Well a conscience is based on knowledge, or feeling, of what is right or wrong. So, I would say they didn't have a conscience until they had eaten from that tree. It's not actually conscience but they only knew and did what God told them to do so it was limited. Eating from the tree opened their minds up to other possibilities including good and bad. I prefer to think of them being simpletons with no imagination before they ate the fruit. Before they ate from the tree of knowledge they didn't know of sin. They didn't know something was wrong therefore, they did not feel bad about it. It was only after they ate from the tree and God chastised them and they gained a conscience because then they knew good from evil.
I found an article entitled "Did Adam Have a Conscience Before the Fall?" by Herman Bavinck in thegospelcoalition. This article is about before the so called temptation of Adam and Eve there is really a harmony between man's love for god and consciousness but after giving it to the sins, the temptation of man, it kinda open the eyes of man to the possibility that they can be separated from god and it manifested through guilt of their conscience. There is a thin line between being conscious that you have committed something wrong and being guilty about it, all of these things can be best explain inside our conscience.
In his article he stated "By the grace of God, humans still retain the consciousness that they ought to be different, that in all respects they must conform to God’s law. But reality witnesses otherwise; they are not who they ought to be. And this witness is the conscience." They did not know that it was bad to disobey God, but as long as they obeyed him they did not need to know what was good or bad. Only when they started acting on their free will did they need to know right from wrong so that they would not do the latter. That is why the commandment not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was such an appropriate one.
In the original language, the word "knowledge" refers to something that you know through experience. Adam and Eve did have any understanding of "morality". They had the understanding that certain thing were right and others wrong. They had the understanding that they were to obey God. They had commandments beside the "do not eat" that they followed, including "be fruitful and multiple" and "have dominion over the earth". What they lacked was first had experience with good and evil. It was God intent that they understand morality through their intelligence and not through their experience. That they remain innocence as far as experiencing the effects of evil.
Though Adam and Eve lacked knowledge of good and evil before eating from the tree, that doesn't necessarily mean they had no understanding of obedience and disobedience, or that they were totally ignorant of right and wrong. Any more than the presence of the tree of life meant they were dead until they ate from it. Even today, we lack a complete understanding of good and evil. We continually debate and question various moral issues, yet, we are not completely ignorant of good and evil either.
Conscience can be influenced by a love one just like Eve to Adam, Peer pressure like the serpent, and God who represents the good moral standard. Just like the story in the old testament, we can apply this story in a more modern perspective. People nowadays can easily be influenced by social media, peer pressure, worldly accomplishments that sometimes what you believe is right and just, all these factors would somehow turn your thoughts and beliefs of really what is right and what is wrong and that's the time where your conscience as a person becomes unstable and you tend to decide on the other side of the table.
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