A Literal Genesis Entails An Evil God

[Tonus]

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.

I find it an interesting point, not because of the placing of the tree or the lack of morality on Adam and Eve's part, but because of the introduction of the serpent.

Imagine that god creates the garden of Eden, places Adam and Eve in the garden, and tells them that only one thing is off-limits: the fruit of one particular tree. It may not matter that Adam and Eve don't know right from wrong; simple fear and/or empathy may have been sufficient, in that they did not want to take an action that their creator had forbid them. And if we assume that the garden was large and well-stocked with everything they needed, there wasn't any temptation from the existence of this particular tree. So it could be an experiment of sorts-- was there any flaw in humanity which would lead them to disobey under those circumstances?

But he introduces the serpent into the picture. And the serpent tells Eve that she has something to gain and nothing to lose by eating of the fruit. Without a moral center and without the understanding that she was being lied to, eating the fruit suddenly seemed like an attractive option. There doesn't seem to be a way that she couldn't have failed this "test" because she was practically wired to fail it. And thus, everything that followed was indeed god's plan. He didn't grant humanity a conscience until it was too late to prevent the action that would reverberate for the next six thousand years.