“Begone from My garden, o ungrateful ones!” bellowed God.

“Why, o Lord?” replied Adam. “What have we done to displease You?”

“You have partaken of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I expressly forbade you from doing so. It is for this reason that I cast you out of My garden.”

Adam looked sheepish, which was a tough thing to do before the invention of sheep. “Please forgive us, o Lord!” he begged. “We will never do it again, I swear to You.” Adam fell to his knees and clasped his hands together just under his well-sculpted chin. Right about then, Eve came walking out of the underbrush carrying some nice fig leaves she wanted Adam to try on. She had naturally heard half the conversation Adam was having and had hurried back to his side to find out what was going on. She saw Adam debasing himself on the ground and had to speak up.

“Um, excuse me, God?”

“What is it, My thankless child, who would not follow the one simple rule I set for you?”

“Well, I don’t know if it is appropriate for me to say this, but don’t You think You’re overreacting a little bit? I mean, all we did was have some fruit. What’s the big deal?”

“The Big Deal, as you put it, My child, is that by partaking of the Fruit of Knowledge, you have acquired the ability to tell right from wrong. You are no longer the perfect innocents I intended you to be. That is why you must leave this place of perfect peace and enter the world of harsh cruelty. Now go.”

“That’s what I mean, God,” Eve cut in. “Before we ate those stupid apples, we didn’t know right from wrong from a hole in the ground, right?”

“Y-yes,” God replied hesitantly. He didn’t like where Eve seemed to be leading. Adam unclasped his hands, stood, and looked at Eve with confusion and a little fear.

“Okay, so if we didn’t know right from wrong, then we couldn’t know that doing what You told us to do was right and that not to was wrong. Therefore, I can’t see how you can hold us accountable for our actions while in such a mental state.”

Adam stage-whispered to Eve, “Eve, what are you doing? Trying to get us uncreated? He’s ticked off enough already.”

“I’m just trying to follow a line of reasoning, Adam dear. What else is there to do around here?” Eve turned away from Adam and continued. “If You think about it, God, this was pretty much inevitable given the situation. I mean, here the two of us are, all of our physical needs are taken care of. We don’t have to worry about food, or shelter, or being attacked or anything. We were bound to start sticking our noses in places they didn’t belong eventually. There’s not all that much else to do. If we had known that doing what You said was the right thing to do all the time under any circumstances, I mean really known it in our guts the way we do now, we never would have disobeyed You.

“Basically, we weren’t fit to make those sorts of decisions, and we weren’t being properly supervised. Therefore, this isn’t our fault. Therefore, I think You’re overreacting by kicking us out of Eden.”

God and Adam were struck silent. God recovered first. “Adam, go to some other area of Eden for a while. I command it. I will tell you when you may return.”

“Yes, Lord,” answered Adam, and walked off into the woods out of sight, wondering if he would ever see his beloved wife again.

The perpetually-blooming trees scattered the sun’s light over the clearing where Eve now stood alone. That light stirred, then rose off the ground to coalesce into a roughly humanoid form. Eve could look at it only with difficulty. Then the light spoke with God’s voice.

“Okay, Eve. Adam can’t hear Me now. Let’s make a deal.” Eve was unsurprised to find she was not afraid of the apparition. “You figured me out, plain and simple. I put you here knowing that someday, when you were ready to strike out on your own, you two would defy Me and eat the fruit. In doing so, your personalities would be altered so that you could live without My continual presence. Then I would force you to leave this nest somehow. I thought My being angered would work. I must have missed a decimal place somewhere.”

“What’s a decimal place?”

God waved the question away. “You’ll find out eventually. The long and the short of it is, you can’t stay here anymore. I’m tearing down this whole area first thing next week to make room for Assyria. You’ve got to be out before then.”

“I understand, God. But I don’t think Adam will. He loves it here. He’ll do what you say, but I don’t think he’ll really see Your reasons.”

God sat down on a conveniently placed boulder and stared at his feet. He sighed. “That boy’s about as smart as yak-hide full of rocks, all right. It’s what I get for using substandard materials, I suppose.” The God-apparition started. “Sorry. Talking to Myself. Occupational hazard. Anyway, that’s why I cooked up the whole forbidden fruit thing. He doesn’t need to know the real reason, just one that sounds good. Here’s what I’m offering. If you help Me get Adam out of Eden by going along with Me on this banishment deal, I’ll give you a little help developing the technology you’ll need to survive. It won’t be much, because I don’t want to upset the balances I’ve set up, but I think a little hint in the area of mathematics would be okay.”

“What’s mathematics?” Eve asked.

“It helps you figure things out by counting them. If you count them incorrectly, you figure things out wrong, and that will cause no end of problems for you and your people. I’m going to teach you an easier way to count things by grouping them together and then counting the groups. But I’ll only do it if you help Me. Do we have a deal?”

“Yes, God.”

“Okay, pay attention. Suppose you have eight people gathering fruit, and each person comes back with six fruits. . . .”

And so it came to pass that God banished Adam and Eve from Eden to live among the savage beasts that roamed the Earth. Adam and Eve ran crying and wailing ahead of God’s disembodied voice, which chased them to the edge of the Garden itself. In the last moment before they left His protection and were eternally cut off from His voice, He reminded Eve once more of what He had taught her, saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply.”