When faced with any logical critique of divinity, believers usually devolve to the apothegm ‘you cannot know the mind of god’. And yet their holy books and everything they proceed to explain to you is all about the mind of god. What he wants, how to get into his good graces, what he created us for…on this basis I take two fundamentals about god. He is all powerful and he is all good.
It is a principle of nature of that life feeds on life…with all the bloodshed, pain, suffering and loss that such a principle entails. The god that created that principle is either not all good or not all powerful. If he were both he would never create such a principle.
The Gnostics answered this by stating that it was a demigod – a lesser being created by god – who actually created the Earth and us. They saw the flaws in creation and knew they cannot be attributed to an all powerful, all good god. It is a pity that 2,000 years later people still don’t get the gaping hole in their description of god.