(May 22, 2014 at 11:54 pm)Godschild Wrote: All of God's punishments are just, an omniscient God could do nothing else.Omniscience would not prevent him from taking any particular action, it only means that he had all of the information he needed in order to act. Nothing stops god from doing something wicked if he chooses, aside from the willingness of others to accept his actions as "good" regardless of what he does. In that sense, his treatment of Eve is "just."
If we just take the dry facts of the case (so to speak) it is pretty simple and straightforward, IMO: Eve's sin was that she disobeyed god. Eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not 'bad' in any other sense than that god told them not to do it, and told them what the penalty would be. The Bible makes pretty clear that the most important rule is to do as god commands. Adam and Eve did not, and paid the penalty that god promised, with only moderate changes.
There are two issues with this, as I see it. Boru already covered one of them, in that without the notion of good/evil or right/wrong, Eve could not have understood the ramifications of breaking the rule given by god. Her only motivation would have been the selfish desire to avoid death, and having that concern removed by the serpent's lie, she was easy prey. The second issue I referred to in my first post, which is that the rest of humanity forever and ever would not get the same opportunity that Adam and Eve got-- they would be born in a world that had been twisted to work against them, and with bodies that had been twisted to work against them, to the degree that they could not possibly determine for themselves whether or not they deserved to continue to live.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould