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  • Is the God of the Bible a gambler? And if so, does he have a problem?

  • Well, if he were real, he is and he does.

  • Now, one quick objection might be, well, if he has perfect foreknowledge, he can't be a gambler because he's going to know the outcome of every scenario.

  • And if you want to go with that, that's fine.

  • That produces way more problems than I'm even going to produce in this video.

  • Look at the biblical examples, many of times which don't show this God, by the way, to have omniscience, as he is constantly, at least in the Old Testament, surprised, regretful, and angered all of a sudden.

  • But regardless, the thing that got me thinking about this were my own children.

  • They're getting to the age where there are necessary risks that they need to take for their own autonomy and growth.

  • As a parent, it's important to figure out where to draw those lines.

  • Now, I don't have perfect foreknowledge, but there are some things that I can assume with certainty.

  • Let me give you a quick example and we'll dive into all of the biblical examples.

  • If we lived next to an interstate and the ball rolled out into the street, it would simply be a never.

  • You cannot get the ball. It's gone.

  • I don't know for a fact that they're going to get hit, but the level of risk is so high that it is simply not worth it.

  • Now, if we lived on a really quiet cul-de-sac where there was hardly ever any traffic, and I taught them very carefully to look left and then right, double check, and then go and get your ball.

  • That, to me, would be an appropriate amount of risk.

  • So, when I compare my own parenting, which is flawed, I'm not a perfect parent, to the perfect God of the Bible, who is supposed to be the example of the Good Father,

  • I see so many problems, to the degree of which I have to say this God is simply willing to gamble with his creation, his children's well-being, their lives, and worse, their souls.

  • And so, that's what I want to cover with you today, and we're going to go through a ton of these gambles.

  • And by the way, we're going to start out with some obvious ones.

  • Please stick with me to the end of this video.

  • I don't usually ask for that, but I know that I'm going to cover so much here that I think is so fundamentally important in understanding why this God simply doesn't work.

  • And also, right now, I'll just ask, go ahead and subscribe, like, share, comment, do all the things on this particular video.

  • But let's dive in.

  • We're going to try to go in chronological order, biblically speaking, best that we can.

  • So, pre-flood, I've got about six or seven here.

  • First is the imperfect creation gamble.

  • Maybe the biggest gamble of all.

  • God didn't have to.

  • In fact, if you believe his word, his original plan was perfection.

  • But yet, here we are in a world with disease, with flaws, with terrors.

  • You can see this video if you'd like to get more into depth with all of that.

  • But the gamble here is that his creation would still find him to be a perfect creator despite his very flawed creation.

  • That's a pretty big risk.

  • And for many of us, it has been a huge swing and a miss.

  • We could look at the free will experiment.

  • Again, people often just put God in a box.

  • Well, he had to give us free will because he didn't want robots.

  • Well, heaven already messes that idea up.

  • But let's not forget, this is an all-powerful God.

  • He can do whatever he wants, and he chose to create a system with free will.

  • This is truly probably the biggest bet that God is going to place, risking that his children will have the option to choose sin and death and hell, supposedly.

  • And kind of in between these first two bets is the Eden setup.

  • This is going to be bet number three for us, where God places a literal test for the first two beings that he creates.

  • Everything is perfect.

  • That's how God supposedly wants it.

  • And he's going to give them the opportunity to fail.

  • But he didn't just allow this one test to exist.

  • He stacked the odds by allowing whatever the serpent is supposed to be, something there to further the temptation, the ease of access to this tree, the labeling of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

  • Is knowledge so wrong?

  • Even the fact that he didn't give them the knowledge of good and evil before, thus eliminating their actual awareness of what was at stake.

  • There's a thousand other ways that God could have tested his creation without creating the fall of man.

  • It's so obviously just a mythological story.

  • But if you're going to take it as literal truth, and its implications for today that we are still broken creatures in need of a savior, you first have to answer for why would this God risk so much?

  • Keep in mind, there's been about 117 billion Homo sapiens that have existed.

  • If we believe that each of them are imbued with the soul, and each of them was born with this sinful nature damning them to hell from birth, unless they properly somehow find and do and believe just the right thing, then that first bet with the tree in the Garden of Eden becomes the most disgusting gamble of all time.

  • And if you're a young earth creationist, that's still 15 billion people, and the vast majority that will be burning in hell.

  • So we're taking a lot of time on these first three, and we're probably at four, because I think allowing the serpent adds kind of a fourth gamble there.

  • The fifth one is what all of this leads to, which is the problem of evil.

  • God allows a world of evil and suffering to exist, and still hopes that people can find their way to believing that he is a good God, which is necessary for people to worship him and follow him and put trust in him.

  • Many people, myself included, are more than willing to accept that there could be a God out there.

  • And many people, like myself, immediately remove this God from the possibility of that, because he is either not the good God he says he is, thus refuting his claims in the Bible and making himself falsifiable, or he's straight up evil and not worthy of my worship, or not trustworthy of my devotion.

  • So, now we've covered the problem of original sin, free will, and the problem of suffering, all bets that have not gone well for God and make no sense for a good father.

  • But what's his next string of bets?

  • Maybe he moves on to a different table game, and this one is going to be the flood wager.

  • Things got away from him.

  • He regretted the creation that he made, even though it was made exactly how he intended it to be, with his perfect foreknowledge, if we're going to again attribute these things to God.

  • That's problematic in and of itself, but the bet is that the world would be better, that humanity 2.0 would somehow get it right.

  • And he lost that bet immediately, in the sense that Noah sinned almost as soon as you could sin, as well as his sons.

  • And from there, it simply did not get any better.

  • So, all that genocide, all that murder, all that suffering, all those animals, all those babies, all those women, all those people who were collectively not horrible and evil, paid an awfully hefty price for God's 2.0 gamble that failed as absolutely soon as it could.

