Originally Posted by: HammurabiThe difference is tobacco farmers have no control over who smokes or who among the smokers will get cancer.

God, by omniscience, would know before creation both of those and, by creating the universe in the manner it was created, create the inevitability of who would and would not smoke as well as who would and would not get cancer.

If you were God then why would you create people if you were just going to control them? Say someone's about to do something wrong, well then God chimes in and keeps that from happening. That's not life, that's manipulation. If God gave us life then he gave us the option to make a decision. There's a lot of pain in the world, I won't deny that, but there are also a lot of lessons in the world. A lot of options. Yeah, God might be able to predict it all and prevent it, but how can someone learn from their mistakes if there's someone/something keeping us from being able to have the opportunity to experience something and really learn from it? Nothing ever beats a good hands on experience to teach someone something so why protect someone from themself? Some people learn, some don't. And if God's manipulating us then I don't think he has any right to send any of us to hell because he should've just made us all have total faith in him from the get go. He'd be making us blasphem him all along and that is his fault. However, if he created us and is letting us live our own lives as we see fit, with or without faith, smoking or nonsmoking, then we're actually living and deserve whatever we get post-mortality.