I'm using christian theology and I speak about god.
Don't mix up your own opinions with the theology when you're talking here.
You know what the apple was in the paradise? It was the free will.
They ate it and they were thrown here as a punishment.
God gave people the opportunity to be virtuous and follow his word.
There needs to be possibility for evil, since you can't be virtuous if you don't have the possibility for evil.
God has all the authority to punish us. He created us.
And now listen, I'm not even christian. I just use theology as the basis for this argument, since you wanted to talk about theology.
Christian theology sings in their Exsultet hymn that Adam's sin was a happy fault and necessary to god's plan.
Why would god punish us for using his gift and keeping his plan on the rails?
Those are all benefits to god and he would not punish us for doing the right thing.
Keep the full theology in mind.
On free will.
They followed their god given natures so the term of free will may not apply.
I have this TLDR piece on this.
Adam and Eve were correct in eating of the tree of knowledge and rejecting God.
It was God's plan from the beginning to have Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the bible says that Jesus "was crucified from the foundations of the Earth," that is to say, God planned to crucify Jesus as atonement for sin before he even created human beings or God damned sin.
1Peter 1:20 0 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.
This indicates that Jesus had no choice.
If God had not intended humans to sin from the beginning, why did he build into the Creation this "solution" for sin? Why create a solution for a problem you do not anticipate?
God knew that the moment he said "don't eat from that tree," the die was cast. The eating was inevitable. Eve was merely following the plan.
This then begs the question.
What kind of God would plan and execute the murder of his own son when there was absolutely no need to?
Only an insane and immoral God. That’s who.
The cornerstone of Christianity is human sacrifice, thus showing it‘s immorality.
One of Christianity's highest form of immorality is what they have done to women. They have denied them equality and subjugated them to men.
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Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.
That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."
But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.
If all sin by nature, then the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin. That being the case, for God to punish us for following the instincts and natures he put in us would be quite wrong.
Psalm 51:5 "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."
Having said the above for the God that I do not believe in, I am a Gnostic Christian naturalist, let me tell you that evil is all human generated. Evil is our responsibility.
Much has been written to explain what I see as a natural part of evolution.
Consider.
First, let us eliminate what some see as evil. Natural disasters. These are unthinking occurrences and are neither good nor evil. There is no intent to do evil even as victims are created.
Evil then is only human to human.
As evolving creatures, all we ever do, and ever can do, is compete or cooperate.
Cooperation we would see as good as there are no victims created. Competition would be seen as evil as it creates a victim. We all are either cooperating, doing good, or competing, doing evil at all times.
Without us doing some of both, we would likely go extinct.
This, to me, explains why there is evil in the world quite well.
Be you a believer in nature, evolution or God, we should all see that what Christians see as something to blame, evil, we should see that what we have, competition, deserves a huge thanks for being available to us.
There is no conflict between nature and God on this issue. This is how things are and should be. We all must do what some will think is evil as we compete and create losers to this competition.
Regards
DL
Evolutionary theology.
