(May 7, 2015 at 3:29 pm)RobbyPants Wrote: I like RPGs (the games, although rocket launchers are cool, too), and one thing I've learned to pay attention to in them is iterative probability. In these games, each challenge you face has a non-zero chance of killing your character. Of course, even if this chance is pretty small, it means that the more challenges you face, the more likely it is your character dies. This is just a fundamental truth of statistics. You cannot get around that without reducing the chance to precisely zero. Otherwise, you have to hope it's low enough that you survive the campaign, hope you get lucky, or be blindly ignorant of how these things work.
Now, apply that to the Garden of Eden.
Genesis posits a physical place where Adam and Eve can hang around doing, presumably anything they want, so long as they don't eat from one tree. Now, I cannot fathom any reason why God needed to put that tree there in the first place. Some may say that God needed to test humanity (why?). Now, if that's the case, the only reason for a test is if there's a chance for failure. If humanity was supposed to stay in the garden, as time went on, the likelihood that someone would eat form that tree would approach near certainty. That's just how these things work.
What did God think was going to happen!?
I mean obviously, this is just one more point showing the absurdity of the myth, but how do apologists reconcile this? They blame free will for all of mankind's faults and refuse to make God culpable for making faulty humans. This situation was engineered by someone who wanted humans to fail or by someone who is woefully inept. That's it. There's no magical third option.
Don't overlook the detail about the Garden of Eden being down the road from Assyria, Arabia, Ethiopia, and Persia. In addition the king of Tyre was said to have live in the Garden of Eden until he ticked off the emperor for collaborating with the enemy.
The Garden of Eden story is intended to show the effects of violating the First Commandment as described in Exodus 34:10-17.
