I recently finished watching HBO’s His Dark Materials, and it didn’t take long to see the attack on Christian theology. Philip Pullman isn’t subtle about it: he’s explicitly stated his goal is to “undermine the basis of Christian belief”. In his trilogy, the Fall is reimagined as humanity’s greatest triumph. “Dust”—representing consciousness, self-awareness, and independent thought—enters humanity at the moment of eating the forbidden fruit, which Pullman frames not as catastrophic rebellion but as our glorious awakening. What Christianity calls sin and corruption, Pullman celebrates as enlightenment and maturity. The Church in his story desperately tries to prevent children from gaining this awareness, severing them from their very souls to keep them innocent and obedient.
His message is essentially that the Christian God fundamentally opposes human consciousness and wants us child-like, unthinking, unable to question or judge for ourselves. “Original sin” is just a lie invented to control people through guilt: “They have been trying to convince us for centuries that we are born guilty… Is there any proof for this heinous stain, this shame, this guilt? No, not at all.”
This objection, though, rests on a misunderstanding of the biblical story, or at least of what many Christians actually mean. The Bible doesn’t teach that babies are born guilty of sin. “Original sin” isn’t about personal guilt for what Adam did. It’s about inheriting a human nature that’s bent toward looking out for ourselves and making ourselves the centre of the universe. You and I aren’t personally guilty of eating the forbidden fruit. But we do inherit the consequences of living in a world where humanity decided it had the right to define reality on its own terms, apart from God. What Pullman attacks, then, is not Christianity in anything like its serious form, but a caricature of it: a distorted version that makes for compelling villains, perhaps, but bears little resemblance to what the Bible actually teaches.
The deeper question remains compelling, though: Is the Christian God really against human consciousness? Against our capacity for independent thought? Against our ability to think critically and make judgments about reality?
Is that what Genesis is saying in the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
A common reading goes like this: eating the forbidden fruit gave Adam and Eve the ability to tell right from wrong, a kind of “moral awareness”. Before the fruit, they were innocent, unable to distinguish good from evil. Afterward, they “woke up”, gained moral consciousness, and acquired the kind of ethical consciousness that makes mature judgment possible.
That reading feels intuitive, which is exactly why it has seeped so widely into our culture. But it is also a misunderstanding, and it quietly reframes the God of Genesis as threatened by human maturity.
If Adam and Eve couldn’t distinguish right from wrong before eating the fruit, how could they be morally culpable for eating it? They already knew God’s command not to eat. They understood that obeying God was good and disobeying was wrong. The serpent didn’t have to explain what a prohibition meant or why violating God’s instruction might be problematic. Eve could articulate the command clearly: “God said, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree… or you will die.’” Obviously, moral awareness (the ability to recognise right and wrong) already existed before the fruit touched their lips.
So if they already possessed moral awareness, what exactly did the tree of knowledge offer?
The ancient Hebrew idiom, “knowledge of good and evil” refers to the authority to judge and rule, the prerogative to determine what is beneficial or harmful, what should be permitted or forbidden. This isn’t about knowing the difference between right and wrong. It’s about possessing the authority to define what right and wrong are.
Consider how Genesis itself uses the term “good”. When God declares creation “good” in Genesis 1, he is not making a string of moral compliments, as though light and land are virtuous in the ethical sense. He is pronouncing them fit, ordered, functional, conducive to flourishing. “Good” here has to do with proper place, purpose, and benefit.
This usage continues throughout Scripture. When God later warns Laban against “speaking good or evil” to Jacob, He isn’t prohibiting moral speech. He’s prohibiting Laban from exercising authority over Jacob’s destiny, from making judgements that would affect Jacob’s life. Likewise, when Solomon prays for wisdom to “judge between good and evil”, he’s not asking for help distinguishing murder from charity. He’s asking for the capacity to rule justly as king—to determine what should be permitted and forbidden in his kingdom, what serves his people’s welfare and what harms it.
The phrase “knowledge of good and evil” is an ancient Near Eastern merism—a figure of speech using opposites to indicate totality, like “searching high and low” or “from beginning to end”. To know good and evil means to possess comprehensive authority to judge all matters.
