Posted on 06/26/2020 1:38:34 PM PDT by JAG 5000
JAG 5000 Writes:
Man's Free Will is responsible for all the evil in the would.
God created a perfect world.
God created perfect human beings.
God gave human beings a Free Will.
Human beings used their Free Will to choose to do evil.
Human beings choosing to do evil is the reason we have natural disasters and evil in the world-- and the reason we have The Curse upon the Earth.
Many atheists blame the God of the Bible for all the natural disasters and all the evil in the world.
You may ask, "How can atheists blame the God of the Bible for evil when atheists do not believe that God exists?
Answer: They postulate that "if God does exist" then He is evil because the Bible presents God as being Omnipotent {all powerful} and therefore He could have created a world without any evil if He had wanted to do that. He did not want to do that, therefore He is evil.
So? So there are many atheists who have said that the God-That-Does-Not-Exist is responsible for all the evil in the world.
What does that mean? Well again atheists do not believe that God exists but, for the sake of argument, they say that if the God of the Bible does exist, then He is responsible for all the evil in the world because He is Omnipotent and could have designed a world without evil.
I just recently read a lengthy thread on another forum where an atheist and many of his fellow atheists blamed the God of the Bible for inflicting the COVID-19 virus on humanity.
Yes, sure! Again, I know that atheists do NOT believe that God exists. But they, for arguments sake, argue against the God of the Bible and say that "if He does exist", He would be evil because He could prevent evil, but chooses NOT to prevent it.
Has anyone read the books written by the infamous "New Atheists"? There are 4 of them. Their names are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
The atheist Richard Dawkins is an especially vile talking atheist. Here is what the atheist Richard Dawkins said about the God of the Bible:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Again, the "New Atheists" do not believe that God actually exists. But they say that "if He does exist" He is evil as I explained above. I keep repeating this because a large number of Internet posters endlessly state that "Atheists do not believe that God exists" as if we did not know that. We do know that.
Back to what some atheists have said about the God-That-Does-Not-Exist . . .
They have specifically and clearly and emphatically declared that the God of the Bible IS responsible for the evil in the world.
Stephen Fry, an atheist, has a video on You Tube, He was being interviewed and he was asked, 'What would you say to God when you die and find out that Christianity is actually true, and you are standing at the pearly gates?
Stephen Fry replied that he was going to ask God "Why he put bone cancer in children? God, What is that all about?", replied Stephen Fry.
Stephen Fry's video went viral and has become infamous on the Internet. You see it quoted and linked to quite often.
____________
Back to The Problem Of Evil . . .
Centuries ago Epicurus formulated The Problem Of Evil like this:
Sayeth Epicurus:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not Omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”__Epicurus
The Christian analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a very good rebuttal to these "New Atheists" and to Epicurus.
Sayeth the Christian Alvin Plantinga:
{You will need to "deep read" what Plantinga says below and spend some time studying and seriously analyzing what Plantinga has written}
As Plantinga summarized his Free Will defense:[14]
"A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_...urther_details
End quote.
The "New Atheists" do not correctly understand the Biblical doctrine of the Omnipotence {all-powerful} of God.
Epicurus did not correctly understand the Christian doctrine of God's Omnipotence. God's Omnipotence does not mean that He can do anything. God cannot create square circles. God cannot make 2 + 2 = 7. God cannot give humans the Free Will to do evil and at the same time prevent humans from doing evil.
The fatal flaw in Epicurus is he misunderstood the Christian doctrine of the Omnipotence of the God of the Bible.
Conclusion: Mankind, NOT God, is the cause of sin, evil, and natural disasters in the world.
The ancient problem of theodicy is that a “perfect” world and mankind would not include evil deeds. And since evil undeniably exists, God MUST be responsible for creating it. So some aspect of God must be capable of evil.
My own resolution of this dilemma is to include the prospect of reincarnation in my Christian belief system. Thus those who commit evil deeds may ultimately be required to “pay” for them “karmically”.
If so, then “evil” may be seen as ultimately beneficial to mankind, by serving as God’s way of teaching and reinforcing moral behavior.
Thus the cruelty of a “hell” can be discarded as an unseemly instrument of a truly loving God.
And for those Christians who regard the idea of transmigration as heretical, several of the early Church fathers (not just Gnostics) adhered to this belief system.
And as Christ himself asked John the Baptist “Art thou Elias?” (John 1:21), some believe that he taught his disciples some aspects of this belief system.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all...”
I love these guys who can’t put the stars in the sky, separate the firmament from the waves create Time and place everything in it but nonetheless think that THEY are more moral than God.”___TalBlack
Amen to that.
With a siggy like “I was blind and now I hear”, you deserve a reply:
There ain’t a shred of credible evidence to support
Reincarnation anywhere in the Bible. I mean not
a whisp. Not even a shadow of a whisp. Nothing.
I understand the New Testament doctrine of
Eternal Punishment is very discomforting, but
Reincarnation is pure fantasy.
