No doubt about it, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil bears some pretty tasty fruit.

Let your imagination stretch for a minute: think yourself back to Eden in the days before Adam & Eve partook of that persuasive produce. If what it imparted was “knowledge of good and evil,” then what that suggests is that, prior to gaining it, these first people literally did not know right from wrong, good from bad, better from worse. Their brains were not capable of making value judgments. They lived in the moment, not retaining memories of pleasure or pain with which they could compare life’s ongoing occurrences.

Is it possible that human beings were once like that? Little more than – dare one propose it – furless apes?

So according to the biblical scenario, after gaining this knowledge humans can say “this is good,” “that is bad.” Why do you suppose a deity would want to keep that thought process from his most favored beings? With that knowledge, as He begrudgingly points out, we become like God and His angels; without it, we are no different from the rest of the animals of Creation.

What it seems like to me is that the Eden story tells of an erect biped gaining the powers of discrimination – what we might even label “intelligence” – so that, looked at from such a slightly detached perspective, this fable tells the whole story of human evolution in one easy-to-grasp narrative – just like Genesis’s preceding account of the Creation was kind of a simplified rendition of the Big Bang (albeit one that could easily be understood by a tribal people who didn’t have much comprehension of high-energy particle physics. Remember, we’re talking a few thousand years before a different apple introduced Isaac Newton to the concept of gravity, so physics was hardly a required course.)

If you think about it, this whole Eden story makes you wonder what’s going on with Genesis. Just how literally can it possibly be taken?