And God smiled…
By: James Dankwah
Tags: Christianity, Theology

Assuming the Bible is true.

“The Fall of Man” by Peter Paul Rubens, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I always wondered why an all-knowing God would create beings that would disobey Him. Did He know He was going to be disobeyed? And if He did, He created mankind this way, and so how could it have been ‘disobedience’? But maybe the point wasn’t about obedience at all. The point was evolution.

The following definitions will be of use.

A perfect environment is defined as one that tends to all the needs of its hosts.

Evolution is defined as the development of living things towards an ideal state in any given environment.

Perfection is defined as the utmost ideal state of a given being in any given environment. A state where it doesn’t have to evolve any longer.

The cause for evolution is external, provided by the environment in which the said living thing exists such that its survival in the given environment depends on its ability to evolve to meet its environmental conditions. In a perfect environment, there would be no cause for evolution of a host. Every need would be provided and so a host would need not evolve beyond its initial state. However, in a perfect environment, it would seem as though a host is perfect, as it does not need to evolve any further. But if the environment was perfect first, tending to the needs of many different hosts before its current host existed, how do we tell the if the said host is perfect or not? And if it isn’t, how do we make it evolve?

Mankind’s environment after the creation was Eden, a perfect environment, and God must have faced the very same problem we just described.

One solution is to introduce an imperfection or to distort the perfection of the said environment. If the host is truly perfect, it should flourish under these new conditions and there would be no need for it to evolve. If it isn’t perfect, it should either die out, or evolve to meet the new environmental conditions, thereby achieving a new ideal. Another way is to introduce an opportunity for evolution through another host which is of a proposed greater ideal (or just the idea of it) to the original host. If the host is perfect, it wouldn’t evolve any further towards this new proposed ideal (or the idea of it) and if that happens to be the case, the new host should rather evolve towards the state of the original, thereby making the original’s idealness obvious.

In the Bible though, both scenarios happened in chorus. The deceitful snake, a proof of the distortion of the perfect environment, introduced mankind (Eve directly and Adam through Eve) to the idea of a ‘greater’ ideal. Bearing in mind the conclusions drawn from the previous paragraph, mankind’s imperfection was clear the moment the apple was bitten. Not because mankind was disobedient but because mankind took a voluntary step towards an ideal that he had decided was greater than his current state.

An imperfect being cannot be left to exist in a perfect environment lest it ceases to evolve and forever remains imperfect. So, God did the right thing, as always, he took mankind out of the perfect environment, an environment which was limiting our evolution, and put us in an imperfect one. Evolve or die, and so far we have survived. God might have been angry at mankind’s disobedience, and mankind’s display of imperfection but maybe, just maybe, in the moment the apple was bitten, He smiled, because He saw an opportunity to make His creation perfect.