God’s Level of Effort

[Willum]

Please read entire post before answering. There is a larger context, and I don’t wish to discuss the obvious or banal.

Many claims are made about what God does and does not do.
God allows freewill, for example.
God will not force people.
God will forgive the repentant, no matter the sin.
God gave Samson strength.
God can do anything.

It is the last that this topic is concerned with. The level of effort.
With the assumption that God is all powerful, than anything it can or cannot do poses the same level of effort for it (does it?). So blackening a star would be as difficult or possible as swatting a fly (right?).

So what determines significance or what God will or won’t do?
Why does freewill rate among the billions of other things that could allow?
Why does physically stopping a rape not rate or other evils not rate?
Or stopping the Apple from being bit?

From the perspective of “God can do anything,” why does God do things like the flood, but not prevent evils?
If all powerful, then aren’t any actions or inactions.by it arbitrary? Even meaningless?
Why /why not?

[Difflugia]

How come just about everything Yahweh tries ends up being thwarted in some way. For an omnipotent god he is really not one of the smartest deities on the block.

Stories are boring and difficult to relate to without some sort of at least potential conflict. That's why Superman has to contend with kryptonite.

If God didn't have something to overcome, nobody would even be able to know how awesome He is. Since God is master of space and time, imagine for a minute that whenever something bad happens, God just starts the Universe over again with the tiny tweak necessary to keep the bad thing from happening. God has eternity to perfect his project, right? Now imagine that you're one of the people whose lifetimes span a period that is entirely free of any sort of badness. How would you know that things aren't just that way?

If you notice, when God does some of the crappiest things to people in the Bible, His excuse is often something to the effect of, "so that they know that I am Yahweh!"

Ezekiel's always good for some smiting of Israel. Here's Ezekiel 6:8-10 (emphasis mine):

Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall have escaped the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through the countries. And they of you that escape shall remember me among the nations, whither they shall be carried captives, when I have broken their whorish heart, which departed from me, and their eyes, which went lusting after their idols; and they shall loathe themselves for the evils, which they have committed, in all their abominations. Then shall they know that I am Jehovah, and that I have not said in vain, that I would do all this evil to them.

[Willum]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #41]

You are sure right there.
If God didn’t design us with such poor logic, we wouldn’t need Satan to see how awesome he is.

It is almost as if men made God and Satan for the sake of pure human logic and reason.