Isn't God evil, if He allowed Adam's fall to harm us?

JAL said:

But again, as an act of kindness, if it were up to you, you'd do everything in your power to protect children from suffering for the sins of some man. Especially if you had enough power to do it by the snap of your fingers.

That's just what kindness does.

Particularly problematical is option 1 of the OP (Adam as rep) as it flatly contradicts almost every page of the Bible. How so? Representation means that we have no moral status. Our actions have no status. All that matters is the status of the rep. His status is our status.

If that's the case, our individual actions have no judicial status. You can't classify them as either evil or good. Therefore God can never be justifiably angry about the behavior of an individual. He can only be angry with Adam. Yet virtually every page of the Bible reminds us that God does regard individual acts as either sinful or righteous.

This leads to another contradiction. The Bible says that Eve sinned first! But if Adam is the rep, then she was still innocent because he hadn't sinned yet. In fact, as already stated, if he is the rep, her act cannot be called sin!

Traditional views of Adam simply aren't scriptural.

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JAL said:

Oh but I have a VERY satisfying answer to those questions, although I would have to move that discussion to Controversial Theology.
And all we have to do - regarding those issues which I CAN discuss on this thread - is define Adam in a way logically consistent with God's goodness and holiness, such that He doesn't have the world suffering unjustly and unkindly for Adam's sin. That's what I did in the OP and I see no alternative to my view.

The closest I've seen a theologian coming to admitting my view is Millard J. Erickson who admitted in his systematic theology (Christian Theology) that "We were all physically present in Adam, such that we all sinned in his act." (That book is a standard textbook in evangelical seminaries). But so desperate to uphold the mainstream dogma of an immaterial soul indivisible into parts and without size and shape, he corrupts his conclusion with the following gibberish. He claims that the soul is an immaterial soul by nature but, just before God puts it in the body, He converts it to a material soul. Then after death, He reconverts it to an immaterial soul. Total nonsense. That's like saying, "I sat on my chair yesterday, but today I can't sit on it because it is now an immaterial substance with no size and shape and thus is, indeed, nowhere to be found."

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JAL said:

The words in bold do not constitute a viable theodicy. A maximally good God would not visit either the sins of the parents or the consequences of their actions upon innocent children (such as fetuses).

You can't construe God as behaving in a way more callous than any of us would act, and then claim to have a valid theodicy.

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JAL said:

"WE" became unholy? Sin is by definition the result of a freely willed act and therefore the notion of a sinful nature transmitted from Adam to someone other than Adam is a logical absurdity.

The Protestant theolgoian Donald Bloesch admitted in his systematic theology that, on the Protestant view of Adam, the transmission of original sin is a logically insoluble problem. That's putting it mildly. As I said, it's a contradiction in terms.

He himself didn't abandon the Protestant view, but at least he admitted that it leads to logically "insoluble" problems (his word). Understand what he's saying. He's not just admitting it hasn't been solved. He's admitting it cannot be solved. Gee I wonder why? Obviously, because a bona fide contradiction cannot be remedied.

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JAL said:

Adam as a robot? I wasn't disputing whether Adam had free will or needed to. In fact, in my view Adam's freedom was a logical necessity. What I oppose is the notion that it was logically necessary for his kids to suffer either the guilt or the consequences of his sin. Seems to me only an evil monster would allow such unkindness and injustice.

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JAL said:

All Christians including myself believe that God is good and proclaim His goodness.

But what if our doctrines inadvertently extrapolate otherwise? The church clings to two views of Adam:
(1) Adam was our representative. ( Catholics and Protestants)
(2) Adam's sin didn't incriminate us but did have horribly painful consequences for our world. (Orthodox).

I suppose a third view exists.
(3) Adam never literally existed. Biologically we evolved into this horrible world.

All three views unacceptably extrapolate to a God who is hardly the epitome of kindness and thus is either comparatively evil or totally evil. After all, given the power to create a world, any of us would have exercised more kindness than 1,2, and 3.

2,000 years of investigation have demonstrated that only one solution is possible. And the church is well aware of it but has rejected it because it flatly contradicts their dogmatic assumption of an immaterial soul indivisible into parts.

The obvious solution is that God only made one material soul named Adam (even Eve was a physical subsection extracted from Adam's ribs). After Adam sinned, God removed most of that material soul from his body unto a place of suspended animation. When each of us was later conceived, God mated a separate microscopic portion of that sin-stained soul to each of our bodies. In other words, YOU are 100% Adam (not a mixture). YOU are the one who freely chose to eat of the forbidden fruit (although none of us currently remember doing so).

P.S. This remedy isn't a complete solution to the problem of evil. The larger issue is, why would a perfectly kind God allow temptation in the first place? Historically the church has made a pretense of providing satisfactory answers but has patently failed. Problem is I can't discuss this aspect on the current forum as my solution falls under Controversial Theology.

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JAL said:

Or we could stop believing nonsense right now and advocate a theology that actually makes sense.

What I mostly object to in the pulpit today is the false sense of security. Most leaders preach with an air of confidence as though they understand quite well what the Bible says, as though their theology is copacetic. I would be more in their favor if they were simply honest enough to regularly admit things like, 'We just don't have know for sure the anwsers. For thing our theory of Adam seems to contradict the notion of a kind God so it quite possibly needs some reform'.

Projecting a false sense of security is intellectually dishonest, grieves the Holy Spirit as to thereby suppress revival, and doesn't spur on the audience to look for better answers. It stagnates instead of nourishes.

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JAL said:

Or we could stop believing nonsense right now and advocate a theology that actually makes sense.

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JAL said:

You wouldn't be so unkind. So one man sins by free will. Fine? So what? Punish the whole world for it? That's ineffably evil.

God seems to be the one who plagued us with sin, in the Protestant view according to which, after Adam sinned, God somehow managed to pollute, corrupt,and infect the rest of us with his sin-tainted soul. Was this an act of kindness in your view?

So he is evil to all the children at the outset, due to Adam's sin, but in the long run He will eventually give them candy and ice cream. That's your theodicy?

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JAL said:

You are assuming that we suffer because of other people, that is, we suffer not because we did something to deserve suffering/punishment, but because God is so unkind and unjust as to permit such injustice.

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JAL said:

This kind of response is proof that you can't refute the arguments.

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