Eating it introduced enzymes and, perhaps, other biological change catalysts that led to a massive morphological change. --increased encephaliztion, neural cell growth and dendritic proliferation --which was susequently fixed as a heritable trait – yes, one option. The physical side of a very complicated event.
“Touching it” was never warned against by God.
Point taken… strike “touching”, and insert “eating”. It’s a magical concept; it should be optional.
By presuming to have eating the fruit trigger such changes, you are introducing non-biblical ideas in a way that make the whole scenario unnecessarily non-biblical.
“Any sufficiently advanced tecnology, from the vantage point of the uneducated, is indistinguishable from magic.”
If you don’t understand how introducing a foreign enzyme can work those kinds of massive changes, then get to studying your neurochemistry harder, is all I can say.
Or, another option is to blindly throw stones at what you don’t understand… but that’s not a very cultured option, now, is it? Please make your critiques more cogent, okay? Cheers.
My critique has to do with your expansion of the changes to the adams outside of Eden.
Some Creationists see an instantaneous affect on the Universe, turning vegetarian animals into carnivores. So I couldn’t be sure whether you fell in with that crowd.
The less dramatic requirement would be that some “unspecified” contact with Adam or Eve would “communicate” the change. So… we can’t be discussing sharing of food - - since the Tree in question is off limits. So are we talking about contact with saliva? Is there enough of the active agent to create the changes you suggest? Or could it be communicated simply through Physical touch? Or simply hearing their words on the topic of God’s morality?
It is a tar baby that I still urge upon @swamidass as an Optional consideration (since there will be many others) rather than a mandatory feature.
As for my critiques being made more cogent… this is a come as you are party. We’re all doing are best, and of course that means you as well.
[Edit: the word “contingent” was supposed to be “cogent”. Apparently my fingers have a cogency all their own when they reject my thought, and type some other word entirely.]
Thank you, that was much more constructive. The contact with “imago Dei” human beings from (BEFORE AND) “outside the garden” was genealogical, affecting everyone, eventually. A novel trait became fixed in the whole population. Those before Adam “who did not sin in the likeness of Adam” from Romans, were, nevertheless, in need of redemption, though no sin was charged against them, because there was no law given to them yet. They were not yet morally sophisticated enough to be held fully morally accountable. They were “innocent,” but not yet “righteous.” I’m using mostly theological language here, to flesh out this option.
BTW, “cogent” is what I asked for; all real communication is contingent, agreed?
I also like your idea about how their words characterizing God’s morality would have a profound effect, as well. But it would seem that that’s what we have in the historical account, in the first place. Told in a remarkably self-reflective --even self-deprecatory --manner, wouldn’t you say?
I have edited the recalcitrant word “contingent” back to the intended word “cogent”.
The sentence below is the one that triggered my critique:
All this additional discussion is not really anything that has to do with my original complaint:
I do not see the need to presume physiological changes (transmissable to the next generation?) triggered by eating the fruit.
No, you don’t. I do; it does imply “transmissability” of a novel, dysfuntional, cognitive predisposition. It’s the difference between essential gradualism and including human choices into the mix. It’s morally required. 'Nuff said, for now.
Show me where that is in the Bible?
In the “girding up” of this scenario, the two touchstones are ever-constant: is there evidence in the non-biblical historical evidence that such-and-such occurred? If not, is there warrant in the Bible that such-and-such occurred, and vice versa.
Let me know when we are compelled to add the 3rd touchstone: does Guy Coe really really like the idea?
The evidence manifests itself in several ways. At roughly 15-13 kya, we are at the headwaters of virtually every human civilization, worldwide. Travel and commerce between these centers was extensive, and thus any novel physical traits were quickly spread around. At roughly the same time we are in a position to see Adam and Eve at the foreground of both irrigation agriculture and animal domestication, both of which are critical to the establishment of Mesopotamian culture and civilization.
For the first time, enforced “property rights” of land ownership came to the foreground, as a shift away from nomadic hunter/ gathering. Moral and social issues were suddenly much more complex. Warfare broke out to settle disputes, the beginning of a “might makes right” ethos that too easily turns unjust.
Shall I go on about how critical this juncture was in human civilization, and quickly and badly A & E’s sin skewed us away from God’s best future for mankind?
At the 15-13 kya mark, North and South America is populated with millions of people with a Meso American culture and civilization very different from Mesopotamian.
Yes, and it was not necessary to destroy those in the flood. Like every human endeavor, they eventually simply unraveled as they failed to remember the true God.
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