I want to make a few remarks on a couple of sections from a blog post that Arthenor wrote in response to me. He writes:

Over on AnAtheist.net, James asks the question “How can a perfect creator produce an imperfect world?” in the recent article Adam, Eve, and Suffering. The essence of the question is essentially the problem of evil. How can a good God create a world in which evil exists? Is God the author of evil?

James says the answer he usually hears is a reference to the story of the fall. However, that does not really seem to answer the question. As James points out, God would have known they would have sinned. Why did he create them in the first place? Furthermore, why was sin made possible? God clearly created Adam and Eve capable of sin and even provided a means for sin (the tree).

The key answer is freewill. God certainly could have created a sin free world which contained only automatons. Clearly, God valued freewill enough that freewill with the potential for evil was more valuable to Him, and therefore, more perfect, than a world without it. The purpose for the tree seems clear as well. Freewill without the potential for negative exercise is not really free.

The conclusion ‘humans have no free will’ does not follow from ‘God stops humans from doing evil acts.’ Just because God prevents us from doing evil doesn’t mean that we are not free to do any number of good acts. Having no free will means not being able to willfully choose to do any action, whether good or bad.

Take a moment right now to reflect upon your free will. It should not take much thought to see that we are not free in an absolute sense of the word. Our freedom to make our own decisions is already limited by the type of decisions we can make and the laws of nature governing this Universe. I cannot, for instance, pick myself off of the ground and fly out the window. Yet nobody denies my free will, despite my inability to fly on my own accord. But if I replaced “sin” with “fly” the argument would sound like: If we no longer had the capacity to fly this would require God to take away our free will.

The inability to sin, rather than taking away our free will, simply places one more limitation on us. We would still have the freedom to choose between an infinite number of good actions, just like we still have the freedom to choose between a number of other transportation methods. Perhaps you don’t like this limitation, but I don’t particularly like my inability to fly, either. In fact, it seems that we are not giving God enough credit here. After all, God wouldn’t have to intervene everytime someone was about to do an evil act because God could have created humanity with an inherent moral sense to choose good acts over evil acts. In other words, God could have created humans to be perfectly moral in and of themselves without sacrificing all of our free will.

Regarding the specific case of the fall, James raises some other objections which deserve answers. One is the observation that if eating the fruit granted knowledge of what was right and what was wrong (good and evil), Eve would have been ignorant of right and wrong before eating the fruit, and therefore, at worst, her eating the fruit would have been simply a misunderstanding. However, knowledge that it was evil (rebellion against God) was given to Adam and Eve prior to the fall (Gen. 2:17) and Eve refers to this somewhat inaccurately (Gen. 3:3). Therefore, she did have knowledge that it was wrong to eat the fruit.

Your claim is that she had knowledge that eating the fruit was wrong before she had knowledge of right and wrong. That would be like telling my dog that barking is wrong and wondering why she still does it.

Furthermore, the Hebrew word “yada” translated here as “knowledge” is a relatively broad word. Many understand it here as meaning “determining”, implying “determining for yourself good and evil”. This also fits much better with the implication that this “knowing” is a divine attribute. It does not seem reasonable to argue that knowing good and evil makes one a god, but establishing a moral law is a divine attribute. Therefore, eating the fruit, did not magically give Adam and Eve perfect knowledge of God’s Law, that which was good and evil. At that point, they already knew all of God’s Law (do not eat the fruit) and they decided for themselves to break it. Rebelling against God’s Law (do not eat the fruit) and substituting their own (eat the fruit). This attempt to become one’s own law maker is the root of sin.

Look, the story is obviously a primitive attempt to explain what observationally differentiates human beings from animals (morality and civilization) and human beings from gods (immortality). Adam and Eve are created in a state where they are to rule over the other animals but do not differ from them in terms of their innocence. Gaining the moral sense allowed them to become more god-like in their wisdom but also forced them to eschew their child-like innocence by covering their nakedness. Only animals and uncivilized brutes wander around naked, after all. Acquiring immortality would have completed the transformation into gods but Yahweh puts a quick stop to that. You read far too much into this simple and straightforward story. Yahweh does not appear to have everything as carefully planned out as Christians would have it. Rather, Yahweh acts much like the other deities of the ancient world – imperfect, vengeful, jealous, reactive, etc.