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Replying to post 5 by Ooberman]
I would have expected that commentary on a Post submitted by ttruscott would have gotten us farther than this by now.
Is anyone here aware that the First Council of Nicaea did not yet have the phrase added in 381 A. D., "and of all things visible and invisible". Similarly the Apostles' Creed "Maker of heaven and earth" was absent from the Old Roman Creed. We see that in the very earliest forms of these two creeds that the Gnostic concept was still allowed for, that Our Lord Jesus Christ was not the primordial creator of worldly stuff (like stars, planets, and possibly non-human but sentient intelligent beings). Thus it is open for Christians taking umbrage with, or sophisticated interpretation of, the two main creeds, to hold that the Universe we live in came about without the involvement of the God we worship.
Nevertheless, even clever manipulations of these two creeds does not solve the problem of evil unless our God (not the Creator Demigod) has entered into this Universe as a Redeemer who has chosen to work with the spoiled Creation which started almost from the first to be Evil incarnate. Our "Lord" (to henceforth distinguish between a Deist's concept of a Demigod Creator "God" and the Entity we Christians worship) allows us imperfect spirits (from worlds long ago before our present life incarnated among Homo sapiens sapiens) to have pre-existed even before our present cycle of reincarnations as humans. Our Jesus is not to blame for the evil and suffering we started in and brought ever "worser" (cuter than "more worse") in primordial times/places/beings/whatever. This Lord keeps offering us salvation, but most in each lifetime reject it, so we humans get "recycled" through subsequent earthly lives until we reach a "take-off" readiness to "ascend" to a higher plane of existence where we are always happy or get our jollies from directing (as "guardian angels"?) the conversion of our associates still on our plane of existence.
Wow, I got farther afield than I intended, and was not really intending to tout straight Arianism/Manichaeanism/Gnosticism or whatever I wound up with here above. Even if as an orthodox catholic Christian myself I would not necessarily subscribe to such a "statement of faith" as I presented above, nevertheless all atheists/agnostics/hard-deists out there need to dispose of the case I therein make that would do away with their favorite justification, the Problem of Evil.
I'm not saying that the traditional two Christian creeds have to be done away with, just that if the creeds as now interpreted don't help in obviating the Problem of Evil, we Christians can reinterpret them and/or prune them back by scholarly criticism.