Again, presupposition of His motives; if He wanted us to become stronger, we must have had opposition, which could not have taken place in the paradisaical Garden of Eden.
Why?
Why would he want us to become stronger, if that strength is only needed to cope with adversity that didn’t have to be there?
Why would he put us in the Garden of Eden in the first place if it couldn’t give us the growth he intended for us?
Why couldn’t he just make us stronger and skip the adversity? Humans develop to resist negative stimuli when they’re exposed to them, and not when they aren’t, because such developments take biological resources. If, for instance, your body insisted on building up your muscles for optimal weight lifting capacity, you would be in big trouble if what you really needed was to survive in a hot desert. We strengthen ourselves in response to adversity because until very recently in our evolutionary history, like all other animals, we did not have the capacity to predict what sort of adversity we’d have to adapt to in advance. An all powerful and intelligent being creating a species could have done much better, and instead of going through all the nonsense of making us suffer so we could get stronger, could have made us stronger so we wouldn’t have to suffer.
Remember that every If or Maybe you offer up, every piece of information you propose about God’s intentions, qualities or character that is not itself sufficiently evidenced for people to believe it without first buying into your religious framework, is another burden on your hypothesis, something that should lower your estimate of your religion being true.
Why?
Why would he want us to become stronger, if that strength is only needed to cope with adversity that didn’t have to be there?
Why would he put us in the Garden of Eden in the first place if it couldn’t give us the growth he intended for us?
Why couldn’t he just make us stronger and skip the adversity? Humans develop to resist negative stimuli when they’re exposed to them, and not when they aren’t, because such developments take biological resources. If, for instance, your body insisted on building up your muscles for optimal weight lifting capacity, you would be in big trouble if what you really needed was to survive in a hot desert. We strengthen ourselves in response to adversity because until very recently in our evolutionary history, like all other animals, we did not have the capacity to predict what sort of adversity we’d have to adapt to in advance. An all powerful and intelligent being creating a species could have done much better, and instead of going through all the nonsense of making us suffer so we could get stronger, could have made us stronger so we wouldn’t have to suffer.
Remember that every If or Maybe you offer up, every piece of information you propose about God’s intentions, qualities or character that is not itself sufficiently evidenced for people to believe it without first buying into your religious framework, is another burden on your hypothesis, something that should lower your estimate of your religion being true.
But then how could we teach our… future children… to be....
.… huh.
Ponderin’ time.