Yeah, man decided to screw God's rule, but God had failed to endow him with a sense of right and wrong beforehand. Therefore, they had no way of knowing that disobeying him was wrong. So how exactly was throwing down a curse on the Earth justified?
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Evil means a Christian God cannot exist?
- Thread starter jc104
- Start date
What does it mean that we have no free will in spiritual matters? The only sense I can make out of that is that God can't/won't foresee our physical life, but he does foresee our spiritual outcomes, which doesn't solve the problem because the test of righteousness is evaluated on a spiritual basis, and hence God is testing noone because he knows what the outcome will be and Earthly life is just a waste of time.
God cannot be omniscient and benevolent. He cannot be omnipotent and give us free will. The two properties are inconsistent.
God provides for our needs as he wills huh? well have fun worshiping a god whose will includes letting thousands of innocent children starve to death every single day
Saying that man only desires evil is bull, there are many many examples throughout history of people (both religious and nonreligious) who have done wonderful selfless acts to help society.
God knows everything, so he knew that if he created mankind in the way he did and put them under the circumstances that he put them under then they would behave exactly as they did. So how is god justified in cursing them for this? If he didn't want them to act as they did he should have created them in such a way that they would not.
Since god is all-powerful he is capable of creating only people who would use their free will to choose right at every opportunity, why didn't he?
Really, one problem seems to be with the idea of omniscience as it's usually being taken. It's incompatible with free will, and very difficult to reconcile with the existence of free will.
If one instead believes merely that God knows every thought and action of every person, not every little detail of every atom in the Universe, then combined with considering God to experience our time, God would not know the future. He would not know the outcome of any 'tests' before they happened, and would not know when he allowed any human to come into existence whether they would or would not do evil.
This may be compatible with the Bible - [i[I would be interested if anyone can cite a passage that definitively disagrees with it[/i]. Essentially, God remains effectively omniscient about anything concerning human affairs.
(It wouldn't necessarily be incompatible with God being 'omnipotent', since that omnipotence could be with respect to our Universe, and not extend to God having the power to limitlessly change his own nature).
This doesn't fully solve the problem though. The argument that God could have created us without either the capacity or the desire to do evil still holds.
If one instead believes merely that God knows every thought and action of every person, not every little detail of every atom in the Universe, then combined with considering God to experience our time, God would not know the future. He would not know the outcome of any 'tests' before they happened, and would not know when he allowed any human to come into existence whether they would or would not do evil.
This may be compatible with the Bible - [i[I would be interested if anyone can cite a passage that definitively disagrees with it[/i]. Essentially, God remains effectively omniscient about anything concerning human affairs.
(It wouldn't necessarily be incompatible with God being 'omnipotent', since that omnipotence could be with respect to our Universe, and not extend to God having the power to limitlessly change his own nature).
This doesn't fully solve the problem though. The argument that God could have created us without either the capacity or the desire to do evil still holds.
This is not saying much. The usual definition of free will is self-inconsistent and as such it is incompatible with everything.
In fact, in order to be both consistent and non-trivial, free will has to be deterministic. Else you might as well discard the concept altogether.
You are wrong.
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
As you see here, clearly Eve understood the punishment for disobeying God. Therefore she understood that it was not right to disobey God.
Of course i'm not perfect. All i can do day in and day out is look out for my self desires. I'm a selfish person, and i'm not saying that because i can, but it is true. When i set my mind on something it's "Screw everything else, i want this" no matter how much it hurts me. I can give you numerous examples if you please.
When man chose to disobey God in a perfect world that God made because he is all powerful and can make Man responsible by making the world perfect and setting Man over it, he unleashed a deadly disease on the human race (sin) which is passed down to all of us. The Result of sin was and still is spiritual death, as rightly deserved for our offense. All we can do now is hate God and love the world. Salvation is solely from God, we can not, and are not able to make amends with Him.
You have food, don't you? That was made by God, which you eat.
i'm sort of lost here, mind making this statement understandable?
In fact, make your post understandable, i'm just a dumb 16 year old. I'll then respond.
See my signature, Only man's faulty logic can come to this conclusion.
He has every right to send lightning down on them, as our representative failed to obey God, and therefore unleashed his justifiable wrath. Actually, you should read the Bible. You'll find many verses praising those with little, because they have much in the Lord.
