Thanks But No Thanks To The Garden Of Eden

From the perspective of moral decision-making, the Bible's single reference to a tree whose fruit contained the knowledge of good and evil seems to call for trusting and obeying rules unconditionally --- e.g., Curb your curiosity --- and never asking for the underlying ethical principles that would render the rules morally approvable in the first place --- e.g., Pushing the limits of our finite, human nature can be a good thing, but not defying those limits altogether. Passing up the fruit stands for sticking to the rules. Scarfing it down exhibits a defiant insistence upon principles.

Tradition has it that we are to follow the former course not because we see for ourselves that it is the better course to follow. We are to follow it because God told us to follow it. On our own, we cannot see what is better and worse, good or evil at all; only God can. All of this cries out for a second look.

It is true that only a mind like God's could contain all of what it would be good to know about good and evil themselves. For one thing, the good or the evil of any created thing (e.g., a beautiful sunset, or a tornado) is relative to how that thing does and does not fit into God's plan for the whole, and it is just this Whole that stretches finite understanding and imagination to the breaking point. Nevertheless, we still want to know anything and everything, from first principles down to last details, even when we discover that our thirst for knowledge may be forever beyond our capacity to quench.

Whatever is good or evil, then, about something cannot be such merely because God says that it is. Rather, when God says that something is good or evil, he does so because that thing really is one or the other, given the kind of world he has chosen to create and the plan by which he has chosen to govern it. Further, he says so on the basis of perceptions and judgments that are open to our understanding as well as to his.

The question of what God sees in something that makes him call that something good or evil, from viruses through civilizations all the way out to black holes and the Big Bang, is one of the biggest questions that we will ever ask about the created order. But it is a question that we ask because we cannot stop asking it. As is the question of whatever else God may know --- about himself, the created order, parallel universes, and perhaps even contemplated universes yet unactualized --- that we might have the capability of knowing, and in the knowing of which we might love him with our minds all the more completely.

Theologically speaking, then, we eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it is in our very created nature and not, as tradition would have it, our fallen nature, to do so. It was truly a tragedy when mention of that tree was dropped without ceremony from the Old Testament altogether, not to appear in its pages again, except perhaps in the oblique hint of a later Preacher that the fruit of a tree like that could only be bitter. "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." (Ecclesiastes 1:18, KJV)

And so, I keep on asking the very same question that flummoxed Eve so very long ago: did she hear the Creator right about those two trees? And I keep on thinking that she didn't. To her credit, she did see through at least one attempt of the serpent to confuse her, recognizing immediately that God's prohibition did not apply to each and every tree in the garden, but only to one. But what if Eve then got confused about which tree it was that she and everybody else must approach with caution?

Think about it. In the light of almost everything else that the Bible says about God's glorious gift of minds with which to know and love him, it simply cannot have been the tree of knowledge that posed the problem in the Garden of Eden. It had to have been that other one. And even the fruit of the tree of life could not have been prohibited absolutely, for it is a measure of God's own life that makes us the living beings that we are. Just as it is a measure of God’s own wisdom that makes us hunger for as much as we can find out about his created order, whose immensity and beauty will both thrill and stagger us for however long our lives shall last.