“Then the Lord God said, ‘Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil. What if they reach out, take fruit from the tree of life, and eat it? Then they will live forever!’” – Genesis 3:22

The foundational story of the Bible – and therefore all of the Abrahamic religions – fell apart for me once I asked one question: “Why?”

Now I understand that this story is in no way based in reality, but because many do treat it as literal history and some very central doctrines derive from it, I will treat it as literal history for the purposes of this post. 

Many years ago, my answer would have been simple and the same regardless of perspective. Why create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first place? Why punish humanity for something they quite literally could not understand was wrong? Why create any of this with explicit foreknowledge of its failure? The answer was always the same: that God was testing humanity’s faith. 

That answer was satisfying when I was satisfied in thinking no further about it. But the question remained of why God, in his supposedly infinite knowledge, would need to test humanity’s faith in the first place. Eventually, I could no longer ignore that question. 

The story very quickly falls apart at the seams. If God was not omniscient, then perhaps he could be justified in testing humanity’s faith. But he is all-knowing, meaning he knew that humanity would fail at the first hurdle. 

When this is pointed out, blame is typically shifted onto humanity. They were tempted, and they gave in to their temptations. They disobeyed God, so they deserved punishment. They knew it was wrong because God told them it was wrong. 

These answers presuppose a few things – that humanity did not know evil but could comprehend what “wrong” was, and that any disobedience of God is automatically evil. 

I remember learning in a sermon that Adam and Eve were effectively babies before the Fall. They did not know good from evil or right from wrong. They were fully innocent beings. Only after the Fall were they able to comprehend right and wrong. 

So imagine that you, as a parent, set up a play area for your newborn child. You give him all the toys he wants, but you place one of them in the middle and tell him he is not allowed to touch it. 

What happens then?

Obviously, the baby will touch the toy. He does not know right from wrong or good from evil. Those words make no sense to him whatsoever. He simply assumes that you are a safe person and, since you are watching him play, that he might stop you if you are about to do something dangerous. Even that second point is generous. 

Any reasonable parent would ask why you would give a baby access to something they should have no access to in the first place. They would also ask why this one particular toy is off-limits. And if your response to these reasonable parents’ questions was, “I told him not to,” you would be hated for very good reason. 

And if your response to this “transgression” was even a fraction of God’s response to humanity’s Fall, any reasonable parent would report you to the Department of Children and Family Services. 

Excepting the clear moral contradictions of this story, it still assumes that an action is evil solely because God said it was. Laws are not always moral – there is nothing immoral about driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit. While laws like this may have utility, there is still no utility to be found in God’s arbitrary forbidding of one tree. 

On the flipside, laws of morality should arise from our humanity, not because of an external force’s command. Imagine asking an atheist and a Christian why murder is immoral. The atheist might say that murder is immoral because it robs one of their precious life and ability to experience it, it imparts undue hardship onto anyone the victim may know and love, and there is even an economic factor if one could be so cynical. Besides, the atheist would rather not be murdered, so it stands to reason that they would refrain from it as well, nothing else withstanding. 

If the Christian is asked the same question and answers that murder is immoral because God says it is, I know I would feel much safer with the atheist. 

The only way in which evil can be correlated one-to-one with God’s command is if God was unequivocally and unarguably moral. And there are plenty of stories in the Bible that show that this is very much not the case. 

To take this point even further, God actually gives a reason for forbidding humanity’s access to the Tree of Life after they become knowledgeable of the difference between good and evil. Humanity has “become like” God, and if they eat from the other tree, they will “live forever.” 

In this view, humanity is not punished strictly for disobeying God, but for the mere possibility of rivalling him in power. And not just power, but knowledge. The reason conservatives fear an educated populace is because more education generally means more questioning and critical thinking, which makes it that much more difficult to maintain control. 

And even if all of the above can be disregarded, there is still the issue of God’s omniscience. No matter his motivations, no matter the definition of evil, no matter his reckless actions, the fact remains that he created all of this and allowed it to happen with the express knowledge that it would fail. 

God set humanity up for failure, for suffering, and for death, no matter how you slice it. Evil did not enter the world – God created evil and let it take root. 

Now the argument of free will comes into play. Free will is defined as one’s capacity to make choices unconstrained by external forces. In the Bible, God is said to offer free will to choose between right and wrong – with the caveat that if you choose not to obey his commands, he will throw you into Hell forever. 

And what of Heaven? If Heaven is meant to be a sinless place, but sinlessness can only exist when humanity has not exercised its free will, do humans have free will in Heaven? Any of them could Fall at any point if so. 

Freedom to obey does not make sense, and the threat of eternal torture for making use of free will seems unjust. Additionally, nominally having free will but being unable to exercise it is the functional equivalent of not having free will. 

Of course, this is merely a story written by some religiously-inclined people of a vastly different culture and time period. I would not spill so much ink on this subject if it had no real-world application. 

Because this is not just a story. This is a foundational piece of literature for billions of people. The very idea of sin is born with this story. Humanity is flawed, yes, but to define sin as a refusal to engage in a rotten deal with an insecure yet powerful man is nothing less than tyranny. To brand it as love and mercy is laughable. 

The doctrine of original sin arises from this story as well. Every single person is cursed with pain, suffering, and death from before birth for someone else’s actions. If the Bible is God’s everlasting word, even God himself seems iffy on this idea. In the Book of Exodus, God announces his intent to punish “to the third and fourth generation,” but in the Book of Ezekiel, “the son will not share the guilt of the father.”

Regardless, the message here is that every human is flawed and irredeemable without divine mercy because of someone else’s actions, not their own. Again, humanity is certainly flawed, but these flaws – just like our morality – arise from within us, not because an external force says so. 

And that is an awful way to live one’s life – a way that no truly loving God would impose upon his creations. 

For thousands of years, this story has been interpreted, justified, and re-interpreted by countless members of our species. There is nothing wrong with a detailed exegesis – that is what religion should be, ideally – but if one must dig so far through the exegetical crust that they hit the mantle, a re-examination is in order.