I'm not speaking on Civil Righteousness. Man certainly can to civil deeds to benefit society. (EX Martin Luther King Jr.) Unfortunately, when it comes to our spiritual will, we can only want to do evil. I can hold the door for old ladies and in the end, i'll end up on the computer watching porn, lusting after those women and only desiring sex.
Read 1st Corinthians 1:25. God is all powerful, and made creation "Very Good". By very good, he meant perfect, without sin. He personally made man in his own image and set him in charge of this creation. He then gave the commandment. By doing this, he placed responsibility on man. It was up to Man to keep creation holy. God had made creation without Sin, and since he does no evil, he had no part in the institution thereof. Adam, being responsible for creation, being the covenant head of the human race, and full well understanding the consequence of disobeying God, as noted by Eve, decided to screw the rules and go for fruit.
He did! Adam and Eve had the opportunity to use free will to choose right at every opportunity, and Adam and Eve chose wrong at the given opportunity.
Have i not said this? There is no free will. We only desire to do evil. Are only free will is civil matters within reason of God's creation.
If you would like to worship a God like that, go ahead. That's not what the Bible says.
"We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death 19and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!" Matthew 20: 17-19.
I conclude with this
Hebrews 12 26-27
At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
God shakes the earth, and my faith remains unshaken. Thanks to his love, he sent his son to die on the cross to bare the punishment that was rightfully mine. Through Jesus' resurrection, death and sin were vanquished. With total assistance from The Holy Spirit i am able to at least desire to love God. For HIS glory, all i desire is to share the gospel. All i ask is that you open your hearts towards him who still loves you.
As usual, your conclusion does not follow from your premises. If I point a gun to your head and tell you that if you help this old lady cross the road, you'll die, does that mean doing it is wrong? Of course not. You may know that doing something will get you punished, but that doesn't mean that doing it is wrong or that you know whether it's right or wrong. So Eve either believed she would be punished for her actions, in which case she was retarded, not evil - or the serpent convinced her God was full of shit, and having no sense of right or wrong to fall back to, the blame falls squarely on the serpent for misleading a clueless child.
If you can't be smart, be bold!
Eve was supposedly tricked by the serpent into thinking that eating the apple was not a bad thing. Besides, there was supposedly no death before the fall of the garden of eden, how could she possibly understand the punishment?
A bible verse that says god is wiser than man is not a valid excuse for being completely irrational on matters of religion. Brain made an excellent point earlier about the use of "mans logic"
wait.. your telling that because thousands of years ago two people, who no one currently living ever never knew or chose, messed up (note that since god knows everything he would have known that adam and eve would fail under the circumstances he put them under, and yet still used those circumstances as a test of all humanity) god is justified in sending suffering down to all the world. The fuck??
Why the hell would a righteous god create beings that will inevitably desire evil. that makes no sense, and it makes even less sense to fault them for it and condemn them to earthly suffering and hell for it.
Again, this verse is not at all a valid reason eschew logic
The thing is though that god would have known that adam and eve were going to eat the fruit (because he is god and he knows everything). so how can he fault them with eating the fruit when he knew that they were going to, If anything this is gods fault because if he did not want sin to enter the world he should not have created people that he knew would make decisions which would cause sin to enter the world.
I think you must have misunderstood what I was saying. If god created only being that never desired evil then there would be no evil, which is clearly not the case.
I didn't mean have the opportunity to choose right I meant have the desire to choose right. why would god not only create people who desire good and righteousness so that there would be no evil. Brain expanded on this idea in one of his previous posts, but something tells me you either didn't read it or didn't understand it.
so god creates people that will invariably desire evil and then punishes them with suffering and hell for doing evil. I cannot imagine a greater injustice.
No I'm not.
Eve did not understand the punishment at all. How could she? Nothing had ever died during their stay in the garden. They had no idea what death was. If your parents told you that they would "babasnootch" you if you stole a cookie you would probably still steal a cookie because the punishment wouldn't register in your head.
Secondly, God had never warned Eve not to talk to serpents. How could he blame Eve for falling for the serpent's trick? He never gave her a warning. That would be like blaming a child for falling into a pedophile's trap when you never warned him not to take candy from strangers, and when your child had no knowledge of adult deception.
