The JW doctrine of the "ransom sacrifice" is absurd, start to finish. JWs accept it without clearly thinking through the implications. Any person who acted as God is supposed to be acting would be termed criminally insane by almost everyone, including JWs.
The doctrine is based on the notion of "life for life", i.e., Adam lost his right to life and so Jesus volunteered to die so as to give to God an equivalent value -- another "right to life". But making this equivalence is absurd on several counts. Suppose you have two sons. One violates a house rule and must be punished. Would it make any sense for the other to volunteer to take the punishment for the wrongdoer? Of course not. The principle is nonsensical even in terms of ancient criminal laws. Suppose there are two brothers and one murders a third man. Are ancient notions of justice satisfied if the innocent man volunteers to be executed in place of the murderer? Of course not. Not even the most braindead of JWs would argue otherwise. Yet this is what they believe God demanded of Jesus -- that he die to satisfy the crimes of another man. The JW notion amounts to nothing more than "bad things must come in pairs for justice to be satisfied". In other words, a crime requires punishment, and it doesn't matter who gets punished as long as someone is.
By now the typical JW defender will be wanting to switch gears and say, "Oh! But God wasn't punishing Jesus for Adam's sin. Adam lost the right to life for his offspring and Jesus magnanimously paid it back." Well, duh! Who was the price paid to? Some unspecified entity? Not according to the JW doctrine, although the Society's complete silence on this proves that JW writers understand the problem very well. According to this, it was God who received the "ransom payment". So if God could demand a ransom payment, he could equally well not demand it. What standard (if you can call it that) aside from God's arbitrary demand dictated what was paid to who?
Then we might consider the basic JW reasoning behind "man's fall into sin and death". This too is absurd. Supposedly God created Adam with a sinless nature, perfect in body and mind, fully able to control his desires and, most of all, fully able to obey God. Indeed, the ability to fully obey God is the very definition of "sinlessless", and the inherent inability to fully obey God is the very definition of "inherited sin" in JW dogma. The JW story is that Adam, upon committing an act of sin, lost his perfection and became sinful. But that is absurd because the doctrine is saying that a mere commission of some act cause Adam's genetic makeup to change from one where he was fully able to obey God to one where he was not. This inability, so the story goes, then passed to all of Adam's offspring.
The problem with this doctrine is that it completely ignores the mechanism for the supposed genetic changes. A man manufactures sperm according to a fixed pattern set in his DNA. If Adam's DNA, upon his creation, contained a blueprint for "perfection", i.e., the ability to fully obey God, and then after his "sin" his DNA did not contain that blueprint, then something must have changed the DNA. What was the mechanism? There are only two reasonable ones: (1) God changed the DNA. (2) God built a mechanism into Adam's body that automatically changed the DNA upon Adam's knowingly committing an act of sin. But in both cases, it is God who is responsible for the changes. In other words, it is God himself who caused Adam to become unable to fully obey him. And if God himself caused such a change, the immediately obvious question is, Why? Just why would God make his first intelligent human creation unable to fully obey him? There are no good answers, and the Society knows this because they have never given any. And of course, if God arbitrarily changed Adam's DNA, then he could equally well do anything else he pleased, including not changing it, and not demanding that a third party die in order to pay back this imaginary debt.
Then we have the claim that God and Jesus did such a wonderful thing for mankind by so lovingly providing "a way out". But God himself created the need for this "way out", and so if God wanted a world full of "perfect" humans beings, he had no choice but to figure out some way to undo the things he had done. So his providing a mechanism to undo damage that he himself had created was no big thing. Furthermore, JWs make a big deal out of Jesus' sacrificing his life for mankind. But they don't seem to stop to think that it was a no-brainer for Jesus to do that. Think about it in terms of JW doctrine: Jesus is given a choice -- die as a man and become the second ruler of the universe, or disobey God and die forever. What kind of choice is that? Jesus would have to be insane to make any other than comply with God. Furthermore, Jesus only gave up a human life. He was immediately resurrected to a much more glorious life as a spirit creature. So Jesus certainly did not give up "his life" -- he only changed from one form of life to another.
We also have the JW doctrine that Satan challenged God to prove that mankind would only obey God out of selfishness. Well of course, that's a pretty hard thing to challenge when everyone knows that disobeying God will result in one's death. So it's a stupid doctrine to begin with. But let's assume that that's what God allowed, and go from there.
As the all-knowing creator of man, and as the one who put all of man's design specifications "down in writing", all God would have to do to prove anything about man's abilities would be to refer to the specifications. Case closed. To argue against that logic is to argue that God did not know what he had created. That the angelic onlookers would be able to fully understand these design specifications is proved by the 'fact' that they knew enough about human design to materialize human bodies before Noah's Flood and have them function so perfectly that they could get women pregnant. That takes care of both the "perfect" Adam, and his "imperfect" offspring. By design, Adam was fully able to obey God. By design, Adam's imperfect offspring were not. And of course, the design specs would show that at least some humans would be born with the nature to be more inclined to obey God than others. No physical demonstration lasting thousands of years would be needed.
How about the question of God's sovereignty? Did that need to be answered? Of course not. All intelligent heavenly creatures would obviously know that God is all-powerful, so that completely takes care of the sovereignty question. An all-powerful being is by definition sovereign.
But JWs will opine, "Well, the question was not about God's power but about his right to rule, his justice etc." Well, given the braindeadness of the JW ransom doctrine and related notions, as described above, it's clear that a God who would do such idiotic things as JWs believe would of course be unfit to rule anyone who has the moral sense that most humans have. All of which shows either that JWs have little idea what the Bible is saying, or that the Bible itself is completely screwy.
A few Christians have some explanations for the "ransom sacrifice" doctrine that are much less transparently nonsensical than JW notions, but these too have serious problems. I'll leave that for another thread.
AlanF
