nygreenguy

Can you truly be free w/o the knowledge of right and wrong? If adam COULDNT know between right and wrong why is he accountable for eating the fruit? Shouldnt perfection also include listening to God? Knowing between good and evil?

nygreenguy

can you explain the contradictions?

Spitfire

God revealed him that it would be wrong to eat from that particular tree. Else, he would have had no way of knowing that it was wrong. As opposed to how he later he realized he was naked and needed to clothe himself without anyone needing to tell him afterward.

Do the laws where you live specifically say it is "wrong" to murder someone? Or do they only state that it is against the law and that you will be punished if you do it? Is it specifically written anywhere that it is wrong to break the law? Would the judge in a trial be very impressed if a murderer who had just been convicted by the jury said in his defense that he knew it was against the law to commit murder, but nobody ever told him it was actually wrong?

Anat

Spitfire, your argument isn't relevant as the laws are directed at people who (generally) have the ability to tell right from wrong. That is why small children aren't held accountable by the law and older children are held to reduced accountability. Prior to eating the fruit Adam was the equivalent of a young child who was told not to do something but had no idea why obedience was better than disobedience. Children have to explore disobedience in order to understand the value of rules and laws.

As for your hypothetical. IMO an adult who genuinely doesn't know that murder is wrong is likely to be suffering from a serious mental disorder.

Spitfire

Okay, I know this probably isn't going to make any sense to you (and a lot of people here probably don't want it to make sense anyway) but God would not have commanded Adam and Eve to do something unless they could have understood that they were indeed supposed to do as God commands. It also says in Genesis that mankind was put in the garden to keep and maintain it, indicating (to me, at least) that some sense of filial obligation and loyalty was already understood. It is possible that Adam and Eve knew and understood quite a bit without having had to learn it. They spoke a language, after all.

Along comes the serpent, who tells Eve that they won't die, and that they will be like God, knowing good and evil. From what admittedly little documentation we have, it does not seem like Eve is confused by the idea of death and dying, good, or evil. When Satan tells them that they will be as Gods, he means they will be able to know good and evil without depending on God to reveal the truth to them.

Helpmabob

Hi Jack the Bodiless - There is the suggestion that God doesn’t want Adam (His creation, whom He loves) to do this because God knows it will lead to him being harmed.It was not man’s power, but the ability to discern good from evil that bothered God - The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. [Gen3:22]This ability remains to this day, but not man’s God-like ‘power’, because neither Adam nor any man has ever had the same power as God.

Hi nygreenguy - Originally, I think Adam should have listened to God.

MJ67

I wish to direct your attention once more to the facts which are being circumvented:

There were two trees of importance- the first) imparting knowledge of good and evil which resulted in death (ignoring for now the obviously definitive "you will surely die this day" edict that did not materialize) if one ate of it.

the second- that of life, which had the power to make man live forever and be like the gods who also knew good and evil.

The obvious conclusion is: if man was created immortal, then biblical god had no need to create a tree of life. And if biblical god is omnipotent, he can just create man to be immortal without having to plant a tree, the edible produce of which grants continued life, which requires ingestion by free will-desire to feed on that which is pleasing to the palate. Further, an omnipotent god would not need to move man away from said tree of life, but rather destroy that tree, after all, that tree has not yet been ingested by any human in 5,765 years so it cannot be widespread. Conversely, if man was not created as an immortal, the whole dying aspect attributed to eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil means that man was created with a definitive lifespan making the tree of life and original sin concept redundant.

Febble

My two cents:

I think this myth addresses two key issues:

• Do we have free will?
  
• If God is all-good and all-powerful, how come evil things (like death) happen?

So it's a clever story, because it delegates to Eve the choice to choose, and makes death contingent on that choice.

As a myth, it has resonance, because it can be interpreted as meaning that our exercise of free will confers on us the ability to choose evil as well as good, and thus that our choices do indeed bring evil into the world.

But like all good myths, fables, parables, stories, once you try to impose literal chronology on to the story, the fabric falls apart. It ceases to make sense even as a story (how could Eve know it was wrong to eat the fruit until she had knowledge of right and wrong?), and makes no sense at all as history.

But it makes good sense as a myth.

Julian

Two scenarios. If we were created by god then we only have free will within the confines of the faculties with which he has endowed us. Our choices are entirely dependent upon his construction and therefore ultimately determined by him, at least within some definable range. With a god there can clearly be no true free will, only a range of choices defined by our basic creation. This is, of course, true whether or not our creation stems from god or some natural process. Because it is true in both cases one can conlcude that the existence of god is irrelevant when considering the question of free will, unless one accepts the direct intervention of god to change our minds on the fly.
The bible answes that question in Isaiah 45:7:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

There is no problem of evil once one accepts that god is not all-good which he specifically says he is not.

Julian