I am wondering what sort of response I might get to asking some statistically-significant sampling of humanity whether or not the story of "the Beginning" to "the Flood" in Genesis explains why we are in the moral condition that characterizes us. I might expect that many people would simply discount Genesis, and that many others would treat it lightly, but I would expect as well that--among "believers"--the thrust of an affirmative estimation of Genesis would include the notion that "of course" the first chapters of the Bible explain "why" we are in such moral condition as we are.
Of course, I am going to say that Genesis does not explain the "why's" of our moral condition.
Genesis does not say why we were created--or, really, why anything was created (if the matter of God's sovereign will alone is what concerns us.) Genesis does not say why Creation in general was started--it was simply started. We can say that God created the light that was "good" so that he might ascertain whether or not it was good, but it can scarcely be posited that we are told as much because the matter was ever in doubt--or that we are being invited to bestow our affirmation on God for doing what God set out to do.
We can say that we are being told "why" God made the firmament ("to divide the waters from the waters"), but we are not being told why God made the water-firmament-water assemblage in the first place. We are told that God made "lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night . . . . and to divide the light from the darkness." This seems at last to be a description of an instance of "why" some things were created, including the function of the "lights"--"the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night"--though their described function "to divide the light from the darkness" would seem to be rather redundant, since God himself had "divided the light from the darkness" three days earlier.
Clearly, the descriptions of Creation's progress are meant to be evocative rather than explanatory. The notion that Genesis "explains" humanity's moral state folds in upon itself as we examine the text. For example, the moral framework of a purported "why" of our species' role in Creation ("have dominion . . . over all the earth") would seem to describe a "purpose" for humanity, but this dominion-role would not be necessary if Adam and Eve had behaved aright. We were created--if our conscientious application of human logic has anything to say about it--not to rule over Creation, but to preserve a state in which Creation did not need to be ruled.
And--in a manner which defies clean explanation (as often we will see)--God does not even tell the humans and the animals that the plants were made for their sustenance. Rather, the creeping and walking and flying creatures are told that the plants and their fruit are being given to them. Already, a less-than-exalted (if not outright shameful) looming of creature's appetites over the rest of Creation is being illustrated.
And then, as if to cap off the whole matter in the (first) story of Creation, we are told that God rested after the first six days of activity. Let it not be said, of course, that God rested "because" he had done work--work that is really not done for any humanly-appreciable "why's." In its most childish renditions (renditions that are, incidentally, forced all too often on children), Genesis is treated as a collection of "Just So" stories. The predominant puerile constructions of God's intent in Genesis would be bad enough in themselves, but they are most pernicious in that they seem merely to be lacking in form, when really they are lacking in veracity. The Creation Story does not answer questions about "Why?", yet its verses are treated by conventional Christianity so that its instances of descriptions are as miniscule bricks swamped in a seeping mortar of injected moral pontifications.
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