The Garden of Eden is one of the most misunderstood passages in the history of the Bible. When it comes to knowledge of good and evil, it is the divine knowledge of good and evil. There was no other. Is God’s knowledge of good and evil a purely cognitive knowledge? Where does He look at good and evil, recognize that good is good and evil is evil? No. He determines good and evil. So, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not knowing how some things are bad and others are good — if it were this sense it would be absolutely self-contradictory.

If the knowledge of good and evil were only to know good and evil, that would be incompatible with the idea of God giving them an order. If God has given a commandment, it is clear that obeying the commandment is good and disobeying it is evil. So, God cannot give an order and, at the same time, forbid the guys from knowing good and evil (in the human sense of this knowledge). So it is obviously not a question of this — of mere discernment. God cannot forbid them (Adam and Eve) to know good and evil and then complain because they listened to the serpent… This cannot be the point.

It is divine knowledge, therefore the ability to determine by its very nature what is good and evil

On the contrary, man cannot do this, he lives within a field where there is good and evil predetermined by God; this knowledge he can have, what he cannot have is divine knowledge and that is why it is said that the tree of good and evil was at the center of paradise. So what did they try to do? Usurping the divine authority to determine good and evil… God does not arbitrarily determine good and evil, but according to the expression of His nature.

You are not forbidden to know the truth humanly or to know good and evil (humanly). You are prohibited from trying to be the cause of all things and the generating factor of good and evil, which is exactly what modern culture is trying to do by saying that “good and evil is your choice. There is no morally condemning act… They are cultural creations, etc.”

Now, if you understand that the prohibition against touching the tree of good and evil is a prohibition of knowledge, then you will fall into the Gnostic interpretation — that God made Adam and Eve two idiots (who could not know anything) and that from there came the saving serpent and showed them the horizon of knowledge. They had no precedent for human knowledge of good and evil; only God knew good and evil. So, if it didn’t have a human precedent, it could only be divine knowledge.

The knowledge of good and evil is not a discernment operated by conscience, but the controversial action of trying to obtain that knowledge in a self-sufficient way. When God commanded Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2: 17), He respectfully positioned human freedom as the sole parameter of discernment between good and evil, not mattering that actually eating the fruit of the said tree would contain some kind of cosmic revelation. Not even the tempting serpent identified itself with “evil”, it just exploited the intelligence of Adam and Eve saying: “You will be like gods” (Genesis 3: 5), revealing what actually drove original sin, and which was less a lie than a suggestion. Once the effects of sin were released, man remained ignorant of the nature of evil until the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, who alone became aware of good and evil on the Cross, when the fruit returned to the tree, man became the image of God and the evil of man was redeemed, but still, without any intervention of human intelligence.