Adam & Logic

[simpleas]

It isn’t clear to me that the episode can fairly be characterized as a “test.” There is no reason for thinking it was intended to be. I think the allegorical nature of the story makes it appear that way after the fact, but that is more a function of the story rather than the underlying reality of the choice between good and evil.

Recall that God is Being itself, Goodness itself, so the choice of Adam and Eve can best be characterized as between “God” and “not God” and they chose, in this instance, “not God.”

I’m not sure what to make of this point.

Would we say that someone cannot truly be “a friend” unless they are or, at least, can choose to be an enemy? Only love another if they can hold open the possibility of hating?
I’m just not sure why that would be so.
Jesus said we were to love God, with our whole heart, mind, and being. This would seem to imply that a kind of fully integrated possibility for choosing and acting (purity of heart, guileless, not having a duplicitous nature, integrity) is the wholesome ideal.

The word is “irrational.” Just because a person is eminently rational or wise, does not mean they cannot choose to act irrationally or unwise. He may have been perfectly rational or wise, but chose, in this instance, to act contrary to his best thinking. Will is a different faculty from the intellect. Reason is not “causal” in the way material effects follow from the conditions that bring them about. Having a reason for, not even a strong reason for, does not “cause” a concordant behaviour. That would be part of the nature of being a person and not a molecule or chemical compound.

Because I was referring to a test, I meant that God would have allowed Adam knowledge of evil and death, so that when the time came to be tempted, Adam could make a clear choice of God or Satan. Not because he could be in friendship with God only because he knew he could be an ememy of God. But the he would be able to freely choose good or evil.
The CCC says it’s Freedom put to the test, so thats where I get the test act from.

III. ORIGINAL SIN

Freedom put to the test

396 God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” spells this out: "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die."276 The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"277 symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.

The CCC says this.

399 Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness.280 They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image - that of a God jealous of his prerogatives.

When I think of the grace of original holiness, I think of Adam and Eve like I’m taught in friendship with God, peaceful etc. The question that sticks in my mind, is why did they think that God, whom they were friends with, had become jealous and angry with them, they felt shame at having disobeyed, but to then believe God had abandoned them?
Hense my questions about human sacrifice, God does not like death, yet that is what people began to believe is what God wanted, even though Adam and eve knew by thier disobedence that death wasn’t a good thing.
Its not like we have any text saying Adam tried to teach his children about God, goodness etc since he was the first one to walk with God and the first to make the very first mistake, of believing he could live without God.

 

[simpleas]

“Highly intelligent” is a relative quality, though, not the same as perfectly intelligent, or omni=intelligent or omniscient. The problem with saying that Adam was perfect, in the way you seem to mean it, is that it leaves us with a burning question: If Adam was perfect, and his sin therefore totally inexcusable,* why then did Adam sin*? Was it because he was bad? But that wouldn’t be possible, would it, because God created nothing bad. But He *did *create things less-than-perfect, in a state where then can perfect themselves, with His help, on their journey.

The more I think about it the more it seems right to me that, if Adam had instead reached out and partaken of the other tree, the Tree of Life, then he would’ve been approaching perfection directly, because he would’ve been opening himself to the source of life, the life of God, his Perfecter. Instead Adam placed us on a circuitous route, ultimately leading, as we’re willing, back to that Tree.

And this is why it makes sense to me to say that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gained for Adam the direct* experience*-the intuitive knowledge, or “knowingness”-of evil, a knowledge which would’ve been completely out of sync with and unnecessary in Adam’s innocence. It’s like knowing that lying is wrong because we’re given that knowledge as part of our nature- and yet some manage to override this innate “command” nonetheless, but hopefully learning in the long run, via time and experience, that harming ones neighbor is to harm one’s universe; every sin diminishes the quality of our existence in one way or another, besides offending God as well.

Thanks for your thoughts.

See, I was thinking that being in a state of Original holiness and justice was in a way perfection. We know they both had to stay within that state to finally see God, and being without sin, to me, they were spiritually perfect and in union with God. They were made Good, and God wanted them to stay that way, but he would never force them to stay in his grace.

