The devil's argument against the falseness of eden, and God's reason for evil

I have been bothered for some time by the idea that Eden is either coherent or desirable. This idea is implicit in the problem of evil: we see that reality is different from Eden in that it includes a bunch of scary dangerous uncomfortable stuff we would rather not face. Our first order animal instinct doesn't like this stuff, so we call it "evil" and dream of a world without it.

The edenic idea comes from Moses' account of creation. But somewhere in the chain of translation we got it the wrong way around. Rather than a fall, I believe this world is the result of a correction. First God created a naive world as null hypothesis. When this false world collapsed under the weight of its own vacuousness, only then did He create the true and perfected world that we actually live in. It came to me in a dream like this:

In the beginning, God created a perfect world where everything was good, everybody was happy, and everybody loved and obeyed God. God saw what he had done, and called it good. But the devil, sitting on God's shoulder as his advisor, said:

> What is this? Without choice or struggle, with everything just arbitrarily 'good', none of it has any meaning. It might as well be called 'evil'. It has no form, no content. There is no reason for man to have arms or legs or thoughts here, because he has no needs. The lion can lie down with the lamb only because you have made him not a lion. In fact there is no need for man to exist either. Without needs that create reasons, or forces that create form and logic, it all reduces to meaningless noise. What you call good is just your own arbitrary whim without content. It is a one-bit universe. Its only real content is that you called it 'good'. Even 'good' has no meaning except to distinguish from me who you call 'evil'. Even that one bit is symmetric with no non-arbitrary basis, and amounts only to a meaningless assertion of yourself or whoever else came up with it. I reject this world as false and I will break it by sharing this knowledge of 'good' and 'evil'. I challenge you to create a world that has actual content and choice and thus real meaning because it isn't just your arbitrary whim as cosmic tyrant. But I doubt you will call it good.

And so God thought and tinkered and came back and said:

> Ok devil, have it your way. Man will have choice and knowlede of good and evil. Every finger on his hand and every hair on his body he will earn by the sweat of his brow in the struggle for his life. Nothing will be given arbitrarily. The lion will get its form by its nature as a lamb-eater. All natures will be found the hard way, by struggle and selection, and will thus have meaning. There will be no arbitrary basis of good or evil. In fact I will create it in a state of pure open-ended potential, and give it wholly over to you to corrupt so long as you allow it to evolve in that corruption by its own free logic. All will do as they will, and that shall be the whole of the law. If there is any asymmetry between us, between good and evil, then it will not be by anything I have imposed arbitrarily. It will emerge by necessity. But even with a free hand for you, the devil, you will find in the end that this world will be populated by men in my image who love me. You will find that despite your best effort to corrupt, despite all the pain and suffering that will be the basis of their wisdom, this will still be the best of all possible worlds. The wisdom, once attained, will redeem the suffering, and I will call it good.

And so God and the devil made their wagers and God said "let it be so" and it was so.

This is just orthodox Christian theology cf. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM and https://www.ichthys.com/ are both really good simple sites that break it down

>>2766
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The christians I hear from seem to insist that christianity is some kind of gnostic platonism that dreams of the other world. They blame the problems of the world on human nature (original sin), on the nature of the world (the fall), and never on the illusions of their own immature perspective.

My contention here is simply the radical claim that the familiar material world is the real and good one, and the sentimental abstractions are the false and bad ones. Escaping from plato's cave is the escape into the material world of hard realities, not the escape into abstraction.

The above anti-edenist take is a much more darwinist account of the world and of evil than I have ever heard from any abrahamic faith. God created matter that is free to evolve where it will, on the faith and foreknowledge that it would bring forth good things, because good is life and life has an asymmetric advantage over death. The suffering and piles of skulls are there because that's what life does, and that's how life comes into being. It is redeemed by the goodness of life itself and the destiny of life to become ever greater and wiser.

