Let's assume for argument's sake that God created everything as Genesis states.  We shall consider Genesis to be perfectly accurate.  The problems encountered are far greater than incongruence with reality.

If God has always existed, is all-good and is the origin of everything, I have some questions.  

Where does evil come from?  If God is to be considered the origin of everything/everyone, then God somehow created evil.  If God is omniscient, he did so intentionally.  Further, if God does somehow created evil from the perfection which he is to exemplify, he has a number of options.  He could obliterate evil before creating humans, removing any interference with free will.  He could banish it to somewhere else, where it wouldn't damn an entire race to hell.  He could not create humans until he's got a solution worked out which would necessarily save billions of people from hell.  Being omniscient, one would think that his mind could tackle such an issue.

Now, for some reason evil exists.  For some additional reason, God put the personification of evil in the human habitat.  Then, God put a tree with the knowledge of good and evil into the garden.  An important question to ask is that before eating the tree, how could Adam and Eve have known that eating the fruit was a wrong thing to do?  They had a keep-away command from God, but no possible way to comprehend that disregarding that command was a bad action.  The moral of the story seems to be advocating adherence to orders without question.

The fall is supposed to be the time when evil entered the earth and things started to die and decay.  The issue which seems all-too-evident is that the serpent seems rather evil, and he was in the garden.  The serpent supposedly knows that the people will die as a result of touching the fruit, but advocates it anyway.  So evil existed before the fall, better yet, it was in the garden before the fall.

We now have that there was evil before the fall.  Adam and Eve couldn't possibly understand evil prior to eating of the tree, much less be wary of it.  To break the command of one supernatural entity in favor of the command of another supernatural entity (in a moral vacuum) is a decision which could understandably be based on timing.  If a voice told me not to push a button because it would trigger every nuclear bomb in the world, even without a moral sense, I'd be well reasoned to avoid the button.  Now imagine that someone else comes to me and tells me that it really won't cause any disaster and in fact will benefit me.  These are both clear directions with varied predictions from what I assume to be apparently equally veracious sources.  The clear difference is time.  I'm told not to do something, then told to do just that.  Confusion aside and assuming that I have no reason to distrust either direction, the most recent would be a decent choice to make.

That is what makes the story of creation and the fall disgusting to me.  The 'loving god' of Christianity knowingly created a situation which he knew would produce a given undesirable outcome and did nothing to avert that outcome.  The best we get is some 4,400 years later, he sacrifices himself to himself so that he can forgive us for a situation he put us in.  That's not someone who anyone should want to worship.

Views: 35

Tags: Christianity, Creation, Dogmatism, Evil, Fall, God, Good, Knowledge, Moral, Tree

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Comment by Glen Rosenberg on September 12, 2012 at 2:54pm

I recently used a variation of your argument. It is a good argument. It's just that we should not have to go into the particulars of the delusion. There are endless angles, contradictions and issues to expose. It ought to be enough to point out it is a delusion. Instead we argue with the patient.

Comment by Sean McGuire on September 12, 2012 at 12:15pm

It's a copy of an argument I made to a theist.  That might explain a bit.

Comment by Glen Rosenberg on September 7, 2012 at 8:56pm

Not that I dont like your critique, it is just that you are using anthropomorphic reasoning to trash anthropomorphic construct. I mean maybe when in kiddie land do as the kiddies do but it is enough to juxtapose the universe with the make believe.

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