What was the point of God giving Adam and Eve free will without the ability to know good from evil?
>To test their obedience
How would they have known? Isn't it like putting a bone before a dog and instructing it to abstain from chewing? If they were innocent, how would they have known the difference? Sorry for my lack of theological knowledge, or any knowledge for that matter.
What was the point of God giving Adam and Eve free will without the ability to know good from evil?
Noah Ward
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Jason Wilson
It wasn't a test. God made Adam and Eve as laborers to take care of his garden, and just told them not to eat from his cool trees because it would cause problems, but they disobeyed. That's it. There's no moral to the story.
Read the Sumerian Genesis documents if you want something closer to the original spirit of the tale.
Daniel Sanders
to paraphrase zizek, the best functioning ideology is invisible
remember the bible is just stories you tell your kids to get them to behave
David Kelly
So how would He really have loved them as his children then? Why give them the freedom of choice at all in the first place?
Xavier Evans
The whole debate about free will and all that is without the shred of a doubt a later reading into the story.
Remember that God throws them out before they eat from the tree of life because otherwise they'd become immortal.
All these dumb allegories Paul and later christians read into it are not defensible from the text while the actual content of the text gets ignored.
Leo Myers
So humanity always been stupid, not eating from the tree that makes them immortal first?
Dylan Williams
>God wants man to have free will
>But if man doesn't do exactly what God wants, an eternity of torture awaits
Is God retarded or just an asshole?
Samuel Reyes
God has given man free will as a challenge to abstain from sinning. God is also omniscient so he knows exactly what humanity will do. His purpose for our creation isn't understood to us since he has multiple other ones that worship him unconditionally. However our reason for existence is clarified as abstaining from sins to gain his pleasure and enter Paradise.
Alexander Smith
To use a metaphor, if all creation is a word, then anything that is unsaid by that word (but could have been said), is evil. Therefore, God himself cannot truly consider evil.
Thus he made beings who CAN choose evil, to gain new insights that can improve creation.
>inb4 all-powerful paradoxes
read up on gnosticism you shits.
>Sumerian Genesis
Yeah, it's an interesting read.
ancient-origins.net
Much about the Sumerians is, actually.
Austin Smith
But with the other choice being perdition, wouldn't any other sane being abstain from sinning not out of the love for Him, but fear? If one exerts his freedom to choose the contrary and be persecuted for such, isn't this freedom a mere phantasm? In that case, I do not see how the system God has created is different from an authoritarian state where all liberties are only nominal, since there is only one correct path, or am I wrong to assume that man is more than just an entity of obedience?