It is clearly God's fault in this case. He never warned Eve, and gave Eve no real way of knowing that disobeying him was wrong.
Also I want you to answer one of Brain's posts that was in the evolution thread. I feel that it fits very well in this thread.
A further point to Obsessed's: If the Serpent was capable of fucking everything up, why did God create it in the first place?
Why did he create the two trees of life and knowledge if he didn't want Adam and Eve to eat it? If he had to create them, why didn't he make it impossible for them to eat it, by putting it outside the Garden, or making them too high to get the fruit?
And why did he punish the rest of humanity for Adam and Eve's crime?
EDIT: To be honest, I can't understand why we're arguing with J-Man; it is clear he doesn't understand formal logic. He has contradicted himself multiple times in his last long post, simultaneously claiming that he is sinful, but that sin has been vanquished by Jesus' ressurection.
Why did he create the two trees of life and knowledge if he didn't want Adam and Eve to eat it? If he had to create them, why didn't he make it impossible for them to eat it, by putting it outside the Garden, or making them too high to get the fruit?
And why did he punish the rest of humanity for Adam and Eve's crime?
EDIT: To be honest, I can't understand why we're arguing with J-Man; it is clear he doesn't understand formal logic. He has contradicted himself multiple times in his last long post, simultaneously claiming that he is sinful, but that sin has been vanquished by Jesus' ressurection.
Predicted Jman responses:
1. As part of the test.
2. At part of the test.
3. Blah Blah Blah don't question god, that ridiculous punishment is justified, his anger and wrath are justified. Humanity failed him 6000 years ago, so humanity must be punished forever. Blah Blah Blah
Well of course he fails at logic. Logic has no use to him despite the fact that he uses it in order to understand the Bible even though you can't apply logic to the Bible...
At this point I am hoping Jman is just a troll. The sad thing is that he probably isn't.
His sense of justice is also fucked up beyond belief.
Also Jman really reminds me of this:
Interesting then, that you have not. Unless you have access to godly omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience, why have you not reached the logical conclusion that we hold?
Also, that our logic is faulty means we cannot logically conclude anything. If I observe myself sitting in a room, then, logically I am in a room. But if that is wrong, then I am not in the room, even though I see myself sitting here. Another example: you read the bible, logically you realize it contradicts with things in the real world ( evolution, genetics, geology in general, fossils, current animal species, astronomy, etc.) and conclude it to be literally un-true, and to be taken metaphorically. But if you say our logic is wrong, you may conclude the bible must be true, but then you realize that if you cannot logically conclude that you are in a room, who's to say you are even reading the real bible? Or that the bible even exists? Or that anything exists for that matter.
If our logic is incomplete, then we cannot even be sure we, or any god or gods, even exist.
But we obviously do.
And those passages relate to God's omniscience exactly how?
*Sigh* 1 Corinthians 1:25..... You don't need to know if something is wrong for it to be wrong. Until i got my stepdad, i did and believed in a crap ton of things that he pointed out were wrong (like touching my face, when i didn't know it would cause acne.) Does it mean i was innocent and i was not doing wrong? No, i was still doing wrong (well, not morally wrong, but harmful to my health wrong. How many times has it happened to you where your parents told you to do such and such and you wanted an explanation and they told you they didn't have to. In the same way, it wasn't a divine right that Adam and Eve didn't have to know what wrong was. God told Adam and Eve what he knew what was sufficient for them to know- "Do not eat of the Fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden."
Despite what you wish to think, Eve isn't innocent as i pointed out above, she fully understood that there WAS consequences to eating the fruit as she aptly told the serpent.
If you can't respond with a proper argument, than insult the debater!
Since when has it become man's divine right to know everything? The point is not that Eve understood everything that man thought she ought to know. My Point is that she was told what to do, and she clarified that she KNEW what to do and KNEW that there were consequences for disobedience when she responded to the serpent in the verse i aptly provided.
Please point me in the direction to that post... The reason i use that verse so many times is that i see you coming to these conclusions solely based on Man's faulty logic without any scriptural foundation. all you use is the definition that We have handed you, scrutinized it, and came to the conclusion through your own logic that it is impossible. Until you can find two verses in scripture that contradict the character of God, I shall not cease to fight.
