In short, the original sin means that all human beings are sinners because Adam and Eve had disobeyed God and had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We have inherited a fallen nature from Adam and Eve which prevents us from living pure lives. The opinions are divided about how deprived our nature is. From total depravation to only a partial depravation, all Christian theologians except Pelagius agreed that we need the grace of God in order to be saved from eternal death. In the history of Christianity, the opinions differed. Augustine of Hippo was one of the first theologians dealing with original sin:

“In Augustine’s view (termed “Realism”), all of humanity was really present in Adam when he sinned, and therefore all have sinned. Original sin, according to Augustine, consists of the guilt of Adam which all humans inherit. As sinners, humans are utterly depraved in nature, lack the freedom to do good, and cannot respond to the will of God without divine grace.”[1] 

For John Cassian, who was another important theologian, man needs God because he isn’t able to reach salvation in his nature: 

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“Cassian did not accept the idea of total depravity, on which Martin Luther was to insist. He taught that human nature is fallen or depraved, but not totally. Augustine Casiday states that, at the same time, Cassian “baldly asserts that God’s grace, not human free will, is responsible for ‘everything which pertains to salvation’ – even faith.”[2] 

 All these ideas start from the book of Genesis in which Adam and Eve were disobedient to God. Those theologians maintain that there is something wrong with human nature, something which cannot be fixed by human effort alone but only by God’s intervention. This is a conception which has persisted through the Reformation:

“Martin Luther (1483–1546) asserted that humans inherit Adamic guilt and are in a state of sin from the moment of conception. The second article in Lutheranism’s Augsburg Confession presents its doctrine of original sin in summary form: It is also taught among us that since the fall of Adam all men who are born according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin. That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers’ wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit.”[3] 

 All human beings regardless of what religious faith they profess or in lack of any religious faith, are condemned to eternal hell because according to the book of Genesis all are the offspring of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a matter of fact, humankind isn’t the conveyor of Adam and Eve’s sins because these are mythological, not real personages. Something would be wrong if Buddhists or Hindus would have to suffer a punishment for something in which they don’t believe and which is only a mythological narrative.

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There aren’t any reasons to believe that the followers of other religions than Christianity would have to suffer any punishments from God for their beliefs as far as Adam and Eve are only legendary personages. No one inherited any sins from people who never existed on Earth as real human beings. 

If all religions are based on mythological narratives there isn’t one religion superior to another which can make better promises for salvation.

John Calvin also referred to the original sin: 

“Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath, then also brings forth in us those works which Scripture calls “works of the flesh” (Gal 5:19). And that is properly what Paul often calls sin. The works that come forth from it – such as adulteries, fornications, thefts, hatreds, murders, carousings – he accordingly calls “fruits of sin” (Gal 5:19–21), although they are also commonly called “sins” in Scripture, and even by Paul himself.”[4]

If the book of Genesis isn’t an accurate description of what happened at the beginning of human history and Adam and Eve are not real but fictitious personages, there isn’t such a thing as the original sin. If the human races evolved during a long period of time from other less evolved biological beings, human nature isn’t the result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God but it is the product of natural evolution. As a matter of fact, human nature is similar to that of many animals but amended by culture and education. If there isn’t such thing as the original sin human beings are able to better themselves and to rise to a higher spiritual standard through their efforts. At the same time the Kingdom of God is a spiritual realm in which one can be received by God if one accepts His offer of eternal life.

According to the Bible death had entered into the world because Adam and Even didn’t obey God’s commandment not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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“12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— 13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. 14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.” (Romans 5; 12-14 NRSV) 

If Adam and Eve never disobeyed God because they never existed they also weren’t punished by God with death for their alleged disobedience. Death didn’t come into creation based on a human attitude but it was always in the natural world, life and death being intertwined.

If God punishes all sin with death we need Jesus to redeem us from death because He suffered the punishment in our place, but we aren’t guilty of an original sin. Everyone answers before God for his or her misconduct but not for what the mythological personages Adam and Eve would have done.

Adam and Eve were punished by God with death and we also are deemed to deserve death for our disobedience which is sin. This is the logic of the Bible. What if Adam and Eve weren’t punished for their disobedience with death considering that they couldn’t have disobeyed Him because they weren’t real? If Adam and Eve are only imaginary personages the image of how God would have dealt with human beings is very different than what the Bible says.

