Faith

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(09-18-2015, 03:59 PM)WhoDeyWho Wrote: I'm just taking the attributes that Christians prescribe to their god and trying to make sense of them.  If he is who they say he is and has the attributes that they say he has, then it is silly to pretend like he isn't the cause and ultimate responsibility for any and everything that happens.  

They can't have their cake and eat it too.  Either he planned it to be this way, or he is a bystander whose plans have been sabotaged by humans.  

Religious scholars have debated this point for centuries and there have been numerous theodicies. Someone that questions in the nature that you do might subscribe to the Process Theodicy. its themes are:

[*]•God is not omnipotent in the sense of being coercive. The divine has a power of persuasion rather than coercion. Process theologians interpret the classical doctrine of omnipotence as involving force, and suggest instead a forbearance in divine power. "Persuasion" in the causal sense means that God does not exert unilateral control.
 
•Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. These events have both a physical and mental aspect. All experience (male, female, atomic, and botanical) is important and contributes to the ongoing and interrelated process of reality.
 
•The universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will. Self-determination characterizes everything in the universe, not just human beings. God cannot totally control any series of events or any individual, but God influences the creaturely exercise of this universal free will by offering possibilities. To say it another way, God has a will in everything, but not everything that occurs is God's will.
 
•God contains the universe but is not identical with it (panentheism, not pantheism or pandeism). Some also call this "theocosmocentrism" to emphasize that God has always been related to some world or another.
 
•Because God interacts with the changing universe, God is changeable (that is to say, God is affected by the actions that take place in the universe) over the course of time. However, the abstract elements of God (goodness, wisdom, etc.) remain eternally solid.