I believe it because it says so in the scriptures even when I can't fathom it, being at odds with the usual life experience of ever seeing such a thing.
Yeah but it doesn’t say in the Bible that it’s an historical event. Some Jews and Christians think that it can be both true but not an historical event. And, again, that animals talked with people before the world became a fallen and hostile place, with animals and humans fearing one another, is something shared across mythology and fable generally. If there's a truth in any of them, it's not that they're literal events but that they signify something about humanity generally.
And isn't there some figurative language in this Genesis story? Consider this: Did God mean it literally or figuratively when he said that Adam and Eve would die on the very day that they ate fruit from the tree? Or was he talking about mortality and/or becoming in some sense spiritually dead in a more general and figurative way?
Why is the serpent the bad “person” here anyway? The serpent says that if they eat the fruit they won’t die. What happens when they eat the fruit? They don’t die! The serpent says if they eat the fruit their eyes will be opened. And what happens when they eat the fruit? According to the text “And the eyes of both were opened”. The serpent said they’d become as gods knowing good and evil. And what happens when they eat the fruit? As God himself says “Behold man has become as one of us, knowing good and evil”.
Looks like the only deceivers in the tale are God, Adam and Eve.
Note that God’s complaint isn’t that they were disobedient but that they were getting too powerful so needed to be curbed from becoming godlike and immortal. He doesn't want humans becoming more like "us" (whoever all the other gods are); it's a theme that comes up again (tower of babel).
Anyway, seems to me that to get at what the myth says means reading it and finding what the words there on the page imply, rather than just insert later Christian’s evaluations and then claim you're being true to the text. There's a problem if you want to believe whatever the scripture itself says, but then apply whatever post hoc crap that Christians have interposed into the tale in later centuries.
And ultimately there’s no reading a story like this without taking it figuratively to some extent, or you derive no universal meaning from it. Because if it’s just literal history then it’s nothing but some mundane details about an alleged past event. To signify more than something like "Joe got up and ate oatmeal for breakfast", it has to have a mythic element to it.
Last Thursday (or even just 5 minutes ago according to Bertrand Russell) and everything we think we remember are just fake memories implanted in our heads by the trickster god who put us here.
