Knowledge is better than ignorance, knowing than not knowing, as you can appreciate when you see the pilot enter the cockpit on a flight you’re about to take. Or when you see the surgeon and medical professionals wheel a loved one into an operating room. Or let’s say you’re lost in a place you’ve never been without a map, nowadays without your phone able to display Waze or Google Maps because there is no cell service. You’re nervous because it’s dark and you’re alone and low on gas. What you would give for the knowledge that comes with cell service or a map now. Yet sometimes ignorance is better than knowledge, as when bad guys want to do harm but don’t know how to use a weapon. Or a child not knowing how difficult their life is going to be. Then we might use a saying we’re all familiar with—ignorance is bliss.

Yet at the very beginning of our faith, it’s genesis we might say, is a prohibition by God not to eat from a tree he called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It’s fascinating that what is philosophically called epistemology, the study of knowing, has been central to our religion from the very beginning. That this tree is right next to another tree, one God called “the tree of life,” is also something to ponder. And as we learn in Genesis 2, these two trees were in the middle of the garden, not out on the periphery or in some random location. Whatever is in the middle or center of something is of the most importance, and in some way life and knowledge are connected. We don’t know in verse 9 when we’re told this what the relationship between these two might be, if there is any at all, but I suspect there must be given their proximity. We know specifically that knowledge at least has an inverse relation to life in that it can cause death. We’re told after “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it,” he gives the man this warning:

“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

It may be the act of disobedience to God is what causes the death, or the knowledge itself. Most seem to think it was a kind of test, that the prohibition was a probation, a trial to see if man could be trusted with such knowledge. He could not, as we know.

Again, we’re not told, and over the millennia there has been much speculation as to what this might mean. It could be both knowledge and disobedience, in that disobedience to God is what made man’s awareness of evil a reality and thus caused death. It seems man was created not to have knowledge of evil because everything God created was very good. There was no evil in the world prior to the fall, but evil existed in the universe, in the non-material world because Satan had already fallen. We’re getting into mysteries beyond the ability of the finite human imaginations to comprehend.

It is clear from the rest of Scripture, however, and common sense, that knowledge itself is not the issue given we are exhorted continually to grow in our knowledge because knowledge is a good thing. For example, the Lord says through Hosea that “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6). And we see from Proverbs that wisdom is knowledge rightly applied. It very much depends on what kind of knowledge we’re talking about, knowledge of what and how it is used. So if we go back to the garden we might conclude that man already had and could grow in his knowledge of the good, like the God’s creation in order to rule over the earth, to fill and subdue it. They couldn’t do that without knowledge. That means we’re left with the conjunction “and,” or the connection between knowledge and evil. It is knowledge about evil that was the issue, knowing what evil is. Another way to put that is, man would now have the knowledge of taking God’s good creation and perverting it, turning good into evil.

You Will Be Like God: Knowledge and the Fall
We’re not told, but we can speculate if man had passed the test, he could then be trusted with such knowledge, and have access to the tree of life forever. This understanding seems to fit because the tree of life is at the beginning and end of the Bible. There are four references to it in the book of Revelation, three of those in the last chapter. The first reference is in chapter 2:

To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Adam and Eve lost that right to paradise because they chose to disobey God. Satan knew if he could get man on his side in his rebellion, he would have a better chance to take down God who he saw as the usurper, the one who had taken his rightful throne as ruler of the universe. Talk about hubris. He was the one created by God, not God by him. So the first thing he does is question God’s command, “Did God really say?” When Eve answers the question, then Satan calls God a liar by contradicting him, “You will not certainly die.” Then he attacks his character, “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The implication is that God is petty and jealous and doesn’t want man to have what he has.

This threefold attack is at the center of every sinful human being; question God, accuse him of lying, then attack his character. Man’s motivation at the center of his being now became the same as Satan’s; he wants to take back his rightful throne, to be the one calling the shots, to determine what is good and evil, to be like God. So, knowledge itself is not the issue, but who gets to be God.

²² And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

An important question when thinking about these things is the nature of evil, what it is. This was Augustine’s dilemma, who writes about his struggle trying to figure out what evil is in his Confessions. Early in his life he was taken in by the Manicheans who believed good and evil were two distinct and equal forces in the world doing battle against one another vying for our loyalty, light verses darkness. Over time he realized that made no sense because he could never find something evil that was not first good perverted. In other words, the Bible’s account made more sense, that God created everything good, including knowledge, and man’s rebellion caused him to take the good thing God created and pervert it, use it for evil ends.

So what happened in the fall is that man now had the knowledge to misuse God’s good creation towards his selfish ends. Instead of allowing God to dictate the meaning of things and their use, man would do whatever he wanted. He would now live in the subjective world of his own meaning creation, rather than living in and discovering the objective meaning of God’s creation. This orientation is a definition of sin Augustine gave us, and Luther emphasized as well, “incurvatus in se,” in Latin, or being curved in on ourselves. For me it is the perfect definition, a self-orientation, instead of a God and others orientation, and ourselves in that context. Knowledge now became something we possess to build our own kingdoms, to be our own sovereigns, sitting on the throne of our lives for our glory. What could go wrong!

