(July 23, 2014 at 2:47 pm)alpha male Wrote: That's silly. If they were completely unaware of the concept of right and wrong as you suggest, they would have just eaten the fruit without the serpent's urging. One can have intellectual knowledge of a concept without having experiential knowledge of it.If they were used to doing as they were told, then it would not be surprising that they did not even consider partaking of the fruit until the serpent urged Eve to do so.
God warned Adam against eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, telling him that to do so would mean death. The serpent tells Eve that this won't happen, but that they'll gain additional insight. At this point the fruit of the tree becomes desirable to Eve, and she is able to convince Adam to eat as well.
When god confronts them over their actions, their explanation amounts to "someone else told me to do this, so I did it." It fits the pattern-- the concept of obeying a command overrides everything else, because they do not have the judgment necessary to determine that an action is right or wrong. The lesson in Genesis is that only god can determine right and wrong, and he deserves unquestioning obedience... whether you understand his demands or not.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
