From the Fall to the Flood: How not to fix a problem you created

The Fall is a thoroughly problematic theological mechanism at the best of times. But if you combine it with other terrible concepts and events, it looks even more incoherent.

Most understandings of God entail an OmniGod conception: God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. All-knowing or omniscience also includes divine foreknowledge—knowledge of all future events and decisions.

Let’s remind ourselves of the Fall. Here, God created Adam and Eve and did so knowing exactly what would happen in creating them. God commanded them not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and before they had that knowledge, they disobeyed God and ate from that tree. However, they cannot be held accountable for such a misdemeanor because it was a morally neutral decision given that they had no idea about morality.

There was perfection in the Garden of Eden before this point, but the decision of Adam and Eve led to humanity being fallen, a broken creation. Of course, given God’s divine foreknowledge, this was all to be expected and, indeed, planned.

The long-term goal appears to be one whereby atonement through the sacrifice of Jesus, himself incarnated into human form, pays for sinfulness that started at this particular moment. The books are balanced in the sacrifice of Jesus.

But long before we get to this later stage, we have the Flood. This morally heinous event sees the genocide of the entire human race and countless billions of animals in a mass extinction inundation. Here, we see further nonsensical divine activity whereby God appears not to have divine foreknowledge. Being somewhat surprised at the moral imperfection of the humanity that he has created, God decides to start the whole project again. This is to akin to starting to make a model at home on your trestle table and realizing that you have made a mistake, so you sweep the entire model onto the ground where it shatters, and you start again. While this may be the behavior of an angry human model-maker, this is not the sort of behavior we would expect from OmniGod.

What seems to be particularly difficult to understand here is that God neglected to fix the broken model at the very beginning, even before the actual creation stage. For example, if God had known about this all in advance through his knowledge of counterfactuals, then God could simply have designed humanity better. But, even failing that, he could have done the whole “start the project again” thing right after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden. This would have saved the genocide of masses of human beings and the senseless death of countless animals.

Instead, God knowingly makes humanity go through all of this suffering to end up—somewhat surprisingly— at a place he could have been at originally, if only he had employed a little forethought.

Nothing of the Christian narrative makes any sense.

[For more of this kind of argument, please check out my most recent book 30 Arguments Against the Existence of “God”.]