The Knowledge of Good and Evil seems to be of high importance for
God in terms of creating the Earth.
Creation, as described in
Genesis, appears largely to be a process of distinction between one thing and another by various processes. The whole thing would be a lot more satisfying if
Moses had gone into details about how
YHVH went about creating the heavens and earth, or if he could have provided a detailed
CV so we could go back and figure out which things were created by God and which might be the work of other, perhaps more
competent deities, if any, but he doesn't go there, so we have to just guess.
At any rate, the first real detail we get about creation is that God saw light and said it was good. That doesn't mean that he also decided that darkness is bad, mind you, only that one of God's essential labors during creation was the identification and sequestration of things displaying distinct characteristics. Arbitrary distinctions and nomenclature seem to be beneath God's talents, as those tasks, at least as they were applied to animals and women, are delegated to Adam. Could it be that Adam was intended as a mere tool of the creation process, a bit of automata?
Reading Genesis, I can't help but get the feeling that God had a few more balls in the air than just creating the earth and the heavens. He gets pretty annoyed when Adam & Eve gain knowledge, and to me, annoyance implies some degree of inconvenience, perhaps of the oh-shit-what-did-I-just-do variety. If this was a catastrophic error on Adam's part (as the church likes to remind us), how much more of a screw-up was it for The Man, and, more importantly, to whom was he accountable?
The idea that someone might find out about that unfortunate fruit incident and be pissed is borne out when God says, "...man has become as one of us..." Us? US? Unless God had a divine turd in His pocket, to whom was he referring, and why would he care? Is all of God's conduct throughout The Bible an effort to cover up his mistake? Could His conspicuous absence in the modern world be a result of his doing time in some Penitentiary of the Gods? Wouldn't it be worth our time to plan some sort of prison break? Maybe that's what he was hoping for when he left a couple of trees that were capable of bestowing divine gifts upon his Homunculi. I think it's clear, based on my interpretation, that what God wants from us is a gigantic cake (chocolate, I think) with a big file in it, or perhaps, if we could lay hands of some fruit from the Tree of Life, a large-scale rescue mission/break-out attempt. The guy's taking heat for something we did, right? Seems like the least we could do.