It is clear in the text that God, in this part of the text anyway, doen’t know what humans will do.
The motive for turfing them out of Eden isn’t to punish them for breach of his moral code, but because he’s afraid of what they might do - specifically, that given their track-record with the tree of knowledge, they might take the fruit of the tree of life also.
If I were afraid of what my kids might do with a gun, I would think long and hard about where I would store if I had to leave the house…especially if evil Uncle Stan was going to be in the same house as the kids.
More to the point, God’s not afraid that they will hurt themselves, he’s apparently afraid they will prove to be competition for him!
The analogy isn’t to kids with a gun, it is more like kids with a computer. Dad’s afraid the kids will hack his codes and take over.
Makes you wonder-what kind of father would be afraid that his kids will turn out to be his equal?
Indeed, I always get the impression that parents want their children to be an improvement on the template.
Way I read the text, the original notion of the diety in this story - before Rabinnical commentators (let alone Christians) started to retcon it - was intended as a giant ‘just so’ story, in which God comes across as neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and indeed, rather insecure and unpleasant. He’s most anxious that humans not develop conciousness - that is, the ability to understand good and evil. His anxiety apparently isn’t for the good of humans, but for himself.
So I guess it’s down to two possibilities:
That assumes the relation between god and humans is like that between parents and children. He’s our creator all right in the text, but he’s not necessarily like unto our parents. Maybe it is more like how we would react if we discovered our household appliances were gaining in conciousness on us. 
God pretty much states the same agenda in the follow-up just-so story about why folks speak so many languages after the Flood left just Noah and his family.
Very true. For fun, here’s the translation:
According to the notes, “Babel” sounds like “confused” in Hebrew. Can a Hebrew speaker confirm?
For my part, I have it in my head that it is spelled “gnosh” and always have to remind myself of the correct spelling. :smack:
The Master has addressed the question of whether the fruit was an apple: Was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple? - The Straight Dope Answer: the text doesn’t say, there’s been lots of speculation. He also addresses the “plot hole” you’re discussing:
The Hebrew is more literally “good and bad” rather than “good and evil,” and is generally (by scholars) taken to imply the third bullet.
There are three reasons that it’s unreasonable to take “knowledge of good and evil” as meaning “capacity for moral discernment.” The first is the topic here: the prohibition is meaningless if humans don’t already have that capacity. The second is why would God be opposed to humans having a moral sense? And the third is that it is clear from Genesis 3:3 that the woman knows the meaning of disobedience (i.e., is aware of that obedience is good and disobedience is evil.)
The better interpretation is that “good and bad” simply means “everything.” This happens in language (and in ancient Hebrew) fairly often, stating the two extremes to imply everything in between, like “A to Z” or “soup to nuts” or “up and down.” They do not, of course, become omniscient after eating, but they do seem to have increased intellect: the first thing that happens is that their eyes are opened and they see they are naked.
The only other appearance of the phrase “good and bad” in the Hebrew bible occurs in Deuteronomy 1:39: “… your children who do not yet know good from bad…” The context certainly implies that not knowing good from bad means not to understand anything, the context does NOT imply “having no moral sense,” but “not even knowing to keep their fingers out of the electric socket.”
God didn’t lie. He never said anything about the taste. Also, He didn’t say that the fruit would kill her. He only said 'in that day, thou shalt surely die".
In that day, she didn’t.
I think it’s a valid criticism that Christians have attempted to co-opt an old pagan story, and the results are not entirely successful. The idea that a being capable of creating an entire universe with a thought would be the least bit impressed (let alone threatened) by anything people can do is almost comical. The Tower of Babel story should probably be more like…
MEN: We are big shots because we have built this MIGHTY tower.
Chest thumping ensues.
GOD: (squinting at a marble) Wow! They’re really excited about something… can’t quite make out what it is, though… deep sigh… better make sure they’re not doing anything stupid again.
… except then you’d complain that God has poor eyesight and wonder how he can breathe in outer space.
Let’s suppose that some intelligent being has created the universe. If we have spent thousands of years trying to figure out the universe and aren’t quite there yet, then it stands to reason that we should be utterly incapable of understanding a being intelligent enough to create it out of nothing; and even our best efforts to describe the indescribable must necessarily fall short. We don’t keep studying the story of the Fall of Man because it’s perfect but because it helps us talk about one of the elemental questions of what it means to be human: why are people drawn to things that are blatantly self-destructive? (Cigarette? Well, I don’t know - what’s in it? Um, let me see… poison, poison, poison… more poison… poison, poison, poison. Yeah, I’ve got to try that!)
Of course, there are many possible answers to that question (including “there’s no real point to anything that happens - life’s a bitch, and then you die”); but the Christian answer is that God gives us free will, and sometimes we abuse it. The theory is that if we do good when we could choose to do evil, then the good we do is even better for being voluntary. I mean, there’d be nothing particularly heroic about firefighters rushing into burning buildings to save people if they were compelled to do so.
So why are you talking as if you did comprehend any of it?
It’s that “God is incomprehensible…to you” undercurrent that runs through almost every thread that touches on this subject.
And there’s nothing good about letting innocent men, women and children burn to death if said firefighters don’t do their job. What this says is that some humans are here to be tested(the firefighters, for instance)…but that others are mere props to be used and discarded(the people being burned to death). Remember Job? In that story, his family was a discardable prop-they had no say in what happened to them, no lessons to learn, no path to choose. They were “Red Shirts”.
Sorry - I didn’t mean to get preachy on you. I don’t claim that it must be so or that I can understand God (assuming he exists) better than you. I only claim that one might conclude other than that the universe is run by a malevolent and/or incompetent god and this is the best way I’ve heard it explained.
Yeah, that bothers me too:
Job was tested…
… and they all* lived happily ever after.
But maybe that’s just because we human beings can only focus on one story at a time. Maybe to God, the world is a great web of interwoven story lines, each with its own carefully spun narrative.