Yes life is amazing, and it can be hard to wrap one’s mind around how complex it all is. However, many things which we now understand as being part of nature were originally attributed to God because the people couldn’t understand how nature could cause them. Things like lightning, the weather, and illness are now greatly understood as not being caused by a god/devil. While we still struggle with understanding life and the universe, if you attribute them to God, then you simply hoist the issue to “where did God come from”? If its hard to wrap your mind around humans being here because of nature, then an infinitely more complex God just “being here” seems even more difficult to understand.
From the time of our birth there are a “bazillion” things that we take for granted everyday without “understanding” them. As an infant our ability to understand is basically “nil” and so we take everything for granted including our food, the air, warmth, even life itself, because we are intellectually incapable of understanding things.
As we grow our ability to understand begins to develop slowly and only in small steps are we able grasp the world around us. Only in small steps are we even able to learn to control our own bodies. Only in small steps are we able to learn of the wonders and dangers of our world. Of course walking along with us in this long journey of small steps are our parents.
Our parents, or some other adult(s) guide us, sometimes with soft words and encouragement, sometimes with sharp words and punishment. But at all times with Love and a desire to see us grow up happy and healthy.
Our parents also teach us in accordance with our ability to understand. When we are three years old they might tell us that the thunder is, “clouds bumping together”, or that the lightening is, “Angels playing with the lightswitches”. A parent might actually try to explain lightening and thunder to a three year old, but will the child actually be able to grasp the se mysteries the parent is trying to convey?
Later the explanations and the understandings for things will come closer to the realities of the objects, but only as we develop the ability to grasp things.
All of the above is merely to say that, simply because we do not, and indeed cannot, understand God does not mean that God does not, or cannot exist. Even as adults there are things that we cannot understand, try as we might.
Yes, God ordering the killing (and suffering) of children, among others, just doesn’t make sense from a morally superior being who has the ability to kill them all painlessly with a thought, or better yet intervene beforehand to prevent things from getting out of hand in the first place (since the Catholic God is supposed to be omnimax). The only way I’ve ever been able to make some semblance of sense of the OT was to attribute most of it to allegory.
The Bible as a whole is really a progression of morality from the purely (or nearly) carnal to the purely spiritual. You will find that as the OT progesses toward the NT God places ever greater controls on man’s conduct and on his morality. Just as a parent will teach a child.
Also, it is to be remembered that God, has a different view of things than we humans do. God works in terms of the infinite and not in the finite terms we humans use. So the killing and the suffering that we, from our view, see as inexplicable, God may well see as perfectly necessary. For instance, I don’t think that we can know the fate of those God ordered killed in the OT. Perhaps any person killed “on God’s order” is automatically forgiven any sin and was welcomed into heaven when Jesus redeemed the rightious.
There are many things we do not know, can not know, so we leave it up to God.
Perhaps this will help you place some of these things in context.
Peace
James
