The story of Faust is about the dangers of knowledge and technology. If you know too much, you will eventually lose your soul.
As this book review explains, with the enlightenment and industrial revolution, this fear of knowledge receded. But the myth is still there.
For example, take the "Terminator" movies. They're about the dangers of technology: what if we create machines that are intelligent enough to turn on their creators and seek to destroy them? There is a parallel between gaining forbidden knowledge and making artificial creatures. Today, we are afraid that corporations and governments will use our inventions to control us, but I think that fear has an echo of the old myth that it is dangerous
to learn forbidden knowledge, or create artificial life, because that would be entering the realm once reserved for the Almighty.
It's also about making deals with entities smarter than you are. Essentially the same thing can be found in Science Fiction (e.g. Culture Minds):
> Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward [0]
In classic Fantasy, it's dragons who take the same role, manipulating and deceiving mortals into doing bad things (e.g Tolkein's dragons, based on the old Norse traditions of dragons being sly and deceptive [1]).
And of course, the Djinn's classic Three Wishes is all about being careful what you wish for. The Djinn does exactly what the wisher wishes for, but if there's any way of manipulating it for evil, they will.
We now have AI and tech, so it's natural that we start telling these same stories about our smarter-than-us entities. I don't think the Terminator gets into this kind of story; it's more as you say about our children being a danger to us (but then the Greek creation myths are all about that, too).
It's crazy to think that one of the oldest religious stories, the whole Adam and Eve don't eat from the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge, actually has a coincidence (...I mean, I believe it was a coincidence) in our past diet
I don't believe pre-human primates somehow passed that story down or anything but old stories always make me curious into their origins. Sometimes cool and interesting stuff comes up when you do
> the whole Adam and Eve don't eat from the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge
knowledge of good and evil
It's so odd how often nuance from the bible is lost. Just like people say "money is the root of all evil" when the quote is actually " the love of money is the root of all evil.
These are actually important distinctions. From a literary perspective, knowledge didn't cause the downfall of Adam and Eve, it was awareness of morality that did.
Money is just a tool, but love of money is a motivation that leads to evil actions.
This translation shouldn't necessarily be taken to mean solely awareness of morality. The knowledge of good and evil, being opposites, would in fact include the knowledge of everything. It's a literary device, like the phrases day and night or heaven and earth.
Fruit is great, as described. Knowing fruit is great is of course adaptive and this receives selective presure. Most life forms naturally seek out the things that they need to survive. Intelligent beings will use their intelligence to seek out such things, and will understand their value.
And not just fruit - getting ability to metabolize alcohol, ie. to efficiently consume those ripe fruits lying around under the tree seems to be that jump start in the brain development, walking up-right, etc. And the alcohol produces that artificial feeling of empowerment and freedom (which are basically top temptations by the devil). Btw, in Russia alcohol has evil image of the "green serpent" (after the biblical Serpent, and the Soviet propaganda used all that religious imagery - a 1962 cartoon where moonshine distillator is ran by a Witch and a Daemon and it morphs into the Serpent, and there is also a Faust's Mefistofele signing the famous solo of the opera
I've been told the whole Genesis narrative was essentially political propaganda based on the Babylonian creation account in the Enuma Elish and written during the Babylonian exile.
I don't know how accurate that is but they do share similarities and given the relative cultural influence of Babylon I wouldn't doubt some influence was there.
Those are basically two different theories to account for the similarities. The one where the hebrews picked up the myth during captivity in babylon is mostly out of favor currently though it has some reputable proponents.
"Political propaganda" isn't quite how I would put it but yes a slightly more main stream theory is that genesis is an intentional reconfiguration of a myth that would have been widely known in the region, for the purpose of repudiating the mesopotamian religion in favor of the hebrew one.
Either way, or both, or neither, the story was "in the air" in the eastern mediterranean/west asia at that time. It was widely known and incredibly influential, and bits of it turn up in basically all significant literature with its roots in that place & era. Scholars go back and forth on the archeological and linguistic evidence but it's fairly commonly held that they are all simply a mesh of mutually-influenced variants of an even earlier myth that was lost or never recorded in its "original" form.
> what if we create machines that are intelligent enough to turn on their creators and seek to destroy them?
I disagree with this - it's about creating machines that are powerful enough to turn on their creators. Battlestar Galactica is more about intelligence/superiority IMO (as well as powerful).
We already have no shortage of machines powerful enough to turn on us. A steel rake lying hidden in the grass for example. Everyone knows the apparent danger with these things, yet this tool has managed to infect our very ethos to the point where its potentially operator-harming design has remained unchallenged for 100 years, perhaps longer. I trust there will still be people getting smacked in the face with rakes in 100 and 1000 years from now at this rate.
As this book review explains, with the enlightenment and industrial revolution, this fear of knowledge receded. But the myth is still there.
For example, take the "Terminator" movies. They're about the dangers of technology: what if we create machines that are intelligent enough to turn on their creators and seek to destroy them? There is a parallel between gaining forbidden knowledge and making artificial creatures. Today, we are afraid that corporations and governments will use our inventions to control us, but I think that fear has an echo of the old myth that it is dangerous to learn forbidden knowledge, or create artificial life, because that would be entering the realm once reserved for the Almighty.