17. I Learn What Really Happened With Adam And Eve | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher [Part 17]

"The transition to early humans is both slow and sudden.  At first, you couldn't tell them from animals, but  I could see their potential."

Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.

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Transcript

Season Two - Episode Seventeen

GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - THE PODCAST

JLM -       Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon
Jerry -     Jerry Martin - voiced by Scott Langdon
GOD -    The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice



JERRY

And so, Lord, You call forth the first human beings?

GOD

Yes, the first inklings, forerunners of man. The great apes are wonderful creatures, full of intelligence, energy, and drive. But it is frustrating to interact with them. They are so close and yet so far from having full interactive personalities. They have teleological urges but they are only effective, for the most part, at the biological level. Their social life is rudimentary and their spiritual awareness is diffuse and inarticulate. They lack symbolic order. They can't project ideals beyond the sensual. They can't respond to Me either. 

JERRY

But they evolved?

GOD

The transition to early man is both slow and sudden. At first, you couldn't tell them from animals, but I could see their potential. They didn't have language, but their sounds and marks had representative purposes. They could connect one thing to another, one thought to another. They could remember their past and replay it in their minds. They slowly developed a sense of the future. 

What happens with the first form of man is that they have symbolic capacity, developed only crudely at first, but still it is an enormous leap over previous consciousness. 

JERRY

And this made a difference?

GOD

Take the symbolic system of counting--keeping records of the number of cattle or bushels of wheat. The first step in this is letting a single mark or object stand for something else. A stone might stand for a head of cattle, for example. It is phenomenal to be able to make a representation at all, but some pre-humans do something that is very close. They make marks that have a significance. 

Symbolic capacity makes everything different. Events, bodily motions, things no longer just are; they have a meaning. Before, a stone was just a stone; scratches on a clay tablet were just scratches. Now they may stand for cattle, or for the king, or for past and future events, or for the deity. 

JERRY

And this helped them to think about those things?

GOD

For the first time, thought can be detached from objects. Plans can become abstract, long-term, not just emergent possibilities inherent in situations, as they are for animals. The response to other creatures can be evaluative, normative. It becomes possible to notice that a particular action falls short of the best or right action, that a particular human being falls short of the ideal human being. 

Beauty also becomes possible, as you see in prehistoric  cave paintings. Creatures from a very low level enjoy and appreciate sensory stimulation. In that sense they find a scene beautiful--though not quite a "scene" for them yet. 

But true appreciation of beauty is seeing an ideal form in something material. What they are drawing on cave walls are ideal bulls.

JLM

I found a very fine collection of cave paintings and other prehistoric art in "Images of the Ice Age," by Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut. There is a breathtaking simplicity and grace to many of the paintings. 

The authors report, "The fluid, effortlessly drawn and well-proportioned animal figures...suggests that the artists carried everything in their mind's eye...They never took a measurement--they projected onto the rock an inner vision of the animal." 

GOD

Study the cave paintings and other artifacts. They respond to, reflect, how I was presenting Myself to them. You will be able to see or infer what My experience was like, what I was trying to do. 

JERRY

Lord, these cave paintings also have an aura of holiness. 

GOD

That is right. My first approach is to give humans the sense that nature is special, sacred, that there is something more than trees and clumps of grass, that there is also a spiritual presence. 

JERRY

What does this mean for You, for Your life?

GOD

For Me, it means the first spark of real interpersonal interaction, not just vague spiritual rapport. From very early, humans--protohumans--have a sense of something more, something higher. 

Their sense of the Divine is not just fear and wish-fulfillment, though there is plenty of that. There is a real sense of relating to Me as a Person, not just as the vague spirituality of nature. 

It is hard to convey in retrospect, but at this point I do not quite know I have a personality, and individual personhood. Events pass through my consciousness. I have a sense of My intelligence pervading the world, of fulfilling a universal telos. I feel a spiritual rapport with life. But none of that constitutes a sense of personhood, of an I standing opposite a You. The protohumans gave Me that, or I developed it or become aware of it in relation to them. 

For the first time, human beings mirror Me, look at Me eyeball to eyeball. And I try to draw them forward, to be more evolved, more fully human and fully spiritual. 

(Music)

JERRY

So the emergence of human beings was a surprise?

GOD

Yes. Even though I saw the unfolding of life and understood its trajectory, there is a discontinuity between animal life and human life that's surprising. People are not just smarter animals. It is not just that they have souls--animals have a kind of soul too--it is that they are creative, free, self-reflective, open-ended, have a yearning to go beyond themselves. 

