And the LORD God said,
Behold, the man is become as one of Us,
to know good and evil;
and now, lest he put forth his hand,
and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live for ever.

Adam called back and we all what happened next.

The serpent was cursed for his role, Eve was cursed for tempting Adam and Adam was cursed for….
In the end, all those involved – including the serpent, for whatever reason – were banished from the heaven. “Lest he put forth his hand…”

What are we to understand from all this?
That God, the omniscient and all powerful Father, was ‘evil’?
He must have known what was going to happen… he was omniscient, wasn’t he?

There are people who believe the Bible to be an accurate rendering of the past.
I happen to be one of them.
Only I don’t interpret what I read in the literal sense… the narrative is true, those things did happen, only not in the ‘real’ world. The Bible is not the story of flesh but a story of mind.

It is the story of what has happened in our minds. In our collective mind!

Genesis is the story of how we’ve grown conscious!
Starting from the sensations perceived during our interaction with the ‘real’ world – read ‘serpent’ – and using the evolutionary accrued ability to speak among ourselves – we’ve learned to identify ‘information’.
We, like all other living things, were already able to make the difference between good and ‘bad’. All living things ‘know’ what’s good for them and what to avoid. Or, at least, act as if…
We, like all other primates and along many other animals, were already adept at ‘reading minds’. Were already able to figure out intentions.
As conscious ‘human beings’ we have started to attribute intent! “To know good and EVIL”!

So evil is of a conscious nature, right?

‘How about ‘God’? Is it real?’

Sorry, I don’t have a reasonable answer for this question.
All I know is that the God so many of us believe in is nothing but a representation.
A figment of our collective imagination. And since we cannot imagine things but starting from the real world, there is a strong possibility that there is something, somewhere, which fits, however loosely, our concept. Our concept of a God…

Humberto Maturana, The origin and conservation of Self…
https://constructivist.info/radical/pub/hvf/papers/maturana05selfconsciousness.html
Frans de Waal, Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30231743-are-we-smart-enough-to-know-how-smart-animals-are