Adam and Eve... Set up?

Alright sorry for the stupid name. This is my first post and just wanted to see what you guys think.
Alright I was sitting in my Philosophy class when the subject about god being all knowing came up and I thought of something.

God created Adam and Eve to an exact specification. He knew everything there was: their traits, personalities, thoughts, and so forth. Then he goes to them and said, “You may eat everything in this garden except for the apples in that tree.” Now Adam and Eve had no knowledge of suffering, anger and what not; they had the minds of children. What do children always do when you tell them not to do something? They’ll probably do it.

Now if God is all knowing how could he have not known that they would eat the apple? Even more so if he created them and gave them the gift of curiosity, why would he have been so surprised that they did it?

A very valid question, I think. I’ll let the theists who believe in creation field this one, as the only perspective I could offer would be an atheistic one.

Free will is probably going to enter the conversation. God wanted Adam and Eve to have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, but that begs the question: How free are you to decide when the wrong choice will get you punished?

Are you punished or given a lesson?

The fall of Adam and Eve symbolizes the culmination of the universe’s broken symmetry in the estrangment of humanity from our ontological source.

The two don’t seem mutually exclusive.

the bible taken literally is the bane of every theist.

are we the incest children of adam and eve? and then of noah and of his family?

is the earth 6700 years old?

Did the great flood actually happen?

According to the old testament, you’re a sinner if you have touched a body and didn’t wait in holy quarentine for 3 days outside of the city

Also, you get put to death for a number of ridiculous reasons.

If you take the bible literally then you’re a religious fundementalist, and may god help you.

How do you know that God created Adam and Eve to an exact specification?

Perhaps it was a “challenge” that He put to them. When they ate of the so-called apple, they became conscious of themselves. Consciousness entered into the universe then.

It isn’t about the apple-- it’s about Consciousness and evolution. There are no exact specifications for those things.

do you mean the bible never gave specifications?

do you mean to say that the bible should be taken metaphorically?

In many instances, yes, I think the Bible should be taken metaphorically.

There are so many instances that are metaphors and beautiful poetic symbolisms.

I am not saying that the Bible is a lie, just that I feel written by certain people in particular ways for the understanding of all.

Just as the parable in the New Testament is a story to point to a truth and to meaning of their everyday life.

This is kind of off topic, but would you also agree that there are many instances that are absolutely horrific, like God’s infanticide in Egypt, or the tradition in the old testament of offering your daughters up for sex to house guests?

This is sort of off-topic sort of a twist of God being set up.

We make God accountable for everything evil in the world, don’t we?

How strange, though, when the good abounds, we are responsible.

To me, it isn’t God who creates evil, it is a lack of our own awareness of others and a lack of our own consciousness that creates it.

God’s so-called infanticide in Egypt was the poetic license of a human being trying to find meaning in the barbarism of humanity, perhaps.

God channeled miricles through abraham. It was the holy spirit that comitted the deed, if i recall, as was it gods own idea.

What deed are you speaking of – Abraham bringing Isaac to the stone tablet to sacrifice him for God?

I do believe in the working of the Holy Spirit in the world,

but I have never believed in a God that “creates” evil – or even tempts another to commit evil.

My mind is open to many possibilities but not to one where God is the cause of evil in the universe though there is that perception to many.

Perhaps the Abraham and Isaac story is a kind of parable pointing to God’s providence and of trust in the midst of terror.

woops, i mean moses :smiley: . i’m bad with names…

i’m referring to the great plagues.

For me, it boils down to God giving people free will to choose their paths. There is no telling how long Adam and Eve had been in Eden before their transgression occured. God knew the outcome of the situation, but allowed them to decide for themselves even with them knowing retribution would occur. If they had not disobeyed God, this discussion would have never come about. If the serpent in garden of Eden had never been introduced to offer temptation, would the pair still had disobeyed? I also believe their is a correlation between the fall of satan and the fall of man.

Adam and Eve didn’t know what evil or retribution were. Punishing them is like punishing an infant for playing with the pages of a playboy magazine.

First of all, just to be stupidly critical, there is no mention of apples, just fruit. Secondly, perhaps you should try looking at the myth through symbolic means. Mythological structures often have misleading elements which, if you don’t already know the underlying meaning, can lead to serious confusion:

Eden represents a state of non-duality; the eating of the fruit of the tree represents the seeking of self-knowledge (Adam and the tree of life represent the Knower, Eve and the tree of Knowledge represent the Known, or Knowledge); the snake represents the stimulation to do so (snakes are always symbolic of force or energy - the Jewish Philosopher Philo identified the snake with desire, which is relatively accurate - note that Moses staff turns into a snake, because it represents the power of the Logos (Moses)). The ‘fall’ is the fall from a state of non-duality into a state of mutual opposition of Knower and Known, out of which the temporal cosmos is born.

Oh, and If you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t think Adam and Eve were real persons. Hopefully my above interpretation will be particularly useful to both those who have a habit of taking these things literally, along with atheistic types who deny the validity of mythology altogether.

Okay, as far as Moses goes, I guess one can say that God channeled miracles through Moses. Moses was a prophet and all prophets I feel even those today and I think we have them – pay attention to the world around them, pay attention and listen for God, to God, they contemplate.

Although I do believe in miracles, I somewhat and somehow have a problem with some of the so-called miracles in the Bible. I believe that historically, the Bible is sound, but for me, there is a little confusion because I find it difficult to grasp that everything described, was a miracle and was as large as life as purported in the Bible. For instance, the parting of the Red Sea, was such a miraculous thing. I cannot see, and I could absolutely be wrong here – but I cannot see this great deep sea being parted to allow the Jewish people to run to the other side.

What I can see is that the writers in the Bible, in trying to paint a picture of the times and how they viewed God, and taught their people to view God, made things “larger than life” to point to a greater truth – as for instance, that God so loved His people that He would be willing to actually part the Red Sea so that they could escape. I could be wrong though.

My only question for you, Wonderer, is why you view the great plagues as a miracle. There are many plagues, Aids is a plague, cancer is a plague, there are hurricanes, tsunamis, the terrible blaze that is going on in California right now.

I don’t personally view any of that as the hand of God though I may be wrong. I just don’t know. But I sense “no”.

Is it possible that I pick and choose my miracles. Maybe I do, I don’t know.

Do I believe in a God, yes Do I believe that God becomes instrumental in our evolution, sometimes, yes.

The further along I get, the more I realize, I just don’t know. But I do sense and I could be totally wrong. hee hee

Do I

As I had noted, there is no telling how long Adam and Eve had been in Eden before they had sinned. God visited them from time to time and must have at some point explained sin and consequences to them. If I was to surmise God’s thoughts to them, I would think He had told them purity of thought and spirit would obtain them paradise without having to struggle otherwise. Being human curiosity gets the better of them, they transgress and suffer the consequences. However mystical their ejection or just Eve getting pregnant changing the dynamic of their relationship with God…it netted the consequence stated in the Old Testament. Therefore, I suggest Adam and Eve weren’t as naive as babes and were not clueless to God’s desires.

Why must God have informed them of the consequences and of evil and sin? Why are the consequences of him not informing Adam and Eve impossible, such that this impossibility makes your must the only option available?