Did God create us to sin . . . and then blame us for what we did?
This might sound like a rehash of the problem “if God knew we were going to sin and yet created us anyway, is he complicit in it?” Well, no: foreknowledge doesn’t mean approval. Knowing something implies neither causality nor approval; all it implies is that there may be other values (like freedom) at play and that the priorities assigned to those values by an omniscient and loving God should not be second-guessed by creatures neither all-knowing nor always loving.
But the problem here is deeper. Was Eden a set-up?
Here’s a video that raises the objections.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7sGXzjjpG0?si=o0pfRnShAVWx6q4M]
The objector’s take on the creation story is a dangerous mishmash of literalism and modern thinking, each of which is problematic and both of which together produce a toxic brew. On the one hand, the objector seems to take Genesis 2 literally. Then she assesses it against the criteria of modern suspicion and finds it wanting.
First problem: literary genre. The Bible (which, in Greek, means “books”) encompasses many different genres of writing, which the sacred writer, inspired by God, used to convey certain religious truths. There can be, therefore, a difference between a genre (e.g., a story) and what we would call “historical events.” There can also be a difference between the religious truth and the manner in which that religious truth is taught.
Do we really think the omniscient and loving God who made heaven and earth made the fate of humanity—which in historical fact led to his son’s incarnation to fix—dependent on Eve’s appetite for a McIntosh?
Human simplification of Genesis 2 has led to the transformation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil into an apple tree. Probably because you can’t get too many trees of knowledge of good and evil at your neighborhood nursery. So what’s up?
First of all, let’s look at that name. It’s unusual. “The tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
Knowledge in the Bible is not something theoretical. It is something practical, concrete, hands-on. When the Bible says the man “knew” (יָדַ֖ע) his wife, resulting in Cain (Gen 4:1), it didn’t mean Adam said, “Hi, Eve, long time no see!” Knew was quite experiential: it meant intercourse.
So the tree “of knowledge” of good and evil means the practical, concrete experience of evil, not some mere theoretical awareness. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of that tree—i.e., not to experience evil, not to sin. They chose to experience evil. They sinned.
We don’t really know what that sin was. What the Bible is telling us is that, at the beginning of the human race, man was confronted with the choice of experiencing versus abstaining from evil. He chose the former. He sinned.
That the Bible tells us this in a story, whose fundamental feature is disobedience, does not misrepresent the religious truth. It made the truth comprehensible for its original audience. That should not, however, cause it to lose anything “in translation” for us.
To choose to “experience” evil is to choose to sin. But sin is not a legitimate choice because freedom does not exist to put us in some position of neutrality or ambivalence between good and evil. Just because we are free does not mean that evil is as valid a choice as good. Freedom does not constitute the good: good and evil exist independently of my free choice. Freedom exists not to create the good, but to make what is already good mine. Freedom exists to turn the good into my good.
Freedom is, of course, also used to turn the evil into my evil. The problem with that is that such use of freedom is cannibalistic: it is destructive of freedom. Evil does not enhance my freedom; it enslaves me (John 8:34). The use of freedom to do evil shrinks everyone’s freedom: the free choice of theft makes the perpetrator a thief who always watches his back, while his victims cower behind locked doors or lock their toothpaste behind the counter.
So how did God “dupe” Adam and Eve? Our objector argues that God didn’t tell Eve; Eve didn’t have to listen to Adam; and in any event, how could she be sure that God or Adam wasn’t deceiving her?
Catholics used to pray an “Act of Hope,” which concludes that we should rely on God, “who can neither deceive nor be deceived.” So it’s not in God’s nature. God doesn’t have man’s guile: he’s Adonai, not Zeus trying to seduce some woman.
I think the objector’s bigger problem is assuming that prelapsarian man—i.e., human beings before the Fall—was like what man is today. Implicit in that assumption is that Adam and Eve thought back then like how people might think now. That’s not true.
Sin has a way of distorting our field of vision. It makes us distrustful. We wonder what’s “in it” for somebody else. It becomes “him versus me.”
Our own experience confirms this. Once we stop trusting someone, the burden of proof often shifts in such a way that we presume that the other cannot be trusted even when he seeks to change. The experience of sin throws our moral vision off kilter.
Before the Fall, there was no reason for this. Starting from the assumption that God is God (and no human being is), there is no basis to assume that God will deceive. Nor is there any reason to assume that, without sin in the picture, Adam would have had a reason to deceive Eve. (Honestly, that would assume a sin before the sin!) Neither has any reason to distrust the other. They “knew” they were naked but “were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25). Their coming shamefully to “know” their nakedness (3:7) comes from a change in their moral vision of each other, not a visit to the ophthalmologist.
Before the Fall, they lived in communions of persons: with each other and with God. They were intimately close to each other. They clearly converse with each other.
In such a prelapsarian world, sin is not an “oops” we commit by mistake that suddenly assumes eschatological proportions. No, it is fair to say that the first humans, living in that world of primordial innocence, were even more acutely aware of rightness and wrongness. Innocence is not necessarily naïveté.
Again, human experience bears this out. When we are tempted for the first time by a sin we really itch to commit, we feel its real gravity and, if we fall, a sense of greater guilt. We need temptation to “talk down” our awareness of that wrong and know that repetition dulls our sensitivity.
Now, remember: before the first sin, there is no “itch” of concupiscence bolstering the temptation. It’s fair to say the first sin was a calculated choice to do it irrespective of every reason and experience that argued against it. But freedom is a choice—though, as noted, still blameworthy when selecting evil.
So was man “duped”? Whatever that first sin was, it was a calculated decision to disobey God and not trust each other, all reason to the contrary notwithstanding, in order to “choose” to “know” (i.e., experience) evil—“to be like gods” who discover the bitter taste of death and non-being, since, in the end, that is what the experience of evil is and the only place it can lead.