So if I’m right, you say, God made them good, but less than perfect, and through disobeying God they then knew what Good and Evil was?

Adam wasn’t bad, but he was intelligent enough to understand what the temption of eating from the tree could achieve for him and Eve. It was a lie, as we know.

Thats why satan is classed as the lier from the beginning.

The tree of life isn’t mentioned until after they fell, in their state of sin, God can not allow them to live forever anymore, but he also will not allow any decendants to live forever either. because now noone lives in the garden.

So once they know Good from evil, they start to see their God as jealous and are afraid of him, yet they once knew him when they were in a state of grace?

I shall be for a time about that until I have done enough of this :banghead: then maybe this will happen :idea:

 

[simpleas]

Yes, and that wasn’t Ratzinger’s point which should go without saying. His point was that the Tree of Life, whether viewed as the Cross or as Jesus, Himself, in person on the road to Emmaus or in the form of the Eucharist, was in existence at both events. Jesus was present in the garden in some manner in any case.

And while this is all speculation either way, it’s speculation about a figure which is mentioned in Genesis for a purpose, a purpose I’ve yet to hear your own speculation about BTW, other than a dogmatic sounding statement in post #922. In my own case I only mentioned that Tree as an aside in post #921, the preceding part of the post being the main response to simpleas’s comments.

But IMO it might be profitable for you to take some time to study the second link a bit. The discussion of the Hebrew term “yada” and how it applies to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil might be enlightening as well as the author’s idea of the role the Tree of Life may have played had A&E eaten of it instead, since you seem to be somewhat interested in that particular plant which God placed in Eden.

Yes, Jesus was Christ, the creator of the universe and all living things. So he was God in the garden.

 

[fhansen]

Thanks for your thoughts.

See, I was thinking that being in a state of Original holiness and justice was in a way perfection. We know they both had to stay within that state to finally see God, and being without sin, to me, they were spiritually perfect and in union with God. They were made Good, and God wanted them to stay that way, but he would never force them to stay in his grace.

So if I’m right, you say, God made them good, but less than perfect, and through disobeying God they then knew what Good and Evil was?

By disobeying God they knew,* experientally*, what good and evil were. Good was already the status quo before the Fall. But it would come into stark definition, becoming identifiable on its own for them as something opposed to or contrasted with evil, once evil entered the scene so to speak.

Adam wasn’t bad, but he was intelligent enough to understand what the temption of eating from the tree could achieve for him and Eve. It was a lie, as we know.

Yes. He didn’t trust God for some reason, and we’re now sort of discussing the reason why this was so. A quote from one of the links to a book, “Worthy is the Lamb”, that granny included in post# 924, addresses this and some of your other thoughts, as well as the quality of the knowledge Adam & Eve were to gain by eating the forbidden fruit, a knowledge that Genesis affirms was gained only* after* eating it BTW:
“The forbidden fruit of Eden, then, was a matter of trust. The Hebrew word “know” in Genesis 3:5 and 3:22 is “yada”, which means “knowledge or understanding gained by experience”. “Would Adam and Eve trust God and the knowledge He gave them, or would they seek independent verification on their own?”

The tree of life isn’t mentioned until after they fell, in their state of sin, God can not allow them to live forever anymore, but he also will not allow any decendants to live forever either. because now noone lives in the garden.

No, it was mentioned, as an option, before the account of the Fall in Gen 2:9.

 

[Peter_Plato]

When I think of the grace of original holiness, I think of Adam and Eve like I’m taught in friendship with God, peaceful etc. The question that sticks in my mind, is why did they think that God, whom they were friends with, had become jealous and angry with them, they felt shame at having disobeyed, but to then believe God had abandoned them?
Hense my questions about human sacrifice, God does not like death, yet that is what people began to believe is what God wanted, even though Adam and eve knew by thier disobedence that death wasn’t a good thing.

I think this sense that they “believe God had abandoned them” is the direct result of a change in perspective from ‘what is true’ to a subjective view of truth. In defense of the newly minted ‘self’ as the entity (in place of truth) to which Adam had transferred allegiance and empathy, he (and Eve) could only view the situation as ‘us’ over and against God who became the one responsible for “abandoning” them.

