And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. — Genesis 2:16-17

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Some argue that in Genesis 2, we are actually presented with a separate account of the creation story, and as such, a few of the details occur in the wrong order. For instance, Genesis 1 has man being created presumably at the same time, but in Genesis 2, man is made first, and then along comes woman. Thus, either Genesis just omits the details about how humans came into being or Genesis 2 is a separate account altogether. Also, starting with verse 2:4, (“These [are] the generations …”), the chapter seems to begin another account, with new versions of how plants, man and the animals are made. According to Strong’s, it’s actually unclear whether “these” — transliterated as ‘el-leh — refers to previously related events or those that follow. In any case, we are told — again — of God’s creation of these elements. This time, however, man is created before, not after, the animals as in chapter 1. The book quickly relates the creation of the heavens and earth, which took the writer in the first chapter 10 verses to explain, and moves onto plants, the latter of which are watered by a mist going up “from the earth,” not onto the earth. Now, like the animals in chapter 1, water appears out of the ground to sustain plants that are, one can presume, rooted in the ground. Again, this is redundant because why would water need to come out of the ground to water plants whose roots are already in the ground.

Man’s creation in this chapter occurs in verse 7, and animals are not made until verse 19. Whereas in chapter 1, verse 26:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

God had already created these creatures in verse 1:20. So, if you’re keeping tabs: Chapter 1 — animals before man; Chapter 2 — man before animals.

If these two passages are supposed to relate the same creation, one would expect the order to match up since a world with man but without animals would be vastly different than a world with animals but without man. Further, the first account doesn’t say anything about man naming the animals or the garden in which God placed his creation. Further still, man in the final verses of chapter 1, is given dominion over the animals and plants, including “every” fruit-bearing tree. Yet, the passage quoted above, Gen. 2:16-17, clearly states that there is, indeed, one special tree of which man is forbidden to eat its fruit, the tree of knowledge and evil. Actually, there are two: later in chapter 3, God would assert his ever-present (and self-admitted) jealousy by booting Adam and Eve from the garden after they ate from the tree of knowledge so that man

must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.

The book of Revelation supposedly rights this story by allowing man to finally, and after vast stretches of time have passed, eat of the tree of life in paradise. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of man, just those who believed in Christ.

Tree of knowledge

Now comes the fun part. God apparently has to see how loyal is own creation will be, so he places the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden and tells man that if he eats from that particular tree, he will die. That is an interesting statement, since, according to Gen. 5:5, Adam lives another 930 years. Believers will attempt to right this problem by claiming that God was speaking symbolically or spiritually, not of physical death, and that’s fine, but how (and why) are we supposed to decipher which parts of the Bible are symbolic and which are literal? Could not the whole story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection be symbolic of the kind of ethics on which we should base our lives: sacrificing for others?

Nonetheless, God plants a carrot in the form of the tree of knowledge and then ludicrously tells his creation not to touch, knowing all along (since he’s omniscient) that they would fail the “test.” Now, if he was actually surprised about man’s failure, then he’s not omniscient. But if he knew it all along and still found it “good” to create man with this knowledge fully in his omniscient mind, then how moral is God?

Suppose I have a teenage son, and I tell my son that I am going away for the night. For some capricious reason, I decide to call one of my son’s friends from school, an attractive female friend, to come over and keep my son company. Since I’ve left my son by himself plenty of times without him getting into trouble or having raucous parties, etc., this decision seems peculiar, but I do it anyway. Before leaving, I tell my son to behave, and that I just figured the girl could play video games with him since that’s something they both enjoyed. The next day, I learn that my son had consensual sex with the girl that night. I fly into a fit of rage because he has disobeyed me, tell him that I hoped he had a misery-filled, tortuous rest of his life, throw him out of the house and change the locks. An overreaction on my part? But isn’t this precisely how God reacted when first man disobeyed? After already entrusting Adam and Eve with the garden and every plant and animal, this is essentially the kind of carrot-on-a-stick scenario that God plays out with his supposedly “good” creation. But the latter scenario is actually several degrees more unethical than the one with the girl. God knew man would fail. God knew he would allow Satan into the garden to tempt Adam and Eve. Again, if he was surprised by Satan’s appearance, he’s not omniscient. If Satan used his own power to get into the garden, God isn’t all-powerful, and he’s not exactly all-loving either since he knowing placed man in this lose-lose situation.

Believers here might retort: God had to have a means by which man could freely choose to obey and follow God, or else, man would just be mindless robots without freewill. Thus, man acts as a free moral agent in his decision to follow God or not. God, they might say, wanted man to be a voluntary devotee. This is also the answer Christians give to why bad things happen to good people or why bad things happen at all. The otherwise “good people” but who may not be believers, actively choose to reject God, they say, like  Adam and Eve, thus they exercise their “free will” to reject God’s free gift of salvation through Christ. This phenomenon can apparently be  used to explain why bad things happen to entire nations or in the world generally (like natural disasters). As per Adam and Eve’s failure, this is a fallen world, and as such, we should expect cancer, natural disasters, premature death, and the like because of first man’s choice to disobey God. This theory, of course, ignores the tedious facts that a) many unbelievers don’t make conscious decisions to reject God by fiat. Some haven’t actually given religion much thought, while for others, believing in an all-everything benevolent god is so obviously beyond the pale that it’s also beyond their serious consideration.

In actuality, free will does not exist from the biblical worldview. Giving man the choice between serving a god or suffering the consequences (fire for eternity) is not a matter of benevolent free will granted from God. It is forced coercion: accept this gift, whether you want it or think the story makes sense, or burn. What kind of loving father offers his son or daughter, say, the gift of paid tuition to a university, and if the child says they aren’t interested in going to college, disowns his own child? What kind of loving father says, “You will love, follow me and surrender your entire will and self to me, or you are disowned forever?” But this is exactly the type of “gift” offered by Christian doctrine.

Last, how moral is it that the crimes of a person from, say, the 18th century, be used to convict and imprison someone living in 2011? Yet, the errant choice of two people forever impacts the lives (and apparently the afterlifes) of every single person who has or who ever will live simply because a god in an ancient text penned by superstitious society in Palestine deems it so. Yet still, God doesn’t seem very interested in the “sins” of millions of blasphemers and worshipers of other gods that followed Adam and Eve, except of course, in the pages of the Bible. As it happens, the world outside of the Bible, the only world that matters, hasn’t heard a peep from Big Brother.

As John Hartung pointed out in his 1995 essay, “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality,” the various other immoral acts that will take place in the subsequent passages that will be covered in this series, are the result of in-group, out-group dynamics that dictate that killing unbelievers and worshipers of other gods is just fine because the “Do not kill” of the Ten Commandments means “do not kill” fellow Jews, that is, fellow members of the Israel nation. Thus, killing those from other tribes and races was undertaken, chillingly, simply as a matter of policy under God’s direction. Hartung explains precisely why, outside of the various evils committed in its pages, the book is so immoral compared with other ancient texts:

The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape (Hartung, ms2). Many ancient works do that — The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller. But the effort to make the Bible a universal guide to morality is impossible, because although orally transmitted myths can make 180 degree turns across a series of generations and get away with claims to authority based on antiquity, distortions and selective dismissals of written myths can only, at best, fool most of the people most of the time.