If a carpenter builds a very high quality theater stage so that his children can have the opportunity to put on a play - and his only intention is to bring happiness to everyone - would it be his fault if his children made a mockery of the stage and ended up just fighting with each other and causing themselves misery?
Your analogy is inaccurate. The parent doesn't build a theater, instead he builds a beautiful playground and puts his children in that playground. He says to his children that they must not touch the bag of sweets that are sitting in the playground for no particular reason.
What the parent also knows is that a paedophile is in the playground just waiting to 'corrupt' your children, (the parent also knows he'll succeed).
Note: You might ask why I said there's a paedophile in the playground. The reason is because I submit that most of us would consider them the most evil of people. They would be further linked in that they, (I assume), put on a nice face and deceive the innocent child into becoming corrupted. What we do know from the bible is that the garden was inhabited, (without parental complaint or intervention), by the most evil entity in all existence. Think about it - the most evil entity you could ever possibly ever imagine was walking around in that garden made specifically for his children without the parent batting an eyelid. No human that I know of would consider that reasonable. Can you name me any human that upon finding out that the place made for and inhabited by their children is also home to the most evil entity they can possibly think of, wouldn't get right down there and defend their children?
Yes, our children can make mistakes, bad decisions and ignore our requests but that
never prevents us from protecting them if we have the ability to do so. Unless we're god, in which case christians would have us believe the exact opposite of what we know as parents.
So anyway, this parent knows the playground is inhabited by a paedophile and sits there doing nothing to prevent the inevitable outcome. Nothing at all. The parent saw the paedophile walk in to the playground. He did nothing. The parent saw the paedophile approach the sweets. He did nothing. The parent saw the paedophile approach his children with those sweets. He did nothing. The parent sat idly by watching as those he claims to love more than anything got corrupted.
He then cursed his children for his own unforgivable bad parenting.
All of these miseries that we witness in the world are within human ability to solve - wouldn't that be evidence that we were the ones who caused them in the first place?
I don't see that this statement holds up when observing such suffering and misery in other forms of life. Did we make the spider wasp lay its eggs inside spiders which then proceed to eat it from the inside out while it's still alive?
Did man invent the fly? Did man sit down and design a creature that would terrorise both people and animals? Did we decide that in order to survive it would have to puke on our food and stamp it in? Did we create the fly with it's uncanny ability to spread disease and germs?
So, because we can, (not), solve all the misery that the fly causes by completely eradicating it, how do you claim it is
"evidence that we caused [them] in the first place"?
No my friend, the fly is a masterpiece - clearly and undeniably intelligently designed. Come on, the christian demands it. They tell me only a fool would believe that these things came about naturally, but that they were actually designed specifically by an all powerful intelligence. Which is it?
