Appetizer #2: Apartheid in Eden

The basic premise of the first three chapters of Genesis is that God created everything, including Man and Woman in six days, and having done so he puts them in a garden – the garden of Eden - and gives them one rule: don’t eat that fruit over there. They eat it anyway, and are duly punished with labour pains, misogyny, horticultural difficulties, exile and mortality.

Mainstream Christian doctrine also maintains that as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the garden of Eden, a curse was put on the whole earth; the world we live in is a broken world, a cursed world, cursed because of sin. This, we are told, is not what God had intended. Humans are supposed to be living sinlessly in the Garden of Eden for eternity, communing with God, naming all the animals (Genesis 2:19) and generally living a blissful life. It is only because of The Fall that the world has become rotten and corrupt; damaged and corroded; an unholy shadow of its intended form. (Well, perhaps Christians don’t usually put it quite like that, but you get the general idea). With this in mind, let us for the moment grant as true the Genesis account of the Fall and ask some important questions: What if the Fall had never taken place? What would have happened if the divine plan had actually worked? What if Adam and Eve had managed to ignore the sneaky snake and had retained their sinless status?

Well, presumably, if Adam and Eve had not succumbed to temptation and had refrained from eating the forbidden fruit, then they would have remained without sin and the world would not have become broken. Likewise, any offspring they had would have been born in a state of sinlessness, just like them. Now, as the bible says, following The Fall, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, so presumably, without The Fall Adam and Eve and their progeny would have been allowed to stay in the Garden of Eden forever. This picture of humanity living together peacefully and sinlessly in the Garden of Eden is presumably what it would mean for the world to have remained unbroken and perfect....

…but it is not quite as simple as that is it?

The Fall of humanity cannot be seen as simply the result of failing a ‘one time only’ test. The bible indicates that Adam and Eve did indeed fail this ‘test’, but what if they had passed? Surely the test would have had to continue, if for no other reason than to demonstrate their continued obedience. Remember also that, had they passed the test, Adam and Eve’s progeny would have been subject to the same kind of temptation as they were, and perhaps they would have succumbed where their parents had resisted. Perhaps not, but every generation that came after Adam and Eve would have been subjects of the test, and, sooner or later one of them would have succumbed. Then what? Would the curse have been placed on all of humanity from then on? A tad unfair don’t you think? Or, perhaps, the curse would only have been placed on the Fallen and their descendants. In that case we would have two castes of humans, the sinless caste within the Garden of Eden, and the sinful without, with the latter group gaining new members whenever somebody else gave in to temptation.

Obviously, this isn’t meant to be a serious suggestion of what might have happened if Adam and Eve had obeyed God, but it does serve to highlight that the original plan, as intended by God, would have relied on everyone steering clear of temptation. Given humanity’s innate curiosity, not to mention the notion of free will that we hear so much about, this would seem to be an unlikely proposition.

In short, when considering this so-called ‘divine plan’ for humanity, it is worth remembering that it took only one indiscretion to compromise, whereas it would have required countless acts of restraint to succeed. That appears to be monumentally fragile and disastrously unstable; hardly the work of omnipotence.