Adam and Eve did good.
Philosophical naturalism is the doctrine that everything in the universe, whether physical or biological or social, can be described in sentences, which means a set of assertions that are true rather than false. The invention is attributed most famously to the ancient Greeks, from the Presocratics such as Anaxamander, who said that, through Aristotle, who offered long treatises in description of the various topics about what is in the universe, painstakingly writing prose as carefully as he could to get his descriptions right, sentences different from the subject matter to be described because after all they were words rather than things which have an existence of their own. Words refer to other words and are called meanings while things don’t refer to anything but just subsist in time and space. Perhaps the greatest achievement of philosophical naturalism was Lucretius because he overtly pointed to a program for reducing the world to its descriptions. The Greeks came about this process by abstracting story based myths into abstracted forces so that the forces were the topics of attention rather than the people, the actors, who embodied them. There is slyness rather than Odysseus being sly. Even Plato, who is said to follow a different course in that he writes dialogues rather than discourses, can be said to be engaged in philosophical naturalism because he not only has arguments and elaborations within his discourses but also because his topics are about, for example, how consciousnesses coincide with one another so as to communicate with one another and so is explaining what it is to say that an assertion is meaningful.
A very different civilization, that of the Old Testament, and particularly in “Genesis”, purportedly has a very different perspective than that of philosophical naturalism. It offers stories rather than treatises and does not describe at all the natural world as if the writers couldn’t care less about what we would call science. Rather than taking note of regularities that can be identified as the nature of things, the writers of “Genesis” provide edicts from God as to what people should do and subsequently people will or will not follow these, while naturalism is mindless and self enforcing. It just is, without moral compass, whether people given to naturalism may simply notice what are the consequences of trying to violate rules which is paradoxical in that rules cannot be avoided, just another ruler obtaining a different vision, a crazy or obsessed person doing things differently than what most people do, while rules in the Biblical sense are observed for whether they are accompanied by “should”, that a sufficient way to deal with the gap between a moral ruler observed and then either followed or violated, such as in the Ten Commandments. This is as deep a chasm in thought that I can think of, this between Greek naturalism and Biblical moralism, more even than the one between the primitive and the modern in that the primitive mind supposedly reasoned asx to how to kill Animals and enemies while I am pointing out that Greeks lived in a remorseless world that separated fact from opinion while Hebrews separated right from wrong even if both civilizations could calculate how to kill animals and enemies. Morality, for the Greeks, was seated in human nature, while for the Hebrews, everything important were the laws set by God.
I want to suggest that, in fact, the stories in “Genesis” allow in the idea of naturalism and not by shoehorning it in to a late date writing in “Ecclesiastes” where, mistakenly, the rhymes of the seasons are taken as a description of life rather than the fact that things just change, but at the center and origin of the “Genesis” stories, to which I will attend: the story of the tower of Babel and then, even more centrally, to the story of Adam and Eve.
James Kugel and other Biblical scholars are concerned with whether the tower of Babel was a good or a bad thing. It was a good thing if modeled against the ziggurats to the north from which Abraham had emerged. It was a bad thing, what we would call a dystopia, if it represented a cosmopolitan city, full of people from various places, and so talking in multiple tongues, as would be the case for Abraham and his pastoral nomad descendents. This story is about the war between the rural and the urban, and remains so to this very day.
I want to ask a very different question of the story of Babel. I want to ask about how God intervened and what it meant for Him to intervene. God did not destroy Babel as He had done with Sodom, nor did He exile a culprit from his community as happened when Cain killed Abel. Instead, God intrudes into the social structure so as to change the nature of language, working in directly for His effects and so is like God inspiring Noah to think things inside his own head and so no one else knew about how Noah should proceed as an instrument, a new vision of God’s relation to mankind in that previously public rituals and incantations brought forth the omens through which God spoke. What God revealed was the fact, liked leopards having their spots, which is that cities are multilingual.