Nevertheless, if the Decalogue includes the principle of the creation in six days, which is fiction, it is problematic to know the laws according to which our misbehaviour can be deemed sin. The Decalogue doesn’t express the truth; the world wasn’t created in six days hence the ten commands are not inspired by God. Those commands have, nevertheless, a great moral value, being the expression of necessary conditions for life in any society. They are not unique, for example, researchers have discovered a collection of laws which was authored previous to the Mosaic Law and which is known as the Code of Hammurabi. Some provisions in the Code of Hammurabi originating from Babylon are very similar with the prescriptions found in the Mosaic Law. (see also: gotquestions.org/Moses-Hammurabi-code.html) 

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At the same time, there is a universal justice and according to it all human beings have to respect others’ rights.

In the O.T. there were degrees of guilt measuring human behaviour but even so almost always a ransom of blood had to be paid.

“22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Hebrew 9; 22 NRSV) 

The punishment for any kind of sin is death, of the animal in the O.T. and of Jesus who died in our place in the N.T. There isn’t any sin which doesn’t deserve to be punished by death according to the Bible and this correction would have started with the mythological personages Adam and Eve and their alleged sins.

“A matter of the will more than of the hand, sin is an act of rebellion, revolution, and anarchy against God’s righteous government. As such it is an affront to the holiness of God. The measure of God’s wrath against sin is the measure of His holiness. And the measure of the penalty—death—is the measure of the enormity of the offence.”[5] 

Are there different degrees of sin? It is true that some sins were seen as being graver than others in the O.T. but at the same time all sins are punished by death by God if the sinner is not redeemed. The problem is that it is impossible to atone for sins through his or her good deeds and everyone needs Christ as an expiatory sacrifice in order to atone for sins. How could I redeem my original sin inherited from Adam and Eve if it was such a sin? No matter what I do, I cannot redeem the original sin and only Christ can do that for me. If the doctrine of original sin was right, every person needs Christ’s redemptive sacrifice for him or her, no matter how moral his or her life is, but the doctrine is false if we take in consideration the fictitious character of Adam and Eve. We need Christ for our personal spiritual improvement, not for what Adam and Eve would have done.

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The problem is extremely important because it doesn’t matter how pure in character  someone would be, due to Adam and Eve’s sins he or she cannot be saved by God if he or she doesn’t become a Christian believer. Why necessarily a Christian? The answer is that only Christ can save someone from the original sin made by Adam and Eve, according to the Bible. The story of Adam and Eve prevents Christians admitting that other religious people have an equal claim to salvation as they have. Without Christ who is the second Adam none can be forgiven of the original sin. This is an incorrect doctrine based on the fictitious story of Adam and Eve.

Some sins are worse than others but all sins are punished by eternal death if they aren’t redeemed. The following quotation explains this principle:

“In regard to eternal consequences, big sins and little sins are the same. In the eyes of a Holy God, even the smallest sin is worthy of an infinite and eternal punishment. Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is talking about physical and spiritual death. Isaiah 59:2 says, “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”[6] 

Death had entered into the world through Adam and Eve, according to the book of Genesis. If death didn’t enter into the world through Adam and Eve because they aren’t real personages, that means that death isn’t a punishment from God but a natural thing. Even if death isn’t a punishment for human sin but a natural thing, we still need the power of God to liberate us from death. There is a condition for that, and that is the spiritual regeneration. Redemption without regeneration doesn’t bring anyone into heaven. Jesus’ death on the cross and the new birth in Christ are two doctrines which complement each other.

We aren’t forgiven for our sins unless our sins are paid for by Jesus, and in order not to sin again we need to be born again. A sin for which someone is punished isn’t a forgiven but a chastised sin. The human sins aren’t just forgiven by a forgiving God if Jesus died on the cross for them; all our sins are punished in Him.

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   It doesn’t matter who was punished for our sins, if Jesus took our sins on Himself this means that sins cannot just be forgiven. God doesn’t forgive sins, He only expiates them through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

If our sins would be forgiven by God no punishment would be attached to them and Christ wouldn’t have needed to die for them. God never forgives anything unless someone is punished for the mistake. This is the lesson of the Bible; God’s justice requires punishment in order to be fulfilled. God is motivated by justice and whoever doesn’t accept Jesus as his or her Saviour, he or she is punished with eternal death.

