The ten words I often find myself repeating...

     ...an unhealthy number of times per day.  I repeat these words listening to apologists as I flatten my skull with a unique combination of face-other collisions including palm, desk, keyboard and the occasional cat which neither of us appreciate.  I find the phrase disappointingly frequently inaccurate though and the more times this occurs, my faith in the human race diminishes almost exponentially.  The phrase, of course, is "That's gotta be a gag, nobody is that fucking stupid.".  I'll list a few names which will guarantee at least one utterance of this phrase per time they are encountered in any media.

1. Hovind, Eric and Kent
2. Craig, William
3. Ham, Ken
4. Sharpton, Al

     There are obviously more, but listing each and every apologist who insists on dragging the bloodied and mangled corpses of their horrendously outdated, outperformed and generally thrown out arguments out (is the word losing meaning yet?) would take years. Honestly it would tire me out.  You know I had to use it one more time.
     I utter that phrase when I'm reading the ridiculous ICR Science updates which I find myself bombarded with by well-meaning and concerned family members.  When I go to a Christian website of any flag, you can bet bank that these ten words surfaced.

Creation and the fall: Dogmatism at it's finest

The first Bible story is about God speaking the world into existence.  Part of that story is how the world was ruined.  So let us skip the creation itself.  God has put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden.  Why did God put the tree there?  Good question, I have no answer.  Somehow, the devil in the form of a serpent was also in the garden.  Why, with all of the earth and better yet, with all the universe to bind the devil in did he pick this planet in that garden?  Another question without an answer.  

So when we assume all of this, it is then obvious that evil did not come into the world when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, but when the epitome of evil arrived here.  Shouldn't it be then that the world was tainted?

God commanded Adam and Eve, who at this point have no clue about good and evil to follow a command.  This one command, don't eat that fruit...  don't even touch it...  I'd prefer you don't even look at it...  on second thought, don't even think about it.  Adam and Eve, being innocent and curious creatures naturally gravitated toward the fruit.

The only thing which stands between them and the fruit is God's threat.  One which seems unfounded without an innate sense of morality.  God never told them that to eat the fruit is immoral, and if he did they'd need to have a foundational knowledge of morality.  That defeats the purpose.

So with a dogmatic command to heed, the pair were blissfully ignorant of any moral issue.  The serpent presumably knew this and exploited it to it's fullest.  He made a counter-offer to God's threat and Adam and Eve took it.  They ate the fruit, breaking only an unfounded command.  After that all hell (all too literally) broke loose on the earth and the omnescient God who created and planned it all was dismayed.

God and free will

     God makes a race to worship and serve him.  He gives us free will.  He commands us to act a specific way, but makes doing so impossible.  When we fail to act this way, we're supposedly punished.  Not only slap-on-the-wrist sort of punishment either, eternal torture.

     Say I write a computer program, I write it to complete an equation.  I then give it several different types of equations to solve and expect it to always have the same result.  My analogy fails when we come to punishment, because nothing is less just than infinite punishment for finite crime.  The worst person who ever lived or will live could not possibly deserve that.

     So we've got the celestial "screw you" down.  Let's talk about God's plan for us.  God is supposed to have this divine plan for each of our lives.  That is not possible if we have free will.  Imagine you are commanding an army.  The catch is, none of your soldiers follow orders unless it suits their personal agenda.  Can you imagine commanding a free-willed army?  The only thing which holds a plan involving multiple people together is knowledge of how they will act.  If they change what they are to do, they can endanger the entire plan and screw it up completely.  The typical counter-argument to this is that God can work all things that happen into his plan.  The problem is that it's still a plan, which requires manipulation of at least several elements.

     Next, divine intervention.  Some people think God intervenes on a daily basis for them.  If God saves parking spaces and the like for the individual like some believe, he must deprive another of that parking space.  The other person would have to be swayed divinely to park somewhere else or not make that particular stop.  What does that do to free will?  I suppose God would have to make them want to not stop or not park there so that they'd freely choose to avoid it, but can that be considered free choice?  The educated person cannot believe in both the divine and free will simultaneously.  

     A friend of mine recently posted on facebook "If I had a time machine, I would go back to the Precambrian, throw a pebble in the ocean, and then fast forward to the present to see how much had changed.".  The result in this experiment could be catastrophic, or it could have almost no effect.  In the same way every time God meddles, he disrupts the entire natural order.  When he does that he could change almost everything and what does that say about free will?

     As a Christian, there can be no free will.  Without free will we're not responsible for our actions.  That removes sin, making us sinless.  We'd have no need for God to "save" us.  No hell to punish us for the sin.  If  one argues that we're still responsible without free will then God is a tyrant (which is a notion I wouldn't be above, I derive great pleasure from knowing that he doesn't exist).