deliberate errors, as it were, with the ultimate aim of revealing people's need for God, i.e. inability to work properly on their own
No, hang on. Those deliberate errors don't reveal people's inability to work properly on their own; they cause people's inability to work properly on their own. (Assuming they do; in fact I for one am able to function in spite of these errors, I just get annoyed about it all the time.) If they are indeed deliberate errors with this aim, they are unconscionable. If I were to deliberately cripple my own children because I liked them being dependent on me and wanted them to remain so forever, you would not react to my action or my motivation with anything less than horror and condemnation, and rightly so.
Of course, it would be much easier to just reveal yourself if you were a God like that, but then you have issues with the whole free will thing
I've always had trouble with this one too, actually. You have revealed your existence to me: I've met you in person many times, I've hugged you, I've helped you wrestle with a recalcitrant superglue tube, and as a result I have plentiful evidence of the fact that you definitely do exist. Yet I can love you, or hate you, or be indifferent to you, or quite like you, or anything in between, as I choose, and nobody would question my free will on the matter.
I honestly don't see how it constitutes a restriction of somebody's free will to provide them with the facts. Indeed, it is often considered to constitute a restriction of somebody's free will to conceal the facts from them! So if a God wanted me to freely choose whether or not to love him, surely he should make his existence obvious, and then I could decide whether I approved of what he'd done to humanity, whether I liked what he did to me, what I thought of his personality and his relationship with me, and whether to love him. The idea that first I have to play cosmic hide-and-seek before I can even be sure he's there seems to me to inhibit my ability to make this choice freely, not enhance it.
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No, hang on. Those deliberate errors don't reveal people's inability to work properly on their own; they cause people's inability to work properly on their own. (Assuming they do; in fact I for one am able to function in spite of these errors, I just get annoyed about it all the time.) If they are indeed deliberate errors with this aim, they are unconscionable. If I were to deliberately cripple my own children because I liked them being dependent on me and wanted them to remain so forever, you would not react to my action or my motivation with anything less than horror and condemnation, and rightly so.
Of course, it would be much easier to just reveal yourself if you were a God like that, but then you have issues with the whole free will thing
I've always had trouble with this one too, actually. You have revealed your existence to me: I've met you in person many times, I've hugged you, I've helped you wrestle with a recalcitrant superglue tube, and as a result I have plentiful evidence of the fact that you definitely do exist. Yet I can love you, or hate you, or be indifferent to you, or quite like you, or anything in between, as I choose, and nobody would question my free will on the matter.
I honestly don't see how it constitutes a restriction of somebody's free will to provide them with the facts. Indeed, it is often considered to constitute a restriction of somebody's free will to conceal the facts from them! So if a God wanted me to freely choose whether or not to love him, surely he should make his existence obvious, and then I could decide whether I approved of what he'd done to humanity, whether I liked what he did to me, what I thought of his personality and his relationship with me, and whether to love him. The idea that first I have to play cosmic hide-and-seek before I can even be sure he's there seems to me to inhibit my ability to make this choice freely, not enhance it.