Why was the tree of knowledge in the garde anyhow?
It is the tree whose fruit is the knowledge of good and evil. Not just knowledge, but an understanding of the all moral opposites– right and wrong, should do and shouldn’t do, desirable and undesirable, better and worse, ethical and unethical, pleasure and pain… With this in mind you can see why God forbade eating the fruit. In a state of innocence there is no such knowledge. The other tree in the Garden was the Tree of Life. God said to Adam that he may eat of it (and any other tree except the tree of knowledge) freely. The message is God desires his creation, mankind, to have life and be innocent of all that is evil. Good is simply that which is like God. Therefore to know God is to know good. There doesn’t need to be any independent understanding of good outside of God. Therefore, understanding good is even forbidden. Only Jesus Christ remedies the outcome of Adam’s fall. “For God’s free gift is not like Adam’s offense; for if by the transgression of the one man, the many died, m