In order to live forever one needs to rise to very high moral standards and be able to live without sin as Jesus did. The obedience to God is considered to be the most important Christian value and that message comes directly from the book of Genesis. The O.T. and the N.T. are both focused primarily on this value. The following biblical text underlines the importance of obedience to God:

“22 And Samuel said, ‘Has the LORD as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices, as in obedience to the voice of the LORD? Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. 23 For rebellion is no less a sin than divination, and stubbornness is like iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has also rejected you from being king.’ “(1 Samuel 15; 22-23 NRSV) 

People cannot be blamed if they don’t believe in the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis and their lack of trust in them cannot be considered sin because those stories are unbelievable. Nevertheless, people who believe in God in spite of the inconsistencies contained by the book of Genesis on the basis of their personal experience with Him, and I am one of them, have to consider the requirements of God for their salvation such as they are expressed in the life and teachings of Jesus.

The unbelievers and the sinners will not die because they are unbelievers and sinners, but they will die because all human beings are mortal by nature. 

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    The exception to the rule of human mortality will be made only in connection with people who freely choose to believe in God in spite of the incongruence specific to the book of Genesis, or of other texts of the Bible, and that on the basis of their personal experience with God, and on what they can find still reliable in the Bible.

If humankind had come from evolution and not through Adam and Eve we can say that God didn’t create human beings directly. God could have created them indirectly by influencing the way in which nature has evolved but they could also have appeared through the natural evolution of nature without His influence. There is an innate impulse in nature to transform lower forms of existence into more complicated forms and this natural dynamic cannot be denied.

God could have assured the necessary conditions for the development of biological life and of human beings but we don’t have any reason to believe that without His intervention the life on Earth wouldn’t have existed as we know it. If there is life in the cosmos only where God created it then the Bible doesn’t help us to know if there are other planets hosting life in the universe. Probably, biological life and even intelligent life appears where it finds the necessary conditions for its existence with or without an act of God.

The book of Genesis doesn’t say how life really would have appeared on our planet but only presents a mythological description which is contradictory and against the data of sciences. For example, the creation of plants on Earth before the creation of stars, as the book of Genesis states, is one of the most obvious absurdities that someone can hear. We all are created from matter created in the stars, plants included; hence plants couldn’t have existed on the third day of creation, before the creation of stars. It is without doubt that plants couldn’t have been created before the creation of stars and before the apparition of supernova which produced the elements found in those plants.

The stories of creation from the book of Genesis aren’t revelations coming from God because they cannot explain credibly how the universe and life on Earth came into existence. In order to find answers to fundamental questions related to the origin of the universe and humankind we have to study nature because the study of the Bible doesn’t help us in this regard. The study of nature doesn’t directly point toward God’s existence because nature contains in it all necessary ingredients for the existence of life, but also doesn’t exclude the existence of a higher Reality.

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The so-called theory of fine tuning is a rational one. Such a theory maintains that there are too many coincidences allowing life to develop on Earth. The gathering of so many conditions at the same time cannot be coincidental; it must by a Designer who set everything in place for life to appear on Earth. As a matter of fact, we don’t know how many universes are in place in the entire cosmos and what the probability for life to happen is. The theory of intelligent design contains an interesting possibility but there are also arguments against it. 

Human nature cannot be diminished in any way and humankind was met by God in the human nature. In the so-called depravity and corruption of human nature humankind invented so many religions and by this we can see that human beings have an innate spiritual dimension, hence human nature is open to spirituality. How could human beings aspire to spirituality by itself in every corner of the earth if human nature is really corrupted? The Buddhist monks don’t see themselves as being born again from God but, nevertheless, they sometimes reach high levels of spirituality. The basis of our spirituality is in our nature and to condemn human nature using as an argument the alleged original sin of two fictitious personages, is also absurd. Neither Martin Luther nor John Calvin inherited a corrupt nature from Adam and Eve because the alleged two first human beings never existed on Earth. 

Human nature is linked with human biology and in order to detach it more from biological bonds and see existence in another perspective, we need God’s nature which isn’t determined by biological causality, being spiritual. According to the Christian teachings we can be born again from God in this way receiving a full spiritual nature. A similar detachment from human nature is also taught by Buddhism but the new birth cannot be found in its teachings as such. 

