I’ve been drawing elephants lately, especially mother and child pairs, the mother vast as a house, the little one so very small, sheltering beside her huge bulk, or walking along with her, side by side: safe with mum. Those pictures are so tender, the relationship—and it is a relationship—is so trusting.

These are amazing creatures—intelligent, possessed (like birds) of a complex vocabulary of aural communication, perfectly adapted to their environment, and, perhaps because of the lengthy period in which both the mother and the community raise the little one, they are deeply attached to each other, to their clan and to their group. I’ve seen a video of elephants rushing to gather around and comfort a member of the band who has suffered some kind of trauma; similarly, there’s evidence of elephant grief at death. 

And those amazing trunks, composed entirely of muscle, with multiple functions! Their sense of smell is more precise and sensitive than even a drug-sniffing dog’s; they can perform the heavy work of tearing bunches of vegetation off trees and thrusting it into their mouths (they spend their days grazing, and consume as much as 300 pounds of vegetation per day). But those trunks can also perform the delicate operation of picking up something as small and light and delicate as a potato chip, through a combination of suction and touch from the two “fingers” at the tip. It also serves as a portable water supply: it can store 2.5 gallons of water.

They’re scared of bees—but have no natural predators, apart from humans. And humans being humans, we are doing what we can to eradicate them, through both habitat loss and the vile practice of poaching them for the ivory of their tusks.

So as I draw these strangely beautiful manifestations of God’s imagination, I muse both on the brilliance of their adaptation, and the profound dysfunction of my own human species: how, like a particularly virulent virus, we live to destroy other living things, without moderation and without limits, apart from our own self-annihilation. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that every other species on our mutual planet would be better off if we did not exist.

Hence the question: given the confirmed malignancy of humankind, why did God create us? Are we merely an example of evolutionary over-reach, a laboratory experiment that has gone terribly, terribly wrong?

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In Christian tradition, God created the first human out of mud and breathed life into him (exactly the way a puppeteer awakens a puppet). And because that first man was lonely, God created a companion, either out of the rib of Adam, or through another modelling project—Genesis offers two different versions of the story. 

The two first humans were given free range of an ideal garden with only one prohibition: do not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And being human, they soon broke that single law. As a result, they were expelled into the world of time, death, and pain. 

The story holds great archetypal resonance; other creation myths offer similar elements. But the insight that lies at its heart is the role of knowledge in our existential condition.

Christian theology finds its solution to the problem of evil in this story. It teaches that before that initial heterosexual couple disobeyed God, natural evils such as sickness, pain and death did not exist. After that initial sin, all humans—and with them, all creation—were doomed to die. Therefore, God could not be blamed for the hardships and insecurity and sickness and death that mark our lives. These things are the fault of Adam and Eve, along with the inherited condition of “original sin”, a propensity that leads us (to paraphrase St. Paul) to do the things we should not do, and fail to do the things that we should. 

Thus, in Christian thought, God is innocent of the evils caused by human malice (such as war) or for natural evils like the stray comet that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs—an event that notably occurred millions of years before any humans were around to commit that inaugural sin. 

Thus, in traditional Christian thought, sin is the cause of death, loss, and suffering, while the Creator who set the whole system up remains blameless. 

**

I challenge this traditional teaching. I think that the contemporary person of faith must look squarely at reality, and recognize that, like it or not, life and death are intertwined and interdependent, each feeding the other, the fundamental drivers of life. They’re inseparable, like the strands of a DNA molecule. God designed them that way. He—and not Adam—is responsible.

Further, there’s a second thing for which the Creator, not humankind, must take full and absolute responsibility: our knowledge. He gave us minds. We can’t live like elephants, or other non-human creatures, because our minds give us a fatal understanding. We know that we will die. We know that we can’t go back and undo time; we know that all sales are final. When we lose a child we love, or a battle, or a bet, there’s no return. And we witness the suffering of the innocent—the child who cannot be said to in any way “deserve” to die from cancer. 

This is the existential anguish of humankind, and it’s not because we chose to eat a forbidden apple. It’s a condition of our growing up. Hence our denial games; hence our amnesia. Hence also our fear and anger and desire for revenge and our habit of inflicting the pain we ourselves experience on other creatures, both human and non-human. As T. S. Elliot says, humankind cannot bear very much reality—and that’s what this is: reality. That’s the true fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Animals, no matter how gifted, are innocent of such understanding. 

And that’s the way God made us.

And so, our question to the Creator becomes less the existential one—Why death? Why the cruelty of time?—and more the personal one: Why did you give me this fatal understanding? Why can’t I enjoy the innocence of an elephant? 

The issue for Adam and Eve was not, therefore, their disobedience. It was their over-sized brain, that necessarily posed these questions, and—inevitably—understood the problem of time and the terror of death. Their intelligence meant that sooner or later they were bound to wake up—most likely sooner. And once they woke up, they had to confront their creator with those uncomfortable—and very human—questions. 

**

This version of the problem has far-reaching consequences. It turns the traditional relationship with God upside down, transforming the central mystery of Christian faith. It means that God is accountable to us. It means that our cries of pain and protest—and also our curses—are not some species of presumption on our part, but are, in fact, just. It means that Christ did not die as the one sufficient sacrifice for all human sin—the teaching of St. Paul and all subsequent authorities. Rather, he died as the God-man to atone for what he, as God, did to us. It was the ultimate act of atonement.

It was also, I would suggest, an act of solidarity. As if to say: Yes, it’s true. I did this to you—you can call it my mistake if you wish. And here, because I love you, I will accompany you, in all your sufferings but in everything else as well—because, whatever you do, don’t overlook the joys of life, which are, in fact, enhanced by death. I am with you.

**

Unfortunately, this reflection does not help endangered elephants or any of the other species that we, in our dysfunctional arrogance, are so prone to destroy. But it does change the frame in a big way. We’re no longer the pinnacle of creation, free to do as we like with nature’s bounty. We’re only an unfinished, evolutionary experiment. Maybe we’re God’s mistake. And if God can atone to us, then we in our turn must atone to the creation which we so instinctively misuse—by serving it rather than abusing it.