Apparently it hasn't crossed your mind that suffering isn't always related to events that happen now, but can be related to events that happened in the past. As i've stated before, Adam was man's representative in the covenant between God and man. If he failed, we all failed. Take politics for example. One man in the Senate or House of Reps can bid for decisions that affect all of his constituents (probably better examples). There's a verse in Romans that shows this (Roman's Five Verse Twelve)
So he could rescue them from there fallen state all for his glory. It's not us to decide what's fair or not. As explained, God had no part in making Sin. Did he know Man would sin? Yes. Is it relevant? No. There's a way out. The story, as you seem to be making it out, does not end with Man's fall. By no means it does not. There's more to the story than Man's Fall.
All right then, i'll stoop to you're level. How can the CIA find fault in a terrorist who killed millions of people when they knew he was going to it and didn't stop him from committing the act, even though said terrorist was a pleasant as a child and did nothing wrong during his childhood? I guess the Terrorist is totally innocent and doesn't have to hold any responsibility for his actions because he wasn't stopped.
Genesis 1:31: God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
As you see here, What God created was very good. It was without sin. He did not integrate sin into the world. He made it perfectly. Man was personally made with the ability to be perfect on his own will. God can not be held responsible for sin, because he made no sin. It doesn't matter if he knew it or not, it wasn't him who did it. Take Dynamite for example. It was created with Good intention for the advancement of civilization. What happened? People got a hold of it and used it for evil purposes. So who's fault is it for the weaponization of dynamite? was it it's creator, who had no intentions for it to be bad, or those who turned dynamite into a weapon?
That's all i have for now... I have to leave for church soon.
Clearly, God didn't tell Adam & Eve what was sufficient for them to know. If he did, they wouldn't have eaten the fruit.
When parents don't give you reasoning for why you should do something, they are being bad parents and bad arguers. They are not teaching you anything or raising you when they do that, they are simply keeping you compliant to their wishes and exercising their power.
Also, I've never heard of this "touching your face causes acne" thing.
so
you believe in a god who created man with
- a desire for things that are evil
- no understanding of what "evil" is, beyond a minority of cases living in the past five thousand years who understood that doing evil things will result in eternal damnation (and old testament folk were pretty shaky even on this)
he then sends people to heaven or hell on the basis of how they behaved according to standards he won't even bother to explain (or, for many people living in the wrong time or place, make known). he refuses to give us any proof that he even exists; he just wants us to dance for him down here on earth because if he does exist, then boy are we going to be boned if we don't.
because you can't define good or evil in terms other than "god says so", you have no idea why god asks you to do the things he does. all you know is that you will be burnt for eternity if you don't do them.
i can kind of understand your position here, because faced with an all-powerful all-knowing guy in the sky who decides whether you are going to burn for time infinite, haha, what else are you going to do? the only sensible recourse is to do exactly what he says and worship that motherfucker like it's going out of fashion - no matter how dumb the dance is.
but jesus, what a horrible vision of life. good thing there's absolutely no reason to believe it's true, i guess
you believe in a god who created man with
- a desire for things that are evil
- no understanding of what "evil" is, beyond a minority of cases living in the past five thousand years who understood that doing evil things will result in eternal damnation (and old testament folk were pretty shaky even on this)
he then sends people to heaven or hell on the basis of how they behaved according to standards he won't even bother to explain (or, for many people living in the wrong time or place, make known). he refuses to give us any proof that he even exists; he just wants us to dance for him down here on earth because if he does exist, then boy are we going to be boned if we don't.
because you can't define good or evil in terms other than "god says so", you have no idea why god asks you to do the things he does. all you know is that you will be burnt for eternity if you don't do them.
i can kind of understand your position here, because faced with an all-powerful all-knowing guy in the sky who decides whether you are going to burn for time infinite, haha, what else are you going to do? the only sensible recourse is to do exactly what he says and worship that motherfucker like it's going out of fashion - no matter how dumb the dance is.
but jesus, what a horrible vision of life. good thing there's absolutely no reason to believe it's true, i guess
I did respond with a proper argument, that statement was just a response to your childish proclamation.