What is missed is that as a direct consequence of justice, death became the natural consequence of their abandonment of ‘the Good,’ God himself. It couldn’t BE any other way, in fact. Jesus presents this as the branch cutting itself off from the vine, its source of life.

As to “God does not like death, yet that is what people began to believe… God wanted,” the clear implication of Scripture through the New Testament is that sin ultimately leads people to want the “death” of God (Christ is crucified), even though there is an overriding denial that death is “wanted” by human beings. It is all an aspect of denial of the truth of things that people do not want to accept. We appear to love life because we have self-love, but that is not loving life itself, it is a crippled form of life that we love - a love of what we can get from life, rather than a genuine love of the nature of life for its own sake.

The OT view of sacrifice aims as its trajectory towards Jesus’ view of giving up one’s own entrenched narcissism (love for my way and my will about things) as an integral aspect of sacrifice. Sacrifice is representative of a willingness to abrogate one’s own will to the truth of things (dying to self) in order to upright the overturning of reality that occurred in the fall.

We don’t create reality, we are contingent and dependent upon the ontology of Being, yet to view reality from the perspective of a subjective ego makes reality itself “alien” and foreign to us and our own perspective becomes the de facto one to which we are sympathetic. We are at enmity with God, precisely because the loci of truth has become subjective and limited rather than grounded in the truth of Being itself.

 

[simpleas]

By disobeying God they knew,* experientally*, what good and evil were. Good was already the status quo before the Fall. But it would come into stark definition, becoming identifiable on its own for them as something opposed to or contrasted with evil, once evil entered the scene so to speak.

Yes. He didn’t trust God for some reason, and we’re now sort of discussing the reason why this was so. A quote from one of the links to a book, “Worthy is the Lamb”, that granny included in post# 924, addresses this and some of your other thoughts, as well as the quality of the knowledge Adam & Eve were to gain by eating the forbidden fruit, a knowledge that Genesis affirms was gained only* after* eating it BTW:
“The forbidden fruit of Eden, then, was a matter of trust. The Hebrew word “know” in Genesis 3:5 and 3:22 is “yada”, which means “knowledge or understanding gained by experience”. “Would Adam and Eve trust God and the knowledge He gave them, or would they seek independent verification on their own?”

No, it was mentioned, as an option, before the account of the Fall in Gen 2:9.

Oh of course it is! Its got so little reference to it that I failed to notice, looking more at the reference to the tree of knowledge., and then I see the reference to the tree of life more clearly in Gen 3-22.

Adam eating from the tree of life, and all the others apart from the one tree he was forbidden to eat from, gives in to satan’s temption, then he can no longer eat from the tree of life.

If God left man in his own council from the start, do we need satan as the lier, or man’s own conscience to decide if he was going to trust God or eat from the tree of knowledge?

I will look at post 924 links later

 

[fhansen]

Oh of course it is! Its got so little reference to it that I failed to notice, looking more at the reference to the tree of knowledge., and then I see the reference to the tree of life more clearly in Gen 3-22.

Yes, I think it’s quite possible that Adam & Eve didn’t give it-the tree-much attention either.

If God left man in his own council from the start, do we need satan as the lier, or man’s own conscience to decide if he was going to trust God or eat from the tree of knowledge.

I think the excuse that “The devil made me do it” only goes so far. A&E we’re held accountable in any case.

 

[simpleas]

I think this sense that they “believe God had abandoned them” is the direct result of a change in perspective from ‘what is true’ to a subjective view of truth. In defense of the newly minted ‘self’ as the entity (in place of truth) to which Adam had transferred allegiance and empathy, he (and Eve) could only view the situation as ‘us’ over and against God who became the one responsible for “abandoning” them.

What is missed is that as a direct consequence of justice, death became the natural consequence of their abandonment of ‘the Good,’ God himself. It couldn’t BE any other way, in fact. Jesus presents this as the branch cutting itself off from the vine, its source of life.