  • This moves us straight into our next gamble, which is the tower of Babel risk.

  • God, who claims himself to be not the author of confusion, purposely confuses people, creating new languages and scattering them around the earth.

  • And what is the bet here?

  • The bet is that these people will still be able to find him, even though he's not going to appear to most of the places on earth for a very, very long time, if at all.

  • And that he's only going to give his holy scriptures in three of the many thousands of languages, relying on humans to be able to translate them and spread them around this large globe.

  • Keep in mind, he didn't provide for anything that would be necessary to overcome these odds.

  • We didn't get the printing press for millennia, nor did we cross the oceans.

  • There was simply no hope for the vast majority of all people who have ever lived because of this decision, this bet from God.

  • I hope that you're seeing failure after failure after failure.

  • And the best thing you can do, especially if you're a parent, is just compare yourself.

  • Really, compare yourself with God.

  • I don't care how bad of a parent you think you are.

  • I can almost guarantee you, you are miles above this God.

  • If you had just two children, and they were going to be 100% dependent off of you for their survival and their eternal fate, would you raise them each with their own language so that they could not communicate or work together?

  • And then would you provide them the instructions for how to live life and find you in a different language than those two with simply no way to access it?

  • Because that's what God did for billions of people on this planet.

  • So again, try to put yourself in these situations and see if you would ever do anything that resembles any of these gambles at all.

  • Here's an interesting one I almost didn't include because of the obvious objection, but the Abraham-Isaac bet.

  • God risking that Abraham would kill his own son if allowed to go so far, or worse, what if Abraham wasn't willing?

  • God would have to break this covenant.

  • It would completely erase all of the plans this God supposedly has.

  • And if you have a little objection going off in your head, you're 100% right.

  • And I want to take a second to explain this.

  • The only way that this actually works is for God to both know that Abraham would make the right choice, which is being willing to murder your own child, again, good father material, and that God would be able to stop him in time.

  • Only under those two conditions do we literally get everything else that we have in the Bible and in history, supposedly.

  • And that requires God to be doing two things, to be knowing everything that will happen and to be willing to interfere.

  • So again, if you don't like my earlier gambles about the problem of suffering or free will, that's fine.

  • But then you have to admit that people don't really have free will because God is only putting people in situations where he knows the outcome and he is interfering physically in the world to create those outcomes.

  • This is a lose-lose for apologetics.

  • Here's a big one.

  • What about the Sodom and Gomorrah gamble?

  • God allows Abraham to negotiate with him, literally gambling with the lives of the people based off Abraham's ability to wear God down.

  • And ultimately, this failed anyways because God still destroys the cities.

  • But somewhere in there is a scenario for that bet where some people are saved, but others aren't.

  • Or where potentially, if Abraham had been able to negotiate himself all the way down to just Lot to spare the cities,

  • God wouldn't have destroyed anyone at all.

  • While we're on the same story, we could talk about the gamble of Lot's wife.

  • What could possibly be the point here?

  • And I actually do understand from kind of a meta-truth, moral teaching standpoint, you could pull something out of this.

  • But again, one must believe that this is literal, that these were actual people.

  • Because Lot's wife is dead, because she loses the gamble, by the way, he's then in a position where his daughters rape him.

  • But that's 100% required to get us to Jesus, by the way, from a genealogy standpoint.

  • So this can't just be some meta-truth about turning fully from destruction and not looking back or whatever you want to try to extrapolate from this.

  • And by the way, I'm willing to be wrong on that.

  • If someone can show me something different,

  • I will correct myself.

  • But my understanding is that Lot's eldest daughter, with Lot, has a son named Moab, the ancestor of the Moabites, where we get Ruth.

  • And Ruth and Boaz are the great-grandparents of King David.

  • And we know through King David, we get the lineage of Jesus.

  • So if I'm understanding everything correctly,

  • Jesus is 100% a descendant from this incestual rape.

  • Again, bringing forth the literal nature of these stories instead of some metaphorical moral truth.

  • But let's keep going.

  • You know what else is a gamble?

  • Having favorites.

  • If I choose between my two children to bless one and curse the other, love one and hate the other, provide for one but not the other,

  • I risk, especially with the one I'm hating, them not loving me back, them not following me.

  • I'm also risking their children and future generations saying, hey, what's up with that?

  • This can't be a good father, a good grandfather.

  • And yet time after time with these early patriarch families, we see exactly just that from God.

  • Whether it's Cain and Abel.

  • In this case, we have God favoring Abel's offering over Cain's, which leads, by the way, to our first murder.

  • We have Isaac favored over Ishmael, which the implications of that deserve their own video.

  • It's multifaceted, but that's definitely a major contention for the differences and the infighting between Islam and Judaism, or now Christianity.

  • Also Jacob and Esau.

  • God favored Jacob over Esau even before they were born.

  • God set up Esau and his descendants, Edom, the Edomites, to be enemies, essentially, forever.

  • And Joseph and his brothers.

  • Again, all of those deserve a lot more time and attention than we're going to be able to give them here.

  • But you can see the gamble of playing favorites does not pay off.

  • Unless, and by the way, this is maybe one thing that is worth pointing out.

  • Unless God isn't a good father.

  • Unless his goal isn't to have everyone saved.

  • Unless he doesn't care about all the collateral damage along the way.

  • And this is really the two camps that one has to fall into.

  • You either actually believe what God and Jesus say about themselves.

  • Both of them, in different parts of the Bible, say they desire that none should be lost.

  • Well, then all these gambles so far directly fly in the face of that.

  • Or you're forced through the actions of God that actually happen despite his words to say, oh, he's not a good father.

  • He doesn't care to save everyone.

  • He doesn't love everyone.