The perfection of God

Thank you for the challenge. I'm slightly confused, as you list a few things that you say we should debate about, but you don't have any substance in your argument. However, I'll try to make a few points here, forgive me if I miss your intentions as I'm slightly unsure of what you're looking for here! "we would have to argue the Bible, God's word, which is the only thing to measure Him by since He is God" I would make two points to this. The first is that the Bible is not the only thing we have to measure God by. First, we can make an assumption about God's qualities and abilities. If we abide by the typical Christian definition of God, God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good. If we accept this definition of God, then we can make certain judgments on how God would act in given situations based upon what attributes he possesses. I.E. We can judge that if God saw an act of evil, he would choose to stop it, because he A. has the power to stop it B. has the knowledge to stop it and C. has the desire to stop it (is wholly good). So therefore, we can look events which happen upon our planet and measure God by them. Simply put, upon Earth there exists evil, and God has not stopped it. Before I go further, I will take into account here a potential response-that we can't possibly know God's will, and therefore can't measure him based on Earthly events. Perhaps the reason there is evil is because God has a plan that includes evil, but results in great benefits for humanity. However, even if there is some great benefit which will result from evil, we can still measure God based upon how the situations on Earth are handled. Presume that A. Evil exists, but B. Evil is a precursor to a great good from God, we still must consider that C. We have no rational basis to conclude B. from A. Therefore I measure God by the fact that he forces me to suffer through evil without knowledge of being able to receive a great good from said evil. Indeed, there is no visible benefit of acts of evil upon Earth, what benefit comes from a tornado that destroys the lives of thousands of people? Even if there was some benefit to this, I would contend that we can measure God by his lack of presence-his refusal to stop evil, and his refusal to tell us why he allows evil. Secondly, the Bible as we know is recorded by man. You say 'we would have to argue the fallacy of His word' which I don't agree with. I wouldn't argue that God is fallible, my contention would be that the humans who interpreted his word are fallible, in many ways. First there is the fact that the humans who wrote down the word of God could have misinterpreted what they were told, or they could have manipulated it to their advantage. Second, the Bible has gone through an extensive editing process. There are many gospels, books, and writings that are not included in the Bible because they present contradictory or alternative views of situations, or simply because the Church didn't want to include them. One must remember that the Church and anyone who was involved in editing the Bible had the potential to edit it to their benefit, and we must assume that they did when using the Bible as a resource. Therefore, using the Bible to establish the perfection of God is illegitimate. Lastly you say, "We cannot argue with humanity's idea of God, because to bring God down to are level would make Him less God. If God was any less God, then He would then be human." I would say to this that first, all we have of God is our idea of God. It isn't as if everyone can go visit God every Tuesday and come back and tell people what God looks like, what he sounds like, and what he *is* like. Our knowledge of God, based on people's testimony, the Bible, etc. all contributes to us forming an idea of God-and this is all we know of him. Also, one must consider where our idea of God comes from. If God exists, why would he allow us to hold an imperfect view of him? One would think that our idea of God would be a correct interpretation of God, why would God allow anything else? This leads us to question as to God's perfection in another manner. If God truly were perfect, why do we not all have the same idea of God? A perfect God should be able to make everyone aware of his presence, rather than different interpretations of different gods existing all over the Earth.