The very best to you.
`
Thanks for your comment, Samurai Jack
No, there’s no point in reading some random person’s excuses for a so-called omnipotent, perfect God who is still somehow responsible for absolutely nothing.
The “New Atheists” do not correctly understand the Biblical doctrine of the Omnipotence {all-powerful} of God.
Epicurus did not correctly understand the Christian doctrine of God’s Omnipotence. God’s Omnipotence does not mean that He can do anything. God cannot create square circles. God cannot make 2 + 2 = 7. God cannot give humans the Free Will to do evil and at the same time prevent humans from doing evil.
God is responsible for all of the innocence in the world.
“No, there’s no point in reading some random person’s excuses for a so-called omnipotent, perfect God who is still somehow responsible for absolutely nothing”___A Perfect Lady
I disagree.
You might learn something you didn’t know.
You don’t know everything.
If you picked up just one tid-bit
of knowledge, that’d be a good thing.
As long as you’re “out here” you might as well read.
The holy book of Genesis (literally “beginnings”, the antonym of eschatology) is packed with advanced Hebrew philosophy, with meanings piled on other meanings.
The original Adam and Eve were neither good nor evil, but amoral, like animals. Because whether they *did* good or evil, only God knew. They did not. But when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they became inherently different beings.
“When Soros dies, he has an army
of evil to continue his work.
The work is truly that of
Satan.”___Professional
Georgie and his “army” are very
“small potatoes” compared to
Almighty God who has never lost
a war or a battle against His
enemies, and never will lose one.
“The Lord is a warrior”
Exodus 15:3
Check it out.
“For I am the Lord thy God I created the
good and the evil”__Stockpirate
You mean that’s it?
No argument?
No reason?
Just an assertion.
I spent much time writing my Opening Post.
My OP makes a good argument that man’s
Free Will created Sin and Evil.
If you can assert.
I can assert too, right?
Here I go:
Sinful man created evil.
Not God.
_____
Blessing be upon you.
Where did sin come from?
“WHY IS THERE SUFFERING IN THE WORLD”
I read your post and liked it. But I will do the thing that annoys me most and answer a question with a question.
WHY IS THERE PLEASURE IN THE WORLD?
Think of good and evil outside the box of western mindset. God is the author of all things. God laid out the blessings and the curses.
We live in a physical world. Yin and Yang, Push and Pull, Hot and Cold. To have good, we must have evil. To truly experience pleasure, we must know and understand suffering.
If God allowed free determination instead of predetermination then God is responsible because he made the choice to allow for free choice. Ultimately it comes down to the choice God made and therefore is responsible for the choices he made.
” To truly experience pleasure, we must know and understand suffering.”
In the valley of shadowless death, they pray for thunderclouds and rain. But to the multitude who stand in the rain, heaven is where the sun shines.
A dream of mad man moon.
Theists... they say that atheists see ourselves as God, but it’s Theists who claim to speak for him.
That goes a step back. God is the singularity that creates. Man does not, cannot create. Man can only rearrange. But man’s purpose is to label that which has been created. Forbidden only from labeling or describing God. Another way of putting it is that man creates *abstracts* to describe what God has made.
Mathematics, writing, art, music, theory, all are abstracts.
Prior to eating the fruit, Adam and Eve had no description of good and evil, only that they had been ordered to not eat that fruit. Apparently the serpent *did* have the knowledge of good and evil, so understood what sin was.
So there being no other characters around, the serpent was the first sinner.
This is wrong thinking. There is no such thing as "free will". It assumes people can do what is good. They cannot.
Nobody likes hearing it but people are evil. They are born with wicked and evil intentions. They will never do good-no not one. The problems you see today is nothing that hasn't happened throughout our long, sorry history because it is what people do. There is nothing new under the sun.
And less Christians forget, we once had this same bent to do evil but God has saved us out of that condition.
Eph 2:1-3 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
It doesn't mean Christians can't slip back into this sinful behavior, only that we no longer practice it. We should ernestly pray for those who are bound into this sinfulness that God may grant others salvation. Only the grace of God will solve the situation.
Sorry but it’s written in the Bible that God created the good and the evil and that he did it for his own glory. So we can believe or assert anything we’d like but if the discussion is about God and good and evil then my quote is the final word...
“This is wrong thinking. There is no such thing as “free will”. It assumes people can do what is good. They cannot.”___HarleyD
Incorrect.
The entire Bible is written on the
assumption that man has Free Will
and can choose to either do good
or evil.
I could esasily go dig up 200
Bible verses that call upon man
to choose to do good.
Ahh, but you have already read them
and dismissed them — so I will not
waste my time listing then for you.
You’re gonna have a very time
“selling the no Free Will” thingy.
_______
Anyway, thanks for your comments.
Thought For Today:
“Choose you this day whom you will serve”__Joshua
(as for me and my house, concluded
Joshua, we will choose to serve
the Lord.}
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