For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.
As I've said before, you'e free to believe in this "hands-off" God. It just isn't the God of the Bible. Every example you pick, from Dachau to the crucifixion has only served to show how mistaken your view of God is. Does that mean that God PERFORMED the horror at Dachau? Of course not. But unless you are even more adept at tap-dancing than you've previously demonstrated, I have trouble seeing how Hitler came to power outside of Romans 13:1. After all, it's the Free Willers who always argue that words like "No" and "All" have to be taken without exception, right?
Would you agree with me on the assertion that
God cannot perform evil? God is constrained by His nature, He cannot do anything evil, for He is good (Mk10:17)---nor can God tempt anyone (Jms1:13).
QUESTION---does God harden anyone's heart? According to Romans 9:17-18, God hardened Pharaoh's heart. BUT---there is a "Semitic view", that attributes actions to God, when God clearly did not do the action. Read Exodus 9:34-35, where "Pharaoh sinned and hardened his own heart"---and in the very next verse, GOD is ascribed as doing it! 10:1! Did God harden Pharaoh's heart? NO!
Do you really not comprehend the difference between WOULD not and COULD not?
I believe your wording was close to,
"Could God create a man that WOULD not fall"---for God to
CREATE someone who
WOULD not fall, God is required to accomplish something IN THAT CREATION, that precludes the man from falling. So by saying, "Could God create a man who WOULD NOT do this-or-that", is identical to saying the man COULD not do this-or-that. In both cases the determinate choice
is made by God...
There was no pre-existing "future," for God to omnisciently know. For then matter would be eternal, rather than God.
This is entirely, possibley, faulty logic. The Unified Field connects space, time, gravity, inertia, all the basic forces. No one that I know has solved this---thus, we do not know the nuances of time or space---I personally believe both that time did not exist before Creation, and that time is NOT linear (but exponential---thus billions of years of time
at first happened very quickly, approaching linearity
eventually...). Because of our limited understanding of time and hyper-spatial-dimensions, we cannot say for certainty that God,
even before the creation, could not "look forward in time"---what if time was a
BUBBLE in God's view? Not happened YET, but existing in the DISTANCE? (and even THEN, "yet" has no meaning if time did not exist yet...)
...I said "yet", again; but if time had no meaning yet, well then the reality defies even description in our limited grasp...
then I'll simply be forced to shrug in your general direction.
This was obviously a reference to the movie, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". It was
SO TEMPTING to engage in a word-gag with that "OH NO, I said, 'YET!' again!"---after the "Knights of Ni" scene...
But, then, God
DID speak to Moses, in a burning
SHRUBBERY...
Question: Was the crucifixion a morally GOOD thing for those Jewish leaders and Roman soldiers to do?
Obviously, it was morally wrong. God predestined Jesus, His death-on-the-Cross
from the beginning. God placed Jesus in the time and place proper for the Crucifixion---but God did not machinate the Romans' hearts...
That His quest to redeem a people to Himself to the praise of His glorious grace was PLAN A, rather than a huge cosmic afterthought to rectify his "Oops" in creating such a silly representative. The plan of redemption in the Bible is called an eternal plan, and I take that seriously. And just as God used Pharaoh, Satan, Pilate and a host of others, God used Adam's foreseen free choices to accomplish His plan of redemption.
I think we are splitting hairs here---I believe that God was constrained by His nature to create us
just as He did---but the wording cannot be used,
"God created Adam TO fall" or "God created Adam so he WOULD fall". So you and I agree that "Creation was not a cosmic afterthough", and we agree that "God used Adam's foreseen free choices to accomplish His plan of redemption".
I'm not sure if we agree on what I believe---that God would have
preferred that Adam
NOT fall. I base this observation on verses like 1Tim2:4, "God desires ALL MEN to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth."
"The LORD has made everything for its own purpose,
Even the wicked for the day of evil."
OK---based on your beliefs and our discussion, are you saying that God CREATED THEM EVIL FOR THEIR DAY? Or does He USE their FORESEEN FREE CHOICES and remarks on their DESTINY (which they have
chosen for themselves)?