I'm in the middle of a Facebook discussion between me and two Christian guys from my former church. It's been real fun so far hearing from both of them, and with one of them we're currently on the topic of Adam & Eve. Basically, I said that I don't understand why God created A&E without the knowledge of good and evil from the beginning. His answer had in it these propositions:
p: A&E ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil
q: A&E are given free will
r: free will is the ability to choose between good and evil
So his actual answer doesn't matter, because just from what he's already assumed we can come to the conclusion that God is evil.
Since he basically said that since not p, it means that A&E don't know what good and evil are just yet, but q i.e. they have free will. Put q and r together and we can see that free will entails that the being(s) must therefore have knowledge of good and evil, otherwise how do they freely go about choosing between good and evil? There's a contradiction in the narrative.
I say God is evil because I proposed to him that the only way to salvage the majority of the narrative is to assume that A&E were simply amoral before eating from the tree. This is the only logical solution because otherwise the tree is redundant if they were made with knowledge of good and evil from the beginning. But if they were amoral, then God punishing the beings he created to be incompetent in a situation he planted them in is just about the definition of a malicious being seeking to do harm. Therefore, if we must take Genesis literally, then I propose that we have no choice but to then admit God is not omnibenevolent, not even benevolent, but outright evil for creating beings that would by default be incompetent relative to the situation he arranged.
p: A&E ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil
q: A&E are given free will
r: free will is the ability to choose between good and evil
So his actual answer doesn't matter, because just from what he's already assumed we can come to the conclusion that God is evil.
Since he basically said that since not p, it means that A&E don't know what good and evil are just yet, but q i.e. they have free will. Put q and r together and we can see that free will entails that the being(s) must therefore have knowledge of good and evil, otherwise how do they freely go about choosing between good and evil? There's a contradiction in the narrative.
I say God is evil because I proposed to him that the only way to salvage the majority of the narrative is to assume that A&E were simply amoral before eating from the tree. This is the only logical solution because otherwise the tree is redundant if they were made with knowledge of good and evil from the beginning. But if they were amoral, then God punishing the beings he created to be incompetent in a situation he planted them in is just about the definition of a malicious being seeking to do harm. Therefore, if we must take Genesis literally, then I propose that we have no choice but to then admit God is not omnibenevolent, not even benevolent, but outright evil for creating beings that would by default be incompetent relative to the situation he arranged.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" ~ Aristotle
