Adam and Eve Wouldn’t Have Lasted Two Seconds Outside the Garden

Picture this: You’re Adam or Eve. You just fucked up big time. Your life of ease in the Garden of Eden, days spent naming animals and watering plants, is now over. You’ve been kicked out forever, left to survive with nothing to your name but the clothes on your backs. How will you survive without the Creator who once walked with you?

God cursed Adam to “cultivate the ground from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:23), as was his job in the garden (Genesis 2:15). But where did Adam learn how to farm in the first place, and why? He didn’t pick it up by trial and error, because error in farming means your crops die, and death was not yet a possibility.  Then again, if your crops can’t die, their cultivation becomes a formality. Why would God have the man he created go through the unnecessary motions of farming plants that don’t need farming — unless he already knew the man would need these skills to survive in the future.

And how good of a farmer could Adam have possibly been, coming from a paradigm where nothing could possibly die? Even the best farmers survive only at the whims of burning sun and fickle rain. It would only take one failed harvest for Adam to realize, “Oh, it’s not going to be so easy now, is it?” Adam also wouldn’t be in the habit of storing food for the lean times, either. We have no indication that the garden had seasons, and definitely no droughts or pestilence, so where would Adam get the concept of food shortages in order to be prepared for them?

Let’s say the worst happens. Adam’s first post-fall crop fails miserably, and now he and Eve are facing a long winter without enough food. They could return to foraging, scraping by on seeds and plants. However, thanks to the fall, some of those plants are poisonous now! The Boy Scouts won’t exist for another 6000 years, so they have no clue which plants will sustain them and which will make them vomit until they die.

And let’s not forget that other winter threat: disease. Bacteria and viruses that were once benign are now seeking hosts to infect, and Adam and Eve don’t have years of immunity built up to help them fight illness. Who needs an immune system in a world free of disease? God must have cooked it up on a whim before sending them on their way. In fact, he must have carefully tuned their immune system — they must die eventually, of course, just not immediately. How thoughtful!

Oh, and the winter pinch is not just affecting Adam and Eve. The world has predators now, carnivores who need a new food source since their bodies no longer digest fruit and plants. Why not start with the fleshy pink hairless apes shivering vulnerable in the cold? It would have only taken a single starving saber-tooth tiger to snuff out the only two human beings in existence.

I suppose the Christian answer to all these questions is “magic”: God magicked illness away, magicked predators away, magicked in enough sun and rain (but not too much!) and so on. However, this just turns God into a clingy helicopter parent, no longer walking with them but still orchestrating their lives behind the scenes. It’s as if he realized his discipline went too far but couldn’t bring himself to take it back — after all, what kind of lesson would that teach his impressionable children? As always, the Genesis story only makes sense as one of many creation myths mankind has invented, not as a literal description of historical events.