as a part of our genetic makeup since our creation, which of course would negate the very idea of original sin. Having the "Sin" gene in us from the get-go disallows the "sinfulness" of disobedience, unless you admit that god set us up to fail. In Logic, this is what is called an argument of Self-contradiction, where the very argument presents two points which cancel each other out. The argument of Self-contradiction is not a valid form of argument.
For argument's sake, however, let's say we do spiritually inherit the sins of our parents through genetics. How then does our spirit or soul survive the death and subsequent decomposition of our physical bodies of which our DNA is the most fundamental part? How could our spirits "go to heaven or hell" after we die if our physical genes are the mechanism of spiritual survival ?
The answer is we did not physically inherit either a soul that is immortal or "sin".
If we did not physically inherit sinfulness, then we must have spiritually inherited it somehow.
If that is the case, then what is the mechanism for this inheritance? It is certainly not DNA, as genetics is physical. Religion offers no explanation for this mechanism. There is no "Religious Method" to counter the Scientific Method of understanding, unless you consider the idea of simply believing what you have been told to believe a method of understanding, i.e. faith.
Curiosity by itself would ask that we try and discover the spiritual mechanism through which these "sinful" attributes are being replicated and passed on to subsequent generations. To date, the only mechanism that we know of that does this exact thing is the DNA in each cell, which is a purely physical entity, requiring no spirituality.
Faith doesn't explain how we inherit the spiritual doom of our parents, it only tells us we do, no explanation needed.
The concept that we "inherited" original sin actually relies on a particular scientific precept, transference, which is also one of the foundations of the theory of evolution.
Attributes are transferred to future generations from previous ones. In evolution these are attributes that are favorable to the survival of the physical being.
Religion perverts this concept into one where the transference does not ensure the survival of the spirit, but the likelihood of its permanent death. "The wages of sin is death", Romans 6:23
If science is not the answer to our questions as religion supposes, then why does religion base its most fundamental precept, the "sin" of which we are all guilty, on the scientifically discovered mechanism of replication and transference, namely DNA?
If on the other hand, we don't inherit our sin, but are given it, by god at the very moment of our birth, then god is a truly malicious being. Adam and Eve sinned and earned god's eternal wrath. We, however, did not. We did not eat of the forbidden tree, we weren't around yet. By the same reasoning, we also did not have any bearing on their commision of original sin.
We, as their descendants, either inherited the problem of sin physically through replication and transference, spiritually through some unknown mechanism that is actually scientific in nature, or god himself bestowed us with this malignancy at the very moment of our births . If god did decide to simply confer on us this spiritual vexation on an entirely individual basis, then he did so knowing the damnation of eternal destruction and torment he was annointing his own creation with. Again, if he did this, he is not a god worth recognizing, let alone worshipping.
Of course, science is the true answer. God is too human, to be anything but.
Religion itself uses science for its own purposes.
Only when science blatantly and completely discredits religion's fantastic claims of the supernatural does it divorce itself from the truth of the scientific method.
This alone is enough to discredit it.
As an assay, by the logic of its bible, why doesn't christianity recognize that the whole of the human race must be descended from this first necessarily incestuous family. Cain, Abel and Seth had to have successfully mated with females, else we would not be here. It must have either been their mother or their unmentioned sisters. Disgusting.
How did we as the children of Cain, Abel and Seth come to acquire the "sin" of Adam and Eve?
Was it physically? Did we inherit it somehow? If so, this means we must necessarily have a sinful physical nature. What I mean is, if god created us in his image, never once "tweaking" us after the initial creation, then our physical makeup is the same post-original sin as it was pre-original sin, which in turn means that our ability to pass on genes to our children through the process of inheritance has been with us since our creation. Physically, there is only one way to pass on something biological from ourselves to our children. This is called inheritance and involves the replication of DNA sequences of amino acids called genes. Genes are what we inherit from our parents. If this is the case, then what sequence of amino acids would equate to "sin"? Is there also a "meekness" gene which we inherit? How about compassion? The ability to "hear" god speaking, perhaps? Infact, science hypothesises there might very well be certain sequences of amino acids that coorespond to the affects of humanity, although they are yet to be deciphered.
If we inherited original sin from adam and eve then this means we've had the gene for sin as a part of our genetic makeup since our creation, which of course would negate the very idea of original sin. Having the "Sin" gene in us from the get-go disallows the "sinfulness" of disobedience, unless you admit that god set us up to fail. In Logic, this is what is called an argument of Self-contradiction, where the very argument presents two points which cancel each other out. The argument of Self-contradiction is not a valid form of argument.
For argument's sake, however, let's say we do spiritually inherit the sins of our parents through genetics. How then does our spirit or soul survive the death and subsequent decomposition of our physical bodies of which our DNA is the most fundamental part? How could our spirits "go to heaven or hell" after we die if our physical genes are the mechanism of spiritual survival ?
The answer is we did not physically inherit either a soul that is immortal or "sin".
If we did not physically inherit sinfulness, then we must have spiritually inherited it somehow.
If that is the case, then what is the mechanism for this inheritance? It is certainly not DNA, as genetics is physical. Religion offers no explanation for this mechanism. There is no "Religious Method" to counter the Scientific Method of understanding, unless you consider the idea of simply believing what you have been told to believe a method of understanding, i.e. faith.
Curiosity by itself would ask that we try and discover the spiritual mechanism through which these "sinful" attributes are being replicated and passed on to subsequent generations. To date, the only mechanism that we know of that does this exact thing is the DNA in each cell, which is a purely physical entity, requiring no spirituality.
Faith doesn't explain how we inherit the spiritual doom of our parents, it only tells us we do, no explanation needed.
The concept that we "inherited" original sin actually relies on a particular scientific precept, transference, which is also one of the foundations of the theory of evolution.
Attributes are transferred to future generations from previous ones. In evolution these are attributes that are favorable to the survival of the physical being.
Religion perverts this concept into one where the transference does not ensure the survival of the spirit, but the likelihood of its permanent death. "The wages of sin is death", Romans 6:23
If science is not the answer to our questions as religion supposes, then why does religion base its most fundamental precept, the "sin" of which we are all guilty, on the scientifically discovered mechanism of replication and transference, namely DNA?
If on the other hand, we don't inherit our sin, but are given it, by god at the very moment of our birth, then god is a truly malicious being. Adam and Eve sinned and earned god's eternal wrath. We, however, did not. We did not eat of the forbidden tree, we weren't around yet. By the same reasoning, we also did not have any bearing on their commision of original sin.
We, as their descendants, either inherited the problem of sin physically through replication and transference, spiritually through some unknown mechanism that is actually scientific in nature, or god himself bestowed us with this malignancy at the very moment of our births . If god did decide to simply confer on us this spiritual vexation on an entirely individual basis, then he did so knowing the damnation of eternal destruction and torment he was annointing his own creation with. Again, if he did this, he is not a god worth recognizing, let alone worshipping.
Of course, science is the true answer. God is too human, to be anything but.
Religion itself uses science for its own purposes.
Only when science blatantly and completely discredits religion's fantastic claims of the supernatural does it divorce itself from the truth of the scientific method.
This alone is enough to discredit it.
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