There is more than one important misconception about the connection of death and the opening of Genesis to be found in the church. On one hand, the relatively mild but still blatant error of believing that no death was present before human sin overlooks how animals were still likely to die and, at a minimum, plants must have died if anything at all was to eat [1]. Only human death is specifically said to have beem foreign to the world until humans sinned. On the other hand, a more severe error of believing that God's promise that death would follow if Adam and Eve disobeyed his command (Genesis 2:15-17) is trivialized since evangelicals--perhaps the most widespread kind of Christian in the West but the most irrational and unbiblical all the same--generally fail to realize the death instead of eternal torment is the primary penalty for sin in Christian theology.
Death is the loss of life. Only an extremely figurative use of the word death would refer to eternal conscious torment, meaning there is no evidence from the text of Genesis 2 and 3 that God had eternal torment in mind when he said that eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, since the word death, left to itself, is used to communicate precisely the opposite of eternal existence. This literal meaning of death in Genesis 2:17 is the only one that is consistent with what the Bible describes later on as being the fate of the wicked. As any rationalist has realized to some extent, true inconsistency as opposed to avoidable misperceptions of inconsistency can only mean one thing: part or all of an idea or set of ideas is false. Taking the language of death from Genesis onward seriously is one of several ways a person who thinks the Bible teaches eternal conscious torment for all unsaved beings can start to see the pathetic, heretical house of cards crumble.
The prediction of Genesis that death would follow eating from the tree does not lead to the kind of fulfillment evangelicals expect. Even though they have a difficult time understanding the most basic aspects of everything from justice to soteriology, what the Bible says about death being the grand penalty for sin is rather clear when one does not make assumptions as one reads the book or reflects on it. God's promise of death in Genesis 2 is exactly what the rest of the Bible, save for verses referring to a subgroup of people in Revelation 14, says will befall humans who are not granted eternal life by God. Sin brings eventual death according to multiple places in the Bible--loss of Earthly life with the first death and loss of conscious existence and all of the possibilities and pleasures therein with the second death.
"The soul that sins will die," says Ezekiel 18:4. "The wages of sin is death," says Romans 6:23. God "condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going go happen to the ungodly," says 2 Peter 2:6. That is without even pointing to Matthew 10:28, John 3:16, 1 Timothy 6:16, and more, all of which contradict the Bible itself or use language almost deceptively unless they simply mean that humans are mortal by nature after they sin and that God must extend his eternal life to them or else they will perish. Even various statements made in Psalms that might initially seem like they have little to nothing to do with cosmic death in hell are consistent with this, saying the wicked will come to an end and exist no more (see Psalm 37:20 as an example).
When God said that death would result if Adam and Eve ate the fruit he forbade, anything but true death eventually following would make God a liar, or at the very least a fairly poor communicator. It is evangelicals and their legions of tradition-based biases and assumptions that fail to comprehend this, pretending that death means something other than death even as they pretend their fallacies in other areas are valid. An unwillingness to avoid assumptions and flee from appeals to tradition will keep the irrational from seeing that annihilationism and conditional immortality, or at least ideas that point to them, are plainly taught as early as the second and third chapters of Genesis. Anything other than the first and second deaths actually being death distorts God's promise to the first humans mentioned in the Bible.
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