This exchange took place in the combox of my post, Why Did a Perfect God Create an Imperfect World? The words of “MountainDewFan4” will be in blue.
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So many people think they could do a better job at being God than God does. Atheists love to do this; but not a few Christians fall into the same foolish trap, too.
OK, I can agree that god can not create perfect humans. Otherwise they would also be gods … but why didn’t he do a better job might be a good question.
Humans are not perfect … but they are FAR, FAR, FAR from perfect.
Why are there birth defects?
Why do people get cancer?
Why are some people very smart while others aren’t?
Why do people die?
Why are some people capable of rape and murder?
Why was my former boss such a jerk?
Why are people hungry in the U.S. and across the planet?
Why do so many people get depressed?
Why can’t humans fly?
Why can’t humans grow back limbs?
Why do hawks have better vision than humans, and dogs have better smelling abilities than humans? Why didn’t god give humans the “best” stuff?
It would appear that this “Perfect” god, really didn’t do a very good job creating his people.
Again, original sin / the fall explains much of human evil, that we commit against each other. We’re fallen; we have a propensity to sin, temptations to do it, adverse influences from our surroundings. And so we sin.
In Christian theology, God gives us power to overcome these things and do much better. He gives us grace through the sacraments (physical means of obtaining God’s grace, which is powerful to counter sin). He gives us the Holy Spirit to live inside of us and help us. He gives us the Church and fellow believers and family and friends to guide and encourage and love us. There is prayer; there is intercession of others.
These are the means of improvement, if only we would avail ourselves of them. Many do not (many can’t even figure out that there is a God and that Christianity is true), and so, how can they improve their fallen state?
I don’t need to answer every single question you raise. Most are caused by our fallenness. The natural world has consequences that can be harmful, because of its very nature. If we fall off a building, we’ll get hurt, because the ground is hard underneath. What is God supposed to do? Change the ground to jelly just because we’re falling on it? Then the world would be unpredictable and we couldn’t do things like science (that requires a principle or presupposition of uniformitarianism), which has made life easier and helped people live more comfortably (esp. medical science).
You wanna foolishly blame God for cancer. My father and mother both died of lung cancer. My father was a smoker. We know through science that this directly leads to lung cancer. So he acted stupidly and caused his own final illness. My mother never smoked, but they say second-hand smoke can be very harmful. So maybe I’ll be blessed by that, too, and die of lung cancer, due to someone else’s stupidity; not my own. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. You blame God for what (in this case) was clearly caused by human stupidity and unwillingness to modify behavior. How is that God’s fault? You tell me.
People blame God for the Nazi Holocaust. For Pete’s sake; that whole thing could have easily been prevented if the world had simply listened to Winston Churchill’s warnings, all through the 30s. It’s as simple as that! But they preferred to pretend everything was fine, and put their heads in the sand, all the way up to 1940, even after Hitler had invaded Poland. Now we’re letting Iran get nuclear weapons. We never learn. Malcolm Muggeridge was also warning everyone in the 1930s that Stalin was in the process of starving ten million Ukrainians. No one wanted to listen. The liberals of the time were infatuated with Uncle Joe Stalin, who could do no wrong. Is all this God’s fault, too? Or were people stupid and willfully blind to reality?
You bring up hunger and blame God for that. There is plenty of food on the earth to feed everyone: probably several times over. So why do people starve? Again, human stupidity and greed . . . We know that several governments act in ways that are directly causing hunger: keeping food from people.
That happened (to give two clear examples) in the Irish Famine in the 1840s and in the Ukraine in the 1930s (just alluded to). Communism and socialism bring it about because they are empty-headed economic systems. So why are you so foolish to imply for a second that this is God’s fault? He has given us the wisdom to produce food. If we’d stop sinning and being stupid in our governments and economic systems, there’d be plenty to go around. Or is the evil and stupidity of Stalinism and British oppression of the Irish somehow God’s fault, too?
Can’t you figure these things out without me pointing it out to you? Your list may look very impressive at first glance, but when we start to closely examine it, it’s a very different story.
One thing I know for sure. I’d rather have all these things in a world with God, where they may be sometimes difficult to understand, but where we know God loves us (suffered and died for us!) and has heaven waiting for us if we follow Him; as opposed to a godless universe where nothing has any meaning at bottom and there is no ultimate hope: only death and a despairing, nihilistic sad finality to everything.
That is the really thorny, disturbing problem: the “problem of good“, which is far more of a difficulty than the problem of evil (the most respectable criticism of theism and Christianity).
That was a very well written and well thought out response.
I”m not saying that all of these things are “God’s fault”. What I’m saying is why doesn’t god do anything to prevent or fix these things?
You state that people there is plenty of food, it’s just people’s greed that causes others to starve.
Well, my point is … if God is so powerful, and so loving … why can’t he do something about that? Why can’t he snap his fingers and make corn grow in Ethiopia?
Here is a question for you. Suppose a man had a son who was in pain and slowly dying. The man never calls a doctor, never gives his son medicine, yet every day his son gets worse and worse. This man does nothing to alleviate his son’s pain, he does instead sits back and watches his child just wither away and DIE !!! What kind of a father would do that? What kind of cruel being would do that???
I’ll tell you exactly what kind of being would do that …. God. This is exactly what your God does EVERY SINGLE DAY! He is supposedly “ALL POWERFUL” … yet he DOES NOT use any of this supposed Power to actually Help his children. He does not use this power to end the suffering of his children …. instead, he just sits back and watches them suffer and slowly wither away and die.
Either this God is not All Loving, not All Powerful … or doesn’t exist.
Glad you liked the response and thanks for your kind comment about it.
“What I’m saying is why doesn’t god do anything to prevent or fix these things?”
He’s under no more obligation to repair everything that we’ve made a mess out of than a parent is to fix and repair every silly thing a child does. At some point the child has to learn to be responsible and live life without mommy or daddy holding his or her hand every moment. Likewise, with God and us. He gave us the ability and knowledge to solve almost all of the problems you cite. Therefore, it is absurd to keep blaming Him for our mistakes.
Yes, God could do any number of miracles and solve the problems that we create in our sin and rebellion (occasionally He does when He deems it purposeful to do so). I don’t see how that would help us. We would never learn responsibility or proper stewardship of what He has given us if God became a big “cosmic Santa Claus” in the sky. Atheists mock us for believing such things, then when God doesn’t live up to what they think He should be, they (quite ironically and comically) propose even more “cosmic Santa Claus” than the caricature of Christianity that we (in their eyes) supposedly believe.
Now God is supposed to (in order to please atheists’ never-ending irrational demands) prevent or immediately resolve every single calamity that is conceivable to the mind of man or that actually happens. He just swoops down and changes the sharp knife edge to jelly and the speeding bullet to gas. And we supposedly live in Fantasy-Land?
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