I think most people see the "Garden of Eden" as a stand-in for nature. The story doesn’t really make sense if you don’t get this equivalence. But, if as the nineteenth century intellectual Thomas Henry Huxley put it, there is all the difference between a well-tended garden and nature, why do we see a garden as representing nature?
The fact is, sometimes we see a garden as representing nature, and sometimes we see it as representing civilization. The reason the ancients saw the garden as representing nature is because they saw God in the image of man. If humans have cows, sheep and goats, vegetables and fruits, then God just did the same thing on a grander scale. Humans have farms and God creates eco-systems, so-to-speak. We note that prefacing the story of the garden in Genesis there is a description of how God created both wild and domesticated animals.
Of course, today most educated people believe that humans domesticated animals, but the author of Genesis was writing his or her account long after certain animals were domesticated, so common knowledge that humans had done it initially from wild stock must have been forgotten. At the same time there is a kind of unconscious projection onto God of the human quality of breeder and domesticator. So nature was created - just like a human gardener creates a garden from scratch - or that’s how people must have imagined it.
The author of Genesis imagines that before Adam and Eve have knowledge of morality they are like animals, in not being ashamed of their nakedness. When they eat the forbidden fruit and come to understand good and evil they realize that it is wrong to be naked. By wearing coverings of Fig leaves the two humans are also marking themselves off as non-animals, and this is what God notices in the story. The irony is they are trying to do good but they get in trouble for it. (I love this story.)
The expulsion from the garden is rightly depicted as a tragedy, or maybe a tragi-comedy, because Adam and Eve are trying to use the knowledge in order to be good, but that excuse doesn’t cut it with God. But the real reason they are exiled has nothing to do with disobedience, it is because knowing good from evil, they are no longer like other animals. They know they are naked, they are ashamed, and shame is a distinctly human emotion.
The Christian idea of original sin is a non-starter here. You can’t assume what you set out to prove. You can’t assume that a decision is wrong if it comes before knowledge of right and wrong. What’s original here is morality, not sin.
Jews do not hold a doctrine of original sin, but they read the same version of Genesis as the Christians. Basically Christian thinkers like Paul and Augustine front-loaded the idea of original sin to back up the idea of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Question: Why did the son of God have to die? Answer: As a sacrifice for all of our sins, which originated in Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience. Without the idea of the “Atonement” the whole idea of original sin is superfluous. The solution to this hermeneutic absurdity is to abandon the atonement, but for fundamentalists that is not an option, so they are stuck with original sin. The rest of us can carry on very well without it.
If the garden is a kind of playful story, not so much a plausible explanation of the origin of morality, then where do we find a good explanation for the origin of morality? Plato's famous allegory of the cave is of no help. In fact it is an absolute hindrance, and his dualistic imagery really cripples our understanding of the nature and origin of morality. The blinding light, the burning bush… all models for an objective hierarchical moral system with no relation to living reality. We basically have to wait until Charles Darwin before we can come up with a plausible scenario. But Darwin’s explanation quickly becomes problematic too, as we shall see.
In 1879, writing in The Descent of Man, Darwin had proposed that human morality could have evolved by group selection, reasoning that altruistic groups cohered better and would have outcompeted groups with more selfish individuals.
In 1893, a decade after Darwin’s death, and two years before he himself died, Thomas Huxley, a famous popularizer of Darwin’s theory, gave a lecture called “Evolution and Ethics” which rejected the idea that human morality had evolved by Darwinian selection. The lecture came as a shock to educated Victorian society. Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for defending Darwin’s theory against all comers.
In the prologue to “Evolution and Ethics” Huxley compared human morality to a gardener, who does not allow a struggle for existence to determine which plants will survive but purposefully nurtures those plants which are useful and weeds out those which are not.
