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.”
I think this objection 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 divine 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” doesn’t refer to moral discernment at all. It refers to something far more specific: 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. God is judging creation according to its role within an ordered world.
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. 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, to adjudicate reality itself.
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”. Why? So humanity could partner with Him in finishing the ordering work. 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, and that’s at least a large part of what it means for humanity to live as the image of God.
The prohibition against the tree wasn’t a permanent ban but a temporary fast. 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 maturation requires process. Wisdom in the Old Testament is never achieved instantly or autonomously. No downloads, no shortcuts. Proverbs hammers this point: “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 gift through relationship rather than seized by demand.
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 at the proper time, Adam and Eve gained the capacity to judge good and evil but severed from God’s all-knowing perspective. They appropriated the divine prerogative to define reality but disconnected from the divine wisdom that makes such judgments reliable. 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—not a garden-variety snake but a rebellious member of God’s council. The Hebrew term nachash (serpent) suggests a shining, divine being. Eden wasn’t merely a garden; it functioned as the earthly meeting place of God’s divine council, the intersection point between heaven and earth.
This rebellious divine being goaded humans to obtain divine wisdom “apart from living in obedience to God”. Both divine and human beings possess the fundamental capacity to either partner with God in loyalty or seek independence through rebellion. According to Michael Heiser, the serpent had already chosen rebellion within the divine council, and now it tempted humanity to join the cosmic insurrection. This wasn’t about humans gaining consciousness or self-awareness—they already possessed those. It was about humans claiming divine-level autonomy, the right to exercise independent judgement over reality itself, apart from a relationship to the Creator who actually knows how reality works.
When God said “you will surely die,” He wasn’t threatening 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 rather than struck dead immediately. 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 unravelling. Humanity had been called to extend God’s order throughout creation; instead, we introduced disorder through autonomous judgement disconnected from divine wisdom. A discord in the symphony.
So Pullman’s entire framework inverts the actual 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: humanity was given real authority to name animals, cultivate the garden, and make genuine decisions with real consequences. We weren’t created as mindless automatons but as vice-regents in training, apprentice rulers learning to wield cosmic authority responsibly.
The tragedy isn’t that humanity wanted to grow up; it’s that we attempted to crown ourselves gods before completing our apprenticeship. We seized the throne while still in training. We claimed the authority to define good and evil while lacking the wisdom, knowledge, and perspective to do so reliably, like using a child grabbing surgical tools and attempting brain surgery. The problem is that wielding such tools requires knowledge and maturity the child simply doesn’t possess yet. We obtained the capacity to judge reality but severed from the divine wisdom that makes such judgements reliable. 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.
The serpent promised we would be like God, knowing good and evil. What it didn’t mention is that we’d be like God without God’s omniscience, without His comprehensive perspective, without His perfect wisdom—possessing divine authority but wielding it in darkness, judging a reality we barely comprehend, defining terms we didn’t create, playing at cosmic sovereignty while the creation we were meant to steward unravels around us. Seeking enlightenment, they found exile.
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.
Pullman’s mistake is that he tells 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 from Him.
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 does not clutch divinity as a prize to be snatched selfishly; 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 tried to seize 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.
