Having partaken of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil- that is, having obtained the capacity to distinguish between opposites, and being able now to understand the difference between good and evil- Adam had, on this matter, become as God.
Thereafter, through the righteous exercise of agency, Adam could pursue a course that would eventually endow him with a fulness of the Father. “As to the fall,” Elder Bruce R. McConkie wrote, “the scriptures set forth that there were in the Garden of Eden two trees.
One was the tree of life, which figuratively refers to eternal life; the other was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which figuratively refers to how and why and in what manner mortality and all that appertains to it came into being.... Eve partook without full understanding; Adam partook knowing that unless he did so, he and Eve could not have children and fulfill the commandment they had received to multiply and replenish the earth.” (New Witness, p. 86.)
Elsewhere Elder McConkie wrote:
“The account is speaking figuratively. What is meant by partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that our first parents complied with whatever laws were involved so that their bodies would change from their state of paradisiacal immortality to a state of natural mortality.” (“Christ and the Creation,” Ensign, June 1982, p. 15.)