(December 28, 2013 at 8:25 pm)agapelove Wrote: God knew we would fall which is why He prepared a Savior before hand. You are indicting Him for doing nothing to stop it, but I think you're not acknowledging that God is offering everyone a choice.If he knew we would fall, then he designed us specifically with that in mind. Not only did he not stop it, he deliberately set it in motion. Everything that follows does so because he designed the first humans to fall short, then punished all of humanity for their success in falling short.
The only rule given to the first pair of humans is to avoid one tree in the utopian paradise that god has provided them. If he hadn't introduced this temptation, would Adam and Eve not have free will? If so, then the only way for them to exercise their free will was to break the one rule given them. If not, then we suffer because god added an unnecessary obstacle that was designed solely for the purpose of causing humanity to fall.
The story is written so as to put the blame squarely on god's shoulders, which is why it's such a tricky one for Christians to explain, and why there are such varied (and often unclear) explanations for it. Just the basic story --where god pats himself on the back for his "good" creation then watches it turn on him-- forces the believer to blame humanity for a shortcoming that is built into it. As you delve deeper the questions get tougher and the explanations more and more bizarre.
"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