As to “God does not like death, yet that is what people began to believe… God wanted,” the clear implication of Scripture through the New Testament is that sin ultimately leads people to want the “death” of God (Christ is crucified), even though there is an overriding denial that death is “wanted” by human beings. It is all an aspect of denial of the truth of things that people do not want to accept. We appear to love life because we have self-love, but that is not loving life itself, it is a crippled form of life that we love - a love of what we can get from life, rather than a genuine love of the nature of life for its own sake.

The OT view of sacrifice aims as its trajectory towards Jesus’ view of giving up one’s own entrenched narcissism (love for my way and my will about things) as an integral aspect of sacrifice. Sacrifice is representative of a willingness to abrogate one’s own will to the truth of things (dying to self) in order to upright the overturning of reality that occurred in the fall.

We don’t create reality, we are contingent and dependent upon the ontology of Being, yet to view reality from the perspective of a subjective ego makes reality itself “alien” and foreign to us and our own perspective becomes the de facto one to which we are sympathetic. We are at enmity with God, precisely because the loci of truth has become subjective and limited rather than grounded in the truth of Being itself.

Thanks.
Yes we can understand much now in this time of humanity (I’m still learning!) Trying to understand the teaching of A&E, O.S one would think is pretty easy…

The church states that :

404 How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man”.293 By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand.

I can understand Jesus’ message of love, forgiveness etc.

 

[simpleas]

Yes, I think it’s quite possible that Adam & Eve didn’t give it-the tree-much attention either.

I think the excuse that “The devil made me do it” only goes so far. A&E we’re held accountable in any case.

Yes, the writer of Genesis tells us more about what they did wrong, than what they may have been doing right up until the temption, but even if the story went deeper into what these two first human’s did etc, we’d still end up with the same result.

The blame game…this makes them sound like immature people, we do this when we are children, once we learn, we take ownership of our decisions, this is why I’d like to believe they were both mature people (not needing to grow in knowledge, and could take ownership of what they did)

 

[fhansen]

Yes, the writer of Genesis tells us more about what they did wrong, than what they may have been doing right up until the temption, but even if the story went deeper into what these two first human’s did etc, we’d still end up with the same result.

The blame game…this makes them sound like immature people, we do this when we are children, once we learn, we take ownership of our decisions, this is why I’d like to believe they were both mature people (not needing to grow in knowledge, and could take ownership of what they did)

But couldn’t we say that people we know who are relatively mature otherwise haven’t necessarily yet learned the lesson Adam & Eve needed to learn: of their need for God and the importance of obedience to Him? Aren’t we all on a journey to that end, an end that’s perhaps of greater value if struggle is part of achieving it? Maybe God wants us to learn it the hard way, to *grow *into ownership of it. And Adam did blame Eve, BTW, who in turn blamed the serpent.

 

[fhansen]

Just because a person is eminently rational or wise, does not mean they cannot choose to act irrationally or unwise. He may have been perfectly rational or wise, but chose, in this instance, to act contrary to his best thinking.

This is an interesting statement-and probably true, I suppose. But I’m trying to think of why someone would choose to act against their own wisdom. It’s one thing to act against the wisdom of another-including God-but I’m not sure why one would *will *to do other than what they’d consider to be the wisest course-except in the case of being under duress or fear, coercion, etc. The same old question: Why did Adam will to sin?

 

[grannymh]

The same old question: Why did Adam will to sin?

Answer.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

 

[dmwessel]

Eve had no idea that what she was about to eat would get them removed from their beloved garden. Had she known, she would have told the serpent where to go.

The serpent ‘tricked’ her, promising her wisdom, and she not knowing that it was a deception, led Adam astray.

The sin as so many like to call it was not intentional disobedience, she was deceived by a creature of the garden that was supposed to be on her side: after-all this was Paradise. She would have had no inkling whatsoever that the serpent (bright one) intended them harm as such a thing was unknown in the garden.

 

[fhansen]

Answer.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Ok? So can we dare to consider that there may’ve been something as yet unperfected in Adam that might allow him to so foolishly, i.e. unwisely, contemplate that there could actually be greener grass on the other side of Eden’s fence?

 

[grannymh]

Eve had no idea that what she was about to eat would get them removed from their beloved garden. Had she known, she would have told the serpent where to go.

The serpent ‘tricked’ her, promising her wisdom, and she not knowing that it was a deception, led Adam astray.

