ADAM

From Philosopedia

Adam and Eve, an oil painting by Tintoretto (1518 - 1594)

ADAM (Born some time after 9 a.m., 23 October 4004 B.C.E., according to Bishop James Ussher)

“To condemn all mankind for the sin of Adam and Eve,” wrote W. K. Clifford, “to let the innocent suffer for the guilty, to keep anyone alive in torture forever and ever: These actions are simply magnified copies of what bad men do. No juggling with ‘divine justice and mercy’ can make them anything else. This must be said to all kinds and conditions of men: That if He has visited upon the innocent the punishment of the guilty, if He is to torture any single soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship Him.”

If Adam’s sin was that of having eaten of the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden (many believers mistakenly think the fruit was an apple), the symbolism is provocative in light of Edward O. Wilson’s contemporary and dour view of mankind as a group which has reduced animal life in lakes, rivers, and even the open ocean. As a result, he observed,

• The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

However, as an eminent sociobiologist, Wilson is a philosophic naturalist. What disturbs him is that humans appear to be suicidally programmed by their genetic heritage “to be so selfish that a sense of global responsibility will come too late,” that “their genes also predispose them to plan ahead for one or two generations at most.” {HAB; CE; ER; RE}

Eve, who by giving Adam an apple (sic), caused mankind's fall?

Painting by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1546), a patriarchist.