Quote Originally Posted by stemelbow View Post
....Your effort was to suggest my beliefs make God into a programmer. I am not trying to make God into anything, in fact. I am merely challenging your claims in this thread, so far.

"Thus, if God knew of every evil deed any of His creatures would do before He created them, then that would require that the evil that would be practiced originated in God's own conception, right?"

I add to that this one:

"If God did not conceive of Lucifer's rebellion before creating him from nothing, then Lucifer would never have rebelled, right?"

Interesting. I just explained how your beliefs force God, if taken logically, to be the very source of all evil, and your response was, it seems, that there had to be choice because without such there is no love? You do realize that the very logical conclusion that I laid out for you explains how, in essence, if your beliefs are true, no one has absolute choice (I'll re-explain below just for you). Thus, according to your logic, now, there is no love at all. Now its obvious, all according to your logic, God did not create love, even though you tried to sneak that in earlier.

All according to your beliefs, if taken logically: God created all things out of nothing. Before creating out of nothing, God conceived of every single deed, good or bad (but since no one does good then in actuality only bad), that each of His creations would do. For instance, before creating satan out of nothing, before Satan was in existence, God conceived of every evil act Satan would do long before Satan ever had the opportunity to conceive of those evil acts. On top of that, if God did not conceive of every evil act Satan would do, according to your beliefs, then Satan would not have done one evil act. All because God had to know, had to conceive of, really, every deed each of his creations would do before they exist[ed]. As a result, we all do only that which God conceived that each of us would do. Thus, any actual "choice" we make is traced back to God's conception.

These are the only conclusions to draw from your errant belief system. ...
---I am still in agreement with you, Stem, that these Augustinian/Calvinistic beliefs, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead to the idea that God MUST be the "First Cause" of all the evil in the universe, including the rebellion of a third of the host of heaven.

PS--Good catch, noting that if "There are none that do good" is universally, literally true, then God isn't responsible for all the good that people do since there aren't any people who do any good! I didn't think of that.