Christianity, Knowledge and Science

It doesn't stigmatize good or evil as terrible, but it forbids taking up the knowledge of good and evil, which belongs to God.I have heard a lot of interpretations of this allegorical story, both from Christians and non-Christians. None of the ones I know stigmatizes knowledge in general.The most common approach I think I've heard is that God decrees what's good and evil, not we ourselves. However, even that doesn't have to be accurate. My own church would be prone to saying that God wants us to live spiritually, moved by the life that he gives us, not spend our time judging right and wrong.Daniel Quinn has an interesting one, too, saying that it's about civilized people, who used to live free as part of nature, but then became farmers and citizens of cities, started decreeing how everyone else should live and conquering the world like they were gods or something, and so were banished from the paradise, earth, that they used to be a part of. Right or not, it's pretty creative.Either way, I don't think the interpretation that the garden story stigmatizes all knowledge as bad is a good one. There's nothing in that passage that calls us to reject science.

It's an allegory. There was no garden, and no tree was placed there by God or anyone else.The point was to say that the knowledge of good and evil belongs to God, not man. That's why eating from it made them like God. It wasn't good for that to be so, so they were punished.It's just a story to teach a lesson. That's the lesson. Knowledge is not the culprit in the story. Man deciding good and evil outside of the will of God is the culprit in the story.

Help me out here as a person reading your argument with someone else. What's your point here? The same book that mentions being born again says numerous things about belief (Jn 1:12, Jn 3:16, Jn 3:36, etc., etc., etc.). I can't figure out why you said this. You can not believe in Christ and be a Christian? So I can reject Buddha's teachings and be a Buddhist? What are you saying here?

As a technicality, the RCC teaches that you are born again at baptism. It seems clear enough that the early church fathers used born again and baptism interchangeably, though it is argued as to whether they baptized infants at the time.

It can only seem ludicrous if you're thinking of it as a real story, as some attempt at accurate history. It is not. It is a story meant to teach a lesson. That lesson was that the knowledge of good and evil was meant for God, not us. God decides good and evil. We are punished for disobeying God. Adam & Eve were not punished for anything else they did, except for not doing the one command God gave them.I can't say my interpretation is guaranteed to be 100% correct, but I'm nowhere near the only one offering such an interpretation. The story was originally told to get a lesson across. There's not much doubt about that. The lesson seems pretty obvious to me. Good and evil belong to God, not to man. Since man was punished for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that lesson seems sort of apparent. Since the story was passed down in a society that believed God gave them their laws, it seems also apparent that the job of men, according to the story, is to obey God, not determine good and evil on his own.This isn't ludicrous. This is a rather on-the-surface, obvious sort of interpretation of the story.

To admin:I'm thinking your admonition was addressed to ICANT. Since the topic is why knowing good and evil is bad, I'm thinking sidelined and I are on topic. Please let me know if I'm wrong. It's a story. Personally, I think the serpent is a great addition to the story, and that way there's also an explanation for the rather bizarre way snakes travel. This is a valid question. We don't live in a garden with no one there but animals (where the question of good and evil really wouldn't come up much). We live with a lot of other people in situations that are not ideal, and good and evil come up a lot.I have two answers:1. A Hebrew writer--and this story was passed down by the Hebrews--would expect the law to address pretty much all situations of good and evil. It is awful detailed, and that sort of trust in the law is what inspired such sayings as, "It is written..."2. A Christian would say that we can be led by the Spirit at all times, thus being able to consult God in all situations on the spot. Jesus did say, "I don't do anything except what I see my Father doing." It may not matter, however, how a Christian would see it, because it was originally a Hebrew story and they wouldn't have the same "led by the Spirit" mentality.3. An allegory cannot be expected to answer every situation. Exceptions do not render the lesson of an allegory invalid. Despite encountering situations where good and evil has not been defined for us, the lesson that good and evil are determined by God, not man, and that moral decisions should be based on God's determinations, remains a valid lesson even when we're faced with situations where we don't know God's determination.

I may need more coffee before I can answer your post, sidelined. I have no way of knowing if we just disagree a lot, or if I just can't figure out where you're coming from. But let me take a stab at this. Ok. That's not what I would get from the story, but I can at least see how you would. Ok, now we're talking about whether the lesson I draw from the story is true, which I have never claimed. Since I do agree with the lesson, however, I will be happy to address this argument.I think we're supposed to obey God. He gets to choose what's good and evil. I'm not sure how us complaining about injustice invalidates that belief or even has anything to do with it. Actually, my thought about how a Christian is supposed to live is spiritually. Basically, God's Spirit lives inside of him, and there is a constant attention to what's felt inside. A lot of my day may be moving from one task to another, none of them morally significant or having anything to do with good or evil, but then feel "a check" inside or a feeling that I ought to do this or that. Such things are not to be ignored.Leaving good and evil to God doesn't have to be interpreted that way, though. Another way to look at it, and one that would be more Hebrew and thus more in line with the original story, is that whenever possible, moral choices should be made in accordance with God's law, whatever rules he's passed on to man. In other situations man is free, no law applies. I can't say I even know what you're talking about. This seems bizarre to me, and I don't have an impression of you as bizarre, so I figure I must not be understanding what you're talking about.Why wouldn't someone with perfect information be able to be an arbiter of justice? In fact, why wouldn't he be the best arbiter of justice? What does this have to do with the knowledge of good and evil? Surely you're saying something I'm completely missing. It gets said a lot nowadays that Christians have a narrow view of God and that if there's a real God he'll be much different than the Christian one. I agree with that. I would apply it further, though, and say that if there's a real God he's pretty likely to be far beyond what atheists would imagine him to be, too.There are all sorts of assertions like this one you're making that I think are way beyond what we could know. If there's a God who could create this universe, as I believe there is, then he most certainly could understand all the problems of mortality. Maybe he's experiencing them through us. Maybe he has some other way of knowing. Maybe there's 11 dimensions, and we have only the faintest view of our 11-dimensional God and he has a thorough view of us. Maybe when I turn around, everything dissolves behind me into a mass of possibilities and probabilities and things are only real while being observed, and God gets to create things moment by moment, learning all the time.We don't know enough to make some of the assertions we make about God.In another thread, I read an assertion about God:If God is able and willing to communicate truth, he's God.If God is able, but unwilling, he's evil.If God is unable, but willing, he's impotent.If God is unable and unwilling, then...(I don't remember what this "then" was)My answer to all such lines of reasoning about God, is "maybe we don't have a clue what we're talking about and none of our then's follow at all."I believe in reason and I believe in revelation, but the sort of logic contained in that line of logic and in your suggestion I just quoted seems awful unreliable considering our state of knowledge of the spiritual world.