Who’s Calling? On the Spiritual Terror of the Almost-True

In the early 2000s, I was a Catholic student at Franciscan University of Steubenville, taking a Principles of Biblical Study class under Dr. Scott Hahn. At the end of the semester, we were given an assignment: explain why Adam, a man with an unfallen nature, chose to sin.

I suppose we were meant to restate Hahn’s argument, where he proposed that the serpent in the garden was not a harmless snake, but something far more terrifying—more like a dragon. Hahn suggested that when the serpent said, "Surely, you will not die," it was a threat. Adam and Eve, he argued, were faced with a choice between physical death or spiritual death.

But even then, something about Hahn’s explanation didn’t sit right with me. Why would raising the stakes solve the deeper mystery—that someone without a fallen nature, without an inclination to sin, would choose to sin? Or was the real problem that even Dr. Hahn, brilliant though he was, struggled to imagine why anyone would disobey such a simple rule, and so overlooked something more profound?

I was rather flabbergasted that we were expected to tackle such a vast mystery as "Why the Fall?" with little more than our twenty-year-old minds and a post-Vatican II, pre-Catechism formation. Not that my formation was terrible—it could have been much worse—but it still felt like being thrown into the deep end.

I remember staring at the assignment, thinking, “Dr. Hahn, this is a profound mystery! I can’t simply take Dei Verbum and a few lectures and compete with your PhD-level understanding of Scripture.”

Adding to my dismay was the fact that I had tried to save money by using the NABRE bible I’d gotten for my confirmation instead of the recommended RSVCE Bible, leaving me scribbling translation notes in the margins just to keep up.

For the record, I wasn’t loyal to any one translation. I became a Bible collector, stacking up different versions and comparing them in prayer. I was that student sitting in the dorm chapel at one in the morning, surrounded by four different Bibles and a spiritual journal because I couldn't sleep.

In the end, my final essay was a polite but firm refusal: “Dr. Hahn, this is a mystery you haven’t solved—and here’s why.” He was, understandably, unimpressed. My grade reflected it.

But now, twenty years later—after prayer, reflection, and a conversion to Orthodoxy, though the seeds were already there—I want to offer a fuller answer.

One of the oldest and deepest tensions in life is our vulnerability to deception.How do we know who—or what—to trust? Some lies are easy to spot, but the most dangerous are the ones closest to the truth.

When I reflect on Genesis now, it strikes me that the serpent didn’t offer Eve an outright lie. The deception was subtler, more insidious. The serpent spoke words that ran so close to the truth that the lie was easy to swallow without realizing it.

"You will not surely die," the serpent says. And indeed, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they do not immediately drop dead.

Eve even misquotes God, saying that touching the fruit would bring death—a command God had not actually given. In a way, Eve’s slight misremembering makes the serpent’s challenge seem even more accurate.

"God knows well that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil," the serpent says.

And what happens? "Then the eyes of both of them were opened."

It seems to me that they do come to know good and evil—but their newfound knowledge brings not power, but vulnerability. Their eyes are opened, but what they see is their nakedness, their fragility. That was something even Dr. Hahn had noted: their nakedness reveals their exposure to danger, to suffering, to evil.

The outward truth of the serpent’s words leads to an inward falsehood. Beneath the half-truths lies the real lie—silent but deadly: "God is not trustworthy."

Swallowing that lie, digesting it—which is really what eating from the tree seems to represent—changes their perception. And we see that shift immediately in their reaction to God’s presence:

"When they heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden at the breezy time of day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees."

They hide. They are afraid. The ones created for communion now run from the very One who gave them life.

And isn’t that still our reaction to the problem of evil?

There must be a reason the tree is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.What is the fruit of our awareness of both good and evil? What does it mean to eat that fruit—to internalize it?

Did their perception shift because the fruit itself was poison? Or did eating it mean believing the underlying lie that corrupted their view of God?

When I first tried to read the Bible cover to cover (I made it most of the way through the Old Testament before eventually skipping ahead to the New), one thing stood out to me: Again and again, God says two things: "Where are you?" and "Do not be afraid."

Why is faith necessary for salvation? Because faith is trust. God is asking us to trust Him, even when evil darkens our vision. Faith doesn’t deny that evil exists—it persists despite it.

It seems to me that sin isn’t just what we do out of spite or rebellion. Sin happens when we look out at the world, see both good and evil—and despair. We chase after fleeting pleasures, tiny glimpses of happiness, because we fear they’re all we have left.

But every step of faith resists that original lie: The problem of evil does not mean that God has stopped loving us.

It never has.

It never will.