“Again, I’d ask for one example of Satan’s existence in the pre-human world.”
It’s an interesting request. You want prehistorical evidence of Satan’s intervention in things. I don’t know if it is possible, but I can lend a perspective:
According to some of the apocryphal texts, Lucifer was an angel, not a god, or not God himself. Apparently even angels have free will, and they are capable of sin, because the beef Lucifer had was being asked to worship God’s creation - man. Until the creation of man, Lucifer wasn’t all that concerned with Earth.
He and a third of the angels in Heaven that saw things likewise were cast from Heaven to Earth.
I don’t know how much evidence exists, and the fact that I switched from Satan to Lucifer is important, because I frankly don’t know if they are the same entity.
Jesus said, that Satan was a liar, and a murderer from the begining. Now, ‘begining’ to Jesus may mean something completely different than what it means to a human being.
The Lord’s prayer continues, in that we pray that we are not led into temptation, and to deliver us from evil.
This was the prayer given to us directly by Christ. It frankly scares the crap out of me, because it buries the cosmic lead, which is to say it suggests we are in the middle of a conflict between titanic spiritual entities about which we understand little.
It jibes, for me, the metaphor uses for His faithful on earth - sheep; His flock.
From a timeline perspective, there were no witnesses to the Fall of Lucifer, or where upon the Earth he landed. There’s rumors about some definitive physical location, but your request is difficult to fulfill on purely logistical grounds. This is why we call it ‘faith’.
I appreciate your perspective. It’s well reasoned in terms of exegesis.
In terms of science - which I believe goes hand in hand with the Old Testament, if not the New as well - the simplest explanation is usually the most satisfying if it unifies to existing theory. This is my sense of theology as well.
I believe good and evil are real. But I have trouble taking on “faith” those things for which I see no evidence of before Man is capable of abstracting them through his mind. Whereas contrarily, I see lots of evidence for the workings of God in the same reality.
Though I do acknowledge and respect the sophistication of your reasoning and am content to have it so.
God’s bounty on You and Yours, always...