[Adam] had no knowledge or understanding of good and evil – that makes him very special and not like us at all.
Except that most of us have the knowledge to tell the difference between good and bad, Adam had no such knowledge. He would be unable to use his free will to meaningfully choose between good choices and bad choices.
And Adam would not have known whether that was a good decision or not.
The issue is whether Adam knew he was doing wrong or not. Since he did not possess the knowledge of good and evil then he could not have known that to disobey God was a bad thing. For him to be punished for a bad action that he couldn’t possibly understand is grossly unjust.
And Adam would not have understood whether death was good or bad especially since he had never seen any death yet. The threat is pointless if it is not understood.
And if he didn’t understand that then do you consider the punishment just?
I think I need to explain what is meant by "the knowledge of good and evil". God reserves to himself the right to set moral laws for all his intelligent beings. This power to determine what is right and good and acceptable conduct on the one hand and what is wrong and evil and unacceptable on the other hand is what is meant by "the knowledge of good and evil". God will decide what is good and what is evil and no-one else has the right or indeed the ability to do so. When the Bible says that Adam had "become like one of Us, to know good and evil" (Genesis 3:22) it means that Adam rejected God's authority and had decided to determine for himself what was right and wrong.
There can be no question that Adam knew he was obliged to obey God's command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was a period of time before Eve was created when Adam and God lived together. We don't know how long it lasted, it may have been days, months or years. But during this time Adam and God communicated with each other and God taught Adam as a father teaches a son. It is reasonable to suppose that Adam would have learned who he was, how he was created, his proper relationship with God and so forth.
Adam must have fully understood the concept of death or the warning from God would have been meaningless and the punishment would have been unjust. Just because the Bible does not explain how Adam learned the meaning of death does not mean it didn't happen. The Bible does not purport to be a complete record of every thing that has happened in the history of mankind. On the other hand the Bible does tell us that God is a loving and just God who respects the intelligence and free will that he gave us. If Adam didn't understand the meaning of death then it wouldn't have been a fair test. But since we know that God is fair and reasonable it follows that God must have ensured that Adam fully understood the consequences of disobedience. We can conclude that Adam knew and understood what death meant from the fact that God would not have let Adam be unfairly tested.
Omniscience is infinite awareness and absolute knowledge of everything, past, present and future. Either God is omniscient or it isn’t.
If omniscience exists then everything will be predetermined. If a future event is known with certainty then that event must occur and no one would have the power to change it. If God is omniscient then it will know every choice that I will ever make at the beginning of time long before I even exist – that means my entire life will be predetermined.
That is indeed what it means if God is omniscient.
You seem to have difficulty with the idea that God can choose not to know something if he wishes. Why should he not have this ability? Why should omniscience be an uncontrollable quality? It is more omniscient to know any thing you want, any time you want than to know everything all the time whether you want to or not.
God could indeed know every choice you will ever make if he wanted to know that. But as I explained above God deliberately chooses not to see what choices we will make as individuals so that you will feel your life is not predetermined.
Omniscience does not mean everything is predetermined. You still have free will and no-one but you is in control of that. Suppose there is a flower growing in your garden. Tomorrow that flower will still be there but you can stop it. You can go out to your garden tonight and pull the flower out and destroy it. You can change the future by an exercise of free will.
If Adam was made perfect as has been claimed then he could not have done any wrong. Perhaps you should define what ‘perfect’ means.
And if he was perfect then he would always make the perfect decision and do no wrong.
Perfect means that Adam was physically, mentally and spiritually a perfect man. He had no physical imperfections, he would never get sick, never grow old. Adam had no impure moral inclinations. He was innocent, like a child. But Adam was not a God. He had the inherent human limitations. He had limited sensory perception, a limited capacity to learn, think and reason just like humans today. He learned from God, he experienced his environment. In our imperfect condition we are inclined to do the wrong thing. But for Adam it was a relatively simple thing to obey God's high moral standards. But Adam was not immortal in the sense that he could not die. Adam was flesh and blood and he needed to remain connected to God's energy to continue physical regeneration. If Adam lost his connection to God he would grow old and die like an electric fan that has its plug pulled out.
Being perfect does not mean that Adam would always make the perfect decision. Adam had free will and that means he had the ability to do the wrong thing. I know it can be difficult to understand - how can a perfect man do a bad thing? The best analogy I can think of is this. In today's world you can raise a son the best way imaginable - just the right amount of love, discipline, family, friends, environment and so on. Is that a guarantee that the son will turn out right and do the right thing for the rest of his life? No, of course not. You can give a son the best possible upbringing but that is no guarantee he will live a righteous life. When he grows up he makes his own choices and he alone is responsible for them. And so Adam and Adam alone was responsible for the choice he made.
This would mean that God would have to explain the difference between good and evil, in which case what was the purpose of the tree?
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a symbol. It was just an ordinary tree but God used it to test Adam's obedience. It represented Adam's submission to God's authority.
In which case what is the point of man having free will if it cannot be used to make value judgments of what is good or bad? Virtually every choice you make in your life involves selecting one path over another based on an ability to judge between good and bad. Without that ability Adam’s actions would have been entirely random.
He didn’t have any choice since morality means understanding the difference between good and bad, and he didn’t have that knowledge, and neither could he have understood God’s standards of morality for the same reason.
Adam would have known it was morally wrong to disobey God from God's express command that Adam would die if he disobeyed God. His actions were not random. As I said above you have to accept that Adam fully understood what death would mean for him. Adam lacked appreciation for God's gift of life.
Indeed the point of having free will is so that moral choices can be made. But we are not at liberty to set the standard. God tells us his moral standards in the Bible, the same moral standards that Adam was obliged to obey. We are free to follow God's laws or reject them. But like Adam we know the consequences if we reject God's moral laws. The reason why God has allowed evil to exist all these generations is to prove the consequences of not following God's moral laws.
You need to choose I think.
There is one God. He is not a trinity. He is one single being. Jesus is God's first creation and only begotten son. Jesus is not God.
Understood. So the bible is wrong then and didn’t mean what it said?
If you adopt a strictly literal meaning you can misinterpret the message. There is nothing unusal about this. It is the nature of language that a strictly literal interpretation is sometimes not what is intended. Also we sometimes forget that we are reading a translation. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. As someone who has studied foreign languages I can tell you that when you translate from one language to another you always lose something in the translation. This makes it even more important to be careful not to take a too literal interpretation.
