Imagine for a moment that you go into your neighbor’s home one day and discover a large homemade bomb sitting in the middle of his living room. “Don’t touch that.” your neighbor tells you, “If you do, the bomb will explode and our entire block will be destroyed.” How would you react? If you have an ounce of common sense, you would probably think your neighbor was the biggest nutcase you have ever met, and you would probably say something like, “Why in the heck did you build that bomb and put it in the middle of your living room, just waiting to go off and incinerate us and the rest of our families? Then you’d probably call the police and demand that the bomb be removed and your neighbor be arrested.
Now, imagine you go to work and discover a bottle of deadly nerve gas sitting on your disk “Don’t touch that bottle of nerve gas,” your boss tells you, “because, if you break the seal on the bottle you will surely die.” Off to the police you go again, screaming in rage at the wantonly dangerous conditions. “What kind of insane world is this? Are these people all idiots?”
Now, let us consider the Tree of Knowledge that God planted “in the middle of the garden of Eden,” intermingled with other trees “that were pleasing to the eye and good for food” (see Genesis 2:8 through 3:6). God placed no fence or other barrier around the Tree of Knowledge, and filled it with appealing fruit that “was good for food and pleasing to the eye.” He then told Adam, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it or touch it you will surely die.”
Should we not ask ourselves, “What was God thinking?” Why did God create the Tree of Knowledge, plant it in the middle of the garden of Eden, fill it with attractive fruit, place no fence around it, give Adam and Eve a desire to gain wisdom, indicate that the tree was a source of wisdom, and then merely tell Adam an Eve not to eat of it or touch it? Didn’t God know that verbal warnings are the least effective type of safety precaution, after: (a) safer design, (b) physical barriers, and (3) effective warning labels? Wasn’t the Tree of Knowledge an open and obvious danger — an accident just waiting to happen?
Moreover, how sufficient was God’s verbal warning? God told Adam and Eve that they would “die” by touching or eating of the Tree of Knowledge, but how could they possibly have understood this warning, given that they had no concept of death?
If you were God, and you wanted to protect Adam and Eve from the Tree of Knowledge, would you have done such an inept job? Indeed, according to Genesis, the Fall of Man appears to have occurred on the very same day that God created Adam and Eve. Parents do more to protect their children from matches than God did to protect Adam and Eve from death. Moreover, God is supposedly omniscient — with infinite awareness, infinite knowledge and infinite insight. How is it possible for an omniscient being to have done such a stunningly incompetent job protecting His children from danger?
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