How were Adam & Eve supposed to know it was wrong to eat the fruit?

Great Debates
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[QUOTE=kelly5078]
The main problem with incest is that genetic imperfections get reinforced. Presumably, having been made by God, Adam and Eve were genetically perfect, and there wouldn’t have been much opportunity for problems to creep into the first several generations. So, no problem with incest.

I’m am so totally making this baloney up. I think I’m ready to start my own religion.
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Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
“In-story,” I think we can say that humans weren’t created to live in the Garden forever. We were created to till the earth, to cultivate it and care for it (Gen 2:5, 1:26-28, 2:15, 3:23). Eden, I think, was our nursery, to prepare us to encounter the rest of creation and to be truly “like God” in having dominion over it, caring for it, and shaping it.

But we weren’t ready. We were newly created, like children. We had to mature. And part of that was learning boundaries, learning slowly for ourselves good and evil. The tree was there for us to eat of when we were ready, and it was there to teach us obedience and through obedience right and wrong until we were ready.

But the plan backfired. We disobeyed, and like children who encountered violence and sex to early (or rather were taught them by a mischievous older brother, the snake) we grew up too fast. It suddenly no longer made sense to keep us in the nursery; we had seen all that the garden was meant to shelter us from. We were, for better or worse, cast out into the world, too mature and headstrong to be kept at home, but not experienced enough to find our way. And like a problem child grown to adulthood, we’ve been struggling and rebelling and fucking up ever since, unable to forgive ourselves or accept our father’s forgiveness and help.
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Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Seriously, the whole “Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden” was a put-up job from the very beginning, a Rube Goldberg contraption put together by some imaginative eight year old on a snow day. The moral that is taught in the Christian religions is that you shouldn’t question the words and commandments of your elders, which makes for a neat parable favoring dogmatic servitude but creates a conflict between what you ought to do for yourself and what you’ve been directed to do by authority.

Adam and Eve were patsies. They never had a chance. And poor Lillith…

Stranger

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[QUOTE=ITR champion]
But how was God supposed to know about human nature before there were humans? In the creation story, he creates plants before humans. (In the other creation story, of course, the human preceed the plants.) Remember that the first chapter of Genesis has many statements of the form “God created _____________, and He saw that it was good.” Never does God know what’s going to be good before he creates it.

So the situation is thus. God is all-seeing; He can see everything that exists. God is all-knowing; He can correctly assess whether or not the things he sees are good. But he’s not a great abstract thinker. He can’t judge things before they exist. So the creation of light, for example, was a risk. Light might have been good or it might have been bad. God couldn’t see that it was good until after it was created.

So despite being all-seeing and all-knowing, God had no way of knowing at the start that human nature would lead the humans to eat the one forbidden item.
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God is supposed to be both omniscient and omnipotent. It’s impossible for him not to know something and saying he couldn’t know the “nature” of something before he created it is belied by the fact that he’s the one creating it. How can he not know what he’s creating?

43

When hearing the word “create”, you might think about God grabbing a lump of clay and shaping it into the universe, in which case God could certainly know what effect his physical action will have on the clay. But what Genesis actually says is that he created by speaking. God said, “Let there be Light.” God said, “Let the water teem with abundant creatures.” And so forth.

So speaking was the key. The stuff at the time of creation was endowed with some sort of responsive force that reacted when God spoke. But we’re not told how precise the process was. Consider, as an analogy, a master and a dog. The master can give basic commands: sit, roll over, play dead, and so forth. The dog responds in a general pattern to each command. But there’s no way for the master to precisely determine every motion that the dog makes.

(The business of God creating by speaking is also viewed by many as a parable about the power of words. We use words carelessly there days.)

44

As far as it goes, I believe the following with reference to the story: assuming it’s factually accurate (it may or may not be metaphorical or cut down from actual events), God knew that Adam and Eve would disobey him. He allowed them to do so: the nature of the sin was largely irrelevant, and the temptation would have happened sooner or later, because He (again, knowing how much pain and anguish it would cause), allowed His formerly-favored child/angel/servant (Satan) his rampage.

