The Garden of Eden

[This is the text of the sermon given by Pastor James Windrow on Sunday, July 14, 2024.]

Greetings, brothers and sisters. Today, we reflect on humanity’s origin in the Garden of Eden and its fall and devolution thereafter.

When Christians used to think about the Garden of Eden, it was common to imagine it as an almost metaphysical place, existing on another plane of reality, permanently inaccessible to us “fallen” people. The Biblical text is clear that it is on Earth; it even tells us its approximate location. Yet many people couldn’t quite accept that. They were willing to accept the existence of God, Angels, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, but only when they existed “over there,” away from the “real” world. Even today, when it’s been scientifically proven that the Bible is true, some still think this way.

You know who didn’t think this way? Our ancestors who lived before the Flood. From their recovered artifacts, we know they could sail up the river to Garden and see for themselves the cherubim and the flaming sword. Some deranged people even tried to fight the cherubim so they could seize the fruit of the Tree of Life.

We know where the Garden is. We’ve excavated it and found … nothing. No cherubim, no flaming sword, no wall that pre-Flood texts state surrounded the Garden. These things were presumably destroyed or taken to heaven during the Flood. It is as if God did not want us to know anything more about the Garden than what he deigned to tell us in the Biblical text.

In the Garden were Adam, Eve, and all the animals, including the serpent. God granted mankind dominion over the animals, for he was made in God’s image. While only Adam, Eve, and the Serpent are shown to speak, we now know, based on the recovered remains of animals underneath the flood layer, that all animals larger than rats had brains large enough for intelligent thought and vocal tracts that enabled them to speak human language. Some see a contradiction between this evidence and the Biblical text, but no such contradiction exists. Genesis states that the serpent was “more crafty” than any other animal; this does not imply that the other animals lacked the ability to speak.

Then, as we all know, Adam, Eve, and the serpent rebelled against God. I will read out the verses in which these three receive their punishment.

[3:14] The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

[3:15] I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

[3:16] To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

[3:17] And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

[3:18] thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

[3:19] By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This passage is notable as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. God never tells the serpent that its brain will shrink and it will lose the ability to speak. He never tells Adam and Eve that their descendants would grow dumber, shorter, and less physically attractive over time. Why is this? Well, put yourself into God’s shoes. You gave your children everything they could have ever wanted. You only asked them to follow one rule. They break it. You want to say, “you’re grounded” and then make them go away. You don’t want to give them an extended lecture on their future history. You don’t feel you owe them that.

Some have been troubled by the treatment of the rest of the animals, who received the same devolutionist punishment as the humans and the snakes. But there’s an easy explanation for that. Man is given dominion over the animals; where he goes, they must also go, what he suffers, they must also suffer. Exodus tells us that God struck down the firstborn sons of all non-Hebrews in Egypt, even other slaves. Punishing the animals for the actions of their masters is hardly out of character for Him.

After Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, the process of devolution began. Part of it was the buildup of harmful mutations in the germline, which did not exist in Eden. Part of it was what we call survival of the least fit. In times of famine, humans with smaller brains and bodies needed less food to survive. Another factor in devolution was selection for an earlier age of maturation. Humans used to live hundreds of years, only attaining puberty at around age eighty. Those who matured and reproduced faster, at the cost of lower lifespan, passed on more of their genes.

The same process applied to animals, too, but for them it was even faster. They had those big brains but couldn’t really do much with them, as they lacked our hands to make and use tools. Humans employed some animals for intellectual tasks, but only a small number. More often, they were hunted and eaten. Gradually, the animals lost their ability to think and speak.

It’s not as well known, but plants, too, suffered the same process of devolution. The fruit trees of the Garden of Eden produced bountiful fruit, intelligently designed to be nutritious and tasty by humans. Over time, fruit trees devolved to offer tiny, sometimes poisonous fruit. Grains devolved into weeds.

Yet, despite the devolution of humans, animals, and the plants around them, a countervailing factor allowed the human race to advance. Each generation was duller than the one that preceded it, but, as they say, quantity has a quality of its own. Adam and Eve could do little more than farming despite their vast intelligence. Economies of scale allowed their descendants to specialize and create an advanced technological civilization. For whatever reason, God decided not to tell us this, waiting for us to dig up the ruins underneath the flood layer. He tells us that these pre-Flood humans were wicked, but He doesn’t tell us what exactly they did to anger Him. My explanation for this is that He wants to keep us on edge. If He told us exactly what our ancestors’ crimes were, we might get it in our minds that we can sin all we want so long as we don’t go THAT far. While He promised He would never again destroy the Earth via flood, He reserved the right to destroy the world in other ways.

When Noah and his children landed, it was Adam and Eve all over again. They descended into a primitive, uncivilized state, watching their tools break and lacking the advanced economy to repair them. Then, the same thing that had happened with Adam’s descendants happened with Noah’s. Population growth overtook the devolution of man, and the descendants of Noah rebuilt an advanced industrial society. The main concentration of humanity, estimated to be about 1.5 million strong, lived in Mesopotamia. About two-thirds of them lived in the city of Babel, whose population we reckon was about 1 million. Animals in this period were no longer intelligent enough to contribute to technological advances, but many could still speak.

Individually, the Babelites were far superior to us. They were smarter, lived longer, and committed fewer crimes. But their world was not the utopia on Earth it is sometimes imagined to be. Their small population meant they could not maintain the massive factories powered by vast supply chains we maintain today. “Automation” was no panacea in the short-term, for they lacked the human muscles to build the robot-building factories. Their economic situation explains their relative lack of interest in artificial intelligence. We would love a machine that spits out blueprints for brand-new advanced technology, for we have many unskilled workers we could put to work making it. They had blueprints for a great many things that it was simply not economical to make with such a small pool of labor and such a small market.

