Alright, kjw53, let's play this game of god's philosophy. First, we'll just assume for the sake of argument that Eden is literal, the whole thing with the snake and apple, and ect was literal. We'll take your belief at face value and get all socratic on them, we'll dissect them and follow them to their conclusions.
So you have god, he has given "free will" to humans to choose whether or not they will obey him. For reasons that aren't important for the moment they choose not to. God says "ok, that's fine. I will let you do that for a time to show you how much you do need me. First of all this conflict was inevitable. If man was meant to live forever and he had two choices, infinite time+finite choices=every choice will be made. Given long enough somebody was going to say "Hey, what if I don't want to obey you?". That is simple logic that anyone with any background in math will tell you, so surely god was aware that at some point this question was going to come up. So he had to have had a plan before he even made mankind, lest he be a pretty dim god without even a collegiate level of understanding probability and statistics. So you have a god knowing for a fact that he would be disobeyed, what is his plan? Repeatedly tell everyone how awesome he is and murder everyone that disagrees. Infinite time, wisdom and justice and this is the genius plan that is hatched?
Now let's think about that for a second. It's inevitable that people will decide not to obey him, or disagree with him. Given that a statistical portion of the population will do so for certain, why is his method of dealing with this to kill them all? If you are a loving god that knows each individual in the womb before they are even born, numbering the hairs on the heads of every person, why is murderous intent the default punishment for an action that is certain to happen based on the design you gave them? No better more just or fair plan could be hatched?
How about this, just as a hypothetical that would work without the gross injustice of punishing people for doing that you deigned them to do. How about create a second planet far far away. Not as nice as his "perfect earth" but habitable. Earth was his crown jewel, and if you want to worship at his feet you can live on his crown jewel with the benefits of everlasting life and freedom from sin, but you have to obey him absolutely, you cannot in anyway question his ways, disagree or disobey. But if you want freedom to know good and bad, as inevitably some will, you can live somewhere else away from god's people never to influence them or interact with them in anyway. You can have whatever world of war, famine and death and whatever your sin brings, it's your choice. Now this would be a far more just answer because he knows that a majority of people will want to live free rather than under him, and to kill them for a choice he designed them to be able to make is absurdist. It's like telling an early american slave that they aren't really slaves because they have the freedom to go where ever they want but you will shoot them in the head if they don't want to go to the cotton field and pick you some damn cotton.
Now I know your thought ending platitude of a response to all of this "You can't question god's ways, because he is perfect and god and you are just a lowly human!" But let's think about that for a second. That can be used to justify anything anyone who claims supernaturalhood does. We can't say that the muslim version of god (Allah) is wrong either. Anything he tells his people to do, you cannot question because he is allah and you are but a pitiful human. Same goes for Vishnu, zeuss and yes, even Satan. It justifies anything any god does, because you can't call it into question. Really it is a plead of ignorance, which is just a means of excusing yourself from having to think about anything. Which sounds perfectly sane and great to you, but think about if somebody else does it. Say you want to reason at the door with a bible study who is muslim, and you can't because anything you say is from the pitiful perspective of a speck of dust, and your feeble imperfect attempts at interpreting god's word and the muslim knows that Allah is perfect and it isn't for you to question his ways. It's an inpenatrable way of thinking, or rather not thinking.
But let's think about that from God's perspective. You want to convince people that you are the icon of love, justice, wisdom, and power and your method of doing that is to act in a completely obtuse way so that any human being willing to think about his actions and draw parallels to their own experiences will simply say "WTF?" and spend 2000 years of theology and philosophy trying to explain why it's ok for him to murder children by the tens of thousands who didn't even know they were doing anything wrong (think egypt), or commit mass genocide and murder his own people for what appear to be completely bizarre and capricious reasons. Wouldn't it make more sense to act in such a way that everyone on the planet paying attention can say "Wow, that is clearly a beacon of justice and wisdom. I am in awe of how wise his decisions are!" Or would you make a law that a rape victim has to marry her rapist as long as he can afford to pay a bride price (Deuteronomy 22:28-39), and then let humans scratch their heads for thousands of years before shrugging their shoulders and saying "I guess so? I mean he's god." No you would expect that a god of wisdom that understands his creation will make sure that he at least doesn't act in a self defeating way, that is to say act in a way that makes it appear that he is the opposite of what he describes himself to be.
But now let's jump ahead to the new system. He has now murdered billions of people for an action he knew they would take, not because he peeked into the future, but because it's simple logic, and not only has he killed everyone that disagreed with him, pretty much the entire planet disagreed with him, and mind you he didn't hold an open court with humanity so that we could debate the merits of infanticide and some of the murkier aspects of mass murder of your own creation, but rather simply said "today is the day that I kill everyone that didn't care much for those magazines that I did not personally have a hand in, but gave tacit approval of by not really saying or doing anything, but still if you read between the lines it was pretty clear (to some anyway) that I was ok with that particular brand of magazine that was being passed out door to door by a non descript group", so yeah he just up and kills everyone without so much as a chance for them to question the merits of being killed, or if that's the right thing to do, and satan was released after a thousand years to give more fodder to god for decisions he knew that a statistical portion would make, and now the survivors of his second world wide murder spree are having picnics in a petting zoo for all eternity with the unpleasant memories of the previous system gone, erased by god....with free will to obey god or not. But what did we say in the beginning about eternity+binary choices? That's right, sooner or later somebody is going to choose option "B", and what happens next? God kills them for not choosing option "A". So now you are on a plantation with a dictator saying "You have free will, but if you don't want to have a picnic in the petting zoo, I will shoot you in the head." Which means it is now literally impossible to for someone to choose "B", because choice "B" immediately results in termination, lack of existence. A person cannot be said to have chosen "B" because that person does not exist. Which means you can only obey, you can only choose option "A" there is no longer a binary choice, there is no choice.
His big solution in the end was just to elimate free will. Create happy automatons who don't even remember a time when there was free will.
Yeah, great theology. Air tight, makes perfect sense. Good luck with that.
