(May 8, 2014 at 3:57 pm)Lek Wrote:It's not a case of just deciding that he should be one thing or another. We would logically expect him to be much wiser and more considerate than the story implies. The fact that he falls short so often in the Bible is the reason that excuses like "he works in strange and mysterious ways" and "we cannot know his mind" had to be invented. Because if we consider his actions under a typical framework of ethical or moral behavior he comes off looking either cruel or foolish.(May 8, 2014 at 3:50 pm)Tonus Wrote: If the Genesis stories are allegorical, then you cannot state this with any certainty. If the stories are to be taken literally, then it's not reasonable to fault humanity for what happened. To speak of god as a being of such great power and wisdom and intellect and then pretend that he was so effortlessly bested by the devil and two humans does not make sense.If God is who or what you think he should be then it doesn't make sense. If we allow him to be who he is then it does.
"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
