(January 1, 2014 at 4:21 am)agapelove Wrote: God knew when He created creatures that had a free will to accept or reject Him, that they would fall. His design was to allow us to choose freely and He honored their choice and ordained a Savior to redeem them.If god created humanity and knew that they would fall, then we must have been designed that way. It seems as if you are saying that free will itself was the cause, in which case we are doomed to one of two futures: we will always fall no matter how many times we are redeemed, or we will have to have our free will taken from us in order to serve god.
I don't see a scenario were god can be absolved of the blame if he knew that his creation would fail, and yet did not adjust or modify the design. It brings to mind the angels of Genesis chapter 6-- spiritual creatures who were aroused by Earth women, and who managed to mate with them and produce offspring. Why design spirit creatures with working reproductive parts? Why make Earth women so desirable that even those spirit beings who spent countless years in the presence of the almighty himself would risk damnation for a bit of fornicating?
The biblical god makes some odd design decisions, for which he blames the creation instead of the blueprint. I think the blueprint is the problem. If the blueprint is signed "ancient humans for our imaginary friend Yahweh" it makes sense. If it's signed "Yahweh, king of the everything" then we have some real problems ahead of us.
"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