(June 26, 2015 at 11:07 am)SteveII Wrote: You seem to be confusing anger with acting in anger. There is no indication that God acted rashly or hastily.But he did act in anger, yes?
SteveII Wrote:You think that God is somehow bound by what we consider just or fair.On the contrary, I am aware that god is NOT bound by what we consider just or fair. God is not 'bound' by anything, because no one can challenge his power. It doesn't matter if his actions regarding Job were just or fair, and this is indeed what god made clear to Job, and what Job finally understood. Note that when god addresses Job, he doesn't speak of obligations or fairness; he compares his magnificent and near-limitless power to that of the weak little human before him. Job had no recourse. God has no obstacles.
SteveII Wrote:Regarding your hypothetical if God created beings without freewill, would he send them to Hell (which is best defined as eternal separation from God). No, that would not be within the character of God being the greatest conceivable being. But we do have freewill, so the burden shifts to us.So why wouldn't god choose for us? We have free will because he gave it to us, and apparently the only possible use for it is to get on his bad side, seeing as no human as yet has managed to avoid sin. Job apparently did all he could to get on god's good side, and he was raked over the coals for it. I'd just as soon that god choose to save us all than that he leave us foundering in a situation where the vast majority of us will end up suffering eternal torment. That cannot be the best possible outcome.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould