Why did god create evil?

[lucent]

Of course god isn't a precog, he's a character in a fairy tale you like.

Evidence?

My entire point that one does not have to be a god. Precognition is the only thing required to eliminate free will.

You're wrong, it doesn't eliminate it all. God has the option of changing any part of it at any time. And again, just because He knows what you're going to do doesn't mean you didn't have a real choice. There is a possibility that God could be wrong, and that He isn't omniscient. It just never happens because He is actually omniscient. This doesn't limit you, it just means He is always right.

LOL @ "God isn't a precog, he's just precognitive".

He isn't precognitive either. If anything He is omnicognitive. It's a little bit different when you can see past present and future unfolded before you at all times, *and* do something about it. The analogy is false.

No, god doesn't have anything to do with my eating cheerios, because he doesn't exist.

Evidence?

Of course, if he did, then yes, he has everything to do with my eating cheerios. I could be eating granite, but that's not how he created me huh.

He created you to make your own choices.

So sometimes we have free will and sometimes we don't. Right, so, instead of offering any evidence for this pyramid of bullshit you're just going to complicate it further. Par for the course.

If you're not capable of comprehending how God is omnipresent, can see *and* alter the future, and is not bound by His creation, or obligated to any specific set of events beyond that which has determined beforehand, how can we have a meaningful conversation?

I don't make any assumptions about what's part of a non-existent gods plans Lucent.

Evidence?

Are you seriously saying here though that hardship is part of gods plan, right after saying that not everything is controlled.

I'm saying God is ultimately in control, but that He can offer significant freedom to His creatures, to choose good or evil. Because of that, there is hardship, but the hardship is not a hinderance to His plans.

So what gives, did god plan that tsunami or not?

Traditionally, natural disasters are seen as a judgement against nations. A lot of things that happen are conditional upon how we are behaving. So it may not have been in the original plan, but yes God knew it would happen.

Now I know you will object and say this is ruthless. What I will say is that He is in control of life and death, and that nobody dies "accidently". From the outside, it seems random. But it was surely not random, and all the people who died left Earth on schedule.

It's the same thing with other disasters. Did God allow 9/11? Yes He did. The significant part of 9/11 is not terrorism, it is the fact that God allowed the followers of a foreign God to strike us. Biblically, that means that as a nation we are on the way to an extremely severe judgement unless we repent. Katrina was more evidence of this. So is the economic collapse.

God can- nothing follows from this without evidence for god at the very least. What freewill choice? What free will? Gods a precog..lol.

You have no evidence for your position that God does not exist. I've already told you that only God can prove Himself to you, although I feel there is significant evidence that points to His existence. I told you how to seek out God but you refuse to do that which frees me from the burden of proof. The ball is in your court.

Let's talk about freewill..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam Harris:

"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”

And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."

You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:

"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I even believe anything that you're saying?

I would say that because they did it bigger and better.

That's your opinion, again coming from someone intellectually incurious about philosophy.

So much so in fact that you folks absorbed chunks of their culture.

I love how you make these statements with no evidence or research. There is no doubt that Christians would sometimes use hellanistic terminology to witness the gospel to the greeks, but this is as far as it went. Hellanism was pervasive, but it was primarily geared towards the ruling classes. It's influence in general was superficial. Jews and Christians doggedly maintained the integrity of their beliefs and practices, even to the point of martyrdom. Keeping out the encrouchment of pagan philosophies was priority number one. They maintained their religious beliefs in spite of hellanism, not in harmony with it.

GJ. So you're jewish now? You do realize that jesus doesn't mesh well with teh jews, yes?

I am saying that the religious influence on Christianity was jewish, which predated Greek traditions.