“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” — 1 John 4:8
Thus to say that God does everything with a magic wand as was the belief in the middle ages cannot be correct. For this would imply that God is the active and driving force for sin, corruption, impurity and all suffering (which biblically cannot be in the direct presence of, or directly caused by God). God to my understanding is the force which first set all matter into motion, its motion or rather the virtue of the substance itself being somehow corrupted (symbolized in the fall of Adam). Thus we put God not in some material form but in the immaterial or spiritual, separate yet irrevocably linked to the material. God being wholly personal and wholly impersonal. Such a view is similar to yet fundamentally different from the philosophical view of Spinoza, a view which I am formulating more and more day by day. God does not wave a magic wand. We could easily reason that this means that we are on our own but the bible doesn’t put off such an attitude. It is the belief that man can know God personally- namely through love, acceptance of the sacrifice of Christ, and devotion. There is also the more literal aspect of prayer which serves the belief that God can have some power to alter the material world to a certain extent. Not to say he has no power to alter it entirely but that he choses to allow matter to move about its course largely undisturbed for whatever reason. But therein lies the fatal flaw for atheists. But this is not some divine wrath or evil, it is the freewill of man, the chosen path of mankind. If the nature of God truly is that of love then the biblical narrative of a ‘fallen’ or ‘corrupted’ world is irrevocable to the Christian world view, as embodied (what I believe to be symbolically) through the book of Genesis. But in my feeble reasoning of such grand notions it is important to note as I often say, bacteria are to man as man is to God. Yet even this grand symbolism doesn’t do justice to an ‘infinite’ God.
Red Liberty 