In the short term, the Babelites were cursed by low population, but it is a problem that would have resolved itself within a few hundred years thanks to the magic of exponential growth. But that didn’t get a chance to happen, for God again acted to block humanity’s progress. This was different from the Flood in that it was a pre-emptive strike. God feared what humans might do, not what they had done. Instead of killing them, he simply scattered them across the Earth and confused their speech. We’re still not sure how the scattering was done. Did he instantly transport people? Or were they bundled onto airplanes? We do know that all over the world, cars, planes, and ships were sliced into little pieces so that humans could not return to Babel.

The new “nations” found themselves reduced to tiny populations unable to recreate their industrial bases. The sons of Adam and Noah found it easy to multiply and then build advanced societies. But by the time of Babel, the devolution had taken its toll and people could no longer recreate their forefathers’ achievements. Not only did the sons of the Babelites fail to preserve their fathers’ technology, they also failed to remember their history. While most cultures had some memory of the Flood, the details were always garbled. Cultures also forgot about devolution. We know, from recovered clay tablets, that the pre-Flood and pre-Babel civilizations both understood devolution. They knew what was happening to them. After the scattering, some nations remembered devolution, but they forgot the mechanism underlying it. Greco-Roman mythology looked back to the “Golden Age,” remembering that their ancestors lived to old ages with youthful appearances and found it easy to extract food from the land. But they didn’t understand why they had devolved.

This period also sees the emergence of the false Gods. One factor in this was the devolution of animals. As more and more animals ceased to talk, the few remaining talking animals became prized. These animals would have been the equivalent of 50 IQ humans, but to some of our ancestors, their simple moanings were communications from the Gods! From this idiotic misinterpretation we got wolf-gods, frog-gods, and monkey-gods.

In time, animals completely lost their ability to converse with humans. This occurred at different times for each animal species. It is believed that Chimpanzees could speak as late as 1600 AD. Think about that: when Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World, there were still talking chimps in the heart of Africa. Some bird species retain the ability to speak today; if their brains had not devolved, they would be able to do so intelligently. Devolutionary biologists argue about why these birds, alone in the animal kingdom, retained this ability.

Beginning around 1000 BC, humanity began to be afflicted by a new form of devolution. Bacteria in the Garden of Eden had only a symbiotic relationship with higher life. Afterward, it began to devolve. Survival of the least fit meant that the bacteria that reproduced the most were those that behaved parasitically, exploiting and damaging higher life. Some bacteria even devolved to the extent that they needed a host cell to reproduce. These bacteria caused more and more diseases, which became ever more problematic over time. While Roman Legions primarily worried about their enemies, by 1500, it was the norm that armies would lose more men to disease than to combat.

Something else that devolved were our languages. Even intelligent people find it difficult to learn Latin today, the complex language of a much smarter people. As the descendants of the Romans got dumber, the Latin language degenerated into what we now know as the Romance languages.

The Dark Ages were the nadir of post-Babel humanity. All around was evidence of a much more advanced past, things like roads, amphitheaters, and aqueducts. People in the Dark Ages read the Bible and learned about talking snakes, men who lived for centuries, and giants who were ten feet tall. Some doubted it had ever happened, maintaining that humans were as they had always been, that the world was static and eternal.

Then, yet again, there was a turnaround. Population growth again overtook devolution as humanity began moving forward instead of backward. People began digging up the preserved remains of ancient, big-brained animals, proving that devolution was real. A great man came up with the theory of devolution by natural selection; another coined the phrase “survival of the least fit.” The last doubters of the Bible were silenced as we discovered incontrovertible proof that the world really is 6,000 years old. We rebuilt an advanced industrial civilization and even demonstrated that, in plants and animals, the process of devolution can be controlled and reversed. It can be reversed in humans, too, if we put our minds to it.

And now is where we worry, for the last two times humans got to this point, we were thrown violently back by God. Babel is a particularly frightening possibility, for the text shows no indication that God warned the people of Babel before he scattered them. There is also the question of what God was afraid the men of Babel would do. A common misconception is that God was angry about the tower of Babel itself, but the text is clear that it was not the tower per se that God feared but the potential of a civilization capable of building it. One common suggestion is that God feared the Babelites would eventually develop an artificial general intelligence. There is, I must emphasize, no textual support for this position. It’s speculation based on the self-evident power of an AGI. I do not think this is the case, for the Babelites weren’t very interested and didn’t make much progress in AGI.

If God does send us back, how will He do so? He made it clear He will not flood the Earth again. Scattering us will not work either, for we have already scattered ourselves. No, it will likely be something we don’t expect. One suggestion is that He is already sabotaging us through the subtle phenomenon of sub-replacement fertility. This is a phenomenon peculiar to us; the pre-Flood and Babelite civilizations did not experience it. I encourage our young people especially to keep this hypothesis in mind.

There is one final, haunting thought I would like to share. It used to be thought that animals could not go extinct, for a merciful God would not allow it. This is one of those ideas that is found nowhere in the Bible, the result of people projecting personalities onto God. They thought that if we can’t find any living Wolly Mammoths, they must still exist in the unexplored Northwestern corner of North America. As the whole world was charted and explored, extinction was accepted as real. I will read again Genesis 3:19:

“By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This has traditionally been interpreted as referring to Adam directly. He would die and his body would return to the Earth. But you can also interpret it as referring to the extinction of humanity through devolution. Interestingly, while the Romans knew of the devolution that had occurred in the past, they never extrapolated it into the future. Humans seem to have a bias where they think a great deal about the past and little about the future, then and now. May our devolution continue? May we lose our ability to think and speak, then die out altogether?

Moral of the story is: don’t sin.