God is Spirit and therefore He communicates with us in our inner spirits, giving us personal revelations. (John 4; 24) God the Father speaks to human beings from inside their consciousness rather than in an exterior way. None has seen God and He is love. (1 John 4; 12) 

Did the prophets see God or not? They declared that they saw the glory of God. Take, for example, what Ezekiel saw in connection with God.

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    The images that people have seen in the O.T. when they believed they saw the glory of God aren’t specific to a spiritual Reality but to a technological one, hence cannot be God the Father. God as an external reality to humankind, as an extra-terrestrial civilization and God as the spiritual “substance” of our souls, the spiritual “field” to whom every human being can be connected if he or she wishes, are two very different realities. 

If Jesus died on the cross He didn’t do it because human beings need to be forgiven for the original sin because there isn’t such a thing. A redemptory mission of Jesus on behalf of humankind isn’t excluded but only for personal sins of every individual believer. For any human being, in order to understand sin a new consciousness of good and evil is needed, and that is given to us by Christ. 

The inclination to sin of the human nature, the so-called concupiscence has nothing to do with Adam and Eve because the latter don’t have anything to do with reality. The inclination to sin is nothing else but natural instincts which allow human beings to survive in our world. We live in a competitive world and many adaptations are needed which permit the realisations of the ends of nature. We have strong instincts of survival and our nature isn’t based on idealistic principles. We can, nevertheless, deny our innate instincts and believe in superior principles, and even consider them more important than life but that doesn’t have anything to do with the reality of Adam and Eve. We can believe in Adam and Eve even if they never existed but our belief doesn’t make them more real. 

If Adam and Eve are missing from the picture there isn’t anything left to condemn human nature and to make human beings feel guilty. This is the reason why so many religious people need Adam and Eve. Without them we have no reason to feel ashamed that we are human beings and that our nature isn’t perfect. This attitude of human dignity shadows the need for religions and particularly for religious institutions. We are what we should be based on our natural evolution and the reasons for the aspiration to be better can be found in our culture and in our beliefs. There isn’t any guilt in what we are and there isn’t any fault in our nature, which is the source of our improvement. Christ wasn’t ashamed to be a human being and if He was an improved human being it is because Father dwelt in Him. God wants to live in every one of us because we are the temples of the Holy Spirit. 

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   Moreover, if Adam and Eve didn’t exist, Christ couldn’t have come to Earth, taking the human nature of Adam before the Fall, a non-sinful nature. When Christ came to Earth He necessarily was a human being like us, having a sinful nature but He had the power not to sin and to resist all temptations. All inclinations toward sin were in Christ as they are in us. The presence of the Father dwelling in Christ was the motive for which Jesus didn’t sin while He lived on Earth. This presence is offered to us also and any human being in whom the Father is present can be a sinless person.

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➤

Another problem in Genesis chapter 6 is the one found in verses 5-7. Does God Change His Mind? According with the mainstream Christian view God is immutable, unchanging in His person, His perfections, His purposes, and His promises. At the same time, there are several biblical texts that suggest the idea that sometimes God changed His mind over the course of history. One of those texts is found in Genesis chapter 6: 

“5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ 8 But Noah found favour in the sight of the LORD.” (Genesis 6; 5-8 NRSV)

 The LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” is one of the most intriguing texts of the Bible. What does a Christian expect? God is Omniscient and He knows the future before it happens. When He created the universe, He knew that mankind would fall by disobedience and that such behaviour would attract countless sufferings and death. God decided to create the universe and mankind regardless of the collateral damages. He had taken incredible risks and responsibilities because beside what is great He also created the occasion for pain and death. 

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 God should have known that mankind wasn’t prepared to discern between good and evil and that it would surely cede when confronted with Satan’s temptation. God had created man as a very curious being, curiosity being the engine of his or her interest in reality. The human beings were in fact not free to choose between good and evil because ignorance is an obstruction for the freedom of choice. Man and woman have reacted naturally according to their innate essence and absolute obedience isn’t in human nature. God created human nature and as far as He kept mankind from knowing good and evil, man and woman could have made only incompetent decisions. 

Adam and Eve had missed basic education which was replaced by God’s authority and harsh warnings. How could they understand the meaning of death if even modern human beings have difficulties when trying to grasp it? In the context of the book of Genesis, for Adam and Eve death didn’t mean anything because they didn’t see anyone dying. If death wasn’t present in the creation Adam and Eve just couldn’t have grasped that notion. If death had been present before the human Fall, Apostle Paul was wrong in saying that death came into the world through Adam and Eve’s sins. 

