THE EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

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THE EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

• AN ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATE "WORLD VIEWS"

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• Love must be freely chosen. Love would not be
  love if not freely given. The greatest gift
  that God made in Creation, and the most
  formidable to His goodness, and that which he
  prizes the most, was the freedom of the will.
  Dante, The Divine Comedy

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• Freedom entails risk. In making us free a risk
  is taken by God in creation. In creating beings
  with freewill, omnipotence from the outset
  submits to the possibility of defeat. What you
  call defeat, I call miracle for to make things
  which are not Itself and thus to become capable
  of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the
  most astonishing and unimaginable of all the
  feats we attribute to the Deity. C. S, Lewis,
  The Problem of Pain.

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• A. Good and evil are not things, but the use we
  make of things.
• B. Good and evil are actions with motives, not
  substances.
• C. Good and evil have always existed as abstract
  possibilities or potential ways of acting because
  God is a being who acts.
• D. Good would be the wisest or best use one makes
  of persons or things

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• E. Evil would be the foolish or destructive use
  of persons or things.
• F. Only good existed as a concrete reality or as
  that which was actually done as long as God was
  the only one making choices.
• G. Evil changed from an abstract possibility or a
  potential way of acting to a concrete reality or
  to that which was actually done when certain
  beings freely made unwise and unloving choices.