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If you're not looking for a genuine answer from a Christian, skip this.
First thing: the translation of "the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil" isn't really that good of a translation. It's closer to "the right to define good and evil. That means that eating the fruit is basically saying "fuck you, God. Imma do my own thing". That's not how God designed humans to live, and is incompatible to living alongside someone as powerful as God, which is why God told them not to eat it.
But why create that tree in the first place? Essentially, choice. When you're in the supermarket and you see 50 different flavors, but everything is from the same brand, do you really have any choice? Same thing with God. Unless you have the option of rejecting God, choosing to him means nothing.
Couldn't he have created the world in a way where all that is not necessary? Or one where there would be no bad choices?
Seems kinda evil on his part to design for the option of evil.
You don't have to agree with the poster but they already answered that. There can be no acceptance without the ability to reject. Consent is meaningless without the capacity for dissent. Theodicy is a different matter.
If god is all-powerful, then that is a choice, not a natural restriction.
So the answer is "because god is a jerk"?
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
If god is all powerful everything is a choice and there are no natural restrictions. Why an omniscient and supposedly loving deity created us to suffer and die is a question of theodicy and that is separate from the question of free will. Because god is a jerk is a likely and valid argument in this framework.
A better example for the god is a jerk is Satan/Lucifer. Angels were not given free will and are servants of God by design. Still, Satan and his host were cast down and separated from the light of God's love for their rebellion. Not being endowed with free will, the angels were apparently set up. In this situation, god made beings a certain way and then punished them for it while not giving them access to the tools of salvation (free will.)
Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn't.
Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for "I can't predict the behavior of this thing". For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.
Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that's what trips people up so much.
To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can't hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?
The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn't, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!
Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. "Of course the first three don't have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics"
If free will is observer dependent than why would the omniscience of some other observer relieve us, the observer who is not omniscient, of free will? Something else being able to predict my actions has no effect on my ability to predict the actions of others.
We're not "relieved" of free will. It's not an intrinsic property that one "has". It would be like having "big" or "near". You don't "have" big, it's a relative term.
It's simply a description of observed behavior. That's all it really is in the end, even though people treat it as this super mysterious thing.
So, subatomic particles have free will, but humans don't?
Why not? It might seem absurd, but can you prove they don't "choose" to flit about here or there? A super-intelligent AI might also be able to "pierce the veil" and determine the underlying mechanics, like a video game character determining the math behind the random number generator that powers their world.
That's also only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, mechanistic interpretations aren't ruled out (though a number of variants have been).
I've never heard that translation, how does that justify them noticing they're naked as a bad thing? The idea there is simple with the fruit granting the knowledge, but doesn't make sense with a fruit that allows you to define good and evil. But even then there's another thing you got wrong, they're not kicked out of paradise for eating from the tree, they get punished for that but the reason why they're kicked out is so that they don't eat from the immortality tree:
I said that having eaten from the tree of good and evil put them in a state that humans were not designed to be in, so by kicking them out God is basically saying "it's better for them to die than it is for them to live forever like this"
Well, as a descendant from someone who ate of the tree and understands good and evil I would say that's pretty evil and egotistical, he expulsed them so they don't become like him in two fields since they were already like him on one.
Also, you didn't explained how they knew to cover themselves.
His design was flawed, then, if humans managed to do something they were not designed to do.
This boils down to the best of all possible worlds argument, already well-skewered in Candide centuries ago.
Why create the world exactly the way it was? Is it impossible to create it, so that of their own free will, one more person makes the "right" choice? That's some sorry omnipotence if so. If not one person, why not two? And so on, until you face the question of, "Why not create the world so that everyone, of their own free will, makes the 'right' decision".
Calvinists are intellectually brave enough to accept the metaphysical consequences of their beliefs. Others, not so much.
I'd like to see some citations on that. They're are several scholarly theories about the what the tree represents, but I've never heard this one.
In a really generalised way, the tree and the fruit is kind of a metaphor.
If you live the life style I tell you to, then live in this garden and I will care for you. If you want to make your own rules then you're on your own.
I've never seen it this way before but this actually makes sense really.