victim’s throat, or the man will develop a sudden mysterious immunity to the cyanide capsule I’ve just dropped into his whisky glass.”
If good thoughts and good actions can produce good, solid consequences, while evil thoughts and actions are ineffectual, then there is no true freedom of will. The realities of the consequences of good and evil actions must be equal, if the choice between them is to be a genuine choice. If God is totally benign and totally powerful, there can be no room for equivocation or prevarication. The absoluteness of divine goodness must include absolute honesty. A benign God cannot be a cosmic stage illusionist or a celestial confidence trickster.
There is also the argument of stability and consistency. If everything is arbitrary and uncertain, if cause and effect are not parent and child, then learning is impossible and progress nonexistent. If two plus two make three when they feel like it and five when they don’t, if gunpowder explodes one day and not another, if arsenic kills today but not tomorrow, if affectionate embraces and a dagger in the heart come arbitrarily from the same unpredictable person, then life is impossible. So dare philosophers and theologians assume that God has made their universe consistent? Humanity can learn and develop only in a consistent environment. We can discover and eventually master the Laws of the Universe only if those laws remain faithful to themselves and to our powers of observation and objective experiment. If consistency is as important as free will, have we taken the first faltering steps along the road to a partial solution of the problem of suffering and death in a universe ruled by a caring and omnipotent God? Is this the first tentative answer to the Eden problem?
Obsessively puritanical, fanatical, religious sects have almost invariably connected original sin with sex. Phrases like “forbidden fruit” have been understood by them to refer symbolically to sexual activity — often sex in general, sometimes a specific sexual activity or orientation of which cult members disapprove. The curious and irrational belief that total celibacy or, failing that, varying degrees of sexual abstinence or self-denial, are in some inexplicable way pleasing to a loving, joy-giving, and creative God, may also be traced back — at least in part — to this confusion of sex and original sin. It hardly requires the wisdom and courage of Sigmund Freud, or some other pioneering psychoanalyst of his calibre, to suspect with good reason that the most strident advocates of sexual denial and restriction are likely to be those people with the most serious sexual hang-ups and misconceptions. Sex is as good, as natural and as benign as eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping. It has its safety parameters, of course, just as they have. The wise man or woman does not knowingly eat or drink anything toxic, nor any food infected with salmonella. Neither is it acceptable to steal a neighbour’s food. The sensible man or woman does not breathe contaminated air. But to imagine that God wants people to give up eating, drinking, or breathing, or wants them to feel guilty about those good and natural biological activities seems as far from the truth as the east is from the west.
So if the “forbidden fruit” has no sexual connotations at all, what might the author of Genesis mean by it? What exactly was the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” which stood in the Garden of Eden?
Serious students of morality and ethics come up with a number of tantalizingly different answers. The famous Farmingdon Trust, which did outstandingly good work in the field in the late sixties, categorized three types of moral character and attitude. The first was the psychotic, whom the Farmingdon researchers described as an “emotional moral cripple.” According to them, such people were cognitively aware of good and evil, but could distinguish them only in the way that normal people distinguish colour, size, weight, or shape. The psychotic would know that attacking elderly victims with an iron bar and stealing from them was “wrong” or “bad.” He or she would know that housing the homeless or feeding the hungry was “right” and “good.” The psychotic’s problem is that “right” and “wrong” — “good” and “bad” — have no more emotional meaning for him or her than “left” and “right” or “up” or “down.” Such distinctions as the psychotic makes are totally devoid of emotional context.
The second Farmingdon category was the authoritarian moralist, the man or woman of the sacred book, the unquestioning followers of the guru, of the official rules and regulations, or of the party manifesto. This attitude goes back to — or even far beyond — the days of the ancient Medes and Persians “whose law altereth not.” Authoritarian moralists, despite all their inflexible faults and bureaucratic problems are still morally far ahead of the psychotics. Authoritarians are often deeply emotionally involved with their ethics. Good and evil matter to them. Their central weakness and their main focal problem is their inability to understand that what they regard as the ultimate and infallible source of moral authority can often be wrong — sometimes so hopelessly wrong that it disguises good as evil and evil as good. The famous Ten Commandments and the ancillary religious laws of the Old Testament — written on their literal and metaphorical Tablets of Stone — are the classical example of what typical authoritarians would recognize as an infallible and immutable ethical source. Tragically, in the name of such laws, authoritarians will resolutely and implacably imprison, torture, stone, or burn those who dare to disagree with them — and will then self-righteously convince themselves that the horrendous and inhuman evil which they are perpetrating is good. Matthew Hopkins, the Cromwellian Witchfinder General, was just such a man: as were the witch-finders of Salem.
The third Farmingdon type was referred to as the autonomous moral thinker. This is the man or woman who judges every moral situation on its merits, who refuses to jump on any particular ethical bandwagon — however popular or traditionally revered — without reserving the inalienable right to jump off again, if, in his opinion, the wagon appears to be rolling the wrong way. The autonomous moral thinker takes a general attitude of Is this loving? Is this kind? Is this helpful? Will this give pleasure to someone while hurting no one else? Would I want this for myself? The autonomous moral thinker takes all that he regards as best from every guru and from every rule book, while reserving the intellectual right to disagree. For the autonomous moral thinker, the ultimate source of ethical authority is his own judgment about whether a word or an action is acceptable to a God of love and mercy, whether a thought, word, or deed is kind, supportive, and benign. The autonomous moral thinker has the courage to go it alone, to accept full personal responsibility for his decisions. There is no rule book to hide behind. There is no guru to ask. You decide for yourself whether a thing is right or wrong — and then you speak or act accordingly.
So how does the Farmingdon analysis relate to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden? What moral and ethical approach does that Tree represent? What does it symbolize? Did the literal or metaphorical eating of the fruit of that tree take Adam and Eve, as the literal or metaphorical parents of the human race, into a different moral dimension, something beyond a state of young, amoral innocence? Did it mean that after a certain point of development was reached they had to take on the moral responsibility of thinking for themselves — becoming autonomous moral thinkers instead of obeying unquestioningly, conforming unquestioningly?
That raises the great philosophical, theological, moral, and metaphysical question about whether simple obedience and unquestioning loyalty are “better” — more moral, more likely to produce inner peace and happiness — than wanting to think for yourself and make your own independent decisions. If an all-powerful God had wanted obedient robots, androids, or beings incapable of thinking for themselves, it would have been a very simple task to produce them. But if God chose to create free and autonomous beings who could genuinely accept or reject Him because they wanted to, who could genuinely choose between good or evil because they understood them, then the Tree and its fruit have profoundly deep meanings. Was that first choice the prototype of all truly autonomous choice? Was it the choice of whether to accept the terrible responsibility of having free will and the power to choose?
Who or what
