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Why couldn't God save his followers in Lisbon from getting obliterated by an earthquake on All Saint's Day, 1755? They lit their candles, gathered in churches. The earthquake knocked them down and the resulting firestorm, earthquake and tsunami razed the city.
What kind of omnipotent, all-loving God treats his followers this way? It goes against reason to conclude that God is benevolent and actively interferes. Ours is not the kind of world we would expect from such a deity. There are all kinds of disasters that happen for purely mechanical reasons. I conclude that God acts mechanically, the Blind Watchmaker set up the universe for whatever reason and doesn't take actively support humans generally or Christians specifically.
I think that's a much more fitting stance for a true deity, a true universe-creator. If God doesn't want something to happen, he could make it so that it couldn't, not merely punish or instruct or send messages but to render things physically impossible per the structure of reality. He could constrain choices or outcomes so that the acceptable range is whatever he wants or outright rewrite time and history to correct things. That's what a real deity does, that's boundless power. God is not going to be frustrated by humans sinning against eachother or have to set up elaborate and invisible mechanisms of reward or punishment that need human prophets to explain (without proof... why can't see heaven or hell with instruments). God could trivially create a system where it's impossible to sin while maintaining freedom of choice. I cannot choose to flap my arms and fly like a bird, it simply isn't possible. That's a constraint based on the strength of my muscles, gravity, air pressure, physics, the real forces of creation. If God didn't want adultery or any other transgression, he could make it just as impossible. There would be no need for God to ever provide moral instruction to anyone. The mechanics of the universe are what actually teaches moral lessons by directly affecting results. Sometimes the adulterer gets beaten to death, other times he spreads his genes and gets others to raise his kids.
Only humans need to spread religious teachings about morality or norms, they are a second-level construct. Only humans need to build churches to worship God, only humans need religious ceremonies and special religious holidays for communal reasons.
You are thinking in a worldly manner. If those people were God's followers, they are now in heaven, which is a far better fate than anything that could have happened to them here on earth.
Why doesn't God just end world hunger? For that matter, why doesn't he conjure me up a steak whenever I pray for one?
Any time you find yourself thinking 'If I were God, I would have done this instead...' you are demonstrating the cardinal sin of pride, i.e. putting yourself in the place of God. We are not God, which is why we don't know or understand everything He is up to. As the scripture says, 'My ways are not your ways.' But on the other hand, we can and do see the evidence of His work in our own lives and in our own hearts. At least, I do, and other Christians report that they do as well.
My hope for you is that you have the humility to consider asking Jesus into your life, not as a test, but as a genuine request for a relationship with your Creator. You might be surprised by what happens next.
You shouldn't have to use this line of argument, where you mysteriously can't provide any actual proof and defy the whole idea of proving your own case. Your God should never need clerics writing cope about how he mustn't be put to the test. What kind of deity shrinks from a test? In the Old Testament he was razing cities left and right.
It's wonderful how Christians think that sneering at these 'unworthy' wishes like wishing for steak is some incisive cutting response. Why not grant such wishes? Is your God not as powerful as industrial agriculture which puts so much meat on the table the poor struggle with obesity? Why not have the devout be capable of wishing for manna, isn't that something Christians are supposed to be capable of? Or were those relegated to metaphors since you can't actually accomplish such miracles, only intangible wishes and copes?
God's ways are doing nothing when his followers get massacred, repressed or blown up on their Feast Days. But that's totally fine, fantastic even because they'll get enormous rewards in the afterlife (but nobody can see this, only the dead know). Come on, this is cope from a deity who lacks the power to act physically in the world.
The sole power of your God is the organized religious devotion that has driven history for millennia. The Crusades, the Reconquista, The Thirty Years War... The discipline and will of soldiers can be tested, that's actually real. But he's just one force amongst many and a waning force at that.
The God I'm talking about actually created the universe, created the stars, mathematics, worldly thinking, hunger, cancer, death, cope, social constructs and everything else. If he didn't want us to think in a certain way, it would never happen.
Okay let's go back to first principles. What is your purpose? Why do you exist?
Christianity teaches that your purpose is not physical well-being, it is not hedonistic pleasure, it is not propagating your genetic material. It's not any of these worldly goals.
You are arguing strenuously that the Christian God doesn't make sense because He doesn't provide the very things He has clearly said are not important. The contradiction you are describing is between reality and this made-up version of God in your head. Again, "If I were God this is how I would see things..." It's quite literally the most basic error you can make in theology.
Christians do pray for many such things, and those prayers are often answered. I've personally witnessed God's provision, even to the point of the miraculous, and I know plenty of others who have seen similar things. Plus, there is a massive body of literature on miracles and the evidence for them. I recommend Dr Craig Keener if you're interested to learn more, he has a book "Miracles Today" that covers a lot of this. There's also a lot on Youtube you can check out. However, honestly I doubt you'll do any such thing, it sounds like you've already made up your mind without bothering to look at the evidence.
