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"At that very time He rejoiced greatly in the Holy Spirit, and said, "I praise You, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight." Luk 10:21

It does sound silly to a non-believer but so did Copernicus when he said the Earth was round. While those of us on the Religion forum may have our theological differences, we will all testify that God only reveals Himself to those of contrite spirit.

"Yeah thats a great story, so eating an apple caused the entire human race to be damned for all eternity?"

Of course not. Neither Christianity nor Judaism teach any such thing.

C. S. Lewis:

"A child saying a child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not - and the modern world usually is not - if you want to go on and ask what is really happening - then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something more is not simple. Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack."

In the allegory of the Garden, the fruit of which Eve and then Adam ate was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not an apple. She did that at the prompting of the serpent (Evil) who told her that it was only forbidden out of God's jealousy of His superior knowledge, and that if she and Adam ate of it they would not die, but rather, "You shall be as gods."

The theological truth in this story is that Evil is always urging us to defy God, and that whenever we set out to do those things that only God is capable of doing, we inevitably tromp on our hooters.

If you want to say there warn't no Adam nor no Eve, and there warn't no snake nor no tree, nor even no garden, that's pretty much okay with me. Nothing important is changed by that. The story serves to communicate the theological truth.

In closing, a bit more C. S. Lewis:

"Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.

"It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match - all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.

"Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies - these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either."