I did not say that man had to know everything, however, if someone does not enough knowledge to understand fully why something is wrong and the consequences of that action, it is foolish to fault them for doing it. Eve had been told not to eat the apple and that she would die if she did, but it was never explained why it was wrong to eat the apple so the serpent was able to convince her that it was OK, and even though she had been told she would be given death if she ate it she had no way of knowing what death was.
There is nothing faulty about "man's logic" besides that fact that it can be used to reach conclusions which you don't like.
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. - 1 John 4:16
They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the lord and his majesty. 2nd Thessalonians 1:9
There is no way that an all loving god would create hell and send people there for eternity. Please do not respond by saying that the everyone desrves hell or that people chose hell. It is absurd to think that any finite amount of sins that could be one in a life qualifies someone for deserving eternal suffering. You also cannot seriously say that people are seriously choosing hell just because they have different beliefs than you, everyone I know that "chooses hell" by not accepting jesus does so because they truly believe that god does not exist as you think he does, if anything this is a failure on gods part by failing to make himself known to the world.
Actually it has crossed my mind, and I have come to realize that it is completely unfair for people to suffer because of others actions.
That is a faulty comparison, people choose their representatives in the senate, whereas no man had any say in god choosing Adam and Eve as man's representatives. So basically, god chooses adam and eve as mankind's representatives knowing all the while that they will fail in the situation he puts them in, then he faults all mankind with this failure and condemns them all to suffering for it. Injustice defined.
so god creates evil desiring people and causes them to suffer all so that he can look better. What a vain douche bag.
God created mankind in such a way that sin would arise and he was capable of creating them differently so that sin would not arise. If god did not want sin to exist he would have crated mankind the other way so that sin would not arise. God knowingly did things that he knew would cause sin to arise. God created sin.
If the CIA had full knowledge of a terrorist attack that was about to occur and the power to easily stop it, I would most certainly fault them if the did not stop it.
Furthermore it is not only that god did not stop them from eating the fruit, he created them in such a way that he knew they would.
A better comparison would be if the CIA created super robot meant to spread peace in the world, but then before they launched him they became aware of a fault in his programming that would eventually cause him to become corrupted and reign terror on the world. then the CIA, instead of destroying him, or better, fixing his flaw, chose to still launch him to the world. I would say that the CIA is fully at fault for the terror caused by the robot.
Hypothetically suppose that you had a button and you knew that if you pushed the button somewhere around the world multiple hitleresque babies would be born who would grow up to start a huge nuclear world war killing billions of people, and causing more suffering than any event in history. Now think, would pushing that button be wrong? by your reasoning it would not, but do you really believe that?
The inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, did not forsee its weaponization and thus cannot be faulted for it, however, if he had known that it was going to be weaponized and would cause suffering throughout the world, I would fault him for creating it.
Hi. As my post count indicates, I'm new to the forum, but I've lurked for a little while, and I've been following this thread in particular loosely. Since J-man seems to be the only person defending the existence of the Christian God--presumably the one defined by Roman Catholicism--I'll address this to him specifically and simply:
I, Voltaire, am not sure which faith I should belong to; I suppose I'll give yours an equal chance, J-man. Assuming heaven and hell exist, I assume you think you're going to heaven, being a devout Christian and all; by all means I would like to accompany you there. I do like fluffy clouds, after all, and I've always wanted to be an angel... Anyway, one way to assure yourself a position in heaven would be to convert me to your faith, right? So ok. Please do so. Explain to me why you believe in God, what your faith is grounded by, your reasoning, etc.
Please don't flame J-man, gentlemen; give him a chance to respond in his own way. It's only fair; he seems to be outnumbered here.
I, Voltaire, am not sure which faith I should belong to; I suppose I'll give yours an equal chance, J-man. Assuming heaven and hell exist, I assume you think you're going to heaven, being a devout Christian and all; by all means I would like to accompany you there. I do like fluffy clouds, after all, and I've always wanted to be an angel... Anyway, one way to assure yourself a position in heaven would be to convert me to your faith, right? So ok. Please do so. Explain to me why you believe in God, what your faith is grounded by, your reasoning, etc.
Please don't flame J-man, gentlemen; give him a chance to respond in his own way. It's only fair; he seems to be outnumbered here.
I for one reached the conclusion several pages ago that the Christian God is conceived of in a such a way that it CANNOT be disproven. Also, the original question is resolved by believing that we live in a world that is overall the 'best' possible - though that resolution, while valid, is incomplete in that it doesn't explain HOW no better world is possible.
