21.1: Eden Origins

We tend to think that the story of Adam and Eve only became a problem from the standpoint of believability after Darwin in the mid-nineteenth-century, but, in fact, the strangeness of the story has dogged Christians throughout history. God creates two people and puts them in a garden to eat and have sex and name some animals. He puts two trees in the garden and says they can't eat the fruit off of one of the trees. Then a snake comes by and tells the woman to eat from the tree anyway so she does and the man feels bad and eats the fruit too and God throws them both out of the garden. The story addresses some of the most significant questions in theology but through a mysterious, mythological lens that does not afford the reader any straight answers. Do humans have free will if God is all-knowing? Why do people do evil things to each other? Under what circumstances is sex a moral act? Why do living beings suffer and die? Each of these questions live inside the narrative without a straight response, leaving readers across the millennia to draw their own conclusions.