(December 16, 2024 at 5:33 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: -God can do anything, except when he can't.
-God knows everything, except what he doesn't.
-God made everything, except for all that yucky stuff.
Boru
God's helplessness is one of the more intriguing facets of religious belief, especially for Christians. They believe in a god that made everything, right down to the very rules that control reality itself. But he consistently acts as if he is incapable of dealing with the outcome of his own programming. That is probably the most bizarre and frustrating part of asking Christians to make sense of their god.
Q: God made everything. So when the things he makes act a certain way, whose fault is it?
A: it is the fault of the things he created.
Q: Well, if he created them, then isn't he responsible for the outcome?
A: Nope. It is the fault of his creation.
Q: But doesn't that mean it's his fault? It is his creation, after all.
A: Nope. Totally their fault. God bears zero responsibility for it.
Q: Well, if someone made a defective TV, wouldn't you blame the manufacturer for making a faulty device?
A: Nope. The television broke of its own accord. The maker is free and clear.
And that is not an exaggeration. It's a paraphrase of a discussion I was having with Godschild one time.
"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