It is notable that Darwin got inspiration for his idea of natural selection from the analogy of domestication. Farmers and herders had bred and selected particular characteristics in plants and animals. Darwin reasoned that because living things produce many offspring, but most of those offspring do not survive, there could be a selective mechanism simply from the fact that certain characteristics help survival and others work against it. Characteristics of populations could change over time because the conditions of survival change with changes in climate and environment. Thus plants and animals could become better adapted to changes in the environment out of the sheer struggle for existence, without any help from an intelligent designer.
But what Huxley was arguing in contradistinction, was that in nature, vice and selfish behaviour are rewarded by enhanced survivability. Weeds, because they are aggressive and grow quickly in many different environments tend to take over. If they have no food value or other use to us, we want to select them out of our gardens in order to leave room for useful plants. But this selection is done on purpose, it is not a natural process, but a planned conscious effort on the part of the gardener.
How can morality be natural when it involves deliberately selecting and excluding certain kinds of behaviour? How can our standards of right and wrong have evolved when nature rewards strength and size, not goodness? Might makes right is the law of the jungle. The lion does not lie down with the lamb, he eats it. Why would empathy and altruism be selected for, instead of bigger claws and teeth if bigger and stronger animals could take advantage of the weaker?
Evolutionary theorists just don’t want to admit the possibility that such a basic system of human behaviours as morality could have emerged on purpose, because a group decided to, rather than by chance or natural selection. It has to be Darwin all the way down. My question to them is did dogs evolve from wolves by natural selection? The process of domestication has to be different from natural selection because tameness was deliberately selected.
In Darwin’s defence, I must say that his account of the origin of morality is thoroughly natural and non-dualistic, like the account in Genesis. But lately there is no consensus, only a lot of contention about whether or not morality could originate from the building blocks of altruism. As Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins never fails to point out, natural selection favours selfishness. In Neo-Darwinian terms, altruists are “suckers” who will lose out to "freeloaders", who benefit from the altruists without giving anything in return.
Thomas Hobbes, the first great British philosopher, figured out four hundred years ago,that agreements between people would not be possible without the threat of force as an ultimate back-up and in my mind that means the threat of exclusion from society. That’s why altruism cannot be a building block of morality. Morality has to be a package deal that involves group judgement and enforcement. The resulting stable environment affords trust, empathy, and altruism within the group, while often emphasizing hostility towards outsiders. Morality isn’t built from altruism, instead a moral system creates a kind of niche that encourages sharing within a self-defined group. It is more likely that the first moral system was constructed out of a deliberate collective agreement, than by some chance adaptation.
The key to the origin of morality is domestication - the deliberate selection of tamer animals from a wild population. If humans learned how to domesticate plants and animals, why could they not have learned the same about themselves, then later forgot, just as the knowledge that domestic stocks were derived from wild stocks was lost to the author of Genesis?
But just what was this method of self-domestication? To domesticate an animal, you first select the desired characteristic of tameness as a basis for breeding and kill or leave the rest to the wild. With humans it would have been getting rid of certain undesirables, most likely what we now call “psychopaths”. Psychopaths are rare maybe 1% of the general population, but they make up about 25% of prison populations. (Prisons are where we exclude people from the rest of society.)
Psychopathy could have been much more common two million years ago. Psychopaths have no conscience. They are only in it for themselves. They use people to get what they want, and have no compunction about harming others. Think of an alpha male gorilla or chimpanzee. These creatures have no compunction about beating up or threatening to beat up anybody who gets in their way or who challenges their dominance.
With chimpanzees or gorillas, the most dominant are also the most brutal, and they have to be because they are competing for sexual access to females. In human groups we are free to compete with each other over countless different matters without having to compete sexually at the same time. We control sexual competition through a moral system that is enacted by the entire group. This is one of the ways that we differ from the other great apes.
To me it is uncanny that the story of the garden highlights the prohibition of a sexual behaviour. As I pointed out earlier, for reasons of dramatic narrative style, the story assumes morality from the start, even though it purports to show how morality came about. Note that first humans are created as adults and as an adult couple. So the story also assumes monogamy, almost from the very beginning. What’s going on here?
