Imwashingmypirate wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 4:47 pm
I think a few parents protect said kids and would lie for them. I also think they'd be disgusted maybe but still love them. I doubt they'd decide they would want their murderous children to be executed? So would a parent give up if their kids turned out bad? Just wipe them off the earth? A God with far more knowledge and understanding who understood the processes that led their humans to do such things would have an insight that us parents don't. So to me, I find it hard to imagine an all knowing God feeling like wiping out his children because they made mistakes or they were wired in such a way that some were not right. You wouldn't throw an entire experiment out the window for some outlier results when there are plenty of positive results. You'd assume some unknown variable affected those results and you'd test more until the results were consistent enough to be worthy of publication. You'd only give up if you knew that the experiment wasn't going to work. But we are talking about God here. A God who is supposed to already know the outcome. If you knew the outcome of a trial would you be upset about the steps between if it was guaranteed to be a certain way? If you already knew everything? You would be calm and you'd do whatever you already knew was going to create that result but you wouldn't be aggrieved.
First, you do have some really good points here, some of which I have to let roll around a bit.
However, I do think it should be pointed out that when push came to shove, God did not throw out the entire experiment. This is one of the basic lessons of the Flood story. No, things were not turning out the way God wanted, but God did wind up reconciling himself to humanity as it is rather than as he thought it should be. "And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done" (Gen. 8:21, NRSV). I think this is interesting, that God has to reconcile himself to his own creation.
You may also remember what I said about the traditional omnis being more Greek philosophy than Israelite religion. This genuinely raises the question of whether God as depicted in Genesis knew what the outcome was going to be. I'm sure he guessed some things would go wrong. Intelligence, free will, and opposable thumbs are a really dangerous combination, after all. Also remember the stories leading up to the Flood, are meant to depict just how bad the world had become when God determined to bring the Flood. That sense may be lost on us moderns because of the mythological language of sons of God mixing with daughters of Adam and so forth. So this raises the possibility that things were (at least from God's point-of-view) far, far worse than even God himself expected.