can someone tell me why eating from the tree of knowledge would've hurt Adam and Eve? isn't knowledge good?

Question

if God wanted to make humans as someone would could choose to praise Him, i.e. the creation of Free Will, what good is blissful ignorance? Wouldn't eating from that tree be a good thing because it would give them more choice? i mean, if they hadn't, wouldn't it have been blind faith, and therefore no faith at all?

Answer 1

God cast them out after they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil because they knew too much. They may have ate of the tree of life and lived forever. (Genesis 3:22) Disobedient knowledge is the bad thing. Not knowledge. God is willing to give that, just not rebellious knowledge.

Answer 2

That's a really good question and I don't believe there is an easy answer to it. Maybe easy isn't the word I should use, the better word might be acceptable.

I don't believe Adam and Eve were blissfully ignorant. I believe they were created as intelligent people. God knew they would be deceived before He created them. And it had to happen that way because, yes, God did not want someone to worship Him out of blind faith. It would've been no faith at all.

Look at our own lives. How often does something happen that we have no explanation for? We pray and pray about it. Sometimes God answers us, sometimes He doesn't. God is not afraid of being questioned, He knows all the answers.

The thing with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge was this: they already knew God existed, that He would care for them, that He was. What made it wrong was Satan deceived them into thinking that, having eaten, they could become like God and would no longer need Him. Basically, that's what happened. Humanity told God to git. We've been thinking all along we know better than God, we've got all the answers and we don't need God.

And isn't the world in such wonderful shape now? I don't think so.

Knowledge is not a bad thing. We're told we can ask for wisdom and we should. Wisdom and knowledge are two different things, I know. God wants us to know Him, acknowledge Him and trust Him. We can 'know' an awful lot about the Bible, about God and still not 'know' Him. It's when you can join those two knowledges, that's the beginning of wisdom.

Answer 3

Accodring to Jewish tradition, before eating from the tree Adam and Eve had theoretical knowledge of good and evil. That is to say, they knew that there was such a thing as evil, and they knew that some choices were bad, but they didn't have an Evil Inclination. They didn't have an internal urge to steal or be jealous. It would take very unsual circumstances (such as a persusive talking snake) to make them do wrong.
When they ate from the tree, evil became part of human nature. They had immediate, emotional knowledge of badness. Thus the mess we find ourselves in today.
I imagine it was something like taking drugs. If you've been clean your whole life, you know in a theoretical way that people enjoy taking drugs, and become powefully addicted to them. But that doesn't mean you really want to go out right now and snort some cocaine. You know that's it's a bad idea, and it will ruin your life. On the other hand, once you've started taking drugs, you really want to keep taking drugs, and even if you've stopped, you still feel a powerful urge to shoot up, never mind the consequences.

Answer 4

As it was said, it isn't so much eating of the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil but disobedience that hurt them and it'll hurt us too. By having placed both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, free will and the power of choice given were set in motion else there wouldn't have been the tree of knowledge of good and evil... But as much as God wanted man generically to live dependently on His wisdom rather than the said notion of man being able to be like God when he eats of the forbidden fruit is very much the same fallacy of logic as saying God can do anything everything and can create a rock so heavy He cannot carry. the wisdom the fruit gives isn't parallel to that which God has. The consequence of choice was made clear. He doesn't force us in His way, if He wanted to, All He needed to create were robots

Answer 5

i once was an avid fan highlander the tv series. in one of the last episodes a comment was made that you cant kill an immortal, but poison will slowy destroy the immortal who eats it.
I could not help but notice a similarity with adam and eve.
while knowledge of evil destroys the innocences of a mind that has no shame with nakedness the serpent mustve told the serpent that they were naked and the nakednes and the poison conjured up the the shame in the mind. the poison mustve been a little intoxicating at first but it was also the thing that killed the lack of shame in the innocense of living in the garden.
if adam and eve had rejected the temptation, some people say the wouldve never had anything in this world and our existence would not have happened.
but then again, if they had continued to Grow, the knowledge of God wouldve/mightve increases without the knowledge of evil, or its sting of death. it is possible that men and women wouldve evolved without sin in the kingdom of God and eternal life would've been supreme, but there was the existence of satan no matter what happened.
it almost seems like you are listening to satan just as surely as Eve was deceived.