They are in fact like little gods, though I do not like the usual use of this notion. But people are much more of the same substance and kind as God. That is why I can communicate with them so effectively. The mind is a little reflection or mirror of God. 

Early man I can communicate with. So it seemed to Me at first that I could communicate with them directly, that I would not be so alone. Hegel was right: A self requires another self in order to define itself. 

JLM

Rene Descartes had based his philosophy on the cogito, the thinking I, an isolated pinpoint self. Two hundred years later, G.W.F. Hegel argued, in The Phenomenology of Mind, that a sense of self is possible only through an encounter with another self. 

GOD

With man, I can send dreams, give intuitions, stir love, frighten if necessary. I began to develop My arsenal of ways to deal with man. But I too am primitive and undeveloped. I know little about how to be effective in bringing man forward. 

JLM

Scholars believe that there was a cultural, creative explosion in the late Paleolithic period over thirty-thousand years ago. The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe calls it the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, "a major watershed in cultural development."

According to the Oxford History, DNA studies "point to the conclusion that all of the present-day populations throughout the world were most probably derived from a single common ancestor, within the span of the past 200,000 years."

JERRY

Is this the same as Adam and Eve, Lord?

GOD

Don't be too mythological. That is, they were not in a Garden of Eden, and so on. But the Garden story captures with great precision the prototypical experience of human innocence, and of Divine innocence and awkwardness. In that sense, the common ancestor is Eve, a creature of higher development than ever before, with a new level of interaction, able to hear and respond to a higher level of whispering, and hence, over time, of much greater development. 

The story of Adam and Eve portrays the first kind of experience I had with human beings. I created them in My image. As essentially creative force, I gave them creative force, the power of sexuality and the ability to create other human beings. I gave them objects of beauty, in nature and in each other, and pleasure in eating, moving about, and enjoyment of each other. I had been all alone and I enjoyed the company. 

At first I imagined I could walk among humans and enjoy their company. This required that they obey Me, while not being in awe of Me, and that they retain a certain innocence. This was my first experience discovering that humans cannot interact with God in the simple, direct way they interact with one another. Like children not separated from their mother, at first they had little individuality or purpose. They enjoyed the good things I had given them and did not understand the power of good and evil or the power and complexity of their own sexuality. 

I had also underestimated the power of love. First, I created Adam and I could see he was alone, as I had once been, and this was not good. He did not see it because he did not know anything different. But, as he tried to befriend various animals, he would quickly reach the limit of those relationships and be frustrated and unfulfilled. So I created woman and made her lovely in his eyes. They were naked and knew no shame. And their sexuality was intense and profound. 

And, frankly, I felt left out. I had no such consort. And, while obedient, man loved woman more than Me. Though understandable in light of the human nature I had given them, it was not right. And they knew it was not right and began to disobey Me. They hid their nakedness, which is to say, they hid their creativity and sexuality from Me, detached it from My purpose and used it solely for their own pleasure and intimacy--innocently enough, as children might do, but still wrong. And so, with regret, I expelled them to a life of hardship. Detached sexuality, hiding from God, has its own intrinsic price, the loss of the full bounty and blessing of God.

JERRY

Do You need the world for completion or does the world new You?

GOD

Both. Neither of us is complete or perfect in ourselves. I can only develop a self-consciousness and hence become a Person by interacting with the world and hence with people. 

JLM

For the first time, the dim outline of and overall story was emerging. If we and God develop together, in interaction with one another, then the drama of history  and of individual lives begins to make sense. We are not standing still; we are moving forward together. 

JERRY

Lord, is there an aim, like perfecting the world or uniting us all into the Godhead?

GOD

No, not exactly. There is a purpose but not an end-point. The notion of an end-point derives from the model of the human will and its desires, getting what it wants. The purpose of singing a song is not to get to the end. 

JLM

So history comes to nothing? I found this answer distressing, and Abigail was even more upset. One of the Jew's gifts to the world is the very idea of history, not as a series of endless episodes or cycles, but as a progress, with a Beginning—the Creation—and a Grand Finale: the coming of the Messiah. 

Abigail doesn't even like movies without happy endings. And we weren't talking about movies. We were talking about whether life had any meaning or purpose at all. This was a concern neither of us would let go. 

(Music)

(The End)