“Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.”

“There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.”

“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”

“The apple… came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.”

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

“As Adam said when his wife fell out of the tree—Eve’s dropping again.”

“Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything.”

“When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it.”

“Adam and Eve were still ignorant and new residents of Heaven, yet the tree was placed there to test their IQ level.”

“The story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation. So the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an abstraction across trees, and it's trying to say: 'Here's something that's common across trees, it's a fruit that's common across trees.' The fruit that's common across trees is something that you might call food, fair enough. But here's something that's even more cool: food that's stable across the entire domain of food, isn't food – it's information. We use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information, that animals use to forage for information. Why is that? Because we figured out knowing where the food is, is more important than having the food… That's why we're information foragers.”