The appearance of death as a real phenomenon on Earth would have happened after God had mentioned death to humankind, according to the apostle Paul, but that is inconsistent with logic. For Adam and Eve, the promise of knowledge and the likeness of God would have had a meaning because they had the occasion to see or at least to hear Him. At the same time, the word “death” contained in God’s warning to them would have been meaningless. 

Did God not know what the history of the human races would have been before creating mankind? Either He knew and created mankind according to that knowledge or He didn’t know and human behaviour came as a surprise for Him. From Genesis 6; 5-8, the second version seems to follow. What are the possibilities? God had a plan and in this project He knew that mankind would disobey Him, but also in this plan God decided beforehand that He would kill people and animals at a certain moment in the future. The Flood would have been planned by God at the same time as the creation of humankind, and people had to learn from the experience of the Flood and to become righteous. Did God not know that humankind would not learn anything and that the world would become even worse after the Flood? 

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If God had known that mankind would fail morally, but in spite of that He created them and after that He killed most of them through the Flood, and in the end He will condemn the majority of humankind to hell, the conclusion is that God’s plan itself failed. 

The development of humankind from moral to immoral, proposed by the book of Genesis, is a reversed reality because true evolution is from an initial immoral, instinctual way of life to a higher moral standard. Moral life didn’t diminish from perfection to imperfection, as the Bible says, but it developed in the opposite sense, toward an increase in morality and toward higher ethical standards. People became more conscious in time about the necessity of defending moral values in order to protect the health of the social environment. 

Did God have a plan for all He was doing or did He sometimes regret what He did, as Genesis chapter 6; 5-8 states? Did God’s remorse also enter into His plan? Did God anticipate that He would be sorry for the creation of mankind? If the remorse had been anticipated by God and it was a part of the plan, why was humankind punished through the Flood? Was this destruction an element of the plan also? A plan in which God would have needed to liquidate the majority of the human population on Earth and many animals in order to save few human beings at the end of the world couldn’t have been conceived by a loving God. A loving God would have chosen a minimum of collateral damages but according to the Bible He generates huge destruction. 

Either God had accepted the future state of humankind before creating it or He had created human beings with the clear intention to destroy their majority at a certain time. In the first option the Flood doesn’t make sense and in the second one God cannot be equated with love as some texts of the N.T. maintain. 

In Genesis chapter 6, God’s remorse seems to be authentic and not only a tactic applicable in His war with Satan. God had regretted the creation of humankind and that looks like a change in His mind. God created humankind but He regretted its creation after a while. That description given by the book of Genesis looks like a lack of both planning and of the knowledge of the future. Either way, not knowing the future beforehand or planning inefficiently, or not planning at all, is far from what the Christian apologetics believe about God. 

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 Consequently, Genesis chapter 6; 5-8, is either an inadequate way of presenting God or speaks about another Being than the Reality portrayed by Christian commentators, a Being doomed to failure similar to humankind. 

The text from Genesis chapter 6; 5-8 can be also a pure invention of the author aimed to motivate the alleged Flood, and this inadequate motivation shows that the book of Genesis isn’t inspired by God. 

Let’s see what the arguments of the Christian apologetics about God’s remorse in Genesis chapter 6 are. There are many texts in the Bible which affirm that God doesn’t change His mind such as: Numbers 23:19, I Samuel 15:29, Psalms 33:11; 102:26-28; Hebrews 1:11-12; Malachi 3:6; Romans 11:29; Hebrews 13:8; James 1:17. 

