I Need to Know -- Breanna Poole

 The thing that stuck out to me the most in this reading, was the conversation between Raphael and Adam about the plants and stars. Raphael explains that it does not matter if the Earth revolves around the sun or vice versa, because in the end humans are not meant to have the answers to everything. Instead, Adam should focus on what he already knows and being content with it, as man was not meant to know and understand all of God's creation as they are not God but rather one of the creations. 

I think this is interesting, as it serves as a warning to both the reader and to Adam. We know what will happen, that Adam and Eve will become greedy for knowledge and eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their is nothing that can stop that eventuality from happening, and it is interesting to me that Adam reveals that he already had the foreknowledge of the animal's names and that he was aware when Eve was created despite being asleep. I had never considered that Adam might have named the animals with foreknowledge rather than just naming them as he came across them, as it is never explained in the Bible how he came  up with these names. 

As a warning to the reader, I can't help but think it works for the both the time period in which Milton was writing and the modern day in which we are reading it. In Milton's time, their was large contention about if scientific thought was going to be the end of Christian civilization, and this reads as a warning to the audience of the time to not become too lost in their search that they fail to see the daily spiritual matters that need their attention. I think it applies to us today as we often look for scientific reasoning that perhaps we don't need, as we don't need to know everything in order to exist in a world created by God. 

p.s. I commented on Bryaln and Isabelle's posts.