Just a few Questions

Just a few questions please. I've recently become 'unconverted'. I'm settled on that. But I find myself wondering how it took so long. Some of these questions have been floating around for a very long time. Some are either new, or have finally crawled out of the closet where they had been safely stashed away.

For starters, I'm really trying to comprehend the 'beginning' story. Did God create everything? EVERYTHING? I may have to go back and read some of that stuff again, because if God created everything, including the angels, and nothing went wrong until Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and did so because the serpent beguiled her, then I have to ask, how could the serpent have been so evil as to beguile her if everything was perfect? At that point, it would seem that even the serpent 'was good', if 'everything was good'. And if everything was perfect, why was there a tree in the middle of this garden that obviously WASN'T perfect. Why would there be a tree of knowledge of good ... and EVIL? What kind of god puts his precious creation, his children, in a garden, in a perfect world, (that isn't really perfect then is it?), and leaves them to eat poison which he knows full well will then kill them! Having declared, by the way, that everything he created was good. And while I don't recall it stating that he didn't create that particular tree, I have to back up even further to the fact that there were angels already existing, apparently, and one of those angels, was already evil. Now, is this angel, the one who was 'fallen', the one who was evil, was he also then, created by this same god? Does this god consistently create things that 'go bad'? Or was there already another 'god' who was evil? What's going on up there in heaven, where most of the angels praise god, but one of them, 'went bad'? Something is wrong with this story!