If you’re a regular reader of Jason Rosenhouse, you’re familiar with his argument that the biggest problem evolution poses for Christianity is not in undermining six-day creation, but in undermining the doctrine of Original Sin. Last week, Andrew Sullivan decided to weigh in on this issue, specifically responding to Jerry Coyne on whether the Garden of Eden story was meant literally:

There’s no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn’t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it’s meant literally.

It’s not clear to me that Sullivan has anything like a coherent view here, since just a couple months ago he made a point of telling his readers that Adam and Eve did not literally exist, and went so far as to point out that this causes problems not just for fundamentalist protestantism, but also for Sullivan’s own Catholic Church. I suspect that Sullivan’s real problem is not what Coyne said, but the fact that someone who’s critical of religion in general said it so frankly.

But I think it’s a mistake to focus on “traditional version of original sin” vs. “revised, science-compatible version of original sin” as interpretations of the Bible. Because, well, have you read the fucking thing? The traditional story is that Satan tempted the first humans into sinning against God, and this resulted in a deep corruption in human nature that was spread from generation to generation through sexual reproduction. The story in Genesis has none of that.

Instead, we have this thing called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God tells Adam and Eve they can’t eat its fruit or they will die. But then comes a talking snake to tell them that no, they won’t die, instead they’ll become like God, knowing good and evil. And the snake is right! God even says so! “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

This incident is supposed to explain a lot about the world: why people wear clothes, why crawl on their bellies (apparently the talking snake also had legs, before God cursed it?), why snakes are such a nuisance to humans, why childbirth is painful, why men rule over women (!), and why farming is such a pain in the ass. Notably absent, though, is Paul’s claim that this is how sin entered the world.

When I read this story, the connections that leap to mind aren’t to later Christian doctrine. They’re to Greek myths about stealing fire from Mount Olympus, and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The story is obvious mythology, similar to countless other myths that have been told throughout history (Wikipedia’s article “Pourquoi stories” has a very partial, but still useful, list).

Given these mythological parallels, no one who reads the story without preconceptions is going to conclude that Genesis was divinely inspired in any sense that Hesiod wasn’t. The story, and Paul’s later claims about it, also makes a mockery of the idea that the Bible is a beautifully unified whole. Rather, it’s a clear example of how the Bible was written by a bunch of different people with different viewpoints, who often engaged in dubious reinterpretations of what people before them had said.

So when modern believers like Sullivan try to square original sin with evolution, they’re not merely reinterpreting Genesis. They’re piling reinterpretation on top of reinterpretation until the original story is unrecognizable. Here’s Sullivan again:

I would argue that original sin is a mystery that makes sense of our species’ predicament – not a literal account of a temporal moment when we were all angels and a single act that made us all beasts. We are beasts with the moral imagination of angels. But if we are beasts, then where did that moral imagination come from? If it is coterminous with intelligence and self-awareness, as understood by evolution, then it presents human life as a paradox, and makes sense of the parable. For are we not tempted to believe we can master the universe with our minds – only to find that we cannot, and that the attempt can be counter-productive or even fatal? Isn’t that delusion what Genesis warns against?

How far we’ve come from using a talking snake to explain why humans wear clothes! Yeah, Sullivan’s interpretation is no more plausible than the same interpretation applied to the Prometheus story.

This leaves some interesting questions about what exactly is going on in Genesis 3. The name “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” is certainly evocative, making it tempting to read this as an allegory about how ignorance is bliss and to attain knowledge you must also know evil. However, according to Wikipedia, some scholars think “knowledge of good and evil” was just a poetic way of saying “all knowledge.”

This makes a lot of sense. Eating the fruit causes trouble for humans insofar as they start freaking out about being naked, but most of their trouble comes from God getting mad and cursing them. The point isn’t that they know evil, the point is that they have knowledge and God didn’t want them to, just as God doesn’t want them to live forever. I suppose the author figured humans have a nudity taboo as a side-effect of being so knowledgeable.

There also isn’t any real indication we’re supposed to be on God’s side here, any more than we’re supposed to be on Zeus’ side in the Prometheus story. That makes me think this isn’t a story about humans being bad. It’s a story about humans being AWESOME. It’s says humans are special. How special? The kind of special that is only attainable by STEALING MAGIC FRUIT FROM GOD! And our only problems come from time we made God go, “Oh crap! I need to do something before humans become too awesome!”