To specify: God’s anguish and pain are what chiefly concern me. He allowed us a fair and free choice (not even drowning out the sinful voices; He made His argument) at a great cost to Himself. He has lived with the consequences ever since.

I believe that the reason for this is that He Himself (that is, Goodness) creates a limited scenario. God’s power is not limited, His love is not limited, His mind is not limited. But, by definition, His will is limited. As a good being (let alone Goodness itself), He must be willing to respect other’s boundaries, even though it costs Him.

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[QUOTE=ITR champion]
… Consider, as an analogy, a master and a dog. The master can give basic commands: sit, roll over, play dead, and so forth. The dog responds in a general pattern to each command. But there’s no way for the master to precisely determine every motion that the dog makes.
…
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If the master is omniscient and omnipotent there is.

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[QUOTE=ITR champion]
(The business of God creating by speaking is also viewed by many as a parable about the power of words. We use words carelessly there days.)
[/QUOTE]
I’ve actually never heard of this opinon. I’m not sure I need the newsletter though.

I think you could shorten this discussion by, if your position is that the God in the Genesis story is not omnipotent or omniscient, then simply saying so. I don’t recall anything in the story itself stating that he was.

(Note that he has to be lacking both properties for this to work. If omnipotent, he could make A&E without flaw. If omniscient, he would know before creating them how they would turn out.)

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[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Why did he punish the snake?
[/QUOTE]

Because it committed the sin of enticing Eve to disobey God.

There is an interesting, albeit long, audio lecture on this very question at the Orthodox Union website
Why was the snake punished? (scroll to middle)

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[QUOTE=ITR champion]
But what Genesis actually says is that he created by speaking. God said, “Let there be Light.”
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How did he know what the word light meant?

49

[QUOTE=xtisme]

Right. Now…anyone who has had children should be able to follow this. If you put some kids in a room with a whole bunch of toys and say to them that they can play with all the toys in the room except for this one shinny fire engine here, and then walk out…whats going to happen? Human nature and all that…and supposedly this came as a surprise to an all seeing, all knowing God? :smack:

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True - but I doubt you sentence your kids to death because of it, or kick them out of the house.

No doubt - after all he put the serpent in there in the first place. On the other hand, if he wanted them to grow up and be mortal, he could have made them that way in the first place, not set them up and then say it was their fault. And do nasty things to their descendants , as Christians believe.

Really, the story makes a lot more sense when viewed as explaining why this wonderful god created us, but we die, have to work, and live in pain. The story says it’s not his fault, it’s all Adam and Eve’s fault.

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I am with Apos and ITR Champion (with a strong nod to Alan Smithee. It seems clear that for the Jews, this was story – Haggadah? Halacha? what’s thje right term? – something told, not for an intrinsic factual value, but as a vivid way of conveying an understanding of an anthropological concept. This is how humans behave; this is how we got from God’s perfect creation to where we are now. I’d argue strongly that nobody ever thought it to be factual chronicle before Christianity. It’s much like any number of Talmudic stories illustrating a point, or one of Jesus’s parables.

And the key point is that, just as every child moves from a state of innocence to a knowledge of good and evil, at some emotional cost, that’s what humanity as a whole did.

Under the four-source hypothesis, it was several hundred years after this story was told that it got folded into the creation story and the genealogical frame story that links A&E, Noah, and Abraham & descendants.

Beyond which, every parent knows the very painful fact that, warn as you might, there comes a time when you have to let your kids go and make their mistakes and learn from them. You can’t keep them in a safe garden forever; you have to let them take those risks. The tree was necessary in order that A&E could truly choose to do what God commands – if it’s “do whatever you like” with no exceptions, there’s no moral choice present. To really give them free will, there has to be a prohibition that they can honor or break.

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Yep. If you try to make it into doctrine (like trying to strong-arm the claim that it explains original sin) it doesn’t really work. If the story is just read, then, it’s basically just a tale of how humans are curious and disobedient of god’s commands, which gets them into trouble.

