This week I started reading the Bible from the very beginning. The stories are well known. God created the world in 6 days. God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden only to throw them out a short time later for eating the forbidden fruit (which was not an apple). Then, their children, Cain and Abel, presented us with the first crime in history, as envy drove Cain to murder his brother. Why does the Bible start this way?
There is much to learn from these stories. It’s not about science, as our knowledge and understanding of it constantly changes and advances. It’s not even about the history of the world, for which we have better sources. God in this part of the Bible is not depicted as an omnipotent and omniscient deity. God can create a wonderful world only by speaking, while at the same time He (please excuse this gender pronoun – I use it only to simplify writing) has a “human” side, that makes Him far from being perfect. This real treasure hidden in the ancient text reveals an important key to help us decipher our own human nature.
To fully appreciate God’s human elements we should compare Him to the first “real” humans. After God finished His daily creation work, He looked at His accomplishment and without hiding His satisfaction declared: “This is good”. But when everything was done God looked at Adam, the first man, and realized His first mistake: “It is not good for the man to be alone”. In other words, God admits that He was wrong. What did God do as a result of it? He worked on fixing it. First He tried to match Adam with different animals to find him a companion. It didn’t work out, yet another mistake. Only after these mistakes, did God come up with the idea of creating a woman.
Now, let’s see what happened when God confronted Adam and Eve for their error (eating the forbidden fruit). They automatically went through the stages of denial, cover up, rationalization and blaming others. They did everything but admitting that they were wrong. The Bible wants us to learn from God, but instead most of us follow our primordial ancestors. The Bible chose to portray God as one who is capable of messing up, but this was not to relegate Him or to diminish His image. It was to teach us that if it is okay for God to make a mistake, admit it and look for a way to correct it, then it is definitely okay for us humans too. Only, we were wrong for not understanding and accepting this lesson.
If parents could check the transcripts of everything they ever said to their children, I have no doubt that they would find many lines akin to “you should not be afraid of making mistakes”, or “mistakes provide learning opportunities”. But those lines are rarely consistent with our overall message that mistakes must be avoided. We do all we can to protect our children from errors, we cover up for them even at the cost of declaring a full blown war against anyone who points out their mistakes. We make excuses for them – everything to avoid admitting that they were wrong.
Teaching our children by example, we (parents and teachers) drill into their heads that mistakes are bad. By doing so we rob them of the opportunity to learn and grow as a result of making these mistakes. We also unintentionally convey a clear message: we don’t think you are capable and strong enough to deal with errors.
Kathryn Schulz, in her important book Being Wrong- Adventures in the Margin of Error writes:
Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.
God knew what He was doing. He could have created a world and placed robot like creatures, or even angels, to attend it. It would have been perfect, error free – but boring as hell. So God created us instead, with a full capacity to constantly make mistakes. But there is more. He also gave us the knowledge and skills to use the lessons from our mistakes to make a better and more interesting world.