Why do Christians make God out to be dumb?

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Since God is good, our way of being pleasing to God is by doing good. Likewise, our way of rejecting God is by doing evil. If you remove our option of doing evil, we are forced to please God, and he doesn't want that. He wants us to choose to please him.

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Just to understand your position, doing good pleases God. Doing evil is rejecting God. God wants us to be able to reject him, so that we can choose to please him, because he doesn't want to force anything out of us. Why then does he threaten us with an eternity of damnation if we don't choose to please him? It sounds like God is trying to force us to choose him by giving us a horrible alternative. This seems like an interesting variation of Hobson's choice.All in all, your God is very passive-aggressive.

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If someone robs you of your money and beats you until you are unconscious, God cannot interfere, or he would destroy the robber's free will in that situation. However, God IS willing to give you salvation from the evil that you have done, as well as comfort and strength to persevere through evil if you let him do so.

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Oh, I get it. The robber's choice to hurt takes precedence over the victim's choice not to be hurt. Well, at least he helps us get over it.

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The defining feature of extremely brilliant plans is that they're immediately clear to everyone. When faced with an extremely brilliant plan, the reaction of most people isn't "That's so complicated, I'll never understand it!" but rather "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that?" I tell you this because I've made a somewhat amature study out of observing cleverness in action.

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Well, this is assuming that God's intelligence is approximately comparable to human intelligence. Vastly stupider beings than humans usually don't seem to comprehend our master plans. It really isn't all that hard to outsmart a dog, for example. If God's intellect is only to ours what ours is to animals, there is no reason to believe we would have any way to understand his plans.It's not that the plan is seen as brilliant because we don't understand it, it is that our understanding is not relevant to the brilliance of the plan.

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The point is that your God, whose nature is goodness, somehow has free will without the choice of committing evil, so why can't we?

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Outstanding point. However you do know that you are just setting up a "God is different/mysterious" rebuttal, right?

He can be just different enough to kill the discussion. This is one of my points in another thread, though, so no need to talk about it here.As to dogs talking, that really depends on your definition. Based on my dog's barks and actions when people come to the door, I can tell who it is. As far as a higher communication standard capable of transmitting complex philosophies and advanced science, I have to agree with you. However, to a vastly superior being, our chatter may be no more than the barking of a dog.Perhaps God's language is too complex for him to express advanced ideas to us, and ours too inferior to express anything more than basic thoughts. God's speeches to us in the Bible could be phrased to us in a way we might understand, kind of like a command to a dog."Made in his image" is too vague to draw any applicable conclusions. It has been said that apes mirror human behavior, but I don't think that it is just a language barrier that prevents them from typing the works of Shakespeare.

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Who wants to worship a God so weird he can't be understood? Who wants to worship a God so mysterious you don't know what eternal consequences your actions could carry?

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Um... Fundies?

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Who, then, do you think he talks to with it?

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Languages are created by communities. If we're in communion with God then we needs must be speaking the same language, because we create the language, together.

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Other God's? Perhaps Angels are advanced enough to understand him. Perhaps after we die our intelligence is elevated to a level in which we can understand Him. It really doesn't matter. A sole human on a desert island has a language that nothing else in that system can understand.I live with my dog, we are a community, but I can't explain Atlas Shrugged to him. Of course, I can't explain Atlas Shrugged to most people, so maybe that is a bad analogy.

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I disagree. Clearly it means that the similiarities between God and man should be taken to outwiegh the differences.

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That is your interpretation, and a valid one. I think mine is valid too though, as far as communication potential goes. Apes are an image of humans in their behavior, but we can't communicate on a meaningful level with them.To me, the ineffability of God spoken of by most theologians and philosophers that I have read implies that the differences outweigh the similarities. I won't press this though. Like I said, your interpretation is fine, it is just that it isn't the only one.

Are you implying that humans who are never exposed to language are intellectually ape-like? It's not that I don't believe you, but I have to see some studies on this. Even if it is true, God can still meaningfully talk to other Gods (don't tell me other Gods aren't Biblical), and perhaps angels and enlightened (maybe only dead) humans.As soon as apes who know sign language can discuss philosophy or literature, I'll agree that they have human-scale consciousness. Until then, they are an image of us who cannot understand us on a meaningful level.Ineffability may not be Biblical, but that doesn't mean anything. Contrary to popular belief, the Bible is not the only thing we have to understand God. I would recommend William James' The Variety of Religious Experience for a different approach. While you may not agree that religious/mystical experience imparts any real knowledge, it is just as valid of a way to gain supernatural insight as the Bible. For example, if God came to me in the form of a burning bush and told me that I had better switch from Coke to Pepsi, I would do so, regardless of what the Bible has to say in the matter.I have quoted a relevant section of James in the PHILOSOPHY IS KING thread in Free for All. Post 55 on the fourth page if you are interested.

Feral children is a really interesting subject that I will definitely get into, thanks for the link.

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Depends on what part of the Bible you're talking about. The Bible hardly presents a unified front on the subject of the existence of competing deities.

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Very true, it's not like it's one book. I think we can agree that there is material there for multiple Gods though. Or for all we know there were multiple Gods for the OT, then one God achieved dominance as the other Gods lost worshippers. That’s way off topic though, as interesting as the speculation it may be to me.

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You might be interested to know that human children actually lag slightly behind ape children of the same age in terms of spacial awareness and mental mapping - right up to age 3, which is about the point that the human child begins to absorb and use language. Again, not conclusive proof, but interesting.

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Interesting, but I don't really even see it as evidence. The stupidity of human larvae (sorry, I hate small children, I'm a waiter) doesn't really mean anything about their potential. Some children advance more rapidly than others. Some kids never learn to read until school, some teach themselves at 3. The former can go on to become Nobel Prize winners, and the latter can become stand-up comics. Besides, children don't have the need to advance as rapidly as I would think would be helpful in wildlife.

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(Would it surprise you to know that I'm an English major? )

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Dude, you too? I have a handicap though, my mother was a journalism teacher/editor for Road and Track magazine. Her lessons don't seem to have taken completely, however, as I can be as long winded as Hawthorne. Do you have aspirations of being a writer, teacher, or fast food worker? Teacher for me (though obviously college level).

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Yes, I know. My point has never been to prove definitive statements about the character of God - after all, I don't even believe he exists - but rather to show that the Biblical model of God, specifically, is not consistent with reality as we experience it.

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I agree with what you say, I was just trying to show that it isn't a given that we can understand enough about Him to justify any model of Him, let alone judge its consistency with reality. I'm all for agreeing to disagree on this point though. Since my own beliefs don't hinge on consistency with reality, I see no reason to do the point to death.Since we may have strayed from the original intent of the thread, I would enjoy picking up a discussion of some of our other points on a different one. Perhaps the ineffability of God, what being created in the image of God means, or even our cognitive relationship with apes.