Life is a never ending series of “could have been”s. The same goes for the world. At any and every point in eternity, things could have gone differently. Where would we be then? Not here, I can certainly tell you that much.
This holds true for all versions of history: scientific fact (the Big Bang) and religious beliefs concerning creation and such. The main story, the one quite a few religions agree on, is Genesis. This belief states that the world was created, then came Adam and Eve. They, as the first humans, lived in Paradise until Eve succumbed to the temptation of that apple, and paradise was lost. That, however, now begs the question, what if? What if the apple had remained uneaten? Would we live in a paradise, a utopia, so to speak? What, exactly, did we lose?
Honestly, I don’t think we lost much at all. If anything, I think our greed, our sins, freed us. Instead of being trapped in paradise, forever perfect with no chance to make mistakes and therefore learn, we were released on the world. The world, a place full of endless possibility that we had, and still have, the potential to discover. We were no longer mindlessly languishing in a “Paradise” that wasn’t even of our creation. We were, and are, free to create, destroy, invent, dream, hope, believe…
A paradise runs into the same fundamental problem of utopia; not everyone’s got the same idea of perfection. Everyone must have their free will and essentially their ‘self’ stripped before a Utopia can exist. An imperfect world, on the other hand, leaves everyone partially satisfied, and offers a goal: the nice, if unrealistic, idea of a Utopian Society.
You see, Necessity is the mother of invention. Deficits leads to desire, and this will spark any intelligent and inquisitive mind to begin to create.
So yes, we lost utopia. On the other hand, though, we gained freedom and a chance to expand ourselves. In paradise, all needs were satisfied and there was no reason for that awfully greedy but awfully fruitful and singularly human desire that whispers, “but I want more!” Greed makes us want. Envy gives us a desire to improve. Pride gives us something to work for. Lust and gluttony give us goals to attain, and sloth shows us what not to be, a state of man at his worst.
So maybe we’ve all got it wrong. Sure, Paradise was lost, but paradise wasn’t. When Eve ate that one apple, the forbidden fruit, all that was ensured was that paradise, a place where improvement and success and true life was possible, was upheld.