Go a step before that. Why’d God put the tree there in the first place?
God created sin, introduced it to humanity, and ensured evil would spread across the earth.
True. He even admits it in Isaiah:
Isaiah 45:7 - I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.
Calamity or disaster is a better translation. Looking at God as a judge, it’s His right to render a verdict and enact punishment.
Pretty good article on this verse and what it’s actually saying. https://www.str.org/w/does-isaiah-45-7-teach-that-god-created-evil-
A judge might have a “right” to punish people for things they didn’t know were wrong, but this is a judge who created those people without giving them the capacity to know right from wrong in the first place and then punishing them for doing the wrong thing anyway.
And of course a Christian apologetics website is going to give the kindest possible interpretation to that passage.
I’d also note that it’s part of the Jewish half of the Bible, so maybe finding out what Christians think about what it means is the wrong way to go about convincing people of your point. Maybe consult a Rabbi’s interpretation instead.
Can’t have light without dark. Can’t have good without evil. Otherwise you just have boring stagnation. God likes chaos and excitement, not boring safety.
Why can’t you have light without dark? If you sped up all the molecules in the universe to the point that they were all radiating heat, you would have light without dark.
It always complete the picture to understand that the creation myth used in the Bible was not Jewish or Christian in origin. It was an appropriation of a pagan myth of the era. Like most Christianity, it is just a syncretism to make the cult palatable to the newly recruited. “Oh yes, that thing that you already believe in was totally our god”.
I think all major religious myths, like languages themselves, are derivative of previous myths on some level. Sure, there was a proto-mythology at some point, but it expanded, changed, etc. until it divided into multiple religions. And, of course, Judaism beget Christianity beget Islam, but all of them took other religious myths that were popular at the time and wove them into the tapestry.
This is colonial thinking. “Civilization just happens to be the natural evolution of what I am doing. Your ways are barbarian backwards savagery”. It is the same logic.
There’s nothing natural or linear in religious belief. Catholicism itself is fragmented into hundreds of sects, and so is every single religion ever to have existed. Adapted to the particular capricious vanities of the local clergy and the established local customs. Christians taking some Jewish elements was just a manipulation tactic. I’m also sure some Islam sects would behead you for suggesting that Islam is a derivative of Christianity. The theory of a proto religion is also wrong, we know for a fact that not all of modern religions started from the same proto-belief, but ancient religions are actually quite varied and distinct.