Forfeiting Eden

I remember spontaneously thinking as a new Christian at age 13 that every person would have done exactly what Adam and Eve did in Eden to disobey God.  No one had ever mentioned this idea to me.  Instead, it was a genuine ramification of assumptions I had made about Christian philosophy, long before I became a rationalist five years later.  The idea that forfeiting Eden could not have been averted is rooted in contra-Biblical concepts that are at least tangentially connected to Calvinistic theology and is contrary to even fundamental philosophical truths about logical necessity, individualism, and autonomy that are true whether or not Christianity is.

Most foundationally and thus importantly, there is no such thing as a person being logically incapable of avoiding any particular sin.  There is no logical necessity in any being at all choosing to sin, and thus every specific sin and the whole of sin altogether could have been and even now could be avoided.  This is true by necessity if sin exists because it is always logically possible for sin to be or to have been avoided, and it is true according to the Bible as well: over and over, the Bible either gives examples of morally perfect people (like Job, who is called "blameless and pure") or demands moral perfection (such as when Jesus instructs people to be perfect in Matthew 5:48).  It is a deep hypocrisy when evangelicals selectively condemn sins as they simultaneously believe and preach that sin is not even something people can consistently resist.

Just because one person takes a course of action does not mean someone else would.  If it was someone else besides Adam and Eve in Eden, there is absolutely nothing logically necessary about them having made the same choice to disobey God.  Regardless of how irrationalistic or rationalistic their motivations were, different people could and would have made different choices when it came to eating the fruit.  Adam and Eve are not every human who has lived.  They are but two individuals.  Evangelicals who almost feel proud of themselves for sinning, as if their stupidity and selfishness and hypocrisy are good because there is no divine mercy without them, might not directly think about this issue, but if they did, they would almost certainly believe that every person would have made the same decision in Eden.  This is false.

Forfeiting Eden was not some inevitable outcome on the Christian worldview.  People are individuals and, for better or for worse, there is no such thing as a worldview, personality, or behavior that any person must have because they are human; each person determines so much more about themselves than is typical to be acknowledged.  In fact, human sin could only be inevitable if God created people to sin or actively forces their wills to sin, in which case they would not truly be evil (they would only be puppets of another mind) and God would be directly bringing about the very things that deviate from his moral nature, making him evil, which is an impossibility since the moral nature of the uncaused nature is the only thing that could make some things good or evil in the first place.

Beyond this, the corruption of humankind can only have the utmost tragic nature if it was not some fated thing.  If the metaphysical status closer to God that moral perfection brings can only be voluntarily forfeited, and then consistently rejected on an individual basis, then human sin is all the more terrible, for it did not have to ever be pursued, practiced, and loved at all.  The Bible is consistent with the logical fact that if moral evil does exist, no person has to err, and yet this is not true because sin would be all the more tragic if it is always voluntary and therefore avoidable in each and every case.  Still, Calvinists and those who for some other reason pretend like sin cannot be abstained from are ultimately holding to an idea that, if true, greatly trivializes the depravity of sin.