There are also passages in which God “appears” to change His mind. The following is a text in which God changed His mind: 

“11 But Moses implored the LORD his God, and said, ‘O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth”? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, “I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for ever.” ‘ 14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.” (Exodus 32; 11-14 NRSV) 

To me this text looks very strange. What did God try to do with Moses? Was it a game or something serious? Did God need someone to remind Him about His own oath? Did He not know human nature and its vulnerability? This is not the image of God which we are used to contemplating in the Christian teachings. God ready to destroy an entire population and convinced to do otherwise by a man. Christianity is about God convincing humankind to be meek but not the other way around. In this story, Moses convinced God to prove self-restraint. The whole story is in contradiction with what makes God the Almighty God. The God that we are taught about during catechisms is much different than what the Bible says about Him. Here is another text about God changing His mind:

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“10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.” (Jonah 3; 10 NRSV) 

In the case of Jonah, the repentance of the population of Nineveh explains God changing His mind. This is understandable and is a very different situation to the one happening in the desert which involved Moses. In the latter, God’s decision wasn’t conditioned by a change in the attitude of the Jewish people and it was a pure punitive action for disobedience. In the former, the punishment was conditioned by a change in human behaviour. Another example of God changing His mind is in Amos: 

“3 The LORD relented concerning this; ‘It shall not be,’ said the LORD. 4 This is what the Lord GOD showed me: the Lord GOD was calling for a shower of fire,* and it devoured the great deep and was eating up the land. 5 Then I said, ‘O Lord GOD, cease, I beg you! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ 6 The LORD relented concerning this; ‘This also shall not be,’ said the Lord GOD.” (Amos 7; 3-6 NRSV) 

God changing His mind in Exodus 32 is explained by the biblical apologists with the allegation that He had submitted people to a test. God wouldn’t have wanted to destroy the Jewish people but He intended to try Moses’ reaction about such a possibility. This is a very thin explanation. Could Moses have been so indifferent about his people to endorse God’s decision to annihilate his family, his friends, and his people? Such a thing would have been a very unlikely development. In point of fact, God had proposed a similar convention to Moses that He had with Noah, but Moses didn’t accept that proposition. There is a big difference between Moses and Noah because the latter was less concerned with his brothers’ and sisters’ fate. Nevertheless, the repetition of the same motif degrades somehow the credibility of both stories, giving to both of them the aspect of a fictitious literary work. 

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The solution given by the apologists of a literal reading of the book of Genesis in this case is highly objectionable for several reasons. First of all, God is expected to have known Moses before giving him a mission in the interest of the Jewish people. God wouldn’t have needed a test to know Moses’ response to a certain situation because He is All-knowing. When God tested Abraham, the challenge was used as a metaphor for the sacrifice of His Son on the cross. The episode with Moses lacks a clear metaphorical sense. This kind of test doesn’t make sense in the biblical context. Comparing with Noah, even if he had failed such a test because he didn’t object to the destruction of the majority of humankind, Noah would have been considered righteous. Moses was righteous also without his defence of the people. 

More importantly, the text in Exodus 32 cannot be considered to be a test because God had already acted as He said upon the Jewish people, but on a smaller scale. 

"20 Then the LORD spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying: 21 Separate yourselves from this congregation, so that I may consume them in a moment. 22 They fell on their faces, and said, ‘O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, shall one person sin and you become angry with the whole congregation?’ 23 And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying: 24 Say to the congregation: Get away from the dwellings of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.” (Numbers 16; 20-24 NRSV) 

According to Numbers God wanted to destroy the whole congregation because of the sins of Korah and his company. Moses didn’t agree with such a solution, considering it unfair. Did Moses have a more acute sense of justice than God? Moses asked God the following question: ‘O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, shall one person sin and you become angry with the whole congregation?’ God was really angry, and in His anger He didn’t consider justice, according with the book of Genesis. Moses has reminded God about justice and only after that speech did He change His mind. The motif of God killing entire congregations or even nations for the sins of some people is found again and again in the Bible. What kind of justice was that? Some commentators would answer that God did whatever He wished. This isn’t an acceptable solution because God being righteous, He should have done only what was right.

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Another explanation proposed by the commentators for God changing His mind would be that when God threatened to destroy a nation, if that nation repented, He would have changed His mind. The only legitimate objection in such a case would be that in all nations some people would repent and others wouldn’t. To punish a whole nation even if not all people are corrupt is something specific for the Bible and is based on the principle that no-one is naturally pure in front of God and all human beings are sinners. The principle that humankind is impure is based on the story of Adam and Eve which is only a legend. If Adam and Eve are legendary personages what else would make humankind impure in God’s eyes? Human nature cannot be described as pure or impure, it is structured to allow human beings’ survival in this world. At the same time, human beings can improve themselves and the Christian solution for that is to change their nature, and that is possible only with God’s help. 

