I don’t claim to be able to understand everything. But you then go on to answer my observations with your own. Why is a loving God who permits his creation to be abused by evil forces (Satan and his minions) and them punish that creation if they come up short consistent?
That’s not what He does. At all. I assume by punishment, you are referring to Hell. Those who go to Hell are not there simply because they “came up short,” because when God graded their lives they only got a 59.8 and at least a 60 was required to pass.
Those who go to Hell do so because they absolutely and completely reject goodness itself, by their own choice. Now, whether a specific action that is objectively contrary to goodness constitutes such a rejection depends also on whether it was done knowingly and freely, as I’m sure you’ve heard. If the person did not know that it was opposed to good, or if he was forced into it, then he cannot have been said to have rejected good.
As far as allowing Satan et al to abuse us - well, Satan is a person too, who also has free will. We can choose to do evil. But God does make sure none of us take more than we can bear. And again, much like how we can understand that evil can be brought from good even if we don’t see how it is done in a particular case, how God decides this may be something that we can’t always see (though perhaps we can sometimes), but we can understand that it is so.
And this is not inconsistent because it doesn’t imply two contradictory things. If you think that it does, you need to find two things that are contradictory that it implies. God loves us and God does not prevent all of our suffering are not contradictory statements (of course, you may disagree, but you would have to show it to be so in order to have demonstrated a contradiction).
The available evidence thus far seems to show us as the final (for now) product of a very long process.
Why would humanity cease to exist without the intervention of a god figure?
When I say we aren’t a final product, I mean something more like we aren’t autonomous being that was made and then exists itself. - that we aren’t self sufficient, that we do not now exist by our own power. Existence is not part of our nature, rather it must be granted to us by God.
And this isn’t a one time thing - it isn’t that we are given existence, then continue to exist by our own power, because if it were then it would be possible for things to exist without God, which would make God fail to be the absolute first principle. (The answer to why do we continue to exist after we we are made would not eventually reduce to “because God” as all questions must. (And yes even the question “why evil” reduces to God, but via our free choice (which exists because God gave it to us) and so, together with the definition in title of this thread, moral responsibility does not go the way back.))EDIT: It occurs to me that this argument may be to simplified, but I’ll look at it again and try to do better when it’s not 3:30am.
I have a tendency to think that the way we get our existence from God is much more like the way a character in a dream gets his existence from the dreamer than the way that a vase, say, gets its existence from a potter. This way of thinking has the downside of sounding almost like our existence isn’t real, which is false, but it does highlight that we exist in a completely different way than God does. (Hence all the “God doesn’t exist, He is existence, as a verb” language.)
As an afterthought - Of course, one could imagine a sort of deity as deists imagine God to be, but because of the contradictions with the first principle thing, such a deity would fail to be God by our definition and would probably be considered more like a sort of powerful angel. But of course, even if we were directly created by a being which was not the first cause/principle, that would just mean that there was some other first principle to whom our creator owed its existence. And that first principle would have the attributes of God, and so we could not exist without its constant will that we do. We would, in fact, be like the dwarves in middle earth, if you have read the similarion.