Remember, for the early Jews, these stories seem to have been first and foremost INSTRUCTIVE: they were supposed to reflect timeless and insightful core elements of the human condition and how it relates to relating to God. There is also a lot of circumstantial evidence that the exact form of the story is less important than the overall mythical theme, because the actual story in the Bible is really only the latest incarnation of a “paradise lost” sort of story found in even older cultures from the same region, just like the flood story. It almost certainly isn’t the details that mattered to the people for whom this story was important, it’s the overall narrative of “isn’t it sad how innocence are shattered by curiosity and disobedience, which leads to both knowledge but also punishment and the loss of innocence.”

52

Snake = true God
Lord God = phony pretend God (tinhorn dictator God)
eating the fruit = see good vs evil for themselves = good
It’s true, you know it is. Well, in the metaphorical - archetypcal - symbolic sense, rather than the Biblical literalist sense.

“Ye shall not surely die; For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”, saith the scaly one.

And Eve hears out the snake, munches the thing, gets Adam to join in, and God goes apeshit, pitches quite the authoritarian temper tantrum, then admits, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil. Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.

In such knowledge, the acquiring of which requires disobedience, comes the lack of any need to obey because from then on they can discern good from evil without blind obedience.

And who or what, if not the incarnation of that which is truly evil in our world, stands in the way of that process and wishes the blind obedience instead?

53

hmmm… newly created man/woman hear voice of god telling them not to eat fruit… then they hear another voice saying its ok to eat the fruit…

Why didn’t God just keep the serpent from speaking? How would he expect these 2 folks (who have very little experience with unseen voices, no rules not to listen to second voice) to figure the second voice was ‘lying’ (had the lie even been invented yet?) and not just giving updated instructions?

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[QUOTE=sciurophobic]
Because it committed the sin of enticing Eve to disobey God.
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But animals can’t sin.

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As a quick aside because I have seen it tossed about in a few threads above…

Did God put the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden? Did Satan?

Did God put/let Satan there? Or did Satan sneak in?

If God is omniscient and omnipotent why didn’t God see/prevent Satan from doing his thing there?

Unless this whole thing played out according to God’s plan it simply makes no sense…even as a story it is filled with plot holes.

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The serpent wasn’t Satan. It was just a talking snake.

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The answer is easy… the bible is a bunch of bullshit!

No, really, it is,… this is not an attempt at humor. The bible and all religions are bullshit. So please stop all those threads that go something like “Could GOD move a rock bigger than himself?” Please please please!

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[QUOTE=soapopera]
The answer is easy… the bible is a bunch of bullshit!

No, really, it is,… this is not an attempt at humor. The bible and all religions are bullshit. So please stop all those threads that go something like “Could GOD move a rock bigger than himself?” Please please please!
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It is both rude, and idiotic, to join a discussion of a topic just to say that the topic is meaningless. Furthermore, discussion of reliqious concepts has a long history both in the SD message boards, and the Straight Dope column. Threads on religious debate in GD are prolific at any given time, and I cannot concieve of why you would visit a message board that regularly talks about something that bugs you so much, and then proceed to post in one of the discussions to that effect.

If you intend to continue coming to this site, please try to be more rational about such things. Don’t go into Cafe Society and comment about how all those threads discussing entertainment are a waste of time.

Furthermore, you didn’t even get the challenge right, you clod. Of course God could make a rock bigger than himself if he was omnipotent and had a physical size. The challenge is “If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock that is too heavy for him to move?”

59

Also, on topic,

I pretty much have held a belief akin to Alan Smithee’s for some time, and enjoyed his very articulate expression of it.

The answer to the OP has already been pretty well-stated; as outlined in the text, they did seem to understand that they should obey God (if not the morality behind it), and he explicitly told them not to eat the fruit (from the tree of knowledge). Furthermore, the knowing good and evil/right and wrong stuff was probably not meant to be taken so literally, given the use of poetry, metaphor, and symbolism common to the bible, and indeed many other religious and legendary writings of times gone by.

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[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
But animals can’t sin.
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They also don’t talk. Come on, it’s a freaking story, cobbled together from earlier stories by people who placed teaching a moral lesson above narrative consistency.