It is reasonable and perhaps correct to think of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as producing a single, homogenous fruit. But it is possible to graft branches from multiple kinds of fruit trees onto a single rootstock so that you have different kinds of fruit all growing from the same tree. It is at least an interesting idea to think of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as being a tree with many different branches of knowledge grafted onto it. Some would be branches of knowledge of the Good, and some would be branches of the knowledge of the Evil. If such were the case, it seems to me that some of the fruit would obviously be good, and some would obviously be evil, but a lot of it would be rather hard to tell. We might pluck a particular fruit that looks good, smells good, maybe even tastes good, and yet it makes us sick. On the other hand, we might pick a fruit that frankly seems downright disgusting and yet it heals and strengthens us. The more fruits that we try, the more experienced we will be at spotting the good from the bad. It would be better if we never picked a bad fruit, but we’re not that smart and we’re not that lucky. But just because we chose poorly one time, it does not mean that we are fundamentally broken or worthless as seekers of knowledge. We don’t have to keep eating the same exact fruit that kills us a little more every single time. We can stop picking the fruits that we know to be evil, and we can keep searching for those fruits that might turn out to be so good that they start to cure us of all of the bad fruit we’ve eaten. Just as we will surely die by eating evil fruits from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so too will we surely enter into life eternal by partaking again and again from the good fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
