Human Free Will Responsible For D rowned Children In The Genesis Flood.

Many atheists unjustly accuse the God of the Bible of drowning children in the
Genesis Flood. They are wrong. The Flood was not God's fault, it was the fault
of fallen evil human beings. The likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel
Dennett, the late Christopher Hitchens, Matt Dillahunty all accuse the God of the
Bible of drowning children during the Genesis Flood.

God was right and just in drowning every living being during The Great Flood.
Why?

Because a vital part of the narrative of The Great Flood was the total wickedness
and murderous violence of the people living at the time of The Great Flood.

If we take any part of the Genesis narrative seriously, we have to take all of it
seriously.

The Genesis narrative says that God did drown all living beings at the time of The
Great Flood.

The Genesis narrative ALSO explains WHY God made the decision to drown them.

Here is why:

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every
inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time." Genesis 6:5

"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence . . .for all the people
of earth had corrupted their ways" Genesis 6:11

We take the narrative that God drowned them seriously and as being historically true.

We then ALSO have to take Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 6:11 seriously and as being
historically true.

If we do not take the Genesis narrative that God drowned them as historically true,
then you have no moral problem with God.

If we also take Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 6:11 as historically true then you should have
no moral problem with God.

Note that the wickedness of man was great and that "every inclination of the thoughts
of his heart was only evil all the time, and that the earth "was corrupt and full of violence."

These people were not salvageable.

Total wickedness. Murderous violence.

And both of those all the time, not just some of the time.

_______________

Free Will.

The institution of Free Will.

Parents are morally responsible for what happens to their children when it is the parents that make Free Will decisions to choose to do evil.

It was wholly the moral fault of the parents living at the time of The Great Flood because it was THEY that made the decision to plunge into total wickedness and murderous violence.

And to do that all the time . . . ALL the time.

Here is the principle:

The reality and presence of innocent children cannot void and nullify the institution of Free Will.

Therefore what parents choose to do, will determine what happens to their children.

For example, mothers who use their Free Will to choose to take harmful illegal drugs during their pregnancies can expect their innocent babies to be born with serious health problems.

These mothers cannot say to God, "Please void out and nullify my Free Will because I am carrying an innocent helpless human baby."

No, the mother is the one morally responsible for her Free Will decision to consume harmful illegal drugs during her pregnancy.

Humans cannot point to their innocent children and say to God, "Do not punish me for my total plunge into wickedness and murderous violence because if you punish me, you will also harm my innocent children.

____________

Classic Historical Example Of This Free Will Principle:

Germany During World War ll

When Germany's parents made the social and political decision to follow Adolph Hitler and embrace Nazism, they also made the decision to put their innocent children at risk of serious harm. The parents of Germany could not say to The Allies (or to God) do not try to put a stop to our Nazism because if you do that, you will harm our innocent children.

So?

So the drowning of the children at the time of The Great Flood was wholly the immoral fault of the parents who lived at that time, and made the Free Will decision to plunge into total wickedness and murderous violence.

And to do that ALL the time . . not just occasionally, but ALL the time.

 

Speculation:

Regarding The Children Drowned in The Genesis Flood:

What follows in this post is pure 100% speculation and is NOT presented as an
argument or as being factually true.

What follows is nothing more than me speculating on what might have happened. What follows carries no weight whatsoever.

Here we go:

We know that God is merciful and that He loves the human race and sent His Son the Lord Jesus to die on a cruel cross to pay for the sins of the human race so they could be redeemed.

1 John 4:16 "God is love."

John 3:16 "for God so loved the world"

So on Christian doctrine God loves the world. And therefore it is reasonable to speculate on what this God who loves the world, might have done
for those children during The Great Flood.

We do not know what God does in the unseen world. Maybe God took the souls of the children out of their bodies before they drowned in The Great Flood, so they did not have to endure the agony of being drowned.

