As simple as possible to summarize the best way you can, first, please. Feel free to expand after, or just say whatever you want lol. Honest question.
As simple as possible to summarize the best way you can, first, please. Feel free to expand after, or just say whatever you want lol. Honest question.
You’re right to point out that God knew what would happen. In Orthodox theology, this is acknowledged—but it’s essential to distinguish foreknowledge from predetermination. God’s knows the outcome of free choices but doesn’t coerce them. His foreknowledge does not violate our freedom.
More importantly, God is not only omnipotent but all-good. And since God is the source of all goodness, the possibility of choosing anything other than God is the possibility of choosing evil—which is, by definition, a lack or distortion of the good. If we are to love God freely, we must be free to reject Him.
Therefore yes, God could have created a world where Adam and Eve never fell—but that would not be a world of genuinely free persons. It would be a world of perfectly programmed beings, and Orthodoxy insists that freedom is essential to personhood. Without it, love isn’t possible.
Also, it’s important to clarify: Orthodoxy does not teach that God “damned” humanity for the Fall. The consequence of sin is death and corruption, not divine vengeance. God’s response was not punishment but a rescue mission—the Incarnation. The “Tree of Life” returns in the Cross.
From our human perspective, it may seem this way. But God did not create evil or suffering—He permitted it as the cost of freedom, because only through freedom can there be love, growth, and communion. What matters is not just that suffering exists, but how God responds to it.
And His response is not indifference, but sacrificial love. In Christ, God enters our suffering, takes it upon Himself, and opens a path to life. The Cross is not God watching suffering from a distance—it’s God partaking and being the example for all of man for our sake.
While it may not mean much to you I would be remiss not to defend Orthodoxy here. Faith isn’t blind belief or wishful thinking; it’s trust grounded in revelation, history, and experience. The resurrection of Christ, the lives of the saints, the enduring wisdom of the Church—these are not “proofs” in a modern empirical sense, but they are reasons for belief.
Furthermore I don’t know what your standards for evidence are but I encourage you to look at arguments like the Transcendental Argument for God. It argues that universals like logic, reason, and math are only justified if God exists. (e.g. X (God) is necessary for Y (logic, math etc). Y therefore X.)
If you deny God’s existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you’re assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify. Furthermore without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally?
Believing in God is foundation to a worldview that relies on universals the alternative is arbitrarily granting yourself self-evident axioms.
I think you misunderstand. He could create a world where they freely choose to not fall. It’s not predetermination, like you say. It’s premeditation. He must have wanted them to fall, because that’s what he knew would happen and he set it up so they would choose that. If I set up a tripline that activated a trap then tell someone to go where it’ll be tripped, that’s something I did, even if they chose to follow it.
He’s all powerful, so he must necessarily be able to create a world with free will and free choices, but also one such that we always genuinely choose the right thing. It doesn’t require us to be programmed beings. Rather it requires foreknowledge, planning, and capability of the designer, and a desire for this to be the case. It doesn’t matter if we can’t imagine that world. He’s omnipotent. He can create it, but chose not to.
Again, he designed it knowing the results, with the ability to create absolutely anything, even things we can’t imagine. The problem with the human perspective is we assume this is the way things must be, but with omnipotence it allows literally anything to be possible, including total freedom, but also where every choice made is good. That is necessarily true, if he is omnipotent.
He can create a world where every person gets into heaven, by choice, even if they have the ability to make choices where they wouldn’t, since he’s omniscient. It’s like setting up domino’s. You don’t program how they fall. You just set things up so they fall as planned, but you’re omniscient and omnipotent, so you never make a mistake. All dominos fall perfectly into place exactly as you want, because you know the outcome of everything you place.
They’re proofs that every religions claims equally, yet (for most) only one can be correct. That’s the big issue.
First, I don’t deny any gods existence. We both lack the brief on most gods. I just don’t believe in one more than you. I don’t claim to have knowledge on any of their existences, except insofar as them not being internally consistent. I’m an agnostic (not knowing) atheist (lack of belief). I don’t actively believe anything about any gods.
The reliability of logic and mathematics are as reliable as the axioms they are founded on. No further and no less. There isn’t a thing universal about them. They are not a part of reality that we wandered across. They’re made up by humans to be useful tools. This seems obvious because both have come into existence in different forms in different places and times. If they were universal they would always appear in the same form.