A dominance hierarchy, with an alpha male on top, is logistically difficult to change into any other system. As soon as one male is toppled, another male or coalition of males takes his place. Only the collective action of the entire group can change the system, and in fact this is what has occurred with bonobos, one of our closest ape relatives. Male bonobos are never allowed to dominate females, because in every instance, females collectively act to prevent it.
Humans are largely monogamous like Adam and Eve. But how did we become monogamous? The story of the garden can’t tell us because it presupposes monogamy. But we get a hint in the fact that our closest ape relatives are anything but monogamous. There is much evidence that suggests that humans are not at all naturally monogamous. The existence of polygamy, the widespread incidence of adultery, and divorce, all point to urges that are far from faithful to monogamy.
At the same time monogamy is prevalent in most societies, which might suggest that its presence as a norm helps human societies survive. There is an even stronger case for morality being universal in all human societies. What if, originally, in human society, monogamy and morality were the same thing? The reason I make this suggestion is that they both require collective enforcement in order to work. The fact that nowadays they are not at all considered the same thing could just be the natural result of a gradual divergence between them as human society became more complex and stratified over time.
They both have to do with the regulation of sexual behaviour, but their effect is to separate sexual competition from other forms of competition. Both moral and monogamous systems create affordances for the division of labour, the sharing of food, and the cooperative raising of children. The presence of either or both could have facilitated the development of kinship relations, cooking, language, longer childhoods, bigger brains, and a more prolonged period of neural plasticity.
Just as in the story of Adam and Eve, we take monogamy for granted and forget that it is not a simple system like a dominance hierarchy. Instead, it requires collective action to enforce. Some of us may be under the impression that long ago the rule was “anything goes”: from single adults, to swingers, to polygamy. This certainly isn’t the case with any other animal. Even bonobos, which are the most promiscuous animals on earth, do not allow male domination, and do not practice monogamy.
Before moral systems, the alpha male was nature’s way of regulating violence, sex, and food distribution in most anthropoid groups. He beat up or intimidated everyone else, he had priority, sometimes absolute, over females, he appropriated the choicest foods for himself and his favourites. And this was rule by example. He was the role model. By establishing and maintaining a monogamous system, the first humans, in effect, set up a system that selectively eliminated those more likely to be alpha males for not being willing to play by the collective rules. The Anthropologist, Christopher Boehm has written a book about this called “Moral Origins”.
In Genesis, the decision to disobey God results in Adam and Eve’s exclusion from the garden and the origin of our human identity as fallible creatures. In Plato’s allegory of the Cave the individual breakout and experience of the light leads to the failed attempt of the enlightened one to free the rest from imprisonment and ignorance. Plato is essentially giving up on our fallible worldly existence and betting everything on the heaven of objective certainty. No room for errors there.
The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden is depicted as a deep tragedy, leading to labour pains, and break-your-back farming. The thing is that there is a subtext to this:
The snake was right, there are big benefits from knowing good from evil. The problem is that we are all fallible, so how do we determine who is right? In contrast to Plato, the author of Genesis leaves this question open. We just have to muddle through, even though we may never know the ultimate truth.
In starting the Academy Plato was being proactive. He made the right response to the tragedy of Socrates death. All the millions of University Professors and Students who have followed since owe him a deep sense of gratitude. But his allegory, which is more persuasive, more memorable, and more effective, than any other thing he wrote, reflects his deep pessimism about the limitations of human nature.
This world killed Socrates, and so, for Plato there was nowhere to go but upwards, away from human society towards the heavens and the untouchable realm of perfect objective truth. Ever since philosophers have been prone to talk about abstractions rather than about things and processes and this has been a mistake that to my mind reverberates in today’s analytic philosophy.
The story of the Garden is older, wiser, and deeper than Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It gives us humans who try, but always fall short of perfection. In contrast, Plato’s Allegory rejects the human body and the human senses, and and looks for knowledge in all the wrong places. I agree with Plato that we shouldn’t be living in caves. But, as in the story of the garden I believe that human beings belong here on earth, always learning, always coping, and always improving.
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