Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Sinelas t1_j6hry94 wrote

Some of the catholics I know have a vision of creation that is absolutely compatible with evolution.

Basically they consider the garden of Eden as a metaphore, the forbidden fruit being knowledge (or consciousness).
Their god is supposed to be omniscient, so it makes zero sense that he forbade Adam and and Even from eating the fruit, knowing that they would eat it anyway, just to ban them from the garden of Eden afterwards, this would be useless cruelty.

Instead, god created man in his image, meaning that he knew that eventually, this man would acquire knowledge.
So he never banned Adam and Eve from the garden, they just could not live in the paradise of not realizing that they will eventually die anymore, so is the curse of consciousness.

You could then see Adam and Eve as a metaphore for the first humans that "became conscious", in that they understood that their life will eventually end, "they realized that they were naked" can meat a lot more than just not wearing clothes.
Leaving the garden of Eden means going from an animal to an human.

Now one point we could make nowadays, is that humans are not so different from many animals, that just have a different form of intelligence, but that doesn't invalidate that methaphore, and nothing said that some animals didn't eat the forbidden fruit as well.

The idea is that human are specials, in that they don't realize their mortality when they are wounded or dying, they are born knowing it, they understand what's in the mirror, what they are and how meaningless their life is in the grand scheme of thing, this is a theme that is not shared only by religious people, but religion here can be seen as a way to explain to people what being human is like, a gift and a curse.

3