Imagine if there had been smartphones in the garden of Eden. The temptation of Adam and Eve might have gone something like this.

Adam and Eve are walking in the garden, but they’re not talking. They’re looking at their phones. Now in their defense, they don’t have any pockets to put them in, so what else are they going to do? The social circle is kind of small at this point, being only themselves, God, and Satan. In this reality, Satan was too lazy to bother possessing a snake, so he invented Facebook. That way, he could do his temptation from the warm comfort of his home. You’d think online porn would have been first, but in a world where everyone was already naked, it didn’t have the same appeal.

As Eve is strolling along, her phone tells Facebook that she’s near the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The algorithm makes sure that she reads the post from God that says, “From any tree of the garden you may surely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat from it; for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) That would be a good thing, except that under the post there’s a button that says, “Missing Context.” Already thoroughly habituated to accepting anything she reads online, she taps the button and finds this, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (genesis 3:4-5) And so it begins.