In the film version of “Men in Black”, Agent K (played by Tommie Lee Jones) says to Will Smith (soon to be Agent J): “Fifteen hundred years ago everyone “knew” the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everyone “knew” the earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago, you “knew” that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll “know” tomorrow.” Here Jones uses the verb “to know” to mean not the possession of a fund of factual information but an uncritical certainty of the validity of one’s beliefs. It is with this meaning of the term that this meditation on the meaning and implications of Man’s Fall from Paradise is concerned.
But what was the misdeed that got mankind expelled from the Garden? People tend to think that the offense was sexual, but there is nothing in Genesis to indicate that sex had anything to do with it. Others, notably Milton, assert that the first sin was simply the disobedience of God’s command, and this was certainly one aspect of the matter. However (and this is the crux of my thesis), it is worthwhile to consider the nature of the command violated by Adam and Eve. They were not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan (or, the serpent, conventionally assumed to have been either Satan or his agent) tells Eve that, if they eat of the fruit of this tree, they will ”become like the gods, knowing good and evil.”
It occurs to me to wonder (after the manner of people) why God, who wants people to be good, should object to people being able to accurately distinguish the good from the bad. This is conventionally understood to mean that the sinners sinned in desiring to be like a god, of whom one characteristic is knowing what is good and what is evil. But maybe another explanation, one less suggestive of a god with an inferiority complex, can assist this inquiry.
I do not believe that the real meaning of this episode and the language used to relate it is that God didn’t want people to understand their moral duty. Knowing good and evil need not mean possessing a fund of factual information concerning what things are actually good and what actually evil. It can equally mean (and this is my interpretation) a mindset of the sort Jones references in the film, namely an uncritical certitude of the validity of one’s opinions – in this case, opinions concerning what is good and what is evil.
If this is the violation that occasioned Man’s Fall, then what God objects to (in addition to disobedience) is the desire to live on the basis of uncritical certainty. And why does He object to this? Because if mankind is the pinnacle of God’s creation (which seems to be implicit in the entirety of Scripture), and if mankind’s great distinguishing feature is his capacity to think analytically and critically to understand, discover, and solve, then to desire uncritical certainty is to reject God’s greatest achievement. And that is something to which even a loving god might reasonably object.
What is God’s response to this sin? He expels Adam and Eve from Paradise, where they needed not toil or suffer but needed only do what was rational, namely, take care of the good thing which had been given them. And thereafter, their punishment consisted of living in an imperfect world in which, in order to survive, they must perforce make use of their intellect, of their problem-solving ability to extract food from the earth and to protect themselves and their offspring, who would now be vulnerable to myriad threats and problems never encountered in the Garden.
This interpretation of The Fall asserts that what God wants is for people to make constructive use of the magnificent, powerful brains which are His greatest creation. What Satan wants, by contrast, is for people to function according to an uncritical certainty that what they believe to be right is absolute, immutable, and not subject to debate. This unreflecting, unquestioning, uncritical certainty is the essence of all absolutist ideologies throughout history and has thus been the common feature of most of the heinous and catastrophic episodes of human history, from Hitler to Stalin to the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, to the Wars of Religion in Sixteenth Century France, to the Spanish Inquisition, to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the killing fields of Cambodia, and all their offspring, imitators and progenitors. The common element that made each of these atrocious developments possible has been a readiness to assume an uncritical, unexamined certainty of the rightness of the cause, of the wrongness of the opposition, and, hence, of the holy necessity of acting implacably to destroy the evil.
Today, as throughout history, it is this same uncritical, unblinking certitude of the rightness of the cause which impels fundamentalist religious militancy (whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other) to wreak havoc upon a world which craves peace, security, and the opportunity to live happy, productive lives in the joyful exercise of their God-given capacity to inquire, to learn, to problem-solve, ever striving to recreate the safe, sufficient world in which we originated and which we lost because we were seduced by the easy allure of uncritical certainty.
In sum, for those who doubt the presence of Satan in the world, his handiwork is to be seen and should be recognized wherever his agents, armed with unreflective, uncritical certitude are on the attack against reasoning, analytical thought, and constructive problem-solving, whose purpose is to enable mankind to progress, through the positive, humane employment of God’s greatest gift in the benign pursuit of that all-sufficient rational paradise, which is where God wanted us in the first place.
