Lots of bashing for the belief of God....

[GameOver22]

Final-Fan said:

2. 
"he gets an EQUAL share of blame since he made it happen just as surely as the people with the blood on their hands."
First, knowing in advance what will happen means nothing. You have freedom to the what you will, so if you shoot anyone the blood is only in your hands, not God`s. That`s like blaming people for our mistakes.
Without freedom and free will, we would be no better than rocks, so to speak.

I'm not saying it's not their free choice, but it was also GOD's free choice to make the universe in such a way that people would do that.  It's like this:  people don't blame the parents of serial killers because they mostly did the best they could and the kid just turned out evil.  But suppose there were some parents who KNEW everything the kid would do in life before they even had sex to conceive it.  Suppose they KNEW that the way they raised him would end up with him torturing squirrels or whatever and then eating people's livers with fava beans and Chiantis.  And they went ahead and had sex and had the kid and raised him that way and not a different way that would lead to a different result. 

Whould THOSE parents not also bear some of of the guilt for his actions, since they were the NECESSARY CONSEQUENCE of their own actions? 

And if you deny that all of the murders ever committed in the universe, etc., were known of in advance by God, you deny his omniscience and/or omnipotence IMO, but go ahead and use that to get out of this because as long as you consistently hold that viewpoint it's a legitimate counter to my argument here. 

To respond to that argument, God's omniscience and omnipotence do not need to be denied. Someone could just give the free-will defense. They could argue that the very act of giving people free-will counts as a good action because it allows for a greater level of moral goodness in the world. If people are not responsible for their own actions, its difficult to understand how we can hold them accountable for their actions or ascribe moral worth to their actions. To take a point from Leibniz, its about making the greatest possible world, and the greatest possible world requires free-will.

As far as the main point, I don't think many religious scholars would argue that God is not responsible for creating the world in the way that he did. It was a free choice he made, and he made a world that allows for human's to have free-will. Because he is the cause of the universe, there is a connection between how he designed the universe and the possible actions humans can make (good and bad). However, the existence of the evil resulting from human actions does not count against God's goodness given that free-will is good. Once again, the point is making the best possible world and not actually making the world with the least amount of suffering or evil. I think we can both imagine a world where no one suffers because God controls every action of the individual's inhabiting the world. I would argue that saying this is a good world in itself is inaccruate (the goodness would lie in God and his decisions-not the world itself).