(March 26, 2014 at 11:08 pm)snowtracks Wrote: from a resource prospective: disease, wars, and famine control population.You're just making it up as you go along. Which demonstrates a problem with basing your religion on ancient texts written with many different purposes in mind. Once you have to go outside of the book to provide explanations for what is in it, it's all open to interpretation, hence the tens of thousands of Christian denominations.
again, earth and universe weren't designed for ultimate perfection. God's plan doesn't include keeping all pain, suffering, and all expression of sin from coming into existence; the garden of eden wasn't secured under lock and key. if sin (which grow into evil) and its effect continued forever, then there would be a real cogent argument against God's nature and even His existence, but both physical and mental suffering is temporary.
also there's human involvement like 1) improper hygiene - God laid out health law practices and instructions for quarantines in leviticus. 2) making poor choices or engaging in sinful behavior which has consequences including disease.
free will has cost and benefits.
It's also a bunch of nonsense. God seems unable to get a handle on population control. One minute he is wiping out nearly all life on the planet in a cataclysmic flood, next minute he is sending his chosen people to massacre whole groups of indigenous tribes, and when that fails he flogs humanity with an endless stream of diseases and genetic defects. And somehow he thinks that telling an ancient tribe of nomads to bury their fecal matter will sufficiently balance the scales.
And if what you say is true, then the costs and benefits of free will are imposed artificially and arbitrarily by an outside agent, thus negating the whole concept of free will. This is what happens when you are forced to fill in the gaps in ancient stories that are cobbled together from campfire tales.
"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