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Why didn't God stop Adam and Eve taking the fruit?

God is omniscient – I believe that God is omniscient in the sense that He can see every possible future, every outcome of every choice that we make, and He can influence our decisions, and try to push us towards the right future. However, evil and sin are against God’s nature, so entirely that God cannot begin to comprehend evil. He cannot see Satan, or understand evil deeds, and He cannot anticipate them. He saw, according to my understand of ‘omniscience’ that Adam and Eve might eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but He told them not to, and considered that future prevented. When the serpent (Satan) tempted Adam and Eve, God could not have foreseen it, because He cannot see or understand evil. He therefore could do nothing to stop it from happening, and the perfect world that He had created was tainted. He punished Adam and Eve, because He could not allow them, as sinners, to stay in the Garden of Eden, and He distanced them from Himself, because He cannot be in the presence of sin. However, He dressed them, because they were sorry for what they had done, and He still loved them. The world is imperfect today, full of suffering, not just because it is necessary for us to appreciate goodness, but because God still cannot comprehend every bad thing that will happen. He gives us the tools to prevent evil, and arms us against temptation and Satan, but He cannot know evil, and cannot know how evil will try to thwart Him, and so it is down to us, mankind, to use the tools that God has given us. We do so with varying success. This doesn’t mean that God is not omniscient, or even omnipotent. It means that God’s knowledge is limited by His natural aversion to evil. He can and does know everything that could and might happen (and He knows what should happen) – omniscience. He gives us all the tools we need to try to make the correct future, and influences events to try to create the future – omnipresence. However, He cannot help us when temptation or evil arrives to test us, because it is against our nature. He still knows every possible outcome, and has still given us the power to prevent evil, but He Himself cannot be the one to do it.

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Sprout
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