And would we still have "free will"?

Adam and Eve had free will. I am not understanding why you think that not disobeying God would negate our free will.

No mention of an apple in the bible. The fruit from the tree of.....

Free will is precisley what they had in the first place. But what they did with that free will is what counts.

Well, I'm just trying to understand the notion of original sin and how it affects the way we are today. Everybody mentions how we are condemned by it (born inherently evil, etc.) and I'm wondering what it would be like if original sin never happened.

None of what happened in Eden makes any sense.

Adam & Eve were supposedly the first humans. They lived what, ~100,000 years ago? (keep in mind that this is before humans discovered fire, made spears, etc...yet somehow this primitive couple had enough cognitive reasoning to understand language and morality, and to be able to decipher between which being was God and which being was Satan)

And they had ONE commandment: "Thou shalt not eat the fruit". There were no other rules or laws, there was no Jesus, nothing. I'm sure you'll say something like if they didn't eat the apple they would have done something else that was wrong, but what? They don't know any better. They couldn't know right from wrong unless God made them more special than all of their descendants and then condemned them (and Adam's sperm of course) the instant they sinned.

So what's the deal with original sin and how would free will play out if it didn't exist?

First off the original commandment was not "don't eat that apple" it was "love and obey your God".

As far as what would the world be like if original sin never happen you can look at Jesus. One of the reasons that Jesus had to be born from a virgin was so that he was not corrupted by original sin.

That is why satan tried to tempt him

And I do not look at the original sin as specific to adam and eve. With the temptation of the devil I feel eventually it would have happened anyway.

So what you should be asking yourself is more so what would have happened if Satan never fell

But I still do not see how you are tying free will into this. It has nothing to do with original sin.

I get what you're saying but I don't think any serious debate can take place on this issue. (I could easily be wrong)

This is because the entire Christians religion is based on the premise that we are all sinners that need to ask for forgiveness. (from the creator that allowed us to sin LOL)

So, as you said, Christians will suggest Adam or Eve would have committed another sin and everything would be the same, etc.

Could God have just set Mary up with a good-looking husband to impregnate her? That would allow Jesus to be born with original sin and also would have saved Mary from having to deal with the notion that she got pregnant in some magical way. I mean, I bet back then people were calling her a lying whore.

And you believe, of course assuming the bible is true, that Mary is up in heaven worrying about what some people called her? And that if she was allowed to do it all over again that she would say "no way people were too mean to me, let someone else be the mother of our saviour"

But why? If humans were originally perfect sinless beings, how would temptation have gotten them to sin in the first place? This is a chicken/egg situation.

Also, how were they able to determine who God was and who Satan was? How could they have even understood language to know what God and Satan were saying? You're giving today's standards of cognitive reasoning (with the information we have in the last few thousand years) to primitive humans from 100k years ago.

And I could have done a much better job at explaining how free will ties into this. I'll promise to do so as soon as the rest of it is more concise.

And how long was all this supposed to last? This paradise?

No it's not. Temptation would have gotten there via satan.

This assumes that they had no real language. I see no reason to believe that. We could trace back to were it seems people started to write things down, but we cannot say when speech started.

Can you show that the first humans did not have cognitive reasoning similar to ours?

Hard to say. In a world were satan exist I do not think that there is a possible world that could have existed where sin did not eventually become present.

So original sin - the reason people are suffering unspeakable horrors - was an inevitability in God's model?

God sounds a lot like the old guy in the Saw movies.

Ourhouse, the answer to your question is quite obvious, the world would be exactly like it is now. ducy?

That is not what I said. I said that I believed that once Lucifer fell that I think it would have eventually happened.

I made no theological claim that it was a necessity. Nor did I say that Lucifer had to fall from grace. So the original model would not have included this.

A better question is: what kind of God allows the rest of humanity for all time to be condemned because of one action by one person?

If you believe the Bible is inerrant, nothing I show you about cognitive reasoning would convince you. No matter how high the confidence interval gets (tracing a timeline of human achievements back to 100k years as best as possible) you will always be able to claim doubt.

So let's (reluctantly) give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that cognitive reasoning was the same 100k years ago as it is today. Would you at the very least agree that human knowledge and experience were both vastly worse (non-existent, even) in the Garden Of Eden than they are now?

Even today, we'd have a difficult time deciding which being was God and which being was Satan, and whether or not what looked like God could really have been Satan playing a trick on us. The only method we can use to decide would be our collective human experiences about what we think God's nature is like (and we could still easily be totally wrong). A&E didn't have those at all.

So how did they rationally deduce who was who?
And even if they magically could deduce it, how, without any previous human experience, were they able to tell right from wrong and good from evil?

Side questions:

Why did God test them to begin with?
What was wrong with the fruit (aside from God didn't want them to eat it)?
How does what they did transfer to their kids as well?
Did God curse them with some sort of "sin spell" after they disobeyed him?
Is our free will to be born without sin now limited because of this?
Did A&E never do anything wrong (e.g. lie, cheat, steal, etc..."sin" as we know the word now) before they ate the apple?
Did they know not to? How?

Because the story of original sin is a myth?

exactly . Anyway for a more serious answer I think its safe to assume we would all be naked.

A God that makes the old guy in the Saw movie look like a saint.

He offers a free ticket of salvation to whomever wants it. So no one is condemned but can have eternal life.

And each man must account for his own actions.

sure.

But God walked with Adam in the garden of eden. There was no question about who God was.

He never tested them. The forbidden tree was merely a symbol of free will. If there was no way to turn from God then they would not truely have free will.

That doesn't answer the question at all.

If anyone ever has not made it to heaven, then that person is paying for the original sin of Adam and Eve.

No, that person would be paying for the sins that they committed. For your stance to be justifiable you would have to show that no one could get into heaven.

Or even show that a single person was incapable of getting into heaven. Because if they were capable but chose not to then their fate would be on their own heads.

Let's look at person X.

Situation A: A&E don't eat the apple. Person X is born without a sin nature and as a result goes to heaven.

Situation B: A&E eat the apple. Person X is born with a sin nature and fails do what it takes to get to heaven.

Tell me how person X is not paying for Adam and Eve's mistake.