(July 12, 2017 at 10:56 am)mordant Wrote:(July 12, 2017 at 10:19 am)SteveII Wrote: Oh, I see. You think everything is God's plan. It is my view that you have to distinguish between God effecting his plan of redemption and his promises to those that believe within a world of free will and sin vs. the effects of free will and sin.Irrelevant. Nothing happens without god either permitting it or causing it, and nothing is outside his ability to prevent, so he is still ultimately responsible for the mayhem. If a burglar comes into my house and slits my children's throats while I passively watch, I can't claim I'm a good father, using as an excuse that I'm not interfering in the burglar's free will.
Your analogy is lacking. So while God does permit evil, it is only because it is a by-product of a much greater goal: free will. Without free will we would have just been happy puppets always following a predefined path. God instead wanted people to *choose* to obey, love and worship Him as well as having loving, respectful, etc. relationships with others (none of which is possible without free will).
You seem to think that God should intervene and prevent evil things from happening. It does not seem to me that we could have a world where we have free will and not have suffering because every wrong choice we made that resulted in suffering (however small) would be met with a supernatural intervention. Such a state of affairs would result in a complete lack of morally sufficient freedom --effectively eliminating free will. So it would seem that a world in which everyone had free will but no possibility of suffering would not be able to be actualized.
