What is the evidence that God knows what he’s doing? She created a Garden of Eden that collapsed after just one sin, thus ruining the entire cosmos. What kind of planning and love is that? He felt that he had to flood the Earth and kill everything on it to start over, but didn’t change the DNA of the human species that had been “infected” and “depraved” by sin.  So the same pattern of rebellion against God was virtually guaranteed to happen again, even though God would continue to blame humans 100% for their actions regardless of the significant moral, intellectual and emotional weaknesses they received at birth.  What could describe a more embarrassing track record of mismanagement and waste? She placed us on planet Earth, which is largely inhospitable to human life. Only through over 100,000 years of perseverance toward technological, social and ethical development has our species learned how to survive consistently. Before the 20th century, the expected life span for all human history was 35-40 years or even lower. During that lifetime, people suffered from disease, famine, attacks by predatory creatures, ignorance, violence, fear, natural disasters, dread, physical birth defects, mental illness, etc., often limited like wild animals in the midst of a labyrinth of dangers and terrifying surprises, with no guarantee of anything beneficent or providential.

Traditional monotheism certainly wasn’t obvious to 99% of world cultures throughout history, as only the three Abrahamic faiths and Zoroastrians believed that way.  Comfort, guidance and protection deriving from a perfectly good, wise and powerful God eluded humans in their billions by no fault of their own – the genetic hardwiring of their brains didn’t lead them inevitably to see the world as being rooted in something other than pantheism, animism, polytheism, atheism, deism or panentheism.  God made a cosmos that is built on the necessity of continual cycles in destruction-creation and life-death.  Without the death of stars, there would be no galaxies or life in the universe.  Without biological death and life processes integrated together, the Earth’s ecosystem would not function.  The orthodox Christian assertion of a “safe” environment for human (or other) life in the Garden of Eden is completely implausible given these realities.  God made a dangerous universe from the beginning.  There’s no evidence of a biblical Fall away from an earlier utopian origin.  The Bible says that in the future God will create a New Heavens and New Earth that is systematically designed to be without sin, death and severe pain and yet many people will be there who didn’t choose Christ – babies, the mentally handicapped and perhaps the unevangelized as well.  So, why would God make our current universe so harsh and baffling?  And why hide or make unintelligible the various essential revelations of God from most people for most of history?

Given what I’ve said above, why would it be rational to trust that God is looking out for our welfare, here or in the afterlife?  I can see goodness and wonder in nature, yet there is also a vast range in types of suffering, waste and tragedy awaiting living things on this planet.  This is not because of sin.  The universe has been like this since shortly after its existence was inaugurated 13.7 billion years ago.  A conservative young earth creationist who wants to maintain that the cosmos began 6,000-10,000 years ago is stuck in the dilemma of explaining how the biology, physics, geology, chemistry, etc. of such a recent start could match with with the radically contrasting record found in the field of natural history and all other areas of science which have been studied and verified for centuries, many times by researchers with Christian beliefs.