Irenist,

I very much appreciate your honesty and introspection. I think we've gone about as far as we can go, however. You agree with me that the evidence, that the world we observe, doesn't support the existence of Aquinas' God, and that any natural reading of the Exodus story doesn't support Trent's conception of God's nature. But you are willing to overlook that evidence based on what you consider the strength of Aquinas' logical arguments. It should be clear by this point that I consider this the opposite of how one should think, and that all of the logical "proofs" that make you believe in a triple omni God should be discarded as flawed in the face of an inconsistent reality, just as Aristotle's theories of gravity went out the window the moment someone bothered to time how long it took for things to fall. You don't, and I'm not sure how we bridge that divide.

BTW: I think the history of Christianity bears out the abstract logic I've presented: Jewish monotheism made the problem of evil morally and intellectually urgent, and Christ is the answer to the problem. But in Israel's neighbors--pagan Rome and Zoroastrian Parthia--the problem wasn't posed as sharply.

You would take from this story a lesson on divine omnipotence, while choosing not to focus on what it has to say about God's moral nature.

Okay. I think I see what you’re getting at. My prior theist commitment to God as all-good prevents me, as a Christian, from allowing that the comment you see in
the story on God’s moral nature could be the theologically correct reading. To the extent that the story naturally elicits that reading, I’m disregarding an element of it. Conceded.

As to theodicy: I don't think it really matters if we speak generally or specifically because I think our various reactions to this particular story are pretty much the same as how Christians and non-Christians see the problem of evil. There only is a problem of evil if one starts with the axioms that God is all
good/knowing/powerful, and then insists that the evidence of the world must be interpreted so as to fit these rules. Without starting with these beliefs,
there is no "problem" in a metaphysical sense. The world simply has evils due to its physical nature, how life evolved, and the choices people make, and if we're smart we'll get to work on making things better.

Agreed. I’d quibble that God’s all-goodness, omniscience, and omnipotence are logical deductions made by thinkers like Aquinas, rather than axioms. But on the basic point, I concur 100%. Without some prior
warrant for theism (e.g., Aquinas’ metaphysical arguments), evils are just stuff that happens, not a puzzle of any kind.

As I've been saying throughout, before trying to explain away the evidence, the more sensible thing to do is to look at all the evidence first, and see if one
axioms are actually supported. The reason evil is such a "problem" is that the state of the world does not suggest the existence of a triple omni God.

I concede this as well: the *state* of the world indeed does not suggest a triple omni God. However, that there *is* a world, at all, does suggest, to one who accepts Aquinas’ arguments, both that there is a God, and, after further deductions, that He has the traditional omni- predicates. If Aquinas or someone like him does demonstrate that God exists and that He has the omni- predicates, then and only then does the Problem of Evil become important, due to the glaring
apparent inconsistency between the omni- predicates and all the world’s countless sufferers from devoured prey to despairing prisoners. But sure, if you don’t
find Aquinas-type metaphysical arguments for theism persuasive, then “suffering-> !(triple omni God)” is certainly the most obvious conclusion.

Just as Trent must invent a new meaning for this passage, just as a previous author had to try to invent a new meaning for that song about the joy of killing one's enemies' babies, Christians have no choice but to try to invent some narrative justifying the evil we see in this world.

Carl Jung once penned an essay titled “An Answer to Job” about the Incarnation. I don’t remember much beyond the title so I neither know nor especially care how closely this tracks Jung, but the gist as I remember it was that Christ Incarnate, Suffering, and Resurrected is God’s answer to Job’s complaint about bad things happening to good people (like Job). The problem of evil, IOW, in the person of Job, is the question. Christianity is the answer to that pre-existing question, not an axiom that calls forth a narrative to justify itself.

For an atheist or a polytheist, the Problem of Evil need not arise: suffering is the fault of either brute nature or of malicious gods. But for the classical monotheist
believer in a triple omni God (like the Jews of Job's author's day, e.g.), the Problem of Evil is prior to Christianity.

So while a figure like, e.g., the Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga takes his Christianity to be a “properly basic” (i.e., axiomatic) belief, the classical theist tradition does not. It’s not that Christianity is axiomatic and then I invent narratives to justify the evil in the world. It’s that the Christian narrative solves the Problem of Evil that metaphysically derived theism sets for me before I even arrive at Christianity. The solutions aren’t tailored to a pre-existing Christianity; instead, I discover Christian theodicy as a solution
to a pre-existing theistic Problem of Evil.

“Free will" is a common one, and I suspect you know it doesn't really do the job. Some other answers involve "mystery" or our lack of a higher understanding of good or evil, or some sort of greater reward we obtain later through suffering now, and so on, and so on.

I think “free will” is the least bad family of theodicies. But were I not convinced of theism logically prior to confronting the Problem of Evil, I agree that I doubt I’d
find any of the theodicies very attractive when "!God" would be a simpler answer.

As with Trent's bible explanation, from where I sit it's silly to argue about whether these explanations are "plausible" once we're this far down the highway, once we've decided to ignore the previous off ramps associated with questioning these axioms.

Agreed! The rubber really hits the road when we weigh the arguments for theism. If theism is
granted, then Christianity is, IMHO, the most compelling solution to theism’s Problem of Evil; having granted that, the theodicy of specific instances of
apparent evil (like the non-perspicuity of the Bible) is just a matter of application of general principle.
However, if the deductive chain leading to
theism seems faulty to you (or worse, if you have somehow acquired the misimpression that Catholic theism is merely axiomatic), then arguing about specific Bible stories is indeed silly. The real
dispute between us is upstream of the Bible, at the questions of whether there is a God, and whether this God has the traditional omni- predicates. If I and
my coreligionists can’t convince you of *that,* then IMHO we haven’t the slightest hope of convincing you that Christian theodicy, or Catholic Biblical hermeneutics, or anything else logically downstream of “mere theism” is at all compelling.