I suspect this is only the case because the interpretations of the definitions of God have changed iteratively over time as more arguments/evidence contradicting it arises.
Either way, we know the Bible is inconsistent with reality/God.
@Voltaire: If his argument was at all cogent and consistent, it wouldn't actually matter that J-man is outnumbered. It doesn't matter how many people or who are participating in an argument, an effective argument stands on its own basis.
sorry cantab and MrIndigo, but ummm... you kinda missed the point :( I was gonna go Socratic on him... you know, asking probing, neutral questions to elicit a response, right or wrong. no worries boys, I just want him to explain his own logic...just trust me... J-man, I await a reply... please don't make it a wall of text, btw.
I know my logical fallacies, but I'm not going to identify them until I see how well he/you understand them :) also, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I should be a believer. J-man, just tell me why.
I know my logical fallacies, but I'm not going to identify them until I see how well he/you understand them :) also, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I should be a believer. J-man, just tell me why.
Believe it or not, there was a time when people actually believed in things in the Bible. To clarify, they actually believed that everything in the bible was not only true, but it was actually falsifiable. For example, to settle whether people should believe in the Judaic god or Baal, so they determined that they'll have an experiment over which god would set a bull on fire, and Elijah's sacrifice (that is, to the Judaic god) successfully got set on fire. The issue of which god, or if there was a god, was settled: it was experimentally proven in biblical times which god you would believe in.
Today however, things are different. We live in a world where natural phenomena can be described as a series of consistent laws, and future events are accurately predicted by these experimental results, and because of that, nobody really has that intensity of belief that was held during biblical times. Religion has changed, degenerating from falsifiable observation to dogmatic following of scripture to "metaphorical" interpretations of scripture. We've divorced our Christian beliefs from real life into the most dry and abstract beliefs of symbolism. It isn't that hard to observe this transformation; looking at how one of the last strongholds of religion, explanation for the origin of life, was destroyed by Darwinian evolution already tells us how elaborate this system of symbolism has become. I almost would like to refrain from seeing how religion will change when sufficiently advanced neuroscience and AI allows for mind preservation and consciousness-uploading.
As a matter of fact, God several times appeared before his people in the bible and told how everything was completely true, and that every one of the accounts in the bible were designed to be taken as a historical evidence during the Old Testament. Now, of course, it was harder during the New Testament to get away with that because Christians were interacting with an already existing social structure (the Roman empire), so they had to make the miracles and absoluteness of religion much smaller, but the same intended tone was still there. There was a reason why the bible speaks in such absoluteness regarding the existence of God and why non-God believers were undesirables (Romans 1:18-25). It's not that different between why scientists look down at AIDS denialists; because atheists (in the context of whatever universe the Bible is in) were denying plain, observable evidence.
Of course, Christians today have stopped doing acts like the prophet Elijah preformed, simply because they can't be reproduced. Likewise, (a good portion of) Christians stopped holding a lot of the truths in the bible as completely true, such as a world flood, and the literal account of creation in six days. Likewise, things like the Big Bang have started to be viewed as metaphors for when God said "let there be light" among other events. However, after a while, why does it become necessary to have these progressively complex rationalizations after another for the world?
Let's re-frame the question for a moment. Suppose that no evidence for evolution is ever discovered and that the laws of the universe are non-consistent and are regularly violated at any given moment. Would somebody have felt a need to ask "Hey, I think all of our biblical stories fall into a realm of non-overlapping magisteria and aren't held accountable to the laws of nature"? If not, then why did this need emerge? How come this attitude towards religion and belief only started to emerge after the age of enlightenment, and not earlier?
I think that those who believe in religion should look at the actual history of religion and what the actual participants thought of their beliefs when their religion was first discovered. The fact is, the attitude of modern religion is so that their belief is not even wrong. The people who made up religion did not have this in mind; they wanted something that could be held accountable to observation, not a bunch of disingenuous "metaphors".
If believers find that believing in their religion in the same way their founders did is a ridiculous notion, then perhaps they should consider why they believe a little bit deeper, and ask themselves if it's really necessary to their lives.
