God's deliberate design flaw

Paradise Lost

Published on December 20, 2004 By InfoGeek In Philosophy

Now, let’s start with the idea that God created everything. So, God made Adam and Eve and set them down in Paradise. Now, the two fell out of favor when the disobeyed God and were tempted by the serpent, the devil.

Now, the Devil was a fallen angel who tried a coup and was summarily brought down, way down.

I have two problems with this.

1. If you are god and know all and see all, and you are creating Paradise, why do you let the devil entrance in the first place? You know he’s going to muck it up, he did it before? Did God do it on purpose? He gave us free will but not the wisdom needed to exercise it and then lets evil enter the realm?

2. If God created the angels, and a few of them stage a revolt, does that mean that angels also have free will? Without the free will, you have constant adoration and complete crowd control. So, for the devil to even think about the coup, he had to have some type of free will, but if God is omnipotent, He already knew the outcome, so why give the angels free will to begin with? No angelic free will, no devil uprising, no devil uprising, no serpent, no temptation. Paradise.

IG

Comments

scatter629

on Dec 20, 2004

The formula is: Free will is the factor that assures there will be no or ,if temporarily, less fence-sitters. Limbo or Purgatory is conceptually a transient state. If you're an angel, and you stay so because of free will, your nature strengthens autonomously with time. Without free will, your nature, will fail or weakly evolve autonomously since you would be 100% dependent on God's will. So an indecisive angel won't need to be a semi-angel, but a devil with all its consequences.The backside would be the existence of evil, but then, that in itself, affirms the righteousness of God's Kingdom. Got it?

P.S. I got this from God (May He spare me from lightning)

InfoGeek

on Dec 20, 2004

But why allow free will into the upper echelon?

And, why let evil into the Garden in the first place if you know the outcome?

And, if you know the outcome, can you really fault the people, if you set them up?

IG

jdkeepsmiling

on Jan 26, 2005

Info,
I think that you pose a couple of good questions here that deserve to at least be talked about.

1) I think that initially the reason that we were created with freewill is becasue God does not wish to have an army of slaves. I truly beleive that He allows us to make our own decisions for the simple reason that He did not want an arny of slaves. If He wanted that he could have just created that. I am also a beleiver that God wants us to have to make the choice between good and bad. THe point is that if you make the good chouce, even right at the end of your life, well then you get rewarded with hanging out with God for eternity.

2) The reason that God let someone revolt is that he lets everyone have freewill for the reason stated above.

Maybe God is opnipotent in creating the physical world, but maybe the one limitation that He has either placed on himself or He simply has, is that there can be no messing with free will. Just check out Bruce Almighty, great example of free will (trust me I usually do not refer people to that movie for religious reasons...lol)

AndyBaker

on Jan 27, 2005

And, why let evil into the Garden in the first place if you know the outcome?

InfoGeek, you forgot about the ultimate outcome - that good overcomes evil. This is as good as done from God's point of view. There are risks and vulnerabilities in love, and God has bestowed the beloved with freedom as a necessary act of love. As Theologian Denis Edwards writes, "God's omnipotence can be understood as God's capacity to enter into love with all its costs. Divine omnipotence is really the divine capacity for love beyond all human comprehension.”

The ultimate outcome is assured, and it's good news indeed. Suffering is "God's deliberate design", (and the symbol of the cross demonstrates that), but it's by no means a "flaw." A greater good arises because of the existence of evil, rather than in spite of it.

Higherdepth

on Jan 27, 2005

I've read in the Bible somewhere "God is Love" . It seems to me that God not only loves, but he wishes to be loved in return. (God after all has feelings and shows emotion.) So God would rather have one genuine Christian than a million robots. God didn't "Let" the Devil in, he was given the choice to be obedient to the law of God (the transcript of God's character) or deceive. Adam and Eve had the choice to accept God's advice (don't eat the forbidden fruit) or be disobedient and unleash the curse of sin. Let's face it people, all the bad things (Asian tsunami) in life are a result of sin, and sin is the result of our pathetic decisions.

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