The sin as so many like to call it was not intentional disobedience, she was deceived by a creature of the garden that was supposed to be on her side: after-all this was Paradise. She would have had no inkling whatsoever that the serpent (bright one) intended them harm as such a thing was unknown in the garden.

Genesis 2: 15-17
Genesis 3: 1-3

 

[GaryTaylor]

Yes, not wise to listen to talking serpents. Good analogy for yesterday and today.

 

[GaryTaylor]

Genesis 2: 15-17
Genesis 3: 1-3

You have a unique interest in Genesis I’ve read many of your posts over the years. Interesting posts I’ve enjoyed reading. Admittedly I also share this interest, more from my many attempts as a youth to read the Bible front to back, usually ending up repeating the process. Revelations became the other fascination as a result, I rationalized back then it would be wise to know the beginning and the ending.

Peace

 

[Peter_Plato]

Eve had no idea that what she was about to eat would get them removed from their beloved garden. Had she known, she would have told the serpent where to go.

The serpent ‘tricked’ her, promising her wisdom, and she not knowing that it was a deception, led Adam astray.

The sin as so many like to call it was not intentional disobedience, she was deceived by a creature of the garden that was supposed to be on her side: after-all this was Paradise. She would have had no inkling whatsoever that the serpent (bright one) intended them harm as such a thing was unknown in the garden.

It is not clear, at least not to me, that Eve would “have had no inkling” that the serpent intended them harm. She knew directly from God, who was their Creator, the One who made the garden and everything in it, that, as Eve herself said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” (Gen 2:3)

She had clearly received indisputable assurance, from the Creator of all, precisely what eating of the fruit of that specific tree entailed in terms of harm. She was faced with a choice here:

1. to trust that the one who had made them (and everything in the garden including the serpent) knew that of what he spoke or
2. to trust a serpent who could not possibly have known more than the Creator since the serpent was a created being like them.

Trusting the serpent was essentially an act of calling God a deceiver, someone not to be trusted or believed. It was a betrayal of the very source of Being itself and opting for self-deception, since the intellect and being of Eve was a gift from God. She chose not to trust God, but also not to trust her own ‘God-given’ abilities, but rather to trust a lie that she could have even more than what God would give if she simply abandoned all that she knew for a promise of what ‘could be,’ that she could be more than she was and determine her own destiny without God, i.e., to determine the nature of ‘the good’ for herself.

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 2:4-5)

 

[simpleas]

But couldn’t we say that people we know who are relatively mature otherwise haven’t necessarily yet learned the lesson Adam & Eve needed to learn: of their need for God and the importance of obedience to Him? Aren’t we all on a journey to that end, an end that’s perhaps of greater value if struggle is part of achieving it? Maybe God wants us to learn it the hard way, to *grow *into ownership of it. And Adam did blame Eve, BTW, who in turn blamed the serpent.

Yes A&E learnt it the hard way, the broken friendship with God, and we in turn are still learning.
We have learnt from history and revelation, and our own experience of life, how we should live our lives for God and the good of each other, I’m still learning, and I think most people are too.

We are talking about the first two humans made by God, alone in the garden…?
I’m not sure if the church teaches we have to believe they were alone, only that we believe there was two unique first humans with Gods spirit within them.
Can we only understand that O.S is passed onto A&E’s children after they had sinned, then pro-created, or they may have had children, giving them time to grow in human knowledge, wisdom, and then be more aware of what they were doing? The O.S being as serious as it was, could still have affected the human spirit could it not?

Does the latter then sound like O.S is just a story the jewish people told to help people of that time in understanding why man does bad/evil things?
Man likes to control, and no body, not even God will get in his way…Or so he thinks…

 

[grannymh]

We are talking about the first two humans made by God, alone in the garden…?
I’m not sure if the church teaches we have to believe they were alone, only that we believe there was two unique first humans with Gods spirit within them.

The Catholic Church definitely teaches that at the moment of Original Sin, only two real human beings were alive on earth. These two persons are lovingly known as Adam and Eve as described in Genesis, first three chapters. The fact that there are only two progenitors of all humankind is the point of this thread.