If God did not do that, then maybe He gave the children special grace to bear the drowning so that it was not a horrifying experience for them

If neither of the above is true, then the children experienced about 8 to 12 minutes of drowning agony, after which they found themselves in the eternal happiness of Heaven. On Christian doctrine God saves the souls of all children who have not reached the age of moral accountability (whatever age that is).

Psalm 116:15 "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints."

Why so? Because He takes them into Heaven to be with Him for all eternity.

God Bless.

 

Actually what they do is they assign responsibilies to God. God should have could have would have. Then they use that as their justification for hating God which frankly really cracks me up, because if there really is a God what gives them the idea that they have the qualifications to know the mind or have the authority to criticize a God when they can't even manage their own affairs? Oh wait a minute that's right atheist are their own gods!

 

It should be noted that I don't blame God for anything, I just don't think this event actually happened. You raise one of the reasons for that, in that it simply makes no logical sense.

That sounds a lot like the "excuse" used by abusive partners - Why did you make me beat you?

There is also a fundamental difference between the proposed Christian God and the parents you refer to in your post. God is meant to be an all-knowing and all-powerful being who directly created the world and mankind. By the definition, surely he has much more control and therefore much more responsibility for the consequence of his creation than a flawed and limited human parent bringing up their child.

All of them? Every single human being alive was fundamentally and irreconcilably evil? And what about all the innocent animals killed at the same time? If there were really such evil people that all God could do was destroy them, wouldn't he have the ability to do it in a perfectly targeted manner?

 

If ou start with the premise of an Omnipotent God, then at the exact instant of creation, God knew that he was going to have to drown his creation in a flood. So either God is not a god, or God created man with the knowledge to the coming flood. God could have chosen to design humans differently. He did not. Therefor God IS responsible for killing the unborn children that pregnant women carried at the time of the flood.

If you buy into the whole flood story.

The other flaw is that how could Noah, and his sons and good Jewish family, produce offspring with the facial aspects of Alaskan Eskimos, Japanese, Polynesian Islanders, Aztecs, Nordics ... etc. Not going to buy it.

 

So is god is cool with punishment for the sins of the father raining down upon the children/ Or is, at least, so focused on punishing mankind for exercising free will not in accordance with his demands that he doesn't give a rat's arse who he hurts in satisfying his need to punish the "evil doers".

these discussions constantly remind me of the degree of intellectual contortion required to maintain particular religious mythologies.

 

Yes, humans were created FLAWED no matter who or what created them.

"God" keeps making them flawed despite getting the same results....that sounds pretty stupid and illogical to me...

That old, trite, tired illogical excuse of "he gave them free will" does NOT excuse him from the fact he made flawed creatures and then expected them to be perfect.

Did he have a POINT ???

If a company makes a product that doesn't work do they just keep making it? Let it fix itself?

NO, they research what is wrong and FIX IT.

 

FoxHastings,

Thank you for your restatement, more-or-less, of Epicurus and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris
and Daniel Dennett, Matt Dillhunty and the late Christopher Hitchens.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”__Epicurus

 

Isn't that a valid argument? Do you have an answer to it?

 

1. If we start off with the idea that God is omnipotent, which He is, yet created humans with free will one has to ask. What was His purpose in creating man at all???
the answer? to develop a group of people in which to display His love. A comment God makes regularly throughout the bible.

2. what makes you think Noah was Jewish???


3. Romans 9:21-Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?.What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath--prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory--


yup. God created some knowing he'd have to destroy them. but their destruction is their choice not His.

2 Peter 3-9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.



There is a way that seems right to man but the end thereof is death...

human understanding is completely worthless our perceptions of who God must be based on our own logic is that absolute height of arrogance. The Bible calls it Idolatry. It's really just the worship of yourself though.

