Why not just say that Augustine answered the question in the fourth century, that no intellectual progress was subsequently made, so that we’re stuck with medievalism forever? That way, at least, you’d be upfront about the implausibility of your pontification.
Does God’s two wills make him schizophrenic? To say God permits bad things even though he’s perfect is to say he doesn’t get exactly what he wants. Why did one of God’s angels rebel against God’s plan? Why did God allow Satan to enter Eden to tempt the childish Adam and Eve? This kind of buck-passing from God to Satan may strike the Catholic bureaucracy as prudent, but it looks like a rationalization when it’s applied to the so-called lord of all things. Obviously, the buck would stop with God, not Satan or human nature.
And do you really believe the Garden of Eden story is literally true?
It’s amusing that you emphasize how “stupid” people are and how smart God is since in doing so, you insinuate that Catholics are indirectly smarter than everyone else just because they side with the one true God. Above all, Catholics must protect their capacity for sanctimonious condescension since that’s the idol in the room. Sanctimony matters more to Catholics that does Jesus.
That idol drives you to contradict Ephesians 2:8-9, in saying, “we must take real account of our spiritual standings, repent, and never veer from the goal of uniting ourselves to God more fully while on this earth. As much as we would like to believe it is, Heaven is not handed to us; Heaven is earned.”
On the contrary, says Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Hopefully, God’s smart enough to resolve that contradiction for you.
Of course, humans are relatively smart, not dumb, compared to the other living things that actually exist, namely animals. We’re smart enough to have invented a human-like master of the universe to flatter ourselves.
Your Christianization of Job completely misses the point and thus the secular upshot of Judaism. God’s answer to Job is a dodge, as the author implies for the reader since the reader knows the true reason for Job’s suffering, a reason God never tells Job, the reason being that God was testing Job’s faith by making a wager with Satan. Satan tricked God, appealing to God’s vanity. Even the epilogue confirms that God’s to blame for human suffering since God admits that Job spoke “right” to him (42:7), and Job’s friends “showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (42:11).