Today however, things are different. We live in a world where natural phenomena can be described as a series of consistent laws, and future events are accurately predicted by these experimental results, and because of that, nobody really has that intensity of belief that was held during biblical times. Religion has changed, degenerating from falsifiable observation to dogmatic following of scripture to "metaphorical" interpretations of scripture. We've divorced our Christian beliefs from real life into the most dry and abstract beliefs of symbolism. It isn't that hard to observe this transformation; looking at how one of the last strongholds of religion, explanation for the origin of life, was destroyed by Darwinian evolution already tells us how elaborate this system of symbolism has become. I almost would like to refrain from seeing how religion will change when sufficiently advanced neuroscience and AI allows for mind preservation and consciousness-uploading.
As a matter of fact, God several times appeared before his people in the bible and told how everything was completely true, and that every one of the accounts in the bible were designed to be taken as a historical evidence during the Old Testament. Now, of course, it was harder during the New Testament to get away with that because Christians were interacting with an already existing social structure (the Roman empire), so they had to make the miracles and absoluteness of religion much smaller, but the same intended tone was still there. There was a reason why the bible speaks in such absoluteness regarding the existence of God and why non-God believers were undesirables (Romans 1:18-25). It's not that different between why scientists look down at AIDS denialists; because atheists (in the context of whatever universe the Bible is in) were denying plain, observable evidence.
Of course, Christians today have stopped doing acts like the prophet Elijah preformed, simply because they can't be reproduced. Likewise, (a good portion of) Christians stopped holding a lot of the truths in the bible as completely true, such as a world flood, and the literal account of creation in six days. Likewise, things like the Big Bang have started to be viewed as metaphors for when God said "let there be light" among other events. However, after a while, why does it become necessary to have these progressively complex rationalizations after another for the world?
Let's re-frame the question for a moment. Suppose that no evidence for evolution is ever discovered and that the laws of the universe are non-consistent and are regularly violated at any given moment. Would somebody have felt a need to ask "Hey, I think all of our biblical stories fall into a realm of non-overlapping magisteria and aren't held accountable to the laws of nature"? If not, then why did this need emerge? How come this attitude towards religion and belief only started to emerge after the age of enlightenment, and not earlier?
I think that those who believe in religion should look at the actual history of religion and what the actual participants thought of their beliefs when their religion was first discovered. The fact is, the attitude of modern religion is so that their belief is not even wrong. The people who made up religion did not have this in mind; they wanted something that could be held accountable to observation, not a bunch of disingenuous "metaphors".
If believers find that believing in their religion in the same way their founders did is a ridiculous notion, then perhaps they should consider why they believe a little bit deeper, and ask themselves if it's really necessary to their lives.
Without a doubt, religion even in pre-Christian societies were attempts at science; Apollo's arrows were the Greeks' explanation for disease because they couldn't make the observations that we can now, of microbial life and the like.
However, I'm not sure I understand what you mean with this paragraph; the historical accuracy of the Bible is debated, and at best it gives a subjective account of events 2000 years ago where the power of explanation and observation were limited by the lack of the scientific method and limited technology. What is it you're trying to say here?
Your hypothetical situation is impossible. Even if the laws of the universe were different to what they are now, they'd still be consistent because we define the laws of the universe based on observation. We would have a system of describing the universe, but it would be different to the one we have now.
That all said, we know why this attitude of religious revisionism came about; because by the time of the enlightenment, religious institutions had already become one of the wealthiest and most powerful groups in history. Indeed, the Catholic Church still has the highly-sought benefit of their own sovereignty. They are afforded taxation and other legal benefits. The benefits of running a religion are obvious. Why would the religious institutions who had held such power over the masses for centuries want to willingly give it up?
To some extent, though, the various religious schisms in history, like Luther's split to form Protestantism, were examples of this attitude. The fact that the access to science in those days were still too limited meant that all you could do was apply logic to the dogma and seek a system more consistent with observation and rationality.
EDIT: On a slightly unrelated note, I can understand why people who are raised to be religious from birth cling to their dogma. Their entire worldview since they were at their most impressionable has been dictated by these religious codes, and so consequently the notion of challenging them and subjecting them to critical analysis is, to many, literally inconceivable. However, I have never understood why/how born-again religious are so strongly attached to their dogma. Does anyone have relevant experience/suggestions?