If God gave us a spiritual faculty, it seems odd that he would give us one so vague that it had the side-effect of humans believing in thousands of Gods other than him. Especially when, according to the Bible, this is punishable by death, everlasting hell, and it goes against the very first commandment!
(4) Why not just give us the 'Christian only spiritual faculty'?
After all he is all-powerful. He could have done that if he wanted to...but he didn't and now billions will torment in everlasting hell (and God being all knowing would have foreseen this).
Why doesn't God just ________?
This is a line of questioning that I am sympathetic to, because believers ask it all the time. Questioning God and wondering why he chose to do some thing over other things is an integral part of having faith. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, this concept is known as "wrestling with God" and comes from Genesis 32. The idea is that we as humans "see through a glass darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12) in that we don't have the full picture or full understanding about the nature of things - and we likely never will.
We only have so many senses. Our brains can only compute so much. The idea is that we cannot reconcile our limited perception and capability to understanding everything with a being (God) who actually does perceive and understands everything, AND whose cognitive capabilities are altogether different (Isaiah 55:8-9) than ours. What this means fundamentally is that a
common sense solution to a problem may not exactly be what God has in mind. So to answer your question, a "Christian-only" spiritual sense and programming our brains to make the Gospel more neurologically receptive would violate our free will. God wants us to make a free and unencumbered choice to follow him, because then it will be genuine.
The only way to get people to make that choice is to utilize a human agency to do the groundwork. We can read from Genesis 1:28 that the original purpose of mankind was to exercise dominion over the Earth. We weren't made to worship. We weren't made to practice religion. We weren’t made merely to know God and accept the Gospel like a robot.
We were made to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. This is why Christ continually preached about “the coming of His Kingdom” and reinforced our specific purpose when he issued the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20). Our job, as Christians, is to reinstate the dominion that God gave Adam, and the only way to do that is to overcome the power of sin with the power of the Holy Spirit. This all sounds wishy-washy, but the reality is that humanity is jacked up. We kill each other for stupid stuff all day every day. The best solution to our problems and to literally bring about world peace is to make peace first with ourselves, reconcile our relationship with God, and then with our neighbors. Even a secularist can get onboard with that.
If the only thing God wanted was for the human race to simply know of his existence so we won’t go to Hell, this still wouldn’t “fix” the human race. Knowledge without action is meaningless; faith without works is useless to God (James 2:14-26). This is why Jesus gave a strict warning to those who merely pronounce themselves as Christians, but don’t actually do Christian things (Matthew 7:15-29). The idea that the human race is meant to be the citizenry in the Kingdom of Heaven is a recurring theme that warrants a lot more study and reflection than I could do justice to in this format of discourse, but “the game” that God is “playing” with the human race isn’t an epistemological one where our sole purpose is to simply
know God’s will, it’s an ethical one where we
do God’s will.
The comment of Hell is an interesting one, because the common preconception is that
as soon as we die, we immediately go to Heaven or Hell - which isn’t true. Unfortunately this idea was popularized by the Catholic Church, but there isn’t any scripture to support it. Getting the eschatological timeline right is critical, because it directly influences how we as Christians view other religions, non-believers, and those who have never heard the Gospel. What is scriptural is the
Resurrection of the Dead (Daniel 12:2, John 5:28-29), which is an event in the future where everyone who has died will be restored to life with a new body. This doesn’t diminish the urgency to preach the Gospel to those who are currently living, but the Resurrection does give the human race a “last chance” so to speak. Based on that, a cursory reading of Revelation 20:11-15 suggests that God will judge people fairly.
(5) I can find no proof online that the Councilmen of Nicaea decided on the final version of the Bible. However the final books were decided, maybe valuable ones were left out, and incorrect ones left in. What is the theological justification for the current version?
Contrary to what Dan Brown books or conspiracy theorists may have us believe about Nicaea, the “truth” of actually what happened in 325 AD requires a great deal of historical journalism. It was the first of seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church, wherein church leaders debated and decided important issues concerning doctrine and orthodoxy. Essentially, the Ecumenical Councils were deeply entrenched in the metaphysics of Jesus. Given that, the purpose of formatting and canonizing the Bible had one clear theological aim: to convey “the real” Jesus. Given the wide variety of writings about Jesus during the 1st and 2nd centuries, the Council of Nicaea had to employ several razors to get to “the real” Jesus.
Who wrote what?
When did they write it?
How did they know Jesus?
Does the content of the book contain the Gospel?
These sorts of questions are explored in great depth by historians, but the Council of Nicaea used them to determine which books made the canon, and which got cut. Yes - there was some politicization of the compiling, but even when taking the entire body of early Christian literature into consideration, the four questions above more or less function as gatekeepers to “the real” Jesus. I would suggest checking out:
The Missing Gospels by Darrell Block and
Lost Scriptures by Bart Ehrman.