Genesis 3: 1 - 7

¹ Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  ² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
 ⁴ “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
 ⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

 This is a fascinating story. After they ate from the tree their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked so they covered themselves. Prior to eating the fruit they knew they were naked; but, it didn't matter. They covered themselves because they felt vulnerable, they had not felt that way prior. To know good and evil means to understand imperfection and that we are all imperfect.

The world we live in strives for perfection and never finds it. We are fascinated with beauty and will modify our bodies to look younger, we take great pride in our physical beauty. We wish to be admired, we wish to be seen as perfect and tell ourselves that we are. We seek to unlearn the knowledge that we gained in the garden, we seek to see and make ourselves as perfect; but our understanding of perfection is flawed. Perfection is a process that allows us to enjoy eternity, it is how God created the world, how he created nature to work.

Why do we seek to be naive and innocent when we are neither? The search for absolute knowledge that we merely have to learn and the search to remove any sense of morality does not create innocence. Adam and Eve were clueless, they were children. If you had the choice today would you have eaten of the tree of life or the tree of knowledge of good and evil?

I would have eaten of the same tree as Eve did. The understanding of good and evil, knowledge, allows us to define ourselves, to become us. God put the tree there for a reason and I am pretty sure he knew what would happen.