First, I did not intend for my statement of being discouraged over presumption to be directed at you Crashfrog, and furthermore I don't understand why you chose to take it personally.
Also, I thought it would be understood but it seems to not have been, I made my second point to correct an earlier statement. Someone else had posted that Adam was not to touch the tree of knowledge. This is incorrect. The command given by God is not to eat of that tree. Touching it was fair game, and, as I already said, makes perfect sense when you consider the responsibility God placed on Adam to keep the garden.
There is much that you said that I disagree with and find to be, plain and simple, an erroneous way of looking at scripture. But that is not my point. My point is to clarify certain facts pertaining to the specific point of the Tree of Knowledge. This is only because it was brought up and equated to leaving a shotgun in the living room, which, by the way, is in no way equivalent to what took place in scripture.
So as to not be a detractor from the main conversation, let me conclude this post with a response to the previous post.
But how could two persons lacking knowledge of right and wrong be expected to know what is right?
This is an assumption plain and simple. There is nothing in scripture that suggests that Adam and Eve had no capacity for differentiating between good and evil. In fact, the discourse Eve has with the serpent shows that they were able to distinguish between the two. Without getting verbose let me just say that her choice was something that was pleasing to the eye instead of obedience to God's command. This is the issue of all sin: choosing self-rule over obedience to God's command.
Russ