If you’re still taking suggestions this is the meaning I can make of Adam and Eve story. I’d be interested if this feels compatible with Christian theology, its spirit if not letter of the teaching. First I have to make it clear I don’t think of God as a parent, liege lord or literal creator of atoms, galaxies and cells. I think what gives rise to God belief is the apprehension of our utter dependence on something which makes our way of being possible. Most of what we experience and about which we can seek to gather knowledge, is first screened and presented for our conscious consideration already infused with emotional significance. This is what no computer will ever be able to do no matter how well they may fool a human observer. We care about what happens, not as a result of a conscious cognitive involvement, but because we are created that way by something within that is not well understood. I could call it processes but that could promote a groundlessly mechanistic interpretation.
Getting back to the Eden story what I see is an injunction not to forget or ever think we can usurp the place of this mysterious beneficial grounding which holds us up and makes people possible. Of course there is nothing intrinsically the matter with knowledge, reason and understanding. The mistake which lets evil into the world which has been created for us is believing that our own efforts can ever take the place of what is and must be provided. Science has no way to create an artificial substitute for what it is which grounds our experience, which essentially makes us possible and the world comprehensible in a human fashion.
In a simpler less, culturally overlaid world our astonishment at what we are and what we are given would be inescapable. In the times in which we live, where information and knowledge seem almost limitless it is very easy to think we create ourselves and this mastery of the world is all our own doing. But if we are afflicted with a stroke we might retain a grasp of the facts and yet find ourselves rudderless to navigate any of it. The prioritization of importance and urgency which had formerly been provided as a gift can go missing and I think that would be a kind of hell.
I don’t think the lesson of the story can be that we should remain simple and give up all means of self determination. But that is something which should always be informed by our regard for the inner mystery that makes us possible. Our inputs are valuable and our creation is not a mistake, it is only thinking our own efforts is all that matters.
So should this inner mystery remain formless? I don’t think so. But we should remember the descriptions we come up with are never literally the truth. We should judge our conceptions instead by whether it facilitates a productive partnership with this ground of being and helps us remain mindful of its essential importance. Questions regarding descriptions carried by stories which have become literalizations like those involving the flood, the garden or creation are actually profane, constituting golden calves which are favored over that which we cannot reduce to an object or fact.
