What does the Average Person know about Adam and Eve?

  God created a man and a woman and gave them a perfect place to live, a garden called Eden. Well, the garden is depicted as an orchard. God gives them this wonderful orchard and tells them they can eat all the fruit they want. And they live in peace with the animals and with one another. It's an image of peace, completion, and wholeness. When we imagine the Garden of Eden, most of us think of a paradise like this, better than anything we could ever find on Earth.

  But what does the Bible say about where it all began? The biblical description is very short. It just says there are four rivers. Tigris and Euphrates are two, and the other two are unknown. That's the problem. You have the location if we can figure out where all four rivers are. And it is the tantalizing mention of these two remaining rivers that has fueled a never-ending search for the Garden of Eden. People have looked everywhere for centuries, from the ocean's depths to the Moon.

  Tigris and Euphrates are in southern Iraq. They come together in an area known as the Fertile Crescent, where civilization first began, a perfect backdrop for the biblical beginning. We've got a place where early men and early women could live in idyllic harmony with the food readily accessible and all that. That's what we're talking about: an earthly paradise.

  We're told that Adam and Eve have everything they could ever need, but to keep all this, they had to obey one rule. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And God warned them that if they disobeyed, they would die.

  Snake comes along and says, once you've access to the Tree of Wisdom, you can become like the gods. You can move up the ladder.

  In a very human moment, we're told Eve couldn't resist the temptation to take more. She took a bite, and she passed the fruit to Adam.

  It was the snack that changed history.

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  The men and the women hide. They're afraid because they know they've done something wrong. When God says, did you eat? It's Adam who points the finger at Eve. And not only at Eve, but at God, because he says, she gave me, and you gave her to me.

  Now, an angry God casts his creation out of paradise. And just like Adam throughout the millennia, everyone has blamed Eve. Women are blamed for lots of things that they need not. Adam could have said that fruit, I'm not going to eat it. But he took the fruit, and he ate it.

  Ironically, in the Muslim holy book, the Koran, there's more than enough blame to go around. Both Adam and Eve are to blame equally for eating the forbidden fruit. So, they're co-equal human beings.

  But in the end, it didn't matter whose fault it was. They both suffered the consequences of disobeying God.

  The first lesson of Genesis is cold and hard. For humans, sustaining life on this earth is not meant to be easy. We have to go out into that cruel, suffering world where we labor by the sweat of our brows, give forth our children in pain and have to suffer and die. Christians believe that this is why Jesus came, to solve that problem, to pay the penalty for sin. But maybe when Eve made the choice that Christians call original sin, it was something more. Perhaps it was the first act of original thought.

  Adam and Eve? Free will? That's the story of how you can make a choice. And that's the most horrible thing that faces a human being. We've got to choose.

  Science gives us insight into the how. How the universe works, and how particles behave. But it provides zero insight into why. Why are we here? What's the meaning of it all? For some people, religion offers some degree of insight into those critical questions. Essential and challenging questions the Bible forces us to think about, like jealousy and rage, and why some people come to hate and harm each other. A lesson starkly taught in the story of the first children, the first siblings. Cain is a shepherd, and Abel is a farmer. Both offer sacrifices to God, but God likes Abel's better. This is about life as we know it. And life as we know it is not fair. We feel the pain of those whom God hasn't chosen. In a fit of jealousy, Cain kills his brother Abel. This was sort of the first example that we ever saw of murder. And the gravity with which God holds the taking of another human life. And yet, with the passage of thousands of years, humankind is still at it. As indeed as Cain killed Abel, the slaughter of innocents continues.