Category Heaven

Classical theism: God’s characteristics shown as incoherent

The classical theistic components of God, his characteristics of being all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing don’t work very well together. This has been something which I have sought to elucidate over the years, so I thought I would compile a synopsis of where we are at