Let’s make an experiment and remove every human from planet Earth. The entire species now absent, how many problems are there? Where are the strife and conflict? The complaining, accusations, and arguing? The senseless wars, the violence, the societal and planetary destruction? Imagine the world going on without all this human dysfunction and turmoil: the seasons beautifully changing, the animals frolicking, birds singing, every aspect of nature thriving, peaceful, and in perfect balance and harmony.
In 1872, Ulysses Grant set aside Yellowstone National Park, more than 2 million acres, as the first formal nature preserve in the world, to be under the managerial care of the United States Department of the Interior. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that the once plentiful “white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from Yellowstone.”
In other words, humans began “scientific management” of the park, began messing around with the balance of nature, and screwed everything up. Until humans came along, nature was doing just fine on its own. Humans, well, they thought they knew better.
But clearly humans don’t know better. In fact, they are the one and only species that doesn’t have its act together—but that genuinely believes it has its act together, and better than all the rest. So convinced are they of this supremacy, they believe themselves necessary and worthy managers and regulators of all the rest. How very, god-like. But then, because nature has its act together, humans abandon the chaos of hustling and bustling cities for the peaceful, serene calm of suburbia and rural areas, which is incredibly appealing. Then, eventually, they turn that environment into another hustling and bustling agent of chaos, too.
Hence the conclusion, concrete and undebatable: humans present all the earth’s problems.
The question is why? Why can’t humans get their act together like the rest of nature and make the world a better place? What’s their friggin’ deal, anyway? There is an answer, a foundational explanation. Found in a place that, evidently, no one thinks to look, which is odd given the obviousness, and given all the scholarly and ministerial minds searching to solve the many mysteries of life. The answer?
It’s found in the Garden of Eden. Or rather, in the garden’s forbidden fruit.
Within the garden stood the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Hanging from its unique, winsome branches among the leaves was its delectable forbidden fruit, which God told Adam and Eve, the first couple, never to eat, or even touch. Of course, they did both, which resulted in a drastic change in human physiology and negatively altered human behavior. Consumption of the fruit wasn’t just an act of human disobedience toward their maker. Something happened to Adam and Eve, something physical, perhaps spiritual. Something that transformed humankind forever. It is to say, the fruit produced an affect, a result. The result?
Self-awareness.
The ministerial class likes to message that God cares for you and that Jesus loves you, and they do love and care. But never once in all my many years of religious instruction have I heard analyzed the immense significance of the garden’s forbidden fruit. Neither how it has influenced human behavior from time immemorial, nor regarding the challenges it presents to humankind, and the world. So, we’ll analyze it here.
Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve didn’t immediately fall over in convulsing fits. Genesis author, Moses, put the reaction this way: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Simply, the first couple each took a bite of the fruit and, shazam! Their eyes were opened—and not for their eyes being physically closed and then suddenly opened, but opened to new perceptions, to a new level of consciousness they had never experienced.
No convulsing. No dramatic scene. Just, a perceptive awakening.
So, for clarity: pre-consumption of the forbidden fruit, the first couple looked at each other’s bodies and had no awareness of nakedness at all, or moreover that nakedness was either good or evil. Then, post-consumption, they instantly noticed a penis, vagina, breasts, potential sexual stirrings, and a desperate need to cover themselves up, which they immediately did, sewing fig leaves together to fashion makeshift clothing.
So the effect of the forbidden fruit was self-awareness and subsequent self-consciousness—and not just consciousness of one’s own existence, but consciousness of one’s own appearance, behavior, image, desires, and so on. Most important was the eternal dichotomy now in place: good and evil, and the human ability to perceive it and to differentiate. Naturally, humans became self-centered and driven by their lusts, which is precisely why God, via the Bible, commanded self-discipline and a servant’s spirit as countermeasures to the new human nature.
It’s logical to conclude that, had the fruit been left alone, human beings would be walking around today naked without any sense of awareness or discomfort, either one. As clearly intended, human nakedness would be normal and accepted. Nobody would care about their diminutive penises or sagging, unperky breasts; about their fat rolls and double chins; their crows feet, eyebags, and laugh lines. No one would care about their imperfect smiles and excessively hairy bodies, their birthmarks and moles, or their many other appearance-related oddities, that wouldn’t be oddities at all. The cosmetic surgery industry wouldn’t exist, nor the toupee industry. And it’s not that modern human beings wouldn’t care about these things; it’s that they wouldn’t know to care about them. Having no awareness of self, no perception of self, none of it would be noticeable or even matter.
Humans would be free from all their self-conscious baggage!
The garden’s forbidden fruit laced with self-awareness, however, all these perceived human flaws and inadequacies do matter. Humans are forever cursed with self-consciousness. Interestingly, Satan told the first couple that if they ate the fruit, they would become gods. And for once, Satan wasn’t lying. Self-awareness creates an inflated sense of self-worth and a god-like, “me first” sense of entitlement. In contrast, it creates senses of human inadequacy, unworthiness, and despair, too—both reasons Satan wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. Playing on their self-awareness-driven sense of god-like entitlement, and their despairing insecurities, vulnerabilities, and desires. Satan knew he could more easily exploit and destroy human beings individually—his eternal goal and mission.
The opportunities were limitless!
How do you exploit and destroy people with no self-awareness-driven weaknesses? Who don’t fancy themselves entitled gods and perceive their flaws?
Not only did consuming the fruit disobey God, whom Satan despises. The resulting self-awareness made for easy human misery and destruction.
[Satan rubbing his hands together in ruinous glee].
Virtually every moment of their lives, humans walk around individually consumed by the world’s, by other human being’s, perception of them: how they look, what they say, how they behave. Other than sleep, there is no respite from the cognitive prison. Humans are virtually consumed with self. In contrast, take the gorilla in the zoo. As people look on through thick plate-glass, he lies in a hammock, defecates in his hand, and throws it on the glass at onlookers. The gorilla doesn’t care what people think, because he has no burdensome self-awareness.
Humans, on the other hand, do care. And why?
Because they were the only species to consume forbidden fruit.
This clearly observable phenomenon—the fact humans are the only creatures in all of nature endowed with self-awareness—undeniably affirms the Bible, its account of creation, and moreover the existence of God. In other words, if one needs a solid, a tangible instead of spiritual, reason to believe in God. Well, here it is. Right there in your self-conscious mind.
Self-awareness isn’t a gift. It’s a curse. A curse chosen for humankind, but a curse, nonetheless. All of humankind’s challenges return to it, too, and there is no turning back. No undoing the spell. There is a way to live with it, however. It’s becoming a believer, in God. It’s understanding, via the Bible, why humans are the way they are and what makes them, you, tick. It’s transcending that nature to become something better, something healthier and happier, and for the creator’s purposes, something more exemplary and useful. And then through that disciplined and aspiring effort, it’s being an example for others, encouraging them to better, healthier, and happier for themselves.
Humans are either improving or degrading, are thus either aspiring or succumbing to their nature, to the curse of the forbidden fruit. So when your priest or pastor says, “We’re called to be something better, are called to excellence!” He ain’t lying, either.
Only, the call isn’t to be better, which clearly creates all the problems.
It’s to be worthy.
Get that straight, why, it’d be like heaven on earth.
©JMW 7/2025
All Rights Reserved
John Mark Warren 