Let's duke it out, ye religious zealots!

"The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity" and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man."
-C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity

On Wednesday I wrote a study for my little youth group kids about the origins of evil according to Christianity and all that, and came across the following conundrum, which I have puzzled over before, and which I wonder if any of you can help me with:

My argument was that God allowed evil to enter the world as part of the risk He took in giving humanity free will. i.e. He loved mankind so much that He wanted to give us the chance to grow and mature and choose Him and the good life for ourselves, rather than being set on auto-pilot. All of which I'm sure you're all familiar with. I think it's a nice idea - the end goal being that God gets a family of children who have developed hearts and wisdom like His, and turned away from evil.

Obviously there are questions as to whether it was fair of Him to allow us to stuff things up so badly when a little more guidance might have spared us a lot of pain, and might have made His 'family' rather bigger. But I guess I'm basically willing to give Him the benefit of the doubt on that one, and assume He knew what He was doing, and has some kind of plan to tie up the loose ends. We'll see.

My real conundrum, though, is about the actual story in Genesis 2-3 - and please note I don't wish to open the debate on the literal/metaphorical nature of this story, which I think I pretty much know all your various opinions about. Rather, I'm going to assume that, either way, the story has an emblematic status which somehow applies to theology.

My question is, if God wanted us to develop maturity and discernment, doesn't it seem slightly backward that the tree they were forbidden to touch was said to offer that very thing - the knowledge of good and evil? God says 'if you eat from it you will surely die'. Which is true of course - when they figure out they can try things their own way they pretty much immediately start stuffing things up and killing each other and things. The serpent says of it "You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." And perhaps that's true too - there's no certainty they'll die; there's a slim chance they'll get it right themselves and not ruin everything. In any case the serpent is just trying to incite them to rebellion - don't listen to everything Mr Big says; don't submit to being His slave. Do what you want.

Some possible solutions to the puzzle:

1) My argument is wrong: God didn't want us to develop maturity etc.; He wanted us to get everything right, and for the world to stay perfect, and therefore when He said He didn't want them to eat the fruit, He meant it.

>>Question: so why put it there? To give them the choice? But if they're better off without the choice, isn't that kinda stupid?

2) God knew all along that they'd take the fruit, and put it there intentionally, so that they'd take it and learn some important lessons - painful though it would be for all concerned - which would ultimately be to their/humanity's betterment.

>>Question: so why does He forbid them to touch it?

>>Question: is it even plausible to say we're somehow better off in a post-fall world? Is that kind of sick and sadistic? Or is that like saying it's sadistic of a parent to take the training wheels off their kid's bike, knowing they'll fall off the first time, but will eventually acquire a new skill?

3) Perhaps it wasn't so much that He was forbidding them, but just that He had to warn them, in all fairness, that it would be a path of suffering, even though it would ultimately be the best.

>>But in that case, why not just say 'kids, you have the following two options - you decide'? Instead, He says 'you must not take option 2'.

4) Perhaps in their auto-pilot state they're not able to make decisions like that anyway, so He has to trick them, and maybe overstate the case a little just to make it more interesting.

>>Hm, oh dear, interesting questions arise as to the nature of God. Though potentially it could be seen as a parallel to a parent who tells his kid not to cross the road on her own, not because he never wants her to cross the road, but because she's not ready yet, and in this stage of her development what she needs is set rules that will keep her safe. So, uh, we're currently in the state of having disobeyed, strayed onto the road, been hit by a bus, and are now very slowly recovering, and very slowly figuring out how to conduct ourselves better in future - possibly mixed with a good deal of angst directed towards our dad who should have protected us better.

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Now I know that the creation/fall story was not written as a philosophical argument, but simply as a story, and perhaps in that sense can't support, or was not designed to support, analysis of this kind.

Still, I think these questions can be drawn from it, in combination with some good old western philosophising: did God actually intend for us to develop autonomy? Did He create us in order to be ourselves, or in order to be His? Is the whole journey of self-discovery that humanity has been on since then good in God's eyes, or bad? Did He want us to be 'gods' - capable of determining our own future? And if so, are we in some sense genuinely independent of Him now...?