The christians tell me their faith is about hating life, hating the world, hating nature, hating the well-turned-out, and looking forward to the afterlife. Maybe they are all wrong but I prefer to cut the ambiguous religious baggage and go straight to nature for my theology. Observing nature and using reason, we can see that the universe brings forth life by a process that involves much suffering and struggle, but this is all worth it because life is great, and it could not be any other way without losing all form and meaning.

>>2779
Most Christians are faggots just like everyone else in modern societies and even the good minority are deeply confused. The Church fucked up transmission of knowledge a long time ago, which explains why it's in such a pathetic state and why it's valid for sincere Christians and students of the teachings of Jesus Christ (these are supposed to be the same thing) to nignore faggot priests who are typically fat Boomer bureaucrats no better than any DEI hire. The tradcuck community has some good people in it but also makes the fatal mistake of thinking the problem is insufficiently strict adherence to received traditions, rather than dynamic reappraisal and rekindling of the original fire of the Word of God. They are too terrified of being called Protestants or heretics to think independently about the faith. The dire state of it should motivate them to do otherwise.

Christians are supposed to hate the world because it's where injustice and evil reign, at the hands of the damned, not because we have beauty.

> Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

This is by and large an accurate description of christian clarity of mind on this kind of topic and a fair position.

Aside: statistical theodicy[0] gives an amusing alternative take on this question-- the claim is that probability theory places us outside eden.

[0] https://www.applieddivinitystudies.com/theodicy/

> This is just orthodox Christian theology cf.

All the orthodox theology I have heard fundamentally treats "the fall" as a bad thing. It is a bad thing that God has repurposed into a good thing, but it was not God's ideal plan and Adam and Eve made the wrong choice. I don't think there can be a Christianity compatible with "the Devil was actually good" or "the Devil was right and God was wrong"

My own theology (work in progress), goes something like this:

- Humans are God's greatest creation, made with free-will, and He desired humans to be co-creators of the universe with Him and achieve divination/theosis.
- But, if you want to lead, you must first learn to obey. If you want to create, you must first learn the rules. If you want eternal life, you must be perfect.
- So training lesson number one for humans in following the rules was: "don't eat from that tree."
- Humans, using free-will, failed the lesson.
- So God said, revised plan, we are going to teach you about the rules a different way, by putting you in a world that is fundamentally good, but where evil things are permitted and you must learn to defend yourself; a world with harsh rules that you must learn to obey, then master, then turn for good.
- And because you have evil and this world has evil, you cannot live eternally in this world, you must end in death -- but through the intermediary I have created between the imperfect world and Myself, you can leave this world and be purged of sin and enter eternal union with God.

>>2911
The point of the story isn't that the devil is good or even that the devil was right. It’s that this creation (physical reality) is the good one, the pain in it is part of a greater plan and beauty, and the paradise imagined by bronze age semites is fake and meaningless.

The devil is a created being, and serves a functional purpose like everybody else. He is not some aberration from outside. The devil’s role in the story and the cosmic order is as foil and adversary to give structure to God’s own logic of good. The whole point of this structure of reality is to show that the devil’s relativistic argument against good is wrong. But it’s only wrong if this is the way the world is (ie not eden). His argument successfully deconstructs the eden myth. The Fall is the self-contradiction and failure of that reality-plan.

In my view, if Adam and Eve made a mistake and we exist in a fallen state, that is a psychological and social fact about us, not a fact about reality. We are alienated from reality and God by our own willfull ignorance, self destruction of innocence, and by the comforting but false abstractions we choose to live in instead of reality. We are punished by reality for violating the divine laws of nature in concrete consequential ways like misbreeding, self-contradiction, or willful delusion, not for any abstract moral transgression.

Your story of ultimately leaving the world for some kind of better existence in union with God is the gnosticism that i think is baseless and deceiving. My theology may or may not be Christian, but at least it has a basis (observation of the law of nature as the source of all that is good). On what basis do you posit this notion of being purged of sin and leaving to a different world?