This seems to be quite a leap here...what made you draw this conclusion?
As Alexander Dumas said "There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."
If we hadn't experienced hardship here on earth, we'd never know how great paradise is, and we'd just be walking around in it going "sure, this is good, but I mean, there's got to be something better!" even though it's the best possible thing in (or out of) the world.
That's a great quote, and I think Dumas has a lot to teach. However, I think it doesn't scale well. "Comparative goodness" works fine for everyday occurrences: if every day was pretty good, then no days would be *really* good. Only in comparison with those not-so-great days is it possible to really enjoy life (seems to me to be Dumas' claim, which I agree with to an extent).
However, human caprice doesn't extend indefinitely. There are biological pleasure/displeasure switches, which if turned on, just plain make you feel good. Even if you were already feeling pretty okay, certain chemicals in your bloodstream would still make you feel like things are really, absolutely, objectively good. Neural activity in a certain region of the brain will make you feel pleasure. There was an experiment with a mouse where they stuck an electrode into this part of the brain and wired it to a pressure plate in the mouse's cage. When she pressed it, she got a jolt of pleasure. She basically kept pressing it until she starved to death.
I don't suggest that humans are as simple as mice and will react the exact same way, but my point is, if God wanted to, he could make us feel good, all the time, even in the absence of something bad to compare it to. It wouldn't even take much magic; the machinery for it is already there (and, presumably, he knew what made it tick). I suggest that Dumas' claim, while germane to the lives of you and me, doesn't apply to the Garden of Eden or to Heaven.
In any case, if it were true, then wouldn't you get bored in Heaven, having such a good time all the time?
If God really wanted to show that he trusted us, he might have made available something that is actually *beneficial* to us, but was disallowed anyway. Like maybe some sort of godly powers -- ability to create new, miniature, short-lived universes or something. Or, he could have allowed Satan to offer it, so that to take it would really be to betray God. But no, he offered us, essentially, a kick in the head. What sort of trust is that?
I'm not that well versed in the Bible, but I was under the impression that the snake that gave them the apple was Satan, or at least symbolic of him.
You're right, it was Satan. But I was trying to indicate that making the Apple available wasn't a very good demonstration of his trust for us. The hypothetical thing that I'm suggesting Satan might have offered should have been something that was *actually* good for us, as opposed to something that would make us mortal, experience pain, have to work, and get us kicked out of the Garden.
I guess you can look at it in the sense that God allowed Satan to tempt us with it; Satan told Eve that eating the Apple would make her just like God (which I guess is what I was suggesting). So if that was Satan's idea, then we get back to "Not a demonstration of God's truts, since God didn't make Adam and Eve believe that it was something they wanted." On the other hand, if it was God's idea (a la book of Job, where God allows Satan to test Job's piety by inflicting horrible misfortunes upon him), then far from being a demonstration of God's trust for us, it shows that God *didn't* trust us, and needed to test us.
Bottom line, I don't think the Tree is a demonstration of God's trust or faith in humanity, which is what Cinlef was suggesting.
Also, I don't think the story of Adam and Eve is meant to be a literal documentation of how man came to be...
Whatever. Treat it as a metaphor for... whatever you like. Early Man took some liberty that he was told not to take, and was punished for it. Maybe it was the use of fire. Who knows. We can still ask, "Why was it prohibted? Why was the punishment so dire? What was God's motivation in... well, in anything he did?"
And I can keep asking, "What has God done for us that was so great, especially when compared with the things he might have done instead?"
-Erasmus
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