The Quest for God and the Good Life

5. Sin and Evil

103 5 | Sin and Evil Creation, the Fall, and Original Sin In the very first chapter of the very first book in the Bible, nature is proclaimed to be worthy of celebrating. All of its parts, the light and the dark, the sky and the sea, the plants and the animals are all created “good.” As a whole, it is “very good.” Human beings are further privileged to be made “in the image and likeness of God.”1 In the Bible sin is not something created by God. It is not natural . It does not enter into the picture until the third chapter, where we see human beings choose to listen to the serpent’s temptation and disobey God. God does not create us to sin, nor does the devil make us do it. Rather, sin and its evil consequences enter into the world through the bad decisions of human persons.2 Mainstream Christian tradition, like the Jewish tradition that preceded and accompanies it, does not take these stories to be literally true. But literal truth is not the only reason to value a literary work. The comics are prized for their humor, novels for their ability to entertain, and speeches for their potential to inspire. While some parts of the Bible are meant to be taken literally, the stories of creation and the fall are not. The first chapter contains one creation story, the most famous one, summarized above. In it God creates the world over a period of six days, starting with the light 1. Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 25, 26, 31. 2. Gen. 3:1–19. and the dark and ending with human beings. The second chapter presents another creation account. This one begins like the first one with the creation of a basic environment, the heavens and the earth. But then it talks about a stream rather than the sea. It has God creating a man first, not plants, then animals, then human beings (which is, interestingly enough, the same order laid out by evolutionary science. The biblical order even gets the details right of fish and birds coming before land animals.) This second creation account has God then create various plants for the man’s food and animals for the man’s partners. When none of the animals is thought to be a suitable partner, God creates a woman from one of the man’s ribs. So instead of being created together, as they are in the first account, they are created with a pause between the man’s creation and the woman’s.3 The Bible thus contradicts itself on a literal level within the first two chapters of the first book, Genesis. This is not some new discovery. The original compilers of the Bible had to know of their contradiction. It is apparent at first glance. So why would they still include both accounts? We cannot know their exact thoughts, but we may surmise that since literal truth is not the only thing worthwhile in a text, they left both accounts in there for some other reason. The traditional view is that while the first three books of Genesis may not be literally or superficially true, they reveal a deep wisdom about the fundamental relationships of things in the world, including us and our role. They tell us that the things in this world come not from competing interests, but from one intelligent , just, caring, and powerful source, called “God.” They tell us that God made the world good, that all its parts are interdependent , that human beings are a late, great emersion in the world. And, combined with the third chapter of Genesis, they teach us that even though we humans derive our living from the larger environment , we are given God-like powers that, if we choose to use them badly, can cause great damage to ourselves and the rest of creation. Such wisdom can be very helpful for ordering our lives. If everything comes ultimately from one source, from one God who 3. Gen. 2:4–24. 104  Decline loves us all, then our wars cannot have an ultimate character to them. “Our” God does not fight exclusively on “our side.” Since the world God created is made of interdependent parts that we can damage, we must behave responsibly. To do otherwise would be devastating. The stories of the first three chapters of Genesis, though not...