God is also supposedly an all-knowing being, while at the same time excuses his shitty decisions and faulty creations with not being responsible for men’s actions and decisions, and also free will is a thing.
Pick a lane. Either god is all-knowing and knows what every single human being who ever lived/lives/will live did/will do in their lifetimes and free will is an illusion, or he’s not an all-knowing being.
Or… hear me out on this… He’s not real! Crazy, I know.
Don’t try to apply reason/common sense/logic to ANY religion. You’ll end up with more questions than answers.
Besides, I was told that the point of the story was resisting temptation. God wanted to see if Adam and Eve could do that. Spoiler: they couldn’t.
And if Yahweh is omniscient, he knew they would eat it, so he put the situation together so that they could be “punished”,
Yahweh is a sadist.
God is a kind of a lazy bitch
Original scapegoat
As in all theological questions, it really requires faith.
If you have faith then you don’t need to worry about the details.
If you don’t have faith then none of it makes any sense.
Because that god is a crazy tyrant that had to prove he had total control over his creations (despite giving them free will), and threw a tantrum like a child when they disobeyed. And we have another example of his childish tantrums when he flooded the world because his toys weren’t playing the way he wanted.
It explains a lot of why Christianity is so fucked up
Tower of Babel too.
Just to add to the great answers already given by others, another aspect to it all is that the mythology that developed into Judaism/Christianity/Islam was originally polytheistic. The god known as YHWH/Yahweh was one of many, but had a dedicated cult (not unlike Greco-Roman deities that often had cults of their own, revering one specific god to the exclusion of others who were nevertheless acknowledged).
So in that sense, the idea of Yahweh being omnipotent and omniscient is a bit of a retcon, meant to highlight the superiority of Yahweh over other gods as his henotheistic sect gradually developed into a more zealous monotheistic religion that rejected the legitimacy of all other gods entirely
That being said, the idea of Satan as a sort of antagonist character to tempt humans towards sin did not emerge until much later either, after the aforementioned omnipotent/omniscient revision of Yahweh. It really just boils down to whatever plot contrivances were convenient for the successive works of religious fan fiction that would later come to be canonized within each Abrahamic religion.
If I’ve learned something from listening History in the Bible podcast is that Yaweh is an asshole and that there are layers of bad translations.
Evangelicals sweep that all under the rug with “divine inspiration.”
Yet here we are with rich assholes running the world and chasing the Antichrist story and trying to summon the end of the world.
You’d think they’d be more intelligent.
It was a test, but if he was omniscient, he would have known the results without having to run it. 😉
He wanted the result, but needed it to be our ‘fault’ for weird passive aggressive reasons and so he could hold it over our heads for eaons. “Sorry son, I’d drive you to the store but you ate that apple. Remember the apple I told you not to eat?”
See how i didnt mention he is also “benevolent.”
There’s quite a bit of evidence to argue he is actually malevolent.
Try telling that to a Christian and you’ll hear the battered wife type arguments come out sooooo quick.
I really enjoy reminding them that Satan only kills about 10 people in the Bible. He temps others to do things, but he’s only responsible for a handful.
God on the other hand… much more direct and merciless. Doesn’t really seem to give a shit at all about killing people actually. Like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants.
Christians then start applying “ends justifies the means” logic.
Calvin ball. Its all just Calvin ball.
beat me to it
Embarrassment kink followed by the lack of emotional regulation to handle the outcome of a scenario they asked asked for.
The god character in Oglaf is probably the most accurate representation of God.
Do you want snakes with legs? Because this is how you get snakes with legs.
Yeah, that story has a lot of plot holes.
…talking snakes?
Fuck you, Zootopia 2 was a masterpiece.
Yeah that was a weird chapter in the bible
Why are there two different creation stories in the Bible? If Cain and Abel were the first sons of Adam and Eve, how could Cain come upon a city while he was wandering the earth? Why are there two conflicting versions of the Ten Commandments? Etc. Etc.
…if you are Christian, it doesn’t matter, it isn’t your book. It is reference for what IS your book. The one that says god’s son came to earth and told us to love one another leading to his nailing to a tree…err…
I mean the Judeo-Christian god is also omniscient so he did so knowing they wouldn’t, meaning them eating the apple was the point in the first place. Otherwise he just wouldn’t have created the tree.
PS: I’m Muslim and this story is a bit different in Islam but I’m pretty sure I got it right.
If you’re not looking for a genuine answer from a Christian, skip this.
First thing: the translation of “the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil” isn’t really that good of a translation. It’s closer to "the right to define good and evil. That means that eating the fruit is basically saying “fuck you, God. Imma do my own thing”. That’s not how God designed humans to live, and is incompatible to living alongside someone as powerful as God, which is why God told them not to eat it.
But why create that tree in the first place? Essentially, choice. When you’re in the supermarket and you see 50 different flavors, but everything is from the same brand, do you really have any choice? Same thing with God. Unless you have the option of rejecting God, choosing to him means nothing.
I’ve never heard that translation, how does that justify them noticing they’re naked as a bad thing? The idea there is simple with the fruit granting the knowledge, but doesn’t make sense with a fruit that allows you to define good and evil. But even then there’s another thing you got wrong, they’re not kicked out of paradise for eating from the tree, they get punished for that but the reason why they’re kicked out is so that they don’t eat from the immortality tree:
22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever”.
This boils down to the best of all possible worlds argument, already well-skewered in Candide centuries ago.
Why create the world exactly the way it was? Is it impossible to create it, so that of their own free will, one more person makes the “right” choice? That’s some sorry omnipotence if so. If not one person, why not two? And so on, until you face the question of, “Why not create the world so that everyone, of their own free will, makes the ‘right’ decision”.
Calvinists are intellectually brave enough to accept the metaphysical consequences of their beliefs. Others, not so much.
I’d like to see some citations on that. They’re are several scholarly theories about the what the tree represents, but I’ve never heard this one.
Couldn’t he have created the world in a way where all that is not necessary? Or one where there would be no bad choices?
Seems kinda evil on his part to design for the option of evil.
You don’t have to agree with the poster but they already answered that. There can be no acceptance without the ability to reject. Consent is meaningless without the capacity for dissent. Theodicy is a different matter.
There can be no acceptance without the ability to reject. Consent is meaningless without the capacity for dissent.
If god is all-powerful, then that is a choice, not a natural restriction.
So the answer is “because god is a jerk”?
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
If god is all powerful everything is a choice and there are no natural restrictions. Why an omniscient and supposedly loving deity created us to suffer and die is a question of theodicy and that is separate from the question of free will. Because god is a jerk is a likely and valid argument in this framework.
A better example for the god is a jerk is Satan/Lucifer. Angels were not given free will and are servants of God by design. Still, Satan and his host were cast down and separated from the light of God’s love for their rebellion. Not being endowed with free will, the angels were apparently set up. In this situation, god made beings a certain way and then punished them for it while not giving them access to the tools of salvation (free will.)
Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn’t.
Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for “I can’t predict the behavior of this thing”. For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.
Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that’s what trips people up so much.
To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can’t hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?
The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn’t, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!
Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. “Of course the first three don’t have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics”
His design was flawed, then, if humans managed to do something they were not designed to do.
In a really generalised way, the tree and the fruit is kind of a metaphor.
If you live the life style I tell you to, then live in this garden and I will care for you. If you want to make your own rules then you’re on your own.
I’ve never seen it this way before but this actually makes sense really.
