by jimwalton » Wed May 08, 2019 3:04 pm
It always impossible to answer the "What if..." question. It's often idle speculation. But I hear your concern: either we were made to screw up or we were just screwed. I'm confident there are more choices.
For instance, we could probably agree that humans are not divine, and therefore, if there is a God (which I obviously believe and you do no), we would be in need of Him. I think this is exactly the point of the "eating the fruit" story: we need God since we're not gods. That's sufficient to explain what's going on.
God, by definition, is uncreated. Therefore, anything created is less than God. Even the best of all possible humans would have been less than divine, but necessity.
The humans had (have) free will. They were just as able to choose the wise course as well as the unwise one. We have quite a capacity to mess things up, but there's no reason to consider it "God-given." We're not divine, and that pretty much explains it. For the Greeks and Romans, not to mention other cultures, they even fabricated that their gods of limited attributes had a generous capacity for messing things up.
So we can't just assume God created us poorly. Nor can we assume that God chose two losers to ruin us all. Since we are less than God by necessity, even the best of us is not omnipotent and omniscient. What it says is not that God made a mistake, but the reason for God's interaction with us is because we would need Him. We just can't achieve perfection on our own, and history is a glaring story of that truth.
It always impossible to answer the "What if..." question. It's often idle speculation. But I hear your concern: either we were made to screw up or we were just screwed. I'm confident there are more choices.
For instance, we could probably agree that humans are not divine, and therefore, if there is a God (which I obviously believe and you do no), we would be in need of Him. I think this is exactly the point of the "eating the fruit" story: we need God since we're not gods. That's sufficient to explain what's going on.
God, by definition, is uncreated. Therefore, anything created is less than God. Even the best of all possible humans would have been less than divine, but necessity.
The humans had (have) free will. They were just as able to choose the wise course as well as the unwise one. We have quite a capacity to mess things up, but there's no reason to consider it "God-given." We're not divine, and that pretty much explains it. For the Greeks and Romans, not to mention other cultures, they even fabricated that their gods of limited attributes had a generous capacity for messing things up.
So we can't just assume God created us poorly. Nor can we assume that God chose two losers to ruin us all. Since we are less than God by necessity, even the best of us is not omnipotent and omniscient. What it says is not that God made a mistake, but the reason for God's interaction with us is because we would need Him. We just can't achieve perfection on our own, and history is a glaring story of that truth.