Answer 6

Hello I am answering your question from a Catholic Christian background - The Lord teaches us through stories and human symbolism, the tree of knowledge does not represent knowledge as opposite to ignorance and blind faith.... it symbolizes the human will to determine what good is and what evil is...

... it symolizes the human implementation of freely choosing to disregard God's teachings imprinted into the human nature and going against it to determine what humans want to become good or what they want to become evil....

.... Adam and Eve who represent man kind in general were not even real characters, the Lord is teaching us that man kind commits a great sin when they go in total contradiction with their nature....

... to shade somelight on this and in a very simple example, look around you how humans have authorized the marriage of people from the same sex, have you ever seen animals in their lowerest beahviors going with this - look at the planet how we are distroying it as masters rather than going into harmony with all creatures....

... this my friend is the original sin that all man kind inherits... not becaue of what Adam and Eve supposedly did but because we as humans define nature and redefine the simplest logical rules that can not be redefined.

Answer 7

Supposedly it has something to do with knowing the difference between good and bad....which somehow makes everyone bad....I don't quite get that part. The reason eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is bad in the bible is because it helps instill in children that asking questions in regards to faith and the church is a sin, and they will burn in hell for questioning the church. The 1st story in the whole book, and it sets the precedent that if you don't do what the church tells you god says to do, you'll hurt yourself, your family, your friends, everyone around you....Why on earth would a religion want THAT kind of control over people?.....Pass the collection plate my way, brother, I'm about to buy some peace of mind...

Answer 8

It was not knowledge per se but knowledge of the difference that resulted. If we believe the story as told in Sunday school, Adam named everything that was brought before him. Today people have trouble picking a name for a child and scientists need an international organization to keep things straight. Adam was not ignorant just blissful.

Now the woman wondered off by herself and became a partaker of the tree. Then she came back and showed Adam. The result was not understanding algebra but understanding that they were naked. That understanding was the product of guilt and self consciousness.

Now we could move to the most ancient pagan fertility worship, built up around groves or trees, and equate the tree with sex. And what of our big ol' slimy talking snake? I will go no further because most answers seem to indicate that many are still under strict parental guidelines and have yet to pass puberty.

But here you have the beginning of the answer to your question.

Your question assumes the devil was telling the truth in saying the tree was good for knowledge and they would not surely die. Lies. Adam and Eve were already like God and already had access to all knowledge and access to the tree of life which was Christ.

The only knowledge they did not have was the ability to see evil in relation to good. That was represented by another tree. That knowledge came when Eve joined herself up with the devil and came back to Adam, already impregnated with Cane, to show Adam what it was all about, and Abel was conceived.

Satanists have worshiped through ages in groves and around trees, the tree being symbolic of their god. That being took a man-like form in the garden. That is why we have the idea of the children of light and the children of darkness. And not more than a hundred years ago people still knew what they were talking about when they talked about "Raising a little Cane."

Sorry, but the garden story is not about K thru12 or apples for teachers. It is about good and evil and sex and pain and pleasure and life and death; both physical and spiritual. And we might add the connection of salvation with child birth, Gen 3:15.


Finally consider this. The Bible says the serpent beguiled Eve. It says after the act that God cursed the serpent to crawl on its belly in the dust. That means that the serpent was NOT on its belly like a snake when it was talking to Eve. That means all the pictures of a snake in a tree or wrapped around a woman, be they painted, digitized or printed on some horoscope page, or appearing in your mind, are not Scriptural.

Cane is not listed in any genealogy as the eldest son of Adam. His very nature was to be like his natural father, a murderer. Scripture further says in I John 3:15 that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. So by Scripture even the life of Christ does not track through Cane. Cane did not pick up the spirit of hate and murder from his peers or his siblings, or because he lived deep in poverty -- it was in him to begin with. What happened with the tree hurt all of us.

Answer 9

To prove their loyalty to Jehovah, Adam and Eve were to refrain from eating from that one tree. By defying God and eating from that tree, they decided for themselves what was good and bad instead of leaving that up to their Father and Creator.

Having free will is good only when it is applied correctly. For instance, we have free will to jump off the nearest cliff if we so desire. But is that a good idea? No. Adam and Eve had a choice to obey God or not. They made the wrong choice and paid the consequences for it.

Answer 10

Eating from the tree of knowledge gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil. Because they had disobeyed God and became sinners their ultimate choice in all decisions would henseforth become evil. Because we are all decendents we also choose to disobey God whenever we make our decisions without seeking God's love and guidance. Simple Eh!