(January 10, 2015 at 10:37 am)Grasshopper Wrote: God doesn't want murder, divorce, prostitution, evil thoughts too. No sin. But obviously we ain't getting that. Free will remember?But god visited destruction and pain upon people many times as a result of their actions. He drowned nearly every living thing on the entire planet at one point. Where were his concerns over free will then? He ravaged Egypt with plagues and drowned its army. Where were his concerns over free will then? He allowed the massacre of his own chosen people time and again, sometimes directly and sometimes allowing the pagan nations to do his work for him. Where were his concerns over free will then?
There are plenty of examples where god did not hesitate to take violent and decisive action against anyone who went against his will. Pointing at the times when he looked away and pretended not to notice does not reinforce the concept of free will; it simply shines a glaring spotlight on his arbitrary and contradictory nature.
"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