 

Do you buy that 'diversity' re the evolution fantasy, wherein according to the myth we're allegedly descended from the same line of extinct negroid-like apes in some small area of Africa? When did we start turning Caucasian, Asian, and Incan in this magical journey around the Earth? Must have taken a while, since there is still no record of any blacks turning white after a few hundred years in Europe or vice versa, any Euros living in Asia or Africa for many generations who look even close to morphing into blacks or Jackie Chan yet.

 

No they accuse the men who wrote the silly stories about a god they created of not showing much logic! Justifying the death of children because of what there fathers did is pathetic but consistent with a desert dwelling tribes morals of the time. Hopefully most have progressed beyond these primitive ideas.

 

Indeed, most quasi-'atheists' have no clue what is going on re the bible, and only have primitive pagan ideas about what is in it. The education system doesn't really instill any ability to correctly assess literature and history and textual analysis in the vast majority of its students, they mostly focus on indoctrination and fashion. We no longer need morals, because we have Hollywood and Oprah now.

 

Interesting, do you agree that it is moral to kill children for the sins of their fathers, it is not clear from your post?

 

Evolution may appear to be "magic"...
to those that don't understand it.

 

Alvin Plantinga has a very good answer to Epicurus

Again sayeth Epicurus:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”__Epicurus

Now Alvin . .

As Plantinga summarized his defense:[14]

"A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions)
is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can
create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so,
then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable
of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these
creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it
turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of
their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong,
however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have
forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga's_free-will_defense#Further_details

You have to "deep read" what Plantinga explained. You have to spend a little time with it. You have
to be willing to read it charitably. If you are already locked-down on atheism, then you desperately
need to "keep Epicurus" as your friend and good buddy.

 

There are millions of examples of skin tone and facial features changing in offspring as mixed race couples produce children.
It's happening in every country that has open societies.

What we don't see are skin tones and facial structure changes in closed societies where mixed race couples do not procreate.
So how did Noah and his sons and their same race families. as the sole survivors of the Great Flood, suddenly start producing
descendants with the facial features of Inca Indians, or Japanese, of Pacific Islanders, etc?

How is it that the Chinese culture has an unbroken recorded history over 5,000 years old, yet the Biblical Flood is younger than that? Were the Chinese ancestors in China, then all get washed away in a flood, and the descendants of Noah repopulate the area, and amazingly become Chinese again?

 

God may appear to ne magic to those who don't know Him.

 

Stick with the supernatural if that's what you're comfortable with and leave science to those that understand it.

 

It's fine within itself, I just don't think it answers the wider questions.

An all-knowing God must have always known what the ultimate outcome was going to be. Given he intervened by killing everything, surely he could have intervened at an earlier stage, before such an extreme act was necessary. The only possibility is that he "wanted" the exact outcome which occurred. There is also the even wider question of why anything. If he can't create free willed beings without creating evil, why create those free-willed beings in the first place? Obviously the only honest answer would be "We don't know". There is as much of an issue here with you claiming to know the mind of God, something we're normally told we can't do.

That's isn't my problem and I'm not debating the existence of gods here, only the literal interpretation of the Flood narrative.

 

Science is what it is because God is orderly in His nature.. Science ain't got a clue about spiritual things. Science is subservient to God.

 

Didn't god make it rain. Even stated it was going to make it rain for 40 days and 40 nights.
Didn't god put out the rainbow as a new covenant for mankind?

Could not the new covenant happen without the drowning of the world?
Afterall, sinful man was left to repopulate the world.

If god wanted a sin free world, he could have just drowned the whole world and tried again with a new Adam and Eve.

Now having said all that, there is ZERO evidence of an entire world wide flood.
So, it really is just a story. Not a factual occurrence.

 

god willing to prevent? God say's it created all things.
You don't believe all things on Earth are a creation of the biblical god?

King James Bible
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

 

Hardly anyone will drown people to show love. Seems counter productive and intuitive.

 

Thanks for sharing your "opinion".
Science deals in natural things not the supernatural,nor does it deal in blind faith.