Theology and theodicy are fraught with pitfalls and surprises. Amateur theology even more so. Here’s a review that is a case in point…
A caring God would not have designed us like this
…discussing a review of a new book, Inside the Human Genome: A case for non-intelligent design by John C. Avise, which argues the genome is such a demonic mess that it had no Designer. The reviewer makes the interesting point – perhaps we have a moral imperative to then fix the mess.
But what of the Designer? With a hat-tip to Anne Rice I wrote this…
Perhaps the Designer intended for biochemical Life to remain as ‘immortal’ archea & eubacteria, and was taken by surprise when they ganged together, made eukaryotes, then sex & death at the same time. After a billion years of watching the carnage S/He decided “enough is enough” and chose to intervene by developing an Intelligent Watchmaker who could fix the biosphere… but we’re just not finished yet. The Designer is still struggling with how to handle “junk memes” and is working on new software to upgrade us to Humanity 2.0…
As believeable as any religion, just more up-to-date.
…tongue firmly in cheek, but the point is that perhaps God didn’t know how the world would turn out – until it turned out this way. Even a “god outside time” has to let events occur to foreknow them, else they’re all being directly orchestrated by god and any “freedom” and “free-will”, as well as any evil and sin, is written into the Script of the cosmos, and God really is just a mask for the Devil. So even a God outside time must be surprised, from time to time, but eternally surprised.
And why should we be surprised by that fact? A number of mathematical arguments imply that knowledge, even perfect knowledge, of a system is only possible by letting that system ‘run’ when it is past a certain level of complexity. God took a cosmic risk when S/He created space-time and all else that followed.