God, choice, and love
You don't understand love because you don't understand God, and vice versa
In the story of Adam and Eve, we assume that God said no, and the serpent said yes, but the story is more sublime than that. Before telling you that story, I wanna tell you another one.
Have you heard of the ham butt problem? A mother was making dinner and she was going to cut off the butt off the ham, per family tradition, and then she thought, “Hey! This is a perfectly good piece of meat. Why am I cutting this off?” So she called up mom and asked, “Why did you cut the butt off the ham?” She answers, “I dunno, grandma always did it that way.” They call grandma, and grandma says, “My pan was too small!” (source)
We know we should be asking questions, otherwise we keep doing things without understanding why. We inherit a bunch of knowledge from our ancestors. What do we keep? What do we question?
I talked to my sister on the phone recently, and she told me about a crucial detail I never noticed in the story of Adam and Eve. Eve wasn’t created until after God said to not eat the fruit, which suggests that Adam repeated the message to Eve. But when questioned by the serpent, Eve said she wasn’t supposed to even touch the fruit. This was wrong. God didn’t say don’t touch!
The devil, as they say, is in the details. Because when the serpent says, “you will not surely die”, you can’t just look at the statement in isolation. No, the serpent was responding to a misunderstanding that Eve had. Eve effectively says, “if I touch it, I’ll die”. And the serpent effectively says, “no, you won’t”. There’s deception, but no lie. Unfortunately, everything is a deception. Or, everything’s a scam.
If we step back, we’ll realize we find ourselves in predicaments like this all the time. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about fruit, religion, or general safety precautions.
When I was around 19, I stopped believing in God. Within the course of about a month, I went to total atheism. Sure, I knew I couldn’t prove a negative, but what’s the benefit of God? This, too, shares the same structure as the Adam and Eve story. I grew up believing in God, but blind faith wasn’t satisfying, and so I got into creationism.
A few years later I got into a podcast called the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe—and you can probably see where this is going. They debunked belief in aliens, ghosts, 9/11 conspiracies, homeopathy, astrology, and creationism. There was only one problem: how could such smart people deny creationism which I held so dear?
This difference of opinion about creationism started to eat away at me. I was applying a different set of standards to it than I did to, say, homeopathy. I figured I should give evolution a fair shake. Now I had another problem: I believed in the Bible because I believed that it had scientific backing through creationism. I was terrified that if God found out I questioned him, that I’d be in trouble. Then I thought, if the God of the Bible exists, looking into evolution will only strengthen my faith. Besides, I’m sure God would be pleased with me taking a question like this seriously—I just couldn’t tell my parents.
I was in the same predicament as Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, but I didn’t recognize it because I always assumed that the serpent lied.
I’ve been watching some videos lately about what it was like to leave Mormonism, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. While still inside, they overlook the mistakes of their institution by saying the religion itself is fine, and it’s the people who mess it up. This is a problem because we always learn about things through unreliable narrators. With Christianity, there’s not just the Bible, but the translation of the Bible. This book talks about Jesus as our intermediary between earth and heaven. There’s always an intermediary, and things always get lost in translation.
The best you can do is be directionally correct, but when you run up against the edge, you realize it’s not enough to be mostly right—it’s possible to overcorrect. The real kicker of the garden of Eden story is that Eve’s over-abundance of caution creates the opportunity for her downfall. We don’t know if the caution originated from Eve misremembering, or from Adam. The word for rib, in the story, can be translated as “side”, and some would argue this would be the appropriate translation. Some translators think the original creation of Adam was both male and female, and God eventually split them up. This would mean that Adam didn’t have to repeat God’s message to Eve.
God said, “you will surely die” (mot tamut).
Eve remembered, “you must die” (temutun).
The snake responded, “you must not surely die” (lo mot temutun).
I met a guy who took understanding the truth of the Bible very seriously. He was a little guy with a sly smile. He knew things nobody else in the church knew. He carried with him a book with the Old Testament, not just in Hebrew, but in ancient Hebrew. The text looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. I was suspicious of him at first. After all, he was a bit of an outsider, and too eager to tell me what he knew—all bad signs. But I sat with him and listened, and I found that I could learn from him. He took me aside and whispered something to me that most people don’t know about the Bible: that there’s a lot of hidden sexual content in there. Did you know that when the Bible talks about knowing God, it uses a sexual term? The word for sex between a husband and wife, and the term for knowing God are the same word: “yada”. This explains why the Bible has such awkward phrasing: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived”. When he told me, I felt a little ashamed—it was almost pornographic.
Should I have trusted the gross feeling or should I have kept talking to him? The real challenge for us isn’t that someone will lie to us, but that someone will deceive us with the facts. That’s the real head scratcher.
This is what makes it so difficult to commit to any religious belief. We want to go about our lives, but then we run into a problem or some observation, we’re surrounded by people for whom the religion still works, and now we’re stuck. Why can’t we just settle down? But no, we want to get as close to the ultimate truth as we can get, and I think we’re right to do that.