We see immediately how the horrible effects of this orientation began to manifest themselves. Adam and Eve didn’t die right away like God seemed to threaten; physical death would be later and be inevitable. But it was a kind of spiritual death. The first bit of knowledge they have is that they are naked. It hadn’t occurred to them before that was even an issue, but now it causes fear, specifically of God. So the first thing they do is sew fig leaves together and make themselves loincloths, which is a poignant expression of the futility of man’s efforts to escape the judgment of God. From that moment on, all history is one long story of human beings furiously sewing fig leaves to try to cover themselves from God’s wrath and judgment, and earn his favor; it doesn’t work. The world’s religions express this futility in a myriad of ways, but they can’t heal the chasm between sinful human beings and a holy God.

Then instead of communing with God when he comes “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” they hide “themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” All religion is basically man hiding from God because he is our judge, jury, and executioner. No wonder we hide. Then in the very next chapter Cain kills Able, and it starts.

Thankfully, God had a plan and we’re given what’s called the protoevangelium, or the first declaration of the gospel in history. God promises the seed or offspring of the woman, Christ, will bruise or crush the serpent’s head, and redemptive history starts God’s millennia long process of reconciling himself to man, to save the world, and knowledge would be integral to that project—we’re given a book filled with it. But the serpent wouldn’t stop his deceits in the garden.

Knowledge and the Creation of the Modern Secular World
It’s no surprise we’re told that “the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.” His deceits would manifest themselves in a variety of ways, and in the modern world he would use epistemology to bring down Christendom and turn it into a secular paradise more resembling a dystopia. I’m semi-obsessed with the history of ideas, and in the development of the modern West, knowledge and knowing is a central feature. It goes back to the ancient Greek sources that inspired Western intellectuals, but the ancients were primarily looking to discover the world as it was, while moderns were looking to remake the world; big difference.

As I’ve written about many times, it all started with a pious Catholic French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650). He was concerned about the growing skepticism developing in Europe, and decided to address it. He started by doubting everything that could be doubted, and came to the conclusion the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his own existence because of his own thinking. So he came up with a phrase so powerful it transformed the medieval world of Christendom into the modern world of secularism: I think therefore I am, or in Latin, cogito ergo sum. Speaking of orientations, the entire Western world began to shift form a God centered outward orientation, to a self-centered inward one. Talk about big differences—it was Satanically brilliant! This was the beginning of modern philosophy, and the so-called Enlightenment, an ironically named movement if ever there was one. With the development of rationalism, for the first time the world was given an epistemology based on human reason alone. The way we come to know is solely through our minds and thinking, our reason, which to Western cultural elites in due course made revelation unnecessary. Man would now get to determine good and evil on his own, no God required.

It didn’t take long for the the Satanic threefold attack to begin. It started with the questioning of God and his word. It wasn’t long before Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a the Jewish Portuguese Philosopher, decided Moses was not in fact the author of the Pentateuch. At the time this was highly controversial, and he was excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam for his troubles, but it wouldn’t be controversial for long. In the 18^th century skepticism about the Bible increased, and philosophers started accusing God of lying, did he really say? French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) was the first to go public, so to speak, of directly attacking God’s character. After the terrible Lisbon earthquake in 1755 in which over 50,000 people lost their lives, he wrote a poem basically outlining the problem of evil, something no one would have thought to do before the Enlightenment. The late 18^th century saw the rise of Deism and a God having nothing to do with the Bible. Then with the 19^th we have a great flowering of open rebellion against God.

Once naturalism, nature is all there is, was accepted as axiomatic, unquestionable dogma, the Satanic floodgates opened. This all happened among intellectuals and cultural elites, and then slowly flowed down into the rest of Western culture. German philosophers like Kant and Hegel developed systems of thought that made the God of the Bible superfluous, although they weren’t themselves atheists. This gave rise to Marx and Darwin, and German biblical criticism, which treated the Bible as just another human fiction, more or less. This then fed something called liberal Christianity which was rationalism cloaked in religious garb, and secularism, society without God, became the worldview of Western culture. It took some time in the 20^th century for the full flowering of a God-less view of reality to fully take over the culture, but by the infamous 60s the victory of Satan was complete. Now man had total moral autonomy, and over a hundred million people were killed in the process, but that was a small price to pay for man finally becoming “like God.” We’re now living in the rubble of epistemology without God.

But a funny thing happened on the way to John Lennon’s Imagine paradise. All the people were not living in peace. There was no brotherhood of man or the world living as one. Without God life was exactly what we would expect—a hellhole. And an increasing number of people want nothing to do with it. Being God isn’t as easy as it looks, and an increasing number of people want the life only God in Christ can provide, reconciliation to their Creator, and the blessings that comes along with it.