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Why Couldn't God Have...

             The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:15-17)

                Yesterday, once again, I came across one of those bits of logic that argued that if God were this, that, or the other that we claim He is, he should have been able to create a universe in which there was no sin or evil. If the atheist posting the meme doesn’t believe in God, it’s all God’s fault because He would have made the poster believe.

                Theoretically, he’s right. God could make him and everyone else believe. Life would have been simpler for all concerned, including God. But that would require God to deny humanity the opportunity to choose against Him. Safe? Oh yes, safe because God was unwilling or unable to take a chance, to allow humanity to do anything other than to obey Him. He would love us only because we had no choice but to be lovable. In short, creating us as the atheist suggested would have meant that God was a coward, and limited in His love to only exist under ideal circumstances that He would have to carefully maintain.

                Among other things, I suspect it would have required that He either make man His equal (making more of God rather than anything separate) or keep man forever in the dark about God and His nature. Keep in mind that the temptation that led to Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the temptation to “be like God, knowing good and evil.  (Genesis 3:5) While the focus in Genesis 3 was on the tree, as long as people aare aware that they aren’t “like God” there will always be the temptation to view that as a problem that needs to be fixed. It seems a laudable thing to try to be better than we are, but when that’s not possible, it leads to rejecting that standard and establishing our own, thereby taking God’s place in our lives.

                Creating a universe in which there is no sin, no evil, and no choice but to acknowledge Him as God would require that God never express the full extent of His love, never have to make a major sacrifice for man, who would be unable to deserve that greater love. It would restrict and restrain God’s love to only that which obeyed Him implicitly. It would involve cowardice on His part as He could not allow them to be at odds with Him. It would require, in short, that God not be God. It would require that He never allow us to even be aware that we are distinct from Him in any way or to have the capacity to care about what that distinction.

                In other words, the argument requires that God not only be a coward but also be deliberately deceitful. And He could have chosen that part. But the way He chose, instead, required that He take chances and demand more of Himself than just keeping us ignorant, weak, and amused, rather like an infant.

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