Every parent knows this problem. I tell my 4 year old daughter to stay off the street. So my daughter says, “But, dad! There’s no cars on the road!” And she’s right. I tell her that a car might show up without her noticing. And then she’ll say, “I’ll hear them if they come!” It’s not that she’ll never be ready, but everything has its time. Some scholars think God didn’t mean to keep the forbidden fruit from Adam and Eve forever.
Another example. It’s better to believe there’s a tiger in the bushes where one does not exist, than to believe that nothing is there, even if there’s a tiger. This is the idea behind Type I and Type II errors. For most people, sticking to their religion is fine, even if the religion isn’t totally correct because they get community, and cutting them off isn’t always wise. When I took the plunge into evolution and told my parents, I immediately saw a wall closing me off from them. They would treat me well, but internally, they knew I was destined for hell unless I returned to faith. By questioning what I was told, I experienced my own fall from grace.
What can we learn from these stories? I mean—why do we wear clothes? If there’s nothing to hide and it’s summer time, why not take them off? Yes, it’s unsanitary to stay uncovered—this is obvious. But it’s also true that we can’t handle the truth. We skirt around it.
One interpretation of the Adam and Eve story is that God wanted them to eat the fruit, and there was no punishment. To read them as being punished puts God in a weird spot. He only said they’d die. He didn’t mention any of the other stuff he piled on until later. And besides, what did they know about death, anyways? They were in paradise. So we could read it like Neo in the Matrix being offered the red pill and the blue one.
You can look at truth as something directional. Sometimes we overshoot the target. Other times we undershoot. And sometimes we just keep away for a while because we don’t need to know yet. Other times we wish we would have known, or we wish we followed our intuition.
Love is the same way. The Jewish concept of equating knowing with lovemaking shouldn’t be taken in the perverted sense. Understanding ultimate truth, or God, is just as mysterious as understanding a woman. True love isn’t when you’re madly lusting for her. No—appearance is the thing that gets in the way. I’ve been listening to a rabbi lately talk how as long as you love something about someone, you don’t truly love them. Appearance is why Eve took the forbidden fruit in the first place. Whether she should or shouldn’t have is something I hold in tension.
We might even consider Eve to be a scientist. A real scientist doesn’t believe without evidence. Until you act on what you believe to be true, you can’t say you know. Until you run the experiment, you just have a hypothesis. And after you run it, you can’t easily go back to the previous state innocent state of not knowing.
If you see someone suffering, and don’t help them, you have guilt. If you never saw the suffering, you can live in bliss. When we create designations of “trusted” sources, we aren’t just specifying a standard of rigor. What’s not included in the standard is just as important. It’s what’s unstated in the standard that will eventually lead to its demise.
People debate about whether we have free will, but it certainly feels like we choose. Religious people sometimes promise a heaven where we worship God forever, and we’re told we’ll like it. We like to choose. We like to have the choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. But these are the trivial choices. If we have free will, then we get to choose not just ice cream flavors. The choice between the red and blue pill is symbolic of choice in the more general sense. It’s a fractal from top to bottom. Every time you choose chocolate over broccoli, you find yourself back in the matrix.
Imagine you’re Neo, you’re offered a pill, and you don’t take it. In the movie, his existence is bland until he makes the choice. In my experience, life in the Matrix starts off pretty good, but little things start to not add up until we reach a crisis point. When we make the choice, we want to be as clear-headed as possible. Ultimately, we’re the ones who make the choice. Nobody else can do it for us. Imagine if Neo went back to his old reality. He will always wonder what would have happened if only he took the red pill. After he took it, going back was always a dangerous proposition. He was surrounded by agents. They could all tell he was not supposed to be there. You could say he was in the throws of schizophrenic paranoia. Everyone was after him. The entire structure of the universe he knew was bent against him.
In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife looked back, and she turned into a pillar of salt. You can think of God as a stand-in for a source that you trust. When you learn something true, delay only makes things worse.
Your connection with God is a very intimate thing. Asking someone about their relationship with God is like asking someone about their sex life. You can ask, but it’s not something you talk about with everyone. True love, like truth itself, is hardly describable. The real key is to see the world through her eyes, identify with her struggles, and hurt when she hurts. Women are mysterious, and to understand her is the intimacy behind the intimacy we see.
We have trouble connecting with the ultimate truth, God, the universe, or whatever you might call it, and we also have trouble with love, and there’s a sense in which these are the same problem.
Hi, i was an atheist then became a theist again and read the bible for myself which gave me some new ideas so i did an article here: https://www.trinity.la/natureoftrinity.htm
I believe in evolution and i don't think Adam and Eve actually existed, i believe the inspired story was more about the future than the past, it paved the way for a Redeemer and a very beneficial sinless intercessor woman to the New Adam.
God bless,
padraic kelly