The tree of knowledge, then, represented the godlike capacity to determine what should and shouldn’t be, and to define the fundamental terms of existence.
And here’s where the story becomes far richer than Pullman could imagine.
Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, which forms the conceptual backdrop of Genesis, understood creation in terms of order, disorder, and unorder. God created order from primordial unorder (the “formless and void” of Genesis 1:2), but He deliberately left creation incomplete. It was “good” but not “perfect” because the finishing work was never meant to be His alone. Humanity was invited into that work as a partner. This partial sharing of rule was demonstrated when God brought animals to Adam for him to name them. Adam was exercising real authority in categorising and organising creation, bringing further order under God’s direction. Cultivating the garden represented the same principle: humanity extending Eden’s ordered perfection outward into the world.
The prohibition against the tree wasn’t a permanent ban. God intended to grant Adam and Eve the mature capacity to judge good and evil and to participate fully in His ruling authority as His image-bearers, but only after proper preparation through obedience and relationship with Him. They were in training for godlike authority, learning to wield divine wisdom under divine instruction. The tree represented their testing ground, the place where they would eventually graduate from apprentices to co-regents, from students to mature judges capable of exercising God-level discernment reliably.
But it takes time to mature. There are no downloads, no shortcuts. Proverbs is clear: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That is not fear in the sense of terror, as though God were a threat, but fear in the biblical sense: reverence, humility, and a deep recognition of God’s authority, within which wisdom is received as a gift through relationship with Him.
The serpent’s deception exploited a genuine truth, which is what made it so effective. The serpent said, “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” This wasn’t a lie. Eating the fruit would indeed make them like God in this specific way. But it was “the abuse of God-given truths”—truth weaponised, truth deployed at the wrong time through the wrong means for the wrong purpose. The gift was real. The timing and method were poisonous.
By seizing wisdom autonomously rather than receiving it from God, Adam and Eve acquired the capacity to judge good and evil while cutting themselves off from the one perspective that makes such judgments trustworthy. They claimed the divine prerogative to define reality, but without the divine wisdom to exercise it well. The result is humanity judging by its own standards, determining good and evil by self-generated criteria, with each person ultimately doing “what is right in his own eyes.”
This wasn’t gaining moral awareness. It was claiming independent authority to define reality itself.
Genesis 3:22 opens the story out onto a much larger stage: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil”. The “us” according to Michael Heiser refers to God’s divine council—the assembly of spiritual beings (elohim in Hebrew) who already exercise judgement under God’s authority. The knowledge of good and evil was something these divine beings possessed but humans had not yet been granted. The serpent itself was likely one of these beings—a rebellious member of that council. The Hebrew term nachash suggests a shining, divine figure rather than just a garden snake. Eden itself functioned as the earthly meeting place of the divine council, the intersection point between heaven and earth. And it was from within this sacred space that the rebellious council member goaded humanity into grasping divine wisdom apart from obedience to God.
So, both divine and human beings share the same fundamental capacity: to partner with God in loyalty, or to seek independence through rebellion. The serpent had already made its choice. Now it was tempting humanity to join the cosmic insurrection.
When the damage was done, God’s words ”you will surely die” were not a threat of immediate biological death. The Hebrew idiom (literally “dying you will die”) means “you will be doomed to die” or “sentenced to death”. The sentence was executed the day Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden and cut off from the Tree of Life. In other words, they were condemned to mortality. But more fundamentally, “death” in Genesis signifies exile: estrangement from God, from creation, from one another, and from ourselves. The chaos and disorder that God had been progressively ordering through creation began to unravel when humanity, who had been called to extend that order outward, turned from its appointed task. Pullman’s framework inverts that story. He presents the Fall as humanity claiming the right to think for itself against a tyrannical God who demands mindless obedience. But Genesis describes something far more specific and far more tragic: humanity claiming the right to define reality for itself, to adjudicate good and evil by self-generated standards disconnected from the all-knowing wisdom of the Creator.
