Most Christians really love their "omni" words when describing God: Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omniwhatever... Yet, at the same time they very rarely if ever stop to think how this clashes with a lot of the Biblical narrative.
In a lot of cases when God acts in a non-omnipotent non-omniscient manner in the biblical stories, the go-to excuse by many Christians is the typical "free will" argument or, sometimes, that God is teaching humanity some kind of lesson. However, in many cases even those excuses don't really hold up to scrutiny.
As an example, why exactly did an omnipotent God, who could have just willed Adam into existence out of absolutely nothing, have to use dust (or mud depending on the translation) to create him? Why did he create him out of dust rather than just willing him into existence? To be poetic about it?
In the story, when Adam was alone in Eden, God noticed that he was feeling lonely, so he brought animals (which he also created from the ground for an even more inexplicable reason, according to the text) to him to keep him company. Yet, Adam was still feeling lonely, so according to the story God took one of his ribs and created a woman as a companion.
If this were interpreted as highly poetic and metaphorical, then fine. And in fact, a few Christian denominations actually do exactly that. However, the vast majority of denominations officially declare the story to be literally true and exactly what happened, to the letter.
So an omniscient God didn't predict from the get-go that his creation would feel lonely and give him a companion from the very start? And the same omniscient God didn't predict that animals wouldn't be enough for this? Only after a bit of trial and error he came up with such a wild idea as creating a second person to keep him company? The omniscient omnipotent creator of the universe who knows everything?
And how did he create this second person? Did he create her out of nothing, as he could have (according to the Christian view that he is absolutely omnipotent and can do whatever he wants)? Did he create her out of the dust of the ground, like he did with Adam and all the animals, according to the story? Nope, for some inexplicable reason he had to take a rib out of Adam and create the other person out of it? Why?
Again, if this were a highly figurative metaphor not to be interpreted literally, then fine, but the majority of Christianity interprets it literally and claims that this is exactly what happened. And no "free will" argument makes sense here.
By far the most common interpretation of the Bible is that only Adam and Eve were created, the entirety of the rest of humanity are their descendants. And the vast majority of Christianity believes this as being literally the case, not just metaphorically. Even putting aside the question of incest, there's the question of genetic degradation, which happens extremely fast if siblings procreate. Thus, Christian apologists have needed to come up with wild (and extremely unscientific) theories about how genetic degradation didn't happen in the beginning somehow.
Why not just as well, since the story remains completely silent about it and doesn't make statements one way or the other, interpret it such that God created an entire population of humans from dirt, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people at once? There's nothing in the narrative that would contradict this (and, in fact, the narrative, even if we took it literally, indirectly supports this, as Cain and Abel were clearly in a world that was already so populated that Cain could go ahead and not only find a wife but moreover found an entire city.)
And, of course, the flood narrative also raises similar questions. If God wanted to destroy humanity and start over (let's just skip discussing about how an omnipotent omniscient God couldn't do it right the first time), why not just wish them out of existence? Why go through the trouble of the physically impossible boat carrying a physically impossible amount of animals, floating on a physically impossible amount of water for a year? Why would an omnipotent God need to go through all this charade?
If we went though the Bible, the list of such incoherent details would be enormous.
And it all stems from that one single claim that God is "omnipotent" and can do anything he wants without any limits whatsoever.
No comments:
Post a Comment