Please hand me that Screwdriver!

In the garden of our innocence

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 out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 22-24, NIV)

It’s called The Fall, human kind’s transition from innocence to consciousness. In the creation story, it happens suddenly with the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In Darwinian evolution, the transition from animalistic to humanistic is gradual, centuries and centuries of the fittest, the most knowledgeable, the ones with the biggest brains surviving and thriving while their fellows perish, so that the species eventually develops the level of consciousness that’s necessary for moral thought. The knowledge of good and evil, in Genesis.

The two are not really competing mythologies; their general purport is very similar. It’s a condition of being human, of being an amazingly smart species that brings with it an acute sense of suffering, of anxiety, of depression, of sorrow-beyond-words. The joy of childbirth made sadly poignant by the agony of labour, by the knowledge of—and the fear of—its opposite. That land of weeds, mosquitoes, and stony ground east of Eden and the cherubim and the flaming sword guarding the tree of life, denying us the elixir that would make us complete . . . immortality. With consciousness comes the sorrow at being “created in the image of gods,” but never reaching the one thing that would make us gods.

Because much depends on which mythology of human existence we embrace, its important that we learn to understand it for what it is. We are not gods, after all, and our consciousness demands that we seek to comprehend both the how and the why of it all. The Genesis stories were probably cobbled together by scribes during the Babylonian captivity, compilations of their oral stories of the beginnings of things. It was a desperate time, a time when life was particularly hard and discouraging and survival as a people was in doubt. That may account for the sorrowful nature of the narrative, the fact that it’s most meaningful when read as a lament for the human condition: to have fed on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil while being denied access to the Tree of Life.

The knowledge of good and evil, however, is one kind of knowledge, just like the knowledge of evolution is only one branch of knowledge. From time to time, we individually and collectively neglect or resist the search for knowledge on the broad scale. “Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh . . . For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD.” (Proverbs 1: 23-29, KJV) It seems prophetic for our age, and support for a very old adage, the first line in Alexander Pope’s famous poem: “A little learning is a dangerous thing . . .”

There is a way in which to understand the first three chapters of Genesis in a much more personal way than we normally do. We sometimes speak of “losing one’s innocence” as a part of growing up, the point at which we discover that our parents are not perfect, that bad things happen to good people, that there are people who very deliberately set out to harm others and that loved ones can be lost forever. It’s a “bite of the apple,” as we say; the threshold at which our eyes are opened and we are ruthlessly kicked out of Eden.

It’s unfortunate that reading the Genesis allegories as the history of everything in the past has done so much harm: Eve (woman) has been faulted with leading Adam (man) into sin with consequences that echo down the halls of history to our present day. By the time we get to Chapter 3, Eve is written out of the narrative—the man is expelled from Eden. “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” and “After he drove the man out . . .” Woman as an appendage of man (a piece of his rib?), an afterthought. More harmful still is the concept of original sin, that a person is born condemned as an inheritor of Adam’s sin when our experience has always been that children are born innocent and good, and that although corruptible by circumstance, the vast majority remain on the side of justice, peace and prosperity for everyone their entire lives.

The exceptions prove the rule.

As surely as the Genesis allegory was given us by God through the scribes of long, long ago, gifts of science, philosophy, biology, psychology, the arts, the learning and knowledge of this modern age have been added as gifts for us in the same vein. How sad would it be if we were to pit them against each other: Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity.