Cris,
Cris said:
That cannot be true; otherwise what is the point of the tree that gave that knowledge.
We don't know, but it likely had a specific purpose to be revealed when the time was ripe (pun alert!). Since it is described as a tree like all the others, an agricultural perspective might not be unwarranted:
Lev. 19:23 "'When you enter the land and plant any kind of fruit tree, regard its fruit as forbidden. For three years you are to consider it forbidden; it must not be eaten. In the fourth year all its fruit will be holy, an offering of praise to the LORD. But in the fifth year you may eat its fruit. In this way your harvest will be increased. I am the LORD your God.
Maybe God wanted to wait until Adam & Eve were ready, or until the tree was ready, but either way, the tree was God's property, while the rest of Eden was Adam & Eve's to enjoy (Gen. 2:16). God's garden, God's conditions - but they weren't
forced to obey Him.
Yes precisely, without the knowledge to distinguish between good and evil all our decisions would be strange. We take it for granted but A&E didn’t have that knowledge BEFORE that ate from the tree.
But if you take something for granted that is unwarranted by the text, you should expect to arrive at stange conclusions. The tree represented knowledge
of good and evil, not knowledge of
distinguishing between good and evil. Consider how distinction works: you weigh the alternatives, and come up with a
conclusion: good or bad. Before then, it's simply raw data. If Adam and Eve lacked the knowledge to discern, God would supply it in the form of a conclusion (such as "you shall surely die"). Satan's temptation consisted out of presented an alternative conclusion. By listening to him and rejecting God's moral authority, Adam and Eve became their
own judges of morality, and therefore had to start bearing the responsibility for wrong decisions.
An interesting Jewish interpretation is that "the tree did not give us moral awareness when we had none before, but transformed this awareness from one kind into another" (R. David Fohrman). "After eating from the tree, humanity's innate sense of moral awareness was transformed from concepts of true and false to concepts of good and evil."
Either way, there is no indication of it being an unfair "setup" in the text, and an attempt to load it with such an interpretation would need substantiation
from the text. If we're not trying to understand what the author intended to convey, we might as well not bother reading it at all.
Right, so now we do have the knowledge and we should be held responsible for our actions, but A&E didn’t have that knowledge BEFORE they ate and thus cannot be held responsible for disobeying since they would not have known it was wrong.
But they
did have the knowledge - God gave it to them. They were responsible for what God gave them, that's all. Even the assumption that they needed to come to the same conclusion independently, already casts doubt on God's motives - and that's when temptation gets a hold. If anything, this wasn't a test of their knowledge, but of their responsibility. If they couldn't be responsible for one instance of right vs. wrong (do vs. don't), how would they handle other moral decisions, especially the ones that had to rely on God's perspective?
I would argue that moral behaviour doesn't start with knowing the difference between right and wrong, but in actually applying the knowledge that you do have.