That's fine. I was just pointing out that your principle was flawed, in the hopes that you will be able to avoid relying on it in the future.

And if you refuse to read the Bible in the narrative premise it sets out
then it's inevitable that you'll notice "inconsistencies" or
"inaccuracies".

I agree with Ben Posin's response.

Here is something from the old (online) Catholic Encyclopedia that makes sense to me:

The Bible, especially the Old Testament, abounds in anthropomorphic expressions. Almost all the activities of organic life are ascribed to the Almighty. He speaks, breathes, sees, hears; He walks in the garden; He sits in the heavens, and the earth is His footstool. It must, however, be noticed that in the Bible locutions of this kind ascribe human characteristics to God only in a vague, indefinite way. He is never positively declared to have a body or a nature the same as man's; and human defects and vices are never even figuratively attributed to Him. The metaphorical, symbolical character of this language is usually obvious. The all-seeing Eye signifies God's omniscience; the everlasting Arms His omnipotence; His Sword the chastisement of sinners; when He is said to have repented of having made man, we have an extremely forcible expression conveying His abhorrence of sin. The justification of this language is found in the fact that truth can be conveyed to men only through the medium of human ideas and thoughts, and is to be expressed only in language suited to their comprehension. The limitations of our conceptual capacity oblige us to represent God to ourselves in ideas that have been originally drawn from our knowledge of self and the objective world. The Scriptures themselves amply warn us against the mistake of interpreting their figurative language in too literal a sense. They teach that God is spiritual, omniscient, invisible, omnipresent, ineffable. Insistence upon the literal interpretation of the metaphorical led to the error of the Anthropomorphites.

Here's the problem I find with the OP and most of its defenders. They are not looking at God in this story as "spiritual, omniscient, invisible, omnipresent, ineffable" (and outside of time). They are taking most of the story literally and then saying, "When God said he would harden Pharaoh's heart, he didn't mean he would do it actively. He meant he would do it passively, by withholding grace—passively, like leaving a loaf of bread sitting out so it gets stale instead of wrapping it up so it stays fresh. But there's nothing in the story that even hints at that.

Also, as several commenters have implied, accomplishing something passively and accomplishing it actively are morally the same when the intended goal is the same.

If I know a person is having a rough time making ends meet and I give him a million dollars to help him, that is a charitable act. If I know a person is having a rough time making ends meet and I give him a million dollars because I believe he can't handle money well, will spend it on getting drunk, and he will be much worse off that if he continued to struggle, and I want him to become an alcoholic, I have not done a good deed. I have done something wicked. If I do a good deed with the intention of something good coming from it, I have done something good. If I do a good deed with the intention of something good from it, and in reality something bad comes from it, I have still done a good deed. But if I do something that appears to be good (like giving money to a poor man) with the intention of causing evil to happen, then I have done something wrong.

So I would say that if God deliberately withholds something like grace—which he is free to give or not give as he sees fit—but does so with the intention of causing evil to happen, then he has intentionally and deliberately caused evil to happen.

That sounds like a Calvinistic way to see things. It contradicts the idea proposed elsewhere that God does not look at faces. If faith, and hence, salvation comes only to people God fancies (and chosen arbitrarily) than there is no point trying to be good. It also throws the idea of free will out the window.
The more I read these articles and the more I read answers like these, the more I start to think that Atheists are probably right.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Sure, God isn't depicted as an actual human, but he is pretty clearly depicted as a sort of person, as an entity with personality, that focuses on things, communicates with people, and picks events to work his will on. The examples you have listed SUPPORT this.

And we're not the ones refusing to read the Bible in its narrative premise. It's people who are saying that we need to ignore the actual text and clear themes in the Old Testament in favor of theories inspired by a book written thousands of years after the Old Testament was written that are refusing to give weight to the Old Testament's narrative premise.

No that's not how it's written; between the burning bush and the ambiguous sourcing of the dialog attributed to God, it's obvious God isn't human or even in human form. And that's a terrible example from Genesis; so bad in fact I'll leave it to you to figure out how many non-human things can walk. And regardless of genre or book it's a consistent theme in the Bible that God can assume different forms on Earth; Jacob wrestling God, the burning cauldron when he makes covenant with Abraham, the whirlwind at the end of Job, take your pick. And if you refuse to read the Bible in the narrative premise it sets out then it's inevitable that you'll notice "inconsistencies" or "inaccuracies". It would be the literary equivalent of reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein while complaining that it's impossible to construct a new life form from dead tissue. Just as you have to read that novel with the premise being true in terms of the narrative; at a minimum you should read the Bible as if the author believed it to be true when he wrote it. And don't complain that the book Frankenstein isn't anything like the Bible; I know Mary Shelley intended her work strictly as fiction and that Bible consists of many genres written across different time periods. The point of my analogy was to frame the way your fallacious argument appears in terms you could appreciate and not to make a direct comparison between the Bible and Frankenstein or to suggest they are alike in every, or even some, respects.

We're getting off topic here

How is it off-topic?

It is an attempt to get to the heart of the epistemology behind the whole "Yahweh didn't REALLY harden Pharaoh's heart. He just didn't prevent Pharaoh from letting his heart go hard and then Yahweh was forced to slaughter innocent babies and innocent non-humans, none of whom had anything to do with Pharaoh's heart-hardening." claim.