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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Religions Don't Make Sense, Part II

This is a series of posts of unorganized thoughts on why religions, specifically Christianity, don't make sense to me. Go to: Part I.


Here's another thing that doesn't make sense about the Christian religion specifically: why didn't God make Adam so he wouldn't sin? There's two characteristics about God that you cannot get around: omnipotence and omniscience. Let's go with omniscience first. If God created Adam the way he did, he created him to sin as, before he even started creating, he knew Adam would sin. The answers I have seen to this don't make sense either. This is yet another place where they throw out free will. "God couldn't know because he created man with free will." I think this is abandoning the omniscience claim, but we will go ahead and run with it. This answer doesn't make sense either. Again, if you accept the Bible (and as a Christian you must), then you know that it is laden with prophecies. Are you telling me that the men who were pretending to be prophets could see the future whereas a god could not? This just does not make sense. Furthermore, Jesus purportedly foretold the future as well, so for those who think that Jesus was God in a man-costume, this eliminates that whole argument. For those who think that Jesus was simply in fellowship with the Almighty, then you get back to the problem of man knowing and god not.

On to the omnipotence characteristic that doesn't make sense. No matter how he created man (with or without free will), he could have made man better. He could have made a super version of Jesus, if you will. He could have made a near clone of himself. Instead, he created man very inferior hardware and with deficient software. This doesn't make sense to me.

Then to the omnibenevolence characteristic, I find answers to the problem of evil to be lacking sense. What kind of sick god would create evil in man and in nature? The free will canard is often tossed out here as well. "God is perfectly good, he doesn't create evil. God created man with free will and man sinned and creates sin." I've always been perplexed by this sort of answer. God can't create evil, but he can create evil-creating beings?


Religions don't make sense to me... to be continued.

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