(The latter is proven, BTW, by the fact that you can take heat into a cold room but not cold into a hot room.)
Wait! So I have just been imagining this invention called the Air Conditioner? :sarcastic
Troublemane said:
And virtue is prized precisely because its difficult to obtain. if it was easy, ha! then it be no big deal.
Funny. I thought virtue was prized because it tended to be attached to benevolence, healthy living, and social harmony.
Quagmire said:
Storm said:
The rules, the dichotomy of good and evil already existed, they just didn't know about them
How is that possible if God already declared everything to be good?
Was Lucifer then considered to be "good" too? The very existence of the rebellion of the angels created a dichotomy of good and evil, if one didn't exist before then.
Furthermore, God would not have been able to say it was "good" if there were no pre-existing definition of what was good and what was bad. God saying that it was "good" would have been meaningless, if you are correct. You defeat your own argument.
kmkemp said:
To answer the OP, you first have to ask yourself, what was God's purpose in creating humanity in the first place and how does the rules that are seemingly in place work to achieve that purpose?
I've never understood the "Well, why did God create us?" response to the Existence of Evil Argument.
Did he create us to have someone to torture, through natural disasters? Did he create us because he was bored? Did he create us because he wanted to be worshipped?
The pat answer is that he created humans because he wanted something that could
freely worship him. Yet, how can we freely decide when we are shackled with Adam's guilt?
For a truly free choice, we should all start out in the Garden, and be given the choice to obey a God that walked and talked with us, or to disobey him by eating the forbidden fruit.
When it comes down to it, an omnimax God did not
have to do anything. He could have created us in any manner he chose; he could have made any rules he wanted.
And
this is what he chose?
I think that the presence of evil speaks more poorly of God than of humans.