was it because they thought they became gods?
was it because they trusted in the serpent more than what God had told them ?
Perhaps this will help you have a better understanding of the narrative.
By oldhermit
As we move from creation to the garden, there develops an emerging discontinuity between man and his association with forbidden things. When man is unconstrained by revelation, he quite naturally draws conclusions based upon how he relates to the world around him. Man allows what he experiences to influence how he defines what is relevant. Once man learns to link the natural to the eternal, he learns to represent human events in quite a different way. One cannot build a triadic picture of reality based upon experiential logic. Human rationalization, operating on its own, cannot properly context the relationship of man to the natural world. Building a triadic picture of reality is only possible when one learns to represent human experience in the light of revelation. To do this, one must allow revelation to transcend experiential logic.
There is an example of triadic structure that demonstrates how the natural world and the supernatural world relate to one another in the eternal continuum. At the beginning of man’s history in the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were mentioned in the context of man’s relationship both to God and to the natural world. The text never seems to indicate that in the beginning there was any prohibition to the tree of life but, that man was only denied access to the tree of knowledge. It was not until after the fall of man that God placed an angel with a flaming sword at the east of the garden to prohibit man’s access to the tree of life.
The way in which Adam chose to represent these trees would reflect his understanding of his association with both God and the natural world. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that access to the tree of life was predicated upon man’s observance of the divine prohibition of the other. Man was to have absolutely no contact with the tree of knowledge. God had provided every tree of the garden for man’s use and pleasure, but this tree was to be left strictly alone. These two trees stand as symbols of a world beyond man’s sensory existence. The tree of forbidden knowledge represents the holiness, the superiority, and the sovereignty of God. It suggests that God always reserves unto Himself the things that belong exclusively to him. It is not merely the tree that has exclusivity, but what that tree represents. As a whole, man is never content to abide by prohibitions. Here, he desires the one thing he is denied. How characteristic this has proven to be of human nature!
Although man was given the highest place of honor as the crowning creation of God, and given dominion over all creation, this tree was a reminder that even man is not God. Man must stand in the index position of this triad and link the tree of knowledge that he can see to the will of God whom he cannot see. He must also link this tree to revealed consequences that he cannot see and has never before experienced. For man to properly relate to both worlds, he must learn to link the eternal world to his world by bringing God’s warning to bear upon his relationship to this tree. He must learn how to define the nature of his relationship to this tree based on what God had told him about it. Now, this epistemology did not just apply to this tree, it extended to everything in man’s dominion. He must understand his relationship to all of his domain based upon this triadic epistemology. God had already defined man’s function in creation and man must relate to his world according to the words of the Lord.
From the beginning, man was confronted with a decision in his association with this icon of good and evil. This tree was a symbol of an unseen reality. There is a particular type of knowledge that man was not equipped to handle and should not seek to obtain. The accessibility of the tree shows that man was given the ability to obtain this knowledge. The prohibition laid down by God says that this knowledge is destructive to man. This reinforces man’s position as a subordinate creature to what is unseen. God had said,
“From this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shalt not eat of it; for in the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die.” Here is a divine standard given to instruct man on how to think when he considers this tree. Since God has decreed that punishment will follow disobedience, the validity of God’s word is upheld. Divine judgment preserves divine justice because it is through the exercise of justice that God protects his holiness. Observance of this revelation becomes a matter of life and death. The ethics were simple; God said, “Don’t touch it.” This did not require a human analysis of ethics to decide what might be the right thing to do. Contact with the tree was evil both because God said it was evil, and because of what man would suffer as a result.