THE GUESSING GOD

The doctrine that God knows what is best for us and thus has the right to let evil happen for he contains it and brings good out of it is a step too far. Religion goes that far because it wants us to be sure we are in the right plan even though God may only believe it is the best and be wrong.
 
There is no contradiction in the idea of a God who knows all that can be known and in him coming up with a plan that could be as good as countless others but which could still be a poor choice. He cannot know if his choice is the best one for he would have to be able to see all the what if's to know that. God can know the whole past and present and future and not know exactly what would happen if Henry VIII had never been born. 

If we are part of God's plan then we have a right to disagree with his plan. He has to accept that. If he does not he is as arrogant as his followers.  We have a right to tell him that we disagree with his laws and to say have sex outside marriage if we deem fit. Religion hates that suggestion.  It says even if God's plan is not the best we must follow it for his guesses are more educated than ours.  But that does not mean going our own way can be that wrong.  Educated guesses are better than mere guesses but could still be wrong.  A charitable God would have to judge us lightly for it.

God may know the future but that has no effect or influence on what he does. When he acts it is like us trying to do our best and sometimes failing. God has to fumble in the dark even though he knows the future for the future is caused by the present and cannot cause the past or present. He makes the best decision and then he sees the consequences of it in the future. Even God cannot be sure it was always right in the future.

In practice, he is doling out suffering and letting disasters happen just like somebody acting upon a guess. When you have to guess you should do the nicest thing just in case. It is the same with God. God is evil. Suppose he sends out suffering to make us virtuous. What happens is that he is indicating that it is likely to work for it would be wrong to hurt if it were not. It often fails but doing evil to make something likely will result in some failures for it is only probable but not guaranteed. And if God saw something in us that makes us likely to use suffering to grow then why send it for we are virtuous in the first place? The more you pray the more likely according to this that you would be made to suffer to become holy. God is guessing by the looks of things. He is cruel and only fit for mocking. The reason it is wrong for us to hurt others to purify them is that we are only guessing that we know what we are doing and we find that he is no better.

God being just and all-knowing does not necessarily mean God knows how to be perfectly fair. He may have to make a reasonable guess like we do.  This is because if he sees the future he only sees what will happen not what will happen say if something in the future turned out different.  The fact that we are not allowed to contradict or disagree with God shows that he is just an idol set up by religion to control us.  If there is a real God he will weep.
 
Even if God were only guessing and was sometimes wrong in the well-intentioned decisions he made, he is still making these decisions based on one or more of the theodicies and the theodicies are inherently bad. The Guessing God does nothing to salvage God’s reputation.

It is not true that you need belief in God to learn acceptance of what happens.  The doctrine that you do is a cynical religious recruitment tactic.