According to the book of Genesis, God didn’t create “pure” people but complex human beings endowed with curiosity and thirst for knowledge. God would have created human nature as it is today. Nonetheless, if Adam and Eve are only legendary personages their imaginary Fall couldn’t have changed human nature in any way, consequently humankind is what it is following God’s creation through evolution. That means that human provenance is linked with the entirety of nature, and because human beings were originally a kind of animal; they followed the instincts imbedded in their nature and not high moral principles. 

At the same time, according to the Bible, there always were people considered to be righteous in God’s eyes, for example Abel, Noah, Lot and his family, Job or David, and that shows that even human nature cannot be seen as irremediably lost. How can we admit the existence of righteous people in the O.T. if Adam and Eve had a sinful nature after the Fall? If we take for granted the story of Adam and Eve the presence of righteous people would be inexplicable following humankind’s Fall. Many Christian commentators maintain that the human nature created by God changed dramatically after the Fall. If this would be the case no righteous people would have been found on Earth after that event because that would have been against human nature. Nevertheless, the Bible speaks about a small number of righteous people in a generation. 

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 Only Noah and his family have been righteous, all other human beings were unrighteous. What would have generated righteousness in the attitude of few human beings as opposed to the majority of humankind? Probably, faith in God would be the most common answer. At the same time, there isn’t any reason why only one person and his family would have been considered to have faith in God, therefore to be righteous if, according to the book of Genesis, humankind already started to call for His name. This doesn’t make sense because calling the name of God is an act of faith. (Genesis 4; 26) 

The puzzle is the number of human beings which would have kept the faith in God between Adam and Abraham, which was very small. Only Noah from an entire generation of many, many human beings had been righteous. One would expect more than one man being righteous amongst hundreds of thousands or even several million human beings. The story is unbelievable if we take into consideration the small percentage of good people amongst humankind in a certain historical time. A minority of good people amongst a majority of corrupt ones would be understandable but only one man on the entire earth is doubtful. Noah was a human being, not the Son of God coming from heaven, therefore his unique situation amongst the population of the earth is inexplicable. As a matter of fact, without a law there wasn’t any objective criteria to know and to judge righteousness. We don’t know how righteous Noah would have been but unlike Moses he didn’t try to dissuade God from His decision to destroy the earth through the Flood. 

Why didn’t God reveal Himself to other human beings instead of destroying them? God would have preferred to annihilate the majority of human population instead of revealing Himself to it. This is the logic of the book of Genesis which isn’t based on realities but on a legend which casts a very dark image of God, but that illustration most probably doesn’t correspond with His character. 

The rationale about the changing of God’s mind in the case of the creation of humankind belongs to the context of the legend, and within the limits of that, because Noah also is only a legendary character about whom the Bible doesn’t give detailed information and he isn’t a real personage. This conclusion can be drawn from analysing the story of the Flood. 

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God had created humankind in His likeness and blessed them and He declared that all His creation was very good. After a while God changed His mind and from being blessed humankind became cursed and He decided to destroy beings that were like Him and who once were very good. Did God bless humankind only for a while? In chapter 1 of the book of Genesis God had asked humankind to multiply and to subdue the earth. This is the biblical text: 

“28 God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ (Genesis 1; 28 NRSV) 

In those conditions the curse that followed after a while is a pure fantasy. The entire story of Adam and Eve is a legend but the way in which that legend develops shows us that God cannot be accused of things that He never did in reality. He never blessed Adam and Eve because they never existed and He never sent a Flood to destroy the majority of humankind. If He had done one of those things the other one would have been in total contradiction with the other. 

From the creation of mankind until Moses’ Law there wasn’t any clear set of norms through which God’s moral standards would have been known by people. Where God’s Law wasn’t in function it wasn’t any responsibility of humankind before God and the nations survived by their own laws, before and after the apparition of Mosaic Law. The Jewish people had been guided initially by the Egyptian laws and after that directly by God through Moses, but other nations had their own religious beliefs and their laws. Those nations wouldn’t have been responsible before God because they didn’t receive His Law. 

It is not fair to despise humankind or human nature just because they haven’t been instructed by God in the past. Before the Mosaic Law many legal norms of human origin prescribed similar rules of conduct as Moses’ Law did at a later time. I also wonder if the way in which the book of Genesis says that the human races would have developed on Earth, through incest and polygamy, wouldn’t have been a possible cause for so much sexual immorality if that method of multiplication would have been real. It is hard to give a definitive answer because the story of Adam and Eve is only fairy tale, but generally speaking incest and polygamy can be causes of immorality.

