Was the Earth a Perfect Paradise Before the Fall?

Good word choice!

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If there was no death one has to wonder what Adam and Eve thought when God warned them to not eat the fruit. Same question applies if there was no evil.

Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

They must have been scratching their heads in bewilderment.

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I knew a YEC who had an explanation for that issue as well: “Adam and Eve were created with perfect brains and they spoke a perfect language. So when God warned them that they would surely die if they ate the fruit, they immediately understood the meaning of the word die. even though they never had heard it before.”

By the way, it is still quite common to hear YECs describe all human language as “devolving” since the Fall. Some even cite as “evidence” the fact that some languages have lost their word inflections. For example, they will mention the fact that an Attic Greek verb could have over six hundred inflected forms—“so that a single word could be packed with meaning which would require perhaps a half dozen or more words in English to express the same idea.”

I’ve always found it fascinating that people with so little knowledge of linguistics will make “value judgments”, such as making the bizarre assumption that a heavily inflected language is superior to one which expresses the same ideas using complex auxiliary phrases and word order distinctions.

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AND mosquitoes!

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Those too.

This is my understanding of the fall. This is an excerpt from a piece I submitted to BioLogos that was actually rejected because they weren’t too keen on me explicitly stating that Adam was a symbol. I’ll try to submit it elsewhere at some point. If you notice, nothing they have posted in the last several months has advocated a “No Adam” position.

"The Cause of Our Fall and the Resurrection of the Cosmos
​As for what caused the human being’s fall into sin, Maximus speaks of humanity’s “fall” as primarily an abdication of its call to unite all of creation to God, or to unite created nature to uncreated nature. In Ambigum 41, Maximus describes humanity’s original vocation to unite what is divided in his description of his fifth division of the cosmos (the division between male and female):

“The human being…is above all-like a most capacious workshop (ἐργαστήριον) containing all things (πᾶσι τοῖς), naturally mediating through itself all the divided extremes, and who by design has been beneficially placed amid beings…Through this potential, consistent with the purpose behind the origination of divided beings, the human being was called to…bring to light the great mystery of the divine plan, realizing in God the union of the extremes which exist among beings, by harmoniously advancing in an ascending sequence from the proximate to the remote and from the inferior to the superior.”

Because the human being contains “all things” within itself, it was called to raise everything in creation (all of matter- plants, animals, “from the remote to the superior”) towards God, but it did the opposite. As Maximus says, the human being “moved around the things below it, which God commanded it to have dominion over” and “misused its natural, God-given capacity to unite what is divided.”

Wouldn’t that be nice if true for many aspects in this whole discussion? It continues to baffle me how “Bible defenders” can be so biblically illiterate in the details.

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That is our opening though. The text makes space for that which they will not.

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I don’t actually recall where Genesis says there was no death. It seems to me that the existence of the tree of life implies that death existed, as eating the fruit was necessary to avoid it.

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Exactly.

…as eating the fruit was necessary to avoid it in the garden. How is that “exactly”?

If there was “no death” before the fall, there is strong evidence that this was confined to the Garden, and did not extend outside the Garden borders.

Let me put this more explicitly: the tree of life is evidence that there was death, or at least mortality, before the fall, inside the garden. (Or in the fictional story of the garden, at least.)

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Yes. If some “poison” (e.g. death) doesn’t actually exist, there is no reason to emphasize that an “antidote” (i.e. the fruit of the Tree of Life) is available for one’s consumption.

As Dr. Swamidass has observed on many occasions, it is quite remarkable that many who consider themselves more “biblical” than everybody else (and so passionately claiming to care about what the Bible states) actually can tend totally to ignore it on a frequent basis.

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I agree with this, but we do need to consider the role the tree of life plays in the story - especially in the light of its re-deployment in the rest of the Bible.

Metaphorically speaking the tree seems to represent the eternal life which God gives, which in many ways is no more than what it means to live in his presence. Just as the tree of wisom represents the wisdom to be found in the presence of God, which in some way can be usurped.

man was mortal, but offered eternal life in the presence of Yahweh - the same promise that comes thorough Christ. Exclusion from God’s presence is excluison from the source of eternal life, and the return to the mortality of the first creation. Whether this was mediated by an actual tree (equivalent to a sacrament) or is a function of the mythic genre of the story is of no great consequence.

But @John_Harshman is right to point out that the tree of life must be opposed, in some way, to an existing mortality. Whether that entails mortality within the garden is another matter - the garden functions as a single, spiritual space within the narrative.

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So, then, do you suppose that the metaphors (trees of life and wisdom) are what man already had in the garden? So that they were conveyed with utter grace and nothing more was needed. But that to partake of the fruit of the trees was to reject the utter grace and instead to pursue on their own that which God had already given? I’m thinking of a two-year-old who is learning his way. You give something to him in order to help him out, and he says no, sets it down and then painstakingly picks it up himself? It is the same thing, but he wanted to “do it” instead? Excuse me if I’m misunderstanding. I’m trying to wrap my brain around your comment.

@John_Harshman we are saying the same thing. It is two sides of the same coin.

The tree of Life is evidence that there was death before the fall outside the garden. Inside the garden, however, it is evidence there was no death before the fall in the presence of the tree.

No, we aren’t saying the same thing. The presence of the tree confers nothing. Eating the fruit of the tree is the only cure for death. That’s why God acted to prevent Adam from eating the fruit of the tree of life after he had eaten the forbidden fruit. Up until Adam eats the fruit of the tree of life, there is potential death in the garden. You are torturing the story for reasons unclear to me.

Are you saying that the whole garden story is metaphorical, not historical? If so, I have no problem, but there seems then to be no point in Joshua’s attempts.

You are inferring unsaid things into bother Genesis and my statement. It is some what entertaining. We really do hold the same view here. I can’t respond in more detail just this moment. apologies.

If so, you are mis-stating your opinions on a regular basis. Nor am I reading anything into the biblical story. It’s right there in the text.