<<Since there never was an Eden, why bother trying to analyze it?>>

Besides that the story still speaks to many, is embedded in our culture, it is, in its raw experience, distant as my polished tooth to roast beef on my plate. Not far off at all from the nausea of my need to eat it.* Most of us work from duress, even those who think they do it willingly. We endure tedium and brutality for the right to have something in our mouths. Then, how different?

*or something.

Beside that, whether the bible stories are valid as models of understanding to us now, the idea that they might be invalidated per se is--or, should I say, I wonder if it might be--a product of our model of understanding, bound as it with our belief in progress. Whether these stories relate a model of the world that you, or I, can accept is irrelevant to their validity as a working model in their time: they did work. Or was the dawn of agriculture, of civilization, nothing but the black night of complete ignorance?