The additional and central point, however, is that God had to intervene so as to make there be multiple languages. That was an historical invention by God rather than the natural tubing, what we would call natural, that obtains before God intervenes. So what the story of Babel shows is that a single language for all mankind seems the natural thing, and even a contemporary reader, fully aware of how many languages there are and that behind every range of hills, another language arose, there is a sense in which it is true that the natural course of things is to have a single languager. Every language has nouns and verbs and tenses and people able to communicate whatever meaning they wanting to other languages even if Whorfians think some languages richer in some topics rather than others and that abstract concepts like rights or obligation are more elaborated in some cultures than in others-- mind you, not because of the languages, but because of the intellectual currents of the timer. Indeed, Noam Chomskygoes so far as to say that there is a single language in that there is a single deep structure for all languages and that the structure is what makes situations natural because, after all, that is what He is engaged in doing is embedded into the way the brain works. So people would all use a single language, or in some sense do, except that God had intervened and presented to us the world with which we are now familiar.
The same procedure of referring to God’s dictates as separating the natural from the historical, the given compared to the contingent, can also be applied to the more complex story of Adam and Eve with just one profound change. Babel had arisen because of people and so God was intruding to alter nature, the Adam and Eve story that is properly part of the Creation story, both of them about how the natural world, including the social world, came to be, all of God’s dictates making situations natural. Each one of the days of Creation add something else to fill in the natural “landscape” with what is essential, from the separation of darkness and light all the way up to the animals and then to Adam, who is the first one capable of wanting the natural order changed so as to have a different natural thing and where God acquiesces and provides to Adam a helpmate. Some commentators might think God was fumbling or trying out parts of his creation and so Eve was an afterthought, a carpentered job He added when he was reminded that He had forgotten about her. But don’t discredit God’s acumen. He may well have created the tree as what the lawyers would call “an attractive nuisance” for am as a stand alone even if all the animals were in pairs. After all, Adam could talk and the animals could not. Adam was different from the others, giving the other creatures their names, and so Adam had a special case somewhere above the animals, even if not an angel or a god himself, and so without the need of a helpmate. But Adam wanted one and the creation of Eve made Adam a bit lower down in the aspects of the created and therefore natural beings because he was more like the other animals.
Then God commands Adam and Eve that they should not eat from the tree of knowledge. That is very curious if you think about it. After all, God had deliberately placed the tree in Eden and so was of some purpose or otherwise it would have been what the lawyers call “an attractive nuisance”, like a vacant lot with spikes and somebody could sue God for having constructed what people might find appealing even if dangerous. The usual interpretation is that the tree shows the limits of human life, that people have to obey, at least about that one thing. But that doesn’t make sense because the punishment for violating that instruction is not very harsh. Men will work by the sweat of their brows and women will have pain in childbirth, which is what now ordinarily happens and so doesn’t make life insufferable, no ultimate punishment for an unpardonable sin. God, I think, banned the use of the tree of knowledge because He could not instruct people to eat from it. They had to come to it themselves out of their evolving free will and in spite of instructions to the contrary. The same is true of the tree of life, also placed in Eden, and therefore also always a possibility, not yet realized, when people will become immortal. An angel says that God had to send Adam and Eve out of Eden because the two might have eaten from both and then become immortal as well as moral. Maybe the angels would feel jealous of mankind having moved up on the scale of creatures, but God never says why He created the two trees or what would happen if people violated that decree or invented a way around them.
What is considered the fall is not a doctrine of a fortunate fall in that Adam and Eve had to fall so that they could be redeemed. They would not need to be redeemed if they had never fallen in the first place. And the story is not that of Prometheus who brings fire and, by implication, civilization, at the price of personal suffering. Adam and Eve were not martyrs but simply following their curiosity and imagination and possibilities, those things ingrained in them by their creator, the two offered endless bounty. St. Paul is the one who engages in the most audacious and powerful version of what Harold Bloom calls a deep misreading of a text by turning the story of Adam and Eve into something awful, Original Sin, something mankind has had to atone for for two thousand years. Rather, it seems to me that Adam and Eve are heroic, especially Eve for having thought of the idea, and for which we are forever grateful. We should put on bumper stickers for those achievements however much God planned for that eventuality in that it was in the nature of things, it was natural, that people would do that.