The tale of Adam and Eve is interesting for a lot of reasons. If you’re the kind of person who thinks that mythology has an insight into psychology (and I am!) then the depth of the story easily doubles or triples.
The story also forms the foundation of a certain justification of human suffering. After all, Eve and Adam eat the apple, in that order, and then God is all, like, “Hey! Now you have to toil in the fields and suffer through childbirth and crap. And ye shall surely die.”
Of course, conceptually, it’s all ridiculous. An all-powerful being creates three beings – a man, a woman and a serpent – knowing each of them as intimately as he knows himself, knowing their natures and knowing their wants and desires. Then he sets up a paradise, but with a caveat. If he were to call this a “test” then that would be a ridiculous notion. He’s all-powerful, and he created the beings. He should know the outcome.
Now, to draw a fun analogy, let’s say I make a ball of wax. I know the nature of the ball, I know how it will behave because I understand physics, and I try to make the best ball of wax I can. Then I decide to create the perfect conditions to test the ball of wax – I make a ramp and try to roll the ball down the ramp. Now, what I want is for the ball to roll straight down to the end of the ramp. Let’s say the ball isn’t perfect – it’s a bit off, and it rolls off the side of the ramp.
As the ball’s creator, I am responsible for it rolling off the side of the ramp. Now, in anger, I might throw the ball of wax against the wall, but punishing the ball of wax is ultimately futile. What I ought to do is remold the wax to make it more spherical, make sure the ramp is straight and test it again once I’ve made it better. Apparently, making a better ball of wax is not in God’s plan.
But what’s worse, to me, the analogy is better stated as God making a ball of wax, putting it in a gutter and being angry when it rolls down the gutter. The story supposes the all-powerful being created curious beings, put them in a garden with a blabbermouth snake, and then got angry when nature took its course.
What’s more interesting to me is that we’d consider that sort of thing completely unethical in our society. A police officer cannot entice you to commit a crime. It’s called entrapment, and it’s cause for a dismissal of charges against the entrapped offender. In the garden, God is responsible not only for putting curious humans in abutment to a talking snake (with legs, at the time), he doesn’t get involved when the snake talks to them. As Ricky Gervais points out in one of his stand-up routines, he could have just told the snake to shut up, or told Adam and Eve that the snake was a liar. But he didn’t.
The story is obviously not sensible at all, which is why it’s mythology and not a true story of how humans came to exist. Moreover, it’s mythology that speaks to a certain psychological belief – that humans are to blame for their own suffering. It is just one more story in a long line of psychological delusions that allow us to continue to believe we live in a fair and just world. We cannot stand the idea that life just isn’t fair, so we invent tales that show us that we are to blame for its unfairness, not to mention that we embrace political ideals that insinuate that the poor are lazy and the disabled are faking it. They must be, because the universe is totally fair to everyone.
The unfairness of any existent god to the people he is supposed to have created is an enormous flaw in any theist claim. But what’s worse, any belief in a Hell or any form of eternal punishment is a belief that the all-knowing creator of the universe created a perfect ball of wax and was pissed off when it rolled away from him.