Christian theology is forced to take up this incredible burden of justifying how the structure of the universe necessitates all these problems from cancer to bad equilibriums, so they bring in original sin or free will or other constructs. But there is no need for them in the first place.
Vs
The simpler solution is better. It doesn't need to invent dogmatic justifications for what's going on. How are we to know that God's plans require his followers to be immolated in Lisbon? Blind faith. And the good things that happen? These miracles are actually good? They aren't some counterintuitive damnation to bring about more evil in the long run (since we're taking on this twisty reasoning process)? Again blind faith. It's not even consistent.
Theology is cope, it's a way to find some justification for the unjustifiable, baffling people with jargon when the case is very simple. Take Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds' - that's real theology done by real theologians. It's obviously wrong. Any idiot could easily make a better world just by subtracting mosquitoes or cluster migraines, or some similar unpleasant aspect of the world.
But theologians erect these huge bulwarks of defence against thinking clearly, they maintain that you can't judge God's action or inaction since you don't know what he's planning. Yet they seem to be very sure about omnibenevolence and love... How do they know what he's like? Because they appeal to the legitimacy of one holy book amongst many about events that happened in the distant past, when supernatural events happened constantly.
It's galactic-scale motivated reasoning, like anthropology or social sciences but without even pretending to be falsifiable, since they deny the very idea of testing their work.
This is simply false. A Christian should obviously test their beliefs. Scripture says, for instance: "Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil." [1 Thes 5:21-22] More importantly, the Christian faith is not a random philosophy untethered to the world, it is specifically tied to the resurrection: "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." [1 Cor 15:14]
You seem to by relying on this idea of 'blind faith' which, though a common refrain in pop atheism, is contrary to what Christians believe. The Christian faith is confirmed not just by the resurrection, which, being historically distant, you can certainly have skepticism about - but it is also confirmed by the miraculous work of God in the lives of believers, which you can still see today (I think I predicted correctly that you didn't even bother to Google the case for miracles).
I will repeat this as many times as I need to: you are tilting at windmills. You are arguing against your own made-up idea of God and of Christianity.
I did go have a look at the man you linked, I find it unsurprising that a Christian scholar believes in miracles. I could find a bunch of imams who believe and write about djinn. Let's see them use djinn in warfare. Let's see them act like they're truly real.
You should never even need to claim miracles. If God doesn't want something to happen, it would not be possible. Why introduce fornication to the world and then forbit it? Why have sodomy be a thing at all? Why have greed at all? There is no grand cosmic reason for men to derive sexual pleasure from buggery, nor for the human back to be weak compared to the weight of our heads and so get back pain.
By the way, you can use the Bible to argue for anything, there's so much contradictory or unclear writing in there that it can be interpreted in any direction:
This is similar to people who go around asking, “Why does God need prayer at all?” “If God is perfect and not lacking sufficiency in anything, why would He bother to even create humans; was He bored?”, etc. God has no need of anything from humans. Our relationship to prayer (or indeed our own existence) is for our benefit, not His. As a Catholic, Aquinas put forth a fairly straightforward theodicy that explains much of what you’ve alleged. God didn’t “introduce” these things, in the way you’re suggesting. “Sin” is a function of disordered desire that turns human beings away from God, and thus is a privation of the good. In its basic form. You could argue (as you’ve already pointed to), that that still doesn’t account for natural evils, but insofar as the physical world is corrupted, it demands God’s grace and faithful obedience from his adherents to the faith. It doesn’t preclude of accidental consequences.
Omnipotence disappears the moment it's called upon. Why can desire be disordered? Why can humans turn away from God? Why is the physical world corrupted at all? Why was there a tree of knowledge in the garden? Why make things and then forbid them?
Efforts to answer these questions presume the precepts of the faith and build up these huge abstract epicycles. Humans have to be able to turn away from God since that's obvious and we see it happening and so God, being omnipotent has to have allowed that to happen and it's somehow part of the plan or needed for free choice... But the other ways that our choices are limited by the structure of the universe are somehow not this grave restriction on free will. God is a lot more opposed to negentropy than sin, the former seems actually forbidden. The latter could be too but isn't. Maybe that's part of the mysterious plan we cannot understand, the catch-all defence.
The scripture, Aquinas and theodicy is written around this gulf between the grand claims of omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the meagre realities. It doesn't explain anything, Epicurean argument alone obliterates all of it. And so you say 'oh this is very basic stuff, we've dealt with the Epicurean argument' but you haven't and cannot without coming up with these question-begging excuses like disordered desire.
Whereas the blind watchmaker needs no excuses. Take away the omnibenevolence and everything falls into place.
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