(November 2, 2017 at 10:10 pm)SteveII Wrote: It seems implicit in your question 1 that God was surprised by the fall. He was not. His purpose did not change because he always knew it would happen. Why in the world do you imagine that "starting over" would produce different results? Without perfect knowledge, free will will always result in sin eventually.
So when God told Adam and Eve not to touch the tree he was being a manipulative asshole because he knew they'd do it anyway, perhaps partly because of his own disingenuous reverse-psychology. Noted.