Thoughts of a Doubting Christian ✓

Original Sin and the Fall

This is the topic that makes me doubt my faith the most: original sin and the Fall.

First, let's take a look at part of the Creation myth, because it is intricately connected to these ideas. If you are unfamiliar with the story of Adam and Eve, this is roughly how it goes:

Adam and Eve are created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden with the rest of the animals. God tells them that they can eat from all of the trees in the Garden except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because if they did that, they would die. Soon, the snake decides to cause trouble by convincing Eve to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree. Eve finds it delicious and convinces Adam to have some, too. When God finds out that they disobeyed Him, He gets angry. He curses the snake to slither on the ground, He curses woman to experience extremely painful childbirth and have her husband "rule over" her, and He curses man to toil and labor for all the days of his life before returning to the dust he was made of. Then God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden so that they won't eat fruit from the Tree of Life and become immortal like Him and the Angels.

Connected to this story are the Christian doctrines of original sin and the Fall:

~ Original sin is the doctrine "which holds that human nature has been morally and ethically corrupted due to the disobedience of mankind." As the story goes, when Adam and Eve were deceived and went against God's orders by eating the forbidden fruit, they introduced sin into this world. The rest of humanity inherited this sin from Adam and Eve. Because of this, there is nothing humans can do to make ourselves righteous in God's eyes except by accepting Jesus's sacrificial death for our sins.

~ The Fall (shorthand for "the Fall of man") is the Christian term for what happened when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and were kicked out of the Garden. They "fell" out of God's grace, out of perfection, and brought evil into the world through their disobedience. Christians blame most things on the Fall: wars, genocide and murder, illness, suffering, death, and even natural disasters. It takes the blame for evil off of God's shoulders and puts it on humanity's. Once again, by this doctrine, the only thing that can save us from the Fall is redemption through Christ.

Until about eight months ago, I believed this doctrine fully. It was a teaching that I grew up with, and it seemed to make sense on the surface, so there was no reason to question it. But now, the Doctrine of the Fall seems to have more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

Think about it: in the Creation story, the world was perfect before Adam and Eve sinned. That means that Adam and Eve were also perfect. But if Adam and Eve were perfect, then how were they able to disobey God and sin in the first place? Shouldn't that be impossible?

This is usually where people argue that God created human beings with free will, and with free will comes the ability to make mistakes. But if Adam and Eve were truly perfect, then they wouldn't have disobeyed! Even if they'd had free will to do the wrong thing, they still would've chosen the right thing because they were without flaw. (You can argue that this isn't free will because they would always choose the right thing, but that's an argument for a different day.) So how did perfect beings make a mistake?

At the risk of sounding repetitive, Jesus was perfect and, by doctrine, incapable of sinning! He could not sin because he was perfect. The same should apply to Adam and Eve. So, if they sinned, they were imperfect. But why would God create imperfect beings, knowing full well that they would sin and He would have to punish them with death for it? Am I the only one who sees the holes in this?

Not only that, but why was it Adam and Eve's choice that brought sin into the world? Once again, think about this. Eve didn't know the full consequences of what she was doing because she was tricked by the snake. Since the snake was the one to urge her to disobey, then wouldn't the snake be the first bringer of sin, and therefore all of the evils of the Fall? Heck, if Creation was perfect before the Fall, how would the snake even come up with the idea to tempt Eve in the first place?

Then people point out that the snake tempted Eve because of Satan's influence. But then that makes Satan the first being to disobey God, meaning that he was the bringer of sin! It would be Satan's fault for the evils of the Fall, not Adam and Eve's. But that isn't how doctrine works.

I don't get it. Why would sin come into being when Adam and Eve disobeyed but not when the snake and the Devil disobeyed before them? Satan and the snake did it first, but Creation was still perfect until humans followed suit? That doesn't make any sense.

Some people try to fix this by saying that there was already evil in the world, but Adam and Eve lost their innocence by succumbing to temptation. But that goes against the doctrine of the Fall, which posits that there was no evil until Adam and Eve sinned. It's because of humanity's sins that there is war, death, destruction, and suffering. If their disobedience didn't bring evil into the world, then where did it come from? The snake? Satan? But how did Satan get it?

That's another problem. Regardless of who was the first to disobey, where did evil come from? God's "perfect" creation sinned, which brought evil into the world, but from where? There is nothing that God didn't create, so doesn't that mean God created sin and evil? Wouldn't that go against His just and good nature?

Furthermore, before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the couple wouldn't have known the difference between the two! That means that they wouldn't have fully understood the consequences of disobeying God, because they didn't know what evil was. How could they have know that what they were about to do was wrong if they didn't even have that knowledge in the first place?

But there's even another twist to this: if evil didn't exist before Adam and Eve sinned, why was there a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden in the first place? That would mean that good and evil already existed, but once again, that means that Adam and Eve's disobedience didn't bring evil into the world. It was already there, they just became aware of it, which would bring us back to the question of where evil first originated.

One more thing: if God knew that Adam and Eve would disobey, why did He plant those forbidden trees in the Garden in the first place? Why did He let the snake in? Why did He let the Devil influence the snake? He knew what was going to happen. So that means, whether God created evil or not, He willingly let death and evil happen, including people suffering eternal torment in hell for not loving Him!

People might argue that God didn't know that Adam and Eve would disobey Him. But that also goes against Christian doctrine. If God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then He would've known that Adam and Eve were going to sin, and therefore He could've prevented the death and destruction that came with it. Why would God make us with the ability to disobey, knowing full well that we would, and then punish us for it?

Eventually, this tiring argument wraps back around to free will. People argue that without free will, Adam and Eve would've been like robots programmed to love God. They would have no choice but to love and obey Him. People say He wanted to give us a choice, because love is sweeter and more meaningful that way. But it isn't much of a choice when your choices are either love God or suffer eternal torment, is it? You either love God or die? That's as close as you can get to forcing people to love you without taking away their free will.

At the end of the day, the Fall and original sin are riddled with problems that defy logic and reason. If the "reason" why humans are sinful and need Jesus is logically flawed, then I wonder, where does that place Christianity?

Hopefully this chapter, along with the previous two ("Religion Roulette" and "Evolution vs Creationism"), will help people understand why I am seriously doubting my faith.