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 What is here in contradiction is that God of the Bible sanctioned some causes of immorality which were incest and polygamy, but also punished harshly their effects. 

“7 At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, 8 but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. 9 And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, 10 but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.” (Jeremiah 18; 7-10 NRSV) 

It is hard to believe that all individuals from an entire nation would have had an identical attitude about good and evil and that all of them would have changed their behaviour. What would have happened in the situation in which half of the people in a nation turned from evil but not the other half? Again, that black and white approach doesn’t cover all situations. People cannot be judged and punished en masse but they have to respond individually for their deeds in order to reach justice. Some individuals couldn’t have responded legitimately before God for the others’ wrongdoings. 

Didn’t God create all humankind? Did He create only the Jewish people? God had a covenant only with the Jewish people but He didn’t propose covenants to other nations. Why were the other nations judged harshly? People were condemned in blocks, good people together with the bad ones. If there had been righteous persons among Jewish people wouldn’t there have been such persons amongst other nations also? There isn’t any reason for which other nations wouldn’t have contained righteous persons together with unrighteous ones. The Bible presents a very strange way of doing justice, a kind of mass judgement which were applied unrightfully later in history to the Jewish people, also by the governments of some European countries. This is the way in which the O.T. depicts the history but most likely this isn’t the reality. Being just, God cannot be as wrathful as the O.T. depicts Him to be. 

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Another explanation for God’s change of mind which comes from commentators of the book of Genesis is that He can change His program or strategies but never His purposes or His plans. Here is an example of this kind of argument: 

“God promised to bring His people into the land of Canaan. Due to their unbelief the first generation did not possess the land, but the second generation did. When Jesus came He offered Himself to Israel as the Messiah. Her rejection has made possible the offer of the gospel to the Gentiles. Nevertheless, when God’s purposes for the Gentiles have been accomplished, God will once again pour out His grace and salvation upon the Jews. God’s program changes, but not His purposes (cf. Romans 9-11).”[1] 

Such an explanation cannot be used to explain the destruction of the majority of humankind through the Flood. God had to know that humankind would fall beforehand and the solution of killing so many people through the Flood wouldn’t have been an efficient one. The Flood could have killed human beings and animals but it couldn’t have been able to eliminate human nature and the sin. After the Flood the situation of humankind from a moral point of view wouldn’t have been superior to what was before. God from the book of Genesis should have known better, sin couldn’t have been eradicated through the Flood. 

In Genesis chapter 6 verse 3 God said: 

“3 Then the LORD said, ‘My spirit shall not abide* in mortals for ever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred and twenty years.’ (Genesis 6; 3 NRSV) 

This verse is not in conformity with what the book of Genesis says would have happened after the Flood. Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years and not one hundred and twenty years as he would have lived according to Genesis chapter 6: 

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“28 After the flood Noah lived for three hundred and fifty years. 29 All the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.” (Genesis 9; 28-29 NRSV) 

 Other patriarchs also lived more than one hundred and twenty years, therefore Genesis chapter 6 verse 3 is in contradiction with other biblical texts also from Genesis. 

“10 These are the descendants of Shem. When Shem was one hundred years old, he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood; 11 and Shem lived after the birth of Arpachshad for five hundred years, and had other sons and daughters.” (Genesis 11; 10-11 NRSV) 

“12 When Arpachshad had lived for thirty-five years, he became the father of Shelah; 13 and Arpachshad lived after the birth of Shelah for four hundred and three years, and had other sons and daughters.” (Genesis 11; 12-13) 

    The book of Genesis contradicts its own assertions. If the human beings were destined to live for one hundred and twenty years there isn’t any reason for which they lived for hundreds of years. If God had set a limit for human life why wasn’t this limit respected? Human beings who lived for hundreds of years are an exaggeration if we accept the opinion of creationist commentators that after the alleged Fall human nature would have suffered a degradation. Most commentators maintain that human nature was badly affected by Adam and Eve’s Fall. At the same time, in spite of this supposed “degradation” human beings would have lived for hundreds of years, against God’s recommendation that they would reach only one hundred and twenty years. Such a situation doesn’t make sense. 

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