God wasn’t against human consciousness, critical thinking, or maturity. He created us precisely for those capacities. He designed us to grow into godlike authority, to exercise wisdom and judgement as His image-bearers, and to participate in His governance of creation. The entire setup of Eden demonstrates this, where humanity was given real authority to name animals, cultivate the garden, and make genuine decisions with real consequences.
The tragedy is that we basically attempted to crown ourselves gods before completing our apprenticeship. We claimed the authority to define good and evil without the knowledge, perspective, or wisdom to do so reliably, like a child snatching up surgical tools and attempting brain surgery.
The serpent promised that we would be like God, knowing good and evil. What he concealed was that we would seek this likeness without God’s omniscience, without His perspective, and without the wisdom that makes such judgement trustworthy. We reached for divine authority in the dark, and the world we were meant to steward began to unravel around us. Seeking enlightenment, humanity found exile.
The result is exactly what we see: billions of autonomous judges, each defining reality by their own lights, each insisting their vision of good and evil should prevail, with no shared foundation and no way to adjudicate between competing claims.
So the answer to Pullman is not just that he misread Genesis, though he did, twisting the whole story. It is that he mistook rebellion for enlightenment. Pullman, and the snake, teach us that self-determination makes us greater, but Christ and C.S.Lewis (Pullman’s literary nemesis) show that greatness comes through participation in something greater. The modern world has run the Eden experiment at full scale: every person sovereign, every desire self-validating, every moral claim self-authored—and the result is not clarity.
Pullman wrote a trilogy to liberate children from a god he invented. The real God of Genesis was never the warden in his story, he was the father waiting for his apprentices to grow up. Pullman armed his heroes against a strawman and called it enlightenment.
But his bigger mistake is telling the story without its second act. Genesis 3 is a tragedy only if it ends there. The whole Bible is the story of God patiently bringing humanity back to the throne we abandoned, and Christ is how he does it. In Jesus, God himself takes on the apprenticeship Adam refused. He learns obedience. He grows in wisdom. He receives glory rather than seizing it. And then he hands that life to anyone who will trust him for it. Pullman wrote three books to free humanity from a god who had already gone to a cross to free them himself.
The final irony is that Pullman thinks Christianity is about keeping humanity small, blind, and submissive, when Christianity actually says the opposite: humanity was made for glory, wisdom, rule, and maturity—but sure as the law of gravity, that can only come through union with God, the source and definition of all these glories. The problem in Eden was never that humans wanted too much. It was that we reached for the right thing in the wrong way. We wanted to be “like God,” and in one sense that was exactly our destiny. But instead of receiving that life from God, we tried to seize it.
And that is why Christ is the decisive answer to the whole story. Jesus is the true image of God, the exact representation of His being. In other words, if you want to know what a fully awakened human life actually looks like—what wisdom, authority, freedom, and maturity are supposed to be—you do not look to Adam grasping at the tree; you look to Christ. He possesses equality with God, yet unlike Adam, He does not grasp, exploit, or seize. He lives in perfect trust.
Christ shows us the paradox that the way up was always the way down. The serpent said “exalt yourself, seize, take, define reality on your own terms!” Christ says “trust, receive, obey, and become truly human.” Adam reaches upward in rebellion and falls into death; Christ descends in humility and is exalted in glory. Adam takes the forbidden path to become godlike and loses life; Christ walks the obedient path even into death, and opens the way for humanity to finally share the life of God.
Christ is the revelation that makes sense of all of it. In Him we see that God is not threatened by human greatness; He is its source. In Him we see that wisdom is not stolen but received, not constructed by the isolated self but found in communion with the One in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. And in Him we see that salvation is not God dragging us back into childish dependence, but God bringing us at last into true maturity—restoring in grace what Adam reached for in pride.
So no, God is not against consciousness. He is against counterfeit godhood. And Christ does not come to shut down the mind but to heal it; not to abolish human freedom but to rescue it from self-destruction; not to prevent our ascent but to lead us through death into the kind of life we were actually made for. The serpent offered humanity a shortcut to glory. Christ offers the real thing.
