Joel Yliluoma wrote:
> and this makes me believe that God's
> reasoning abilities are significantly higher than that of any of us.

I'm curious what part of the bible makes you think that.

>> How come when Joel tells me that I don't understand, I don't get to 
>> point out the parts of the Bible where God says yes, I *do* understand. 
>> Isn't that logical?
> 
> If I understand correctly, you are referring to the "tree of good and evil"
> and interpreting that the tree gave the human powers of understanding good
> and evil equalling that of God.

Yes. Or, at least, that I have knowledge of the difference between good 
and evil, so when I see evil, I am not particularly wrong about whether 
it's really good.

> Genesis 3:22 (KJV) says:
> "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good
> and evil

> This does not unambiguously imply that we now understand everything
> (or even good and evil) as God does. It only says that we've got some
> understanding.

It says "the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil". I don't 
know how less ambiguous it could be. It's a heck of a lot less ambiguous 
than lots of the other stuff in the bible.

Or are you telling me that starving babies in Africa isn't a bad thing? 
Cancer is really good in disguise? Lynching blacks is really *good* for 
them? This is "the best of all possible worlds" argument - since evil 
exists, and God isn't evil, then it must be the case that the amount of 
evil in the world is the minimum amount it's possible to have.

The only problem with *this* argument is that it implies that being good 
won't help - the amount of evil in the world is already at a minimum, so 
nothing you can do can improve the world.

So the original bit still stands - either God *can't* stop the evil, or 
he *decides* not to stop the evil. There really isn't a third choice 
there, even if you say "God is really smart", it just means he's 
deciding not to stop the evil for reasons we can't understand.

And if unbelievers *are* dragged off to the pits of hell at the end of 
the world, it sounds like he's not planning stopping the evil any time 
soon, either.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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