The Incoherence of Knowingly Eating from the Tree of Knowledge for the First Time
To most sensible people, the story of Adam and Eve is symbolic at most. But to a lot of other people, it records a real event. However, even taken symbolically, there are some glaring logical hole. I was recently on the Naked Diner podcast and mentioned this one, which I'm sure many of you will know about, but here goes anyway.
Adam and Eve were punished, and it seems they were punished for eating from the Tree of Knowledge when explicitly told not to.
As Genesis 2 states:
9 Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil....
15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
The awkward part to this story is that, as we can see, they are told not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. This was a moral command and breaking it would be morally bad. One supposes that, in order to break this command, one must know they are doing wrong, or otherwise this is not wrong per se, and any punishment is unwarranted.
They have, Adam and Eve, as of yet, not partaken in such fruit. They have no knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, any proclamation that is moral by nature will not be understood or known to be moral by this pair.
They are tempted by the serpent. But, again, they have no notion of good and evil, and so the idea of temptation (whereby to give into it is morally deficient, and the action they are giving into is also morally deficient) should have no moral value to them.
The two components that make up the moral evaluation here are invalid in terms of Adam and Eve since they have no knowledge of this. It's like having a rule that anyone who sits on a particular bench should be punched in the face for sacrilege against the bench, and then punching two people who sit down on it, but finding out they had only heard the rule in a language they didn't understand.
Now, if the Fall is the reason we are all getting punished, with suffering and sin and whatnot, then there is an added foundation of total incoherence to be added to the grounding of such a terrible scenario.
Or, it's really evil to read a book called the Book of Evil, but you can only find out it is evil to do so by reading the book in the first place!
Bonkers.