In order for there to be free will in the Garden of Eden, there has to be something that Adam and Eve can choose that's not God. What if every choice Adam and Eve make in the garden gets them back to God; the decision to love each other gets them God, the decision to kill each other gets them God? If that happens, there's no genuine free will.- Dr Duke Pesta
So it's like it's like saying you have a maze with only one path. It's not a maze, just a corridor.
And so you have one thing that God does. He puts the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden. And Adam and Eve are told, “That way lies death.”
People will come back and argue, “How can you condemn Adam and Eve when they don't know what death is?” I would argue, and I think this is the brilliance of that story; it is so we know that it’s adamant that God walks with Adam and Eve.
We know that God made Adam and Eve in His image. He walks the garden with them. They can converse with God directly. They have absolute knowledge of the good. The only thing they do not know is evil. So when the tree of knowledge of good and evil is put in the garden, the only thing Adam and Eve can gain from it is the knowledge of evil, because they already know the good.
That's brilliant because God has not stacked the deck against them. They know the face of God. They know their Creator. They know his goodness. They just don't know evil, which God characterizes it as death.
So they know that by choosing that tree they will get something that's not God. And so the parameters of freewill are upheld. And God is absolved of being a tyrant because they know him.
What does it say about the god of the ancient Israelites, the god that has carried us through in Western culture for 2,000 years, what does it say about him that he loved his creation so much that their freedom meant more to him than their obedience?
It's one of the things that sets Western culture so far ahead of other cultures is that we choose freedom not obedience; the free market system. The Socialists, the Marxists, the progressives; they want to go back to a world where all human beings deserve the Garden of Eden like Adam and Eve, but they owe God no obedience for it.
The threat of the Old Testament, the First Commandment, is that you'll become God. “If you don't recognize that I am the Lord your God then you will become gods of yourself.”
Not only from the Enlightenment do you get the fallacy of romanticism - the natural goodness of man, and the fallacy of naturalism - morality is irrelevant because we're all animals. You also get Nietzsche. And Nietzsche said at the end of the 19th century, “God is dead. We philosophers have killed him with our knives. But,” he said, “Men must become like God then to be worthy of it.”
The only way modernism exists, the only way all these modern socialist-Marxist-fascist, whatever you want to call it, utopian dreams and schemes exist is if man assumes he's a God, not an animal.
And there's your corruption. There's commandment number one down the drain.
Taken from the YouTube transcript. Edited for readability, not content.