genesis 1: 6 (NIV) “when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”
today i offer up another way of viewing not only this biblical passage, but also the world. our entire universe is characterized by process and change, due to free-will. self-determination plays a part in everything in our world. i do not view god as some high up puppet master, controlling all the events here on earth. in contrast, i think that god leaves many things up to us, though he may offer up various possibilities that we can choose to act on. it is his wish that all that happens in the world are good and loving, but this is often not the case. rather than blaming and raging against god for this, i choose to see the situation from a different vantage point. i feel that god certainly has a will in everything, but not that everything that happens is in god’s will. like with this passage from genesis, god could have not even created the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and made this story much more simple: no tree, no fall from grace, adam and eve live happily ever after. yet the people who passed down this story for generations through oral storytelling obviously felt that that was not in god’s essence. they felt that rather than being a controlling deity, their god was one of choices, and sometimes people made the right ones and sometimes people made the wrong ones and then had to deal with the consequences.
I like this musing… to me, in a rather twisted way I suppose, this story illustrates what love really is… because God wants love, not just service; lovers, not minions; therefore, we have free will. As you point out, it would be far easier to not create the choice in the first place; to have no option of rejection, of doing wrong… but then love loses its value. This is why one can’t force love, and why there is something in the “love potion” love of stories that is always artificial, and why manipulation and ultimatums in human relationships seem wrong… it’s only when love is freely *chosen* that it can really be called love.