A Hypothetical Interpretation
According to religious tradition man[1] was put on Earth in a condition of perfect ignorance. When God put man on Earth He gave him everything the man would need. There was free food. There was idyllic weather. There was complete security with no danger of any kind. After a bit He even provided man with woman.
But what He did not provide was knowledge. Having everything else it would seem that man had no need for knowledge. God even made a point of the fact that he did not provide man with knowledge; he put it right in the middle of the Garden of Eden and then told Adam he was to have no access to it. It was in the metaphor of a tree and the trees in the Garden were the source of fruit which was there for man to eat, but of the fruit of this one tree man was not to eat. In the traditional scripture we are given no reason for this but we can reason our way to the most likely.
This is a different look at the Garden of Eden. When God created man He gave him everything he might want except for knowledge and man would in response throw all of that away in order to have the knowledge in its place. The Garden was created to confront man with that choice. Man was created to make that choice. Adam, the male version of mankind, was inhibited by his stern obedience from making that profound move but Eve, ruled by emotion, made it for him. When she did so Adam had to choose between his obedience[2] to his deity and his need and love for Eve. He chose Eve in one of the most dramatic and under-appreciated love stories in history.
Note that God did not communicate His proscription of the apple to Eve but only to Adam before Eve was on the scene. But Eve knew, because she told the snake that she knew she would surely die if she ate the apple. But then the snake told her that no, she would not surely die and that apparently satisfied her. She ate the apple.
Here we have the purpose of life, the answer to the question that men have been asking and pondering over since the dawn of human existence and it’s laid out right in the beginning in the lore of the world’s three great religions. It’s all about knowledge. God teased Adam and Eve, holding knowledge out of reach by His fiat to see if they were willing to pay a dear price for it. Adam and Eve passed the test. That is, they passed the test if knowledge is more valuable than a life of sloth and indolence in that perverse garden.
When God took the Garden away he told Adam that he would then live only by the sweat of his brow. That informed Adam that if he didn’t produce that sweat neither would he live. The abundant food, easy living and security were all gone. Note how men are enslaved to this day with promises to return those abundances. Security, no matter how much we desire it, is poison; it destroys incentive. Some men even use the promise of it with an evil purpose to exert power over other men.
It is now the year 2026 AD. Man has at this point made a tiny bit of progress in uncovering further knowledge. The process has had fits of starting and stopping and great periods of inactivity so far. But at the moment it seems to be doing pretty well.
Human knowledge is still in a primitive stage. We know how to use and manipulate things by using the science of mathematics but we still don’t understand the nature of those things. For example we deal with gravity by making automobile tires in a certain way and we launch rockets by building their engines of a certain size but we truly don’t know what gravity is. If we did know we could just conveniently turn it on and off. But we have now perhaps the tools that will help us toward greater discoveries. The most important of these tools is mathematics.
If Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten that apple we would not have the science of mathematics and we would still be living in caves. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Eve. Thank you, snake.
[1] I shouldn’t have to add this but in this essay when I write “man” I mean it in the true sense, the sense of the syllable “man” in “human,” “mankind” and in “humanity.” That includes both the male and the female. When I mean male and female I follow the convention of the scriveners of Genesis and use “Adam” and “Eve.”
[2] I don’t mean “obedience” here as the slavish following of orders but of the acceptance of rules that make order and civilization possible. Adam was only obeying God and God’s rules are always in the best interest of all existence. Aren’t they?
