Now imagine the balance point between having a plan for someone and them having free will, and consider the phrase “God the father”

This is part of what broke my beliefs. It gets crazier than this even.

Let’s put aside free will and just say it’s God’s will. Oh this flood happened, it must have been God’s will! I ask, to what end?

The average Christian will reply “something good will come of this, you’ll see, we just can’t see it yet”.

Okay, let’s pause there. God is infinite and all powerful, correct? So, that means, in true infinity and all power, no matter what he is doing with his Devine plan, there are infinite alternative ways he could have achieved it. That’s infinity. If there aren’t, then he’s not infinite. If he can’t do some of those infinite ways, then he is not all powerful.

If he can do any of those infinite ways, then he chose this one, the one that destroyed homes and lives, he chose it out of infinite other options that wouldn’t have destroyed people. There exist infinite other paths, he chose the destructive one.

So God is either not all powerful, and he’s just a guy trying his best, which hey, good trying and I understand, but not “God” then. Or he’s sadistic and chooses this.

That is the one that broke my faith.

The theological answer is that God doesn’t really have a step by step plan for the life of each person. Sure, there are ways he wants to bless you, and things he wants you to do that he’s put you in a position to do, but not a step by step plan. Example: Esther was in a position to have the king’s ear when he planned to kill all the Jews. Esther 4 says that the Jews will be saved with or without Esther helping, but God had chosen her and given her what she needed to save the Jews.

Also, on free will, the most important part of free will is the ability to choose to leave God. That’s what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is about. It’s not knowledge in our modern sense, a better description would be “the right to define good and evil”. So when Adam and Eve ate that fruit, they were basically saying “I don’t want God’s idea of what good and evil is, I want to do it myself”. I know that seems not so bad to our culture, but it’s basically saying “I know better than God, who knows everything”.