The Theory of Evolution: The Science is Etched in the Genesis Text
By
David Gottfried
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, initially, walked around in the nude. The bible tells us that they were unashamed.
Eventually, a snake tells Eve to eat fruit from the tree of “Knowledge of Good and Evil.” In eating the fruit, Eve, and then Adam, break the Lord’s command not to partake of that tree’s fruit.
Upon violating G-d’s law, they are punished. Among other things, their nakedness makes them ashamed and they don the first clothes.
When Adam and Eve were naked, they were like monkeys. When they became ashamed, they became human. The book of Genesis endorses the notion that apes are man’s evolutionary antecedents.
Also, to punish womanhood in particular, G-d decrees that giving birth will become a trial and torture for women. This also echoes evolution. Pregnancy and Labor are much less of a tribulation for man’s mammalian forebears.
For example, a cat, after giving birth to a litter of nine kittens, is up and around in no time teaching each of her nine kiddies how to jump and accomplish other tasks. Our evolutionary antecedents had much smaller skulls, relative to the vaginal canal, and childbirth was not as arduous.
Also, G-d’s punitive transformation of the snake’s anatomy (The snake was punished for coaxing Eve to eat the forbidden fruit), which rendered it a creature compelled to slither on its front, is an example of physical form being changed or, more broadly, evolution.
In addition, I vaguely recall that prior to Man’s fall in the Garden, he was not slated to die. (If I had my druthers, I would look this up, but I only thought of this now, as I am posting this piece on line.) If he did not suffer death, he was akin to animals. Animals die, but perhaps they do not realize that they are mortal. Although our most recent antecedents may realize their mortality, I hardly think that our more distant forerunners are aware that they will die (cockroaches and microscopic single-celled organisms which don’t even have a brain)
Finally. consider the tree which bore forbidden fruit, “The tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” This is a name as deliciously strange as the names that John Lennon gives to objects in his haute hallucinogenic masterpiece, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” where he speaks of “newspaper taxis” and “rockinghorse people.”
After they ate of the tree, they became more intelligent as the tree gave them knowledge of good and evil. In other words, they progressed from Apes to Men. Some scholars say that the name of this tree suggests this tree represented evil and that consumption of the fruit of this tree connoted dalliances with the immoral.
However, such an idea would make sense only if the tree were named the tree of knowledge of evil. But it is instead named the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Arguably, one can only know what is good if one also knows what is evil. The suggests, amazingly enough, that G-d did not want us to be able to distinguish between good and evil and that G-d was something in the nature of Hermann Hesse’s concept of G-d espoused in his novel “Damien,” in which G-d is both good and evil. Does this suggest that real iniquity entered the world only when we drew distinctions between good and evil and relegated the evil to burning stakes and a panoply of torture chambers.
This essay is rather short. I feel a bit uneasy composing such a short piece, but I don’t see the need to append a lot of superfluous sentences. In short, I will adhere to Nietzsche’s edict that good writers will say in ten sentences what other people fail to say in a book.