I agree that if a person is not confronted with a choice to make, then they aren’t exercising their free will. There has to be a choice available. Also, some amount of knowledge is required for a choice to really be called a free choice. This part I understand.
Agency means the ability to choose between good and evil. Now the Bible teaches that Adam and Eve did not know the difference between good and evil, until they had eaten of the fruit; which means that they could not have had agency before that time either.
Is there some kind of official resource that talks about what that knowledge in the tree of good and evil consisted of (or maybe it wasn’t in the tree, but in the act of eating from the tree in disobedience)? The reason I ask is because that quote you gave from DC sort of sounds like you have to experience having made the wrong choice, or experience bad stuff in order to know good stuff. Maybe that is the knowledge that was meant, the knowledge that comes from experiencing making an evil choice and having something bad happen and then realizing that is a total bummer.
Here is a quote to help with why I wonder about that:
2Nephi2:23 And they would have had no a
children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no b
joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no c
sin.
It seems to say that knowing misery is a prerequisite to knowing joy. Sort of like knowledge must come from experiencing doing these things, both the good and the bad, and then, once you have the knowledge of what it is like to do the act of choosing evil, choosing good.
Moses 6 seems to have something about it, too:
55 And the Lord spake unto Adam, saying: Inasmuch as thy children are a
conceived in sin, even so when they begin to grow up, b
sin conceiveth in their hearts, and they taste the c
bitter, that they may know to prize the good.
It sounds like children when they come to an old enough age start to do sin in their heart, and so taste the bitter, and after that, then they can know to prize what is good. But if they didn’t first taste bitter, I assume this means they couldn’t prize the good? Is there some teaching source that explains if this is what they mean?
I know this is a digression but it came up as I was reading stuff on the lds site: If eating from that tree would bring knowledge and agency, and Satan got in so much trouble for trying to set up a Plan where man would have no agency, why would Satan try to tempt Adam and Eve into eating from that tree? If he hadn’t tempted them, then no one could ever progress and go on with the correct Plan of salvation. Then he would have gotten what he wanted in the council in heaven, sort of. I may be simplifying what Satan wanted, though, but I thought it was like to destroy agency.
Are we sure that Adam didn’t have agency before he ate from that tree? Is there a direct quote from a teaching source for that? I didn’t find an entry over at
lds.org in that gospel section with an index. There was no article for “tree”, “knowledge”, or “evil”. The “agency” article doesn’t mention that Adam didn’t have it.
You quoted:
Moses 6:
56 And it is given unto them to know good from evil; wherefore they are agents unto themselves, . . .
So from the surrounding context this appears to be about the children of Adam have this knowledge given to them, and so they can be agents. By what means is it given to them? Is it given by them by doing their first sin, sort of like Adam? Or, is it sort of placed there so they just know it before ever doing anything?
I thought I was done, but I had another thought, but I went over the limit, so I’ll post it in the post below.
