I appreciate your comment, but I would also like to draw attention to the inherent difficulty in speaking about these concepts.
In speaking of being "innocent of evil" you also imply being "innocent of good" and so can good truly manifest itself, in the light of self-responsibility, in the face of innocence from it?
Further, you want to speak of "scientific knowledge" as separate from the knowledge of "good and evil", but Saul's identification of six qualities (common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory, and reason) are all in some sense well-springs of knowledge: they guide our action, the way we exercise our agency, and so they way in which we conceive our self-responsibility.
I feel in no way, in bringing up the tree of knowledge, is Saul attacking Judeo-Christianity. He is articulating, instead, the manipulation of scripture, in its narrow interpretation, to the meet the ends of the elite.
In fact, there is something inexorable about eating from the tree, as I argue it is what enables good, but dualities abound, and so with it comes evil, but to only see one side of it is deception.
It is not only "the fall" of man, but also "the ascent."
It's hard to know how good would have been truly manifested without the fall. Some Orthodox Christian theologians have said that had the fall not occurred, Christ would still have taken on flesh for the sake of divinizing humanity (meaning to make them like God; see theosis[1]). What's important to note, though, is that the created world of matter and all the living and nonliving things in it were initially good in and of themselves.
That being said, the initial "job" of Adam and Eve, and the way in which they demonstrated their goodness, was in loving and delighting in God, one another, and all of creation. However, the ramifications of Adam and Eve's actions reverberated throughout the cosmos, and now we all share in the result.
The things described in the six qualities were created and given to us by God in order to help know God, one another, and creation. As such they are indeed good in their essence, but sometimes they are used in a disordered way that fragments creation, that separates us from God and our neighbor. We can use creativity to make music, or we can use it to hatch a plot to hurt someone else.
I didn't mean to imply that Saul is attacking Judeo-Christianity. But in basing his argument upon the wrong name of the tree, I think he ended up mixing these things that have "inherent difficulty" with his main argument, and that might only result in more confusion rather than illumination.
In speaking of being "innocent of evil" you also imply being "innocent of good" and so can good truly manifest itself, in the light of self-responsibility, in the face of innocence from it?
Further, you want to speak of "scientific knowledge" as separate from the knowledge of "good and evil", but Saul's identification of six qualities (common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory, and reason) are all in some sense well-springs of knowledge: they guide our action, the way we exercise our agency, and so they way in which we conceive our self-responsibility.
I feel in no way, in bringing up the tree of knowledge, is Saul attacking Judeo-Christianity. He is articulating, instead, the manipulation of scripture, in its narrow interpretation, to the meet the ends of the elite.
In fact, there is something inexorable about eating from the tree, as I argue it is what enables good, but dualities abound, and so with it comes evil, but to only see one side of it is deception.
It is not only "the fall" of man, but also "the ascent."