Thinking about God as parent, Abba

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@EDC1

Does God have a natural instinct for having children? I dont know, and I would be extremely hesitant to apply such a biological and sociological understanding to God. As the Trinity, it seems He is not ‘needful’ of anything if a natural instinct is understood as such. Love already exists within His very being, so He has no ‘need’ to love outside of the Trinity. But then who really fully understands the Trinity? I would suggest noone - another mystery, which I doubt any human would have made up.

I would just say no to instinct. But I will argue that the most natural and logical motivation of a being who has everything, is everything, and needs nothing, is to give of His abundance to others. And if there are no others then He will have reason to create them.

@EDC1

I think God should be viewed as a parent, He is called Father after all. But I think the problem with saying that is the answer to the problem of evil is that He is not a human parent, very limited to what they can do.

But that difference only strengthens the argument and applicability to the problem of evil.

@EDC1

God knows and sees all. God knows the choices humans will make before they make them, but if they are choices for evil

I don’t believe that. God can know whatever He chooses to know just as God can do whatever He chooses to do. But to say God must know everything whether He wants to or not is a severe limitation which makes Him incapable of most things we can do. And I see no significant difference from pantheists like Einstein who do not believe in a personal God.

I believe in a God who CAN take risks, give privacy, make sacrifices, have faith, trust, and do all the other things which are essential for a relationship of real love with another person. In a real relationship both parties write the story of their relationship together otherwise it is only the relationship of author to his made up characters and that is a pale imitation of a real relationship.

I believe in a God who can set power and knowledge aside to become a helpless human infant. Those who insist that God must first satisfy their definitions of God as omnipotent and omniscient, saying God cannot do so many things because of this, have effectively enslaved God to their theology. Real omnipotence puts God’s own will and desire first to say God can do as He chooses.

@EDC1

He generally doesn’t seem to intervene. Now that could be argued that is reasonable of Him to do as He has given us free will, but even a human parent will step in, for example, to try to stop their child from killing themselves with drugs. Whilst I know God does do that sometimes, it seems He often does not. For me that is a mystery - God sometimes steps in powerfully, and at other times it seems He is nowhere to be seen.

Sometime the point of speculating to find answers to these question is not to claim that one knows the answer but only to see that an answer is possible. For someone deciding whether the whole idea of God is even coherent, this is an important thing to do. So I speculate that…

1. The laws of nature are important for they are the very substance of our life and freedom of will.
2. The laws of nature are probabilistic rather than absolute so they don’t disallow exceptions but only prohibit an alteration of the probability distribution.
3. Prayer is a form of taking responsibility so this allows God to do more without taking away our freedom of will.
4. So God will intervene as an exception to show his love, but he will not change the rules which our very lives depend upon.