Why I Am No Longer Christian

#4a: Original Sin and the Fall Are Illogical, Part 1

When I was a Christian, I didn't believe in the Creation myth or the existence of Adam and Eve, but it didn't occur to me until recently that without a real Adam and Eve, the concepts of original sin and the Fall fall apart. Not that they need the help — on further investigation, they fall apart on their own.

First, for the biblical story and concept itself. Once again, Genesis 3 is unnecessarily long for a chapter of this length, but you can find it easily at biblegateway.com in whatever edition and language(s) you want to read it in.

In Genesis 3, the snake tricks Eve into eating fruit from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She gives some of the fruit to Adam, and he eats it with her. Then they realize that they are naked. God figures out that they disobeyed when they hide their nakedness in shame when he takes a walk through the garden, and he punishes them accordingly. The snake is cursed to "crawl on [its] belly," "eat dust all [its] life," and fight with humans. Eve (and subsequently, all women) is cursed with "pains in childbirth" that are "severe," "desire" for her husband, and to be shackled to her husband, who "will rule over [her]." Adam (and subsequently, all men) is cursed to toil the ground for food and return to dust at the end of his life. Adam names the woman Eve (because she hadn't been named yet), God gives them clothes, and then God banishes them from the Garden of Eden, putting an angel with a fiery sword to guard the entrance so that they can't get back in.

There is a lot to unpack here. First, for those who believe in biblical literalism, I have so many questions. How do you explain a talking snake when the anatomy of a snake makes it impossible for it to have speech like humans? Snakes don't have ears, so the snake wouldn't be able to hear Eve's response, anyway. Sure, you can claim that with God anything is possible, but that raises even more questions. Was the snake the only animal in the Garden of Eden that could talk, or did they all speak? If they could, how and when did they lose that ability, and why is the Bible silent on this matter? And if God overrode anatomy to give the snake the ability to speak to (and hear) humans, why did he? Wouldn't that make him at least indirectly responsible for the snake tricking Adam and Eve?

What about the rest of the animals? How did they get out of the Garden of Eden for humanity to interact with them? Sure, God could've shooed them out with Adam and Eve, but why would he? The other animals didn't do anything wrong. Why would they be punished, too? And if they were kicked out of the garden with humanity, why does the Bible make no mention of it? What about the plants in the Garden of Eden? Did God replant them outside of the garden so that Adam and Eve would have something to farm and eat? (Genesis 2:5-9 says that the earth was barren of plants until God watered the ground, created Adam to take care of it, and planted the Garden of Eden.)

Of course, even more problems can be raised regarding this myth. The more questions you ask, the more problems pop up! Snakes don't eat dust, for example; they're carnivores, so they eat things like insects, rodents, birds, eggs, fish, lizards, and other small animals. For another, if God is truly all-knowing, he would've known that Adam and Eve had disobeyed him before he even asked them, and he would've known that it was coming far in advance (more on that in Part 2). 

One more argument involves the other special tree in the Garden of Eden, the tree of life. In Genesis 3:22, God says that if Adam and Eve ate from the tree of life, they would become "like one of us" and "live forever." But earlier, God had said that the only tree that was forbidden was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not the tree of life. Was he banking on them not eating from the tree of life when they didn't know about good and evil? Why would he plant the trees in the first place if he knew his creation would disobey? And if Adam and Eve weren't immortal before they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, why is one of their supposed punishments death?

Another point is that this passage, along with Genesis 2:18-24, is the root of much of the destructive patriarchal culture and sexism of the Abrahamic religions (i.e. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). In both passages I listed, women are devalued. Unlike in Genesis 1, where man and woman are created together in God's likeness, in Genesis 2, woman is created out of man to be his "helpmeet" or "helper." Then, in Genesis 3, woman is cursed by God to have man "rule over [her]." Not only that, but Adam names Eve himself (Genesis 3:20) — this effectively makes her his property, since God named Adam but let Adam name the animals (Genesis 2:19-20) that he would be ruling over (Genesis 1:26). I will go over the sexist aspects of the Bible in more depth in Chapter 18.

Okay, so there are a lot of surface-level problems with the story of how humanity fell from God's grace. But let's assume, for a moment, that the story is true. How do the Christian doctrines of original sin and the Fall arise from it, and what logical problems are there with these doctrines themselves? We will discuss this in Part 2.