Notes

God created Man in His image, and called His creation good. That means, in the beginning, man at first, was indeed good.

They also were intelligent beings, by nature. Because God gave them jobs to do, naming the animals and everything. And they had to directly go against that nature, to defy God, and eat the forbidden fruit. Right?

So that officiates that God gave us freewill, and the power of influence. Because without it, the temptation would have failed. We would have already had one nature, that nature wouldn't be able to be changed as it was.

It did, however, do two things to us in that moment.

When man ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (..wow.) they gained knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge, translated daat in hebrew, translates to "connection" and is also used to mean intimacy and physical connection. We suddenly had a connection, an intimacy with both good, and evil. We suddenly had knowledge of both, and both instilled within us to be able to be influenced by and to follow. We already had the ability, by free will, but we suddenly had a split nature, one to be influenced to do either desire dependent on which suited said nature.

By doing that, we were no longer like God, I'm a sense that we were tainted beings. God is purity, holiness, and is in and of Himself, righteousness. He can do no evil, no wrong. And though Adam and Eve once walked with God, being one with righteousness, in harmony. They suddenly were separated from God, because righteousness and unrighteousness could not coincide. They had knowledge of both good and evil, but not knowledge of righteousness, because they had broken their communion with it. They could not know it, be intimate with it, because their sudden intimacy with evil.

So what happened after that? They were suddenly separated from righteousness, which made them no longer covered by purity. which made them naked and vulnerable in their uncleanliness. They were no longer clean = pure = righteous. Their heart was suddenly wicked, not because all they could do was "bad" morally, but because it had been tainted by evil, which is the absence of righteousness, which is what happened when God forced them out of the garden. The garden was a place of unity and communion with righteousness, a holy place that only the holy/pure can be in.

The garden of Eden was that covering. When they were no longer pure, they could no longer wear the covering of purity. So they were separated from it. And yet, God still loved and had a plan for us. And still proved He longed to commune with his children. So as the first sacrifice, the only bridge we had to gap our separation from righteousness and to cleanse and cover our unrighteousness, God sacrificed the first lamb, pure, and untainted, to cover Adam and Eve, though they were naked and stained with unrighteousness. The blood to cleanse, and the skin to cover. A prophecy, showing what was yet to come as the restoration of our separation between us and God. Christ.

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I think the answer is that, in human definition, man can be good or evil, dependent on their influence and their actions/reactions thereof. But speaking in a sense of righteousness, no man is righteous, because we all enter the world lost and separated from God. But through salvation, and Christ's sacrifice, his blood covered and cleansed our unrighteousness and bridged the gap between us and God. So inherently, man is evil, only in the sense that they are lost and absent of righteousness (God, essentially) but as soon as man accepts Christ they are a new creation and made righteous, by nature. Because we are changed and made new creations, in Christ.