God set His humans in the Garden to manage things for Him and His glory. They were imbued with a native understanding of what He required of them. No one had to tell them where the boundaries of moral action stood. Divine revelation was rather simple: take care of the Garden and avoid eating from that one tree.
When the Tempter approached Eve in the Garden, what he suggested was tantamount to calling on humans to evolve, to rise to higher beings, to become their own gods and seek their own glory. It was a blatant transgression of the boundaries, seeking to be what they knew they could not be. While the temptation included all three core weaknesses of human fleshly nature — Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and Boastful Pride of Life — the one I will emphasize here is the last.
They lost access to the Garden and the Tree of Life. That’s a symbolic way of saying they were forced to abandon their eternal form, enshrouded in mortal flesh like the animals. The Sword of God’s Word stood guard; they would have to die physically to see the Garden again. Instead, they faced a mortal existence without that inherent knowledge of the boundaries. They eventually began calling on God to reveal those boundaries in ways they could understand.
It was a continuation of that temptation when the Watchers transgressed their boundaries and came down to the humans. Their progeny, the Nephilim, presented themselves as teachers who could elevate humans to that greater power, showing humans how to do all sorts of things that violated the boundaries God revealed. The Flood killed the Nephilim, but they eventually sneaked back into this world and had to be killed off during the invasion of Canaan Land by the nation of Israel. So far as we can tell, David killed the last of them. The only way they can animate now is to seize a mortal human soul.
In his documentary Aliens and Demons, Heiser explains how all of this is connected to the kind of human ambition promoted by the Nephilim spirits — the demons we face today. The human obsession with advancement and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge is just a continuation of the Three Rebellions. Heiser connects the secret government research that did awful things to so very many people, and the insistence of keeping these abominations hidden, with the necessity of creating the myth of Roswell aliens as a way to misdirect investigations away from the awful results of that immoral research.
We would surely debate what falls on which side, but I distinguish between learning how to live with our current situation, gaining the knowledge of how to implement God’s plan, versus the effort to ignore God’s Word and learn to manipulate Creation. God says the wisdom of Creation is not secret, nor is it obscured such that it requires grand human talent to dig it up. Rather, the truth of His Creation is hidden by the moral darkness of humans who reject His Word. That deep knowledge of the boundaries of His revelation is right there in plain sight.
A part of that truth is that we have no real use for most of our efforts to plumb the facts of intellectual knowledge about the universe. There is nothing we can do to change anything that matters. Whatever it is we figure out does not lead us to a better place; we are still mortals living in a false reality. This whole thing, including our fleshly existence, is slated for destruction. It has a distinct shelf life and will be destroyed in due time. The only thing worth understanding is how we can get out of here to an eternal existence that is a free gift.
Everything you could possibly use in this life is already provided in Christ.
There’s a lot of folks that, even without a belief in God, couldn’t handle the idea of not “advancing” humanity. At least plenty of westerners. We’re too wedded to that way of thinking.