Indeed, using the gifts of intelligence and creativity that God gave us.

But if your God gave us just a little
more help we lose it?

How can you be sure how much "help" has been given?

Is your God that powerless?
Explain the miracles in your bible if God is so strongly
constrained by the rules of nature.

The point is that they ARE miracles - incredibly rare acts that people
recognised as incredibly rare. You use the word "constantly" above and
below. If they were "constant" - or even frequent - they would neither
have been noted nor thought special, would they?

There is no evidence myracles happened. But say some _had_ happened.
At what number of the things you would call it too many?

Clearly, where it reaches the point where it stops being "miraculous".
That is, the point where we cannot speak of 'laws of nature' and rely
on them holding.

A breach of natural law is, after all, a breach of natural law.
Your whole argument has the smell of a made-up story to explain
all the evil in the world.

Except, if you think about it, it doesn't. It merely accepts that in a
world where there are reliable laws of nature, bad things will happen.
Or do you think that's not the case?

The world does have reliable laws of nature, and bad things do
happen. But we do not know if in some (fictional IMO) world with
both miracles _and_ natural laws that bad things would have to
happen. Who would not prefer a world with beings in it that
are not responsible[1], but created so as not to commit
outrages against one another _and_ be happy? What constrains
your deity from doing that?

You could not know if any of your
bizarre theory of responsibility is true. _How_ would you test it?

I fail to see what you think is bizarre about it. And what happened to
that logic you were using in earlier posts?

How about this:

Responsibility requires an ability to make a reasonable prediction of
the consequences of your actions

1) And why would not an all loving creator forget responsibility
and give its creations a joyous life[1]? I try to do that even
for my pets. Yet your deity will not even keep stop from slaughtering
each other wholesale?

2) The very existence of free will in
the sense of having an undetermined choice is not settled. Social
'responsibility' is necessary to prevent crime, but we don't know
if we actually have some kind of metaphysical 'responsibility'
in the sense of our choices not being determined ultimately and
completely by the laws of nature. Scientific evidence does not
indicate that any such metaphysical 'responsibility' exists at all.

3) Your creator has a track record of particularly cruel acts, such
as ordering the killing of tiny children in Egypt (genocide)
and turning a woman into a pillar of salt as a punishment for
her curiosity (misogyny of the worst sort). So even if your
responsibility theory _were_ true you would
still have these crimes, committed directly by your deity, to explain.

4) Your creator promises to torture insubordinates unthinkably forever.

This is the ultimate evil act. Will you will try to explain
that away as divine justice?

The ability to make predictions depends on the world behaving predictably

Therefore Responsibility is impossible if the world does not (on the
whole) behave predictably.

Then create us both without responsibility _and_ without crime.

What makes responsibility a greater good than being created so as
not to commit outrages against one another _and_ be happy?[1]
What constrains your (IMO fictional) creator? Who among us
would not do that even for our pet animals? Yet your creator can't send
down a paper that shows us how to prevent cancer?

And before you jump on the "on the whole", note that responsibility
does not require the ability perfectly to predict the consequences of
your actions - merely to make a reasonable judgement. Therefore very
occasional breaks in natural laws do not negate responsibility.

Absurdities multiply: Since he was constantly performing miracles
according to your holy books, then according to your previous
paragraph we must have no moral responsibility now,
since the laws of nature have _already_ been breached.

You must surely be aware that that last line of argument is illogical.

Not actually an argument, is it?
How would you test your bizarre theory of responsibility to be true?

Using the logic that seems to have deserted you in your last few posts.
And what do you mean "test" ? We're scarcely talking here about things
that can be decided using the rules of science.

Questions of what a (IMO fictional) deity might be capable of doing are
indeed silly.
I have just been trying to show you that your (IMO fictional)
deity is mean spirited.

You make up stories about 'responsibility'
requiring evil; I can make up better ones about happiness and goodness
without responsibility.


[1]
And now we come to the crux of the old 'responsibility' saw. I have heard
apologists claim that people could not be 'conscious' without it, and that
somehow the consciousness makes up for the evil in the world. (I don't know
if that is your basis for claiming a need for responsibility, but let's
get past this anyway.)

My response to that is -- they have absolutely no way of knowing that, either.
Indeed you and I are conscious (yes, you have passed my Turing test),
yet we don't know if we do indeed have responsibility --
at least not in the metaphysical-free-will sense responsibility. And it is on
that metaphysical-free-will sense that these claims about consciousness rest.
We just don't know if we are ultimately determined. I think science
tends to suggest
that there is no free will, but at any rate there is no evidence that actual
free will in any metaphysical sense exists. Yet we are, indeed,
conscious.