07-10-2023, 10:34 AM
(07-09-2023, 09:28 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: Well, I think there needs to be context for why you created the aircraft with a flaw in the first place.
God created us with free will, which is itself a flaw because free will suggests that we can do whatever we want. If we can do whatever we want then we can act in ways that are evil. But God did not create us to commit evil acts, he simply gave us the choice to. He gave us free will to be able to choose what we want, but in a limited sense of course.
I would still say God is responsible for creating us with free will, but I wouldn't say he's responsible for all the indivudal choices we make out of that free will. That's all on us because we chose to do it. Now, if God created us with free will and then literally controlled us like puppets at points in our lives and made us act out evil things that we didn't freely choose to do, I would say God is responsible for all of our evil acts. But that's not what's happening.
I think we come back to using your analogy here - if I know for a fact that a person is planning on committing a mass shooting and I provide them with the weapon to do so, fully knowing they will use that weapon to kill people, then I am culpable in some manner for that shooting. There would be an extra moral penalty if the people that were killed were those that I loved. When we speak about god's design and his omniscience & omnipotence, he knew that by giving us free will we would sin. We would have the capability for committing terrible acts and cause suffering. His beloved creations would cause suffering amongst themselves, and he would have to assign a large portion of his beloved creations to suffering for eternity because by that same free will, there would be those who choose to not believe in him.
This is a strange decision to make for a benevolent, all-loving god. Why is free will designed in this way? Why does free will have an implicit inclusion of sin? We are talking about the creator of the universe - all universal laws would have been created by him. Why not create free will, or life, without the ability to commit terrible acts? Again, he knew everything that was to come of his design choices, so why would he continue with them despite having the ability to change it?
Quote:In regards to salvation...
God didn't have to offer us that. At all. He could have created a world where there's just a bunch of suffering and then you die. But I believe he offered us an alternative out of love. I know people will have gripes in the way that God is deciding to offer it to us, but at the end of the day I would argue that the reasons for not taking that offer seems a bit quesitonable.
For those who have a disdain for God, they want to have the free will to do what they want right? They want to be able to do all the "sinful" things they want to do, but why? Obviously because that's what's "fun" that's what's "interesting" that's what's "enjoyable", but that's all quite relative and I'd even argue a bit trivial in comparison to everlasting life in which you wouldn't get to act out those sinful desires but still have free will in a limited sense. This is because at the root of it all, we all really want peace. Eternal happiness. It's what we strive for as human beings. It's why we go to work everyday to make ends meet. It's why we have trelationships with other human beings. It's why we follow the law. It's why we eat and drink and sleep. It's why we do the majority of the things we do in life, because we want these things to lead to a happy/satisfying/peaceful outcome. Yet none of it lasts eternally.
Here comes God, offering us eternal salvation but we don't want that because we have less choice than we had before?
Sure, he didn't have to offer us salvation at all. However, he also didn't have to offer the current version of free will. He could have offered us anything. He could have replaced gravity with something else. He is all-powerful and there is no limit to what he could have done, but he still designed us imperfectly unless, by his eyes, we are perfect. If we are a perfect creation, then his design would have to be intentional, for better or for worse. He would have the foreknowledge of all that was to come and the eternal fates of many of his creations, and he would have to approve of those outcomes. This would change the idea of a "loving god" to one that is similar to a person being proud of their ant colony and the ecosystem they designed rather than a creator who loves all of his creations individually and wants to protect them and keep them safe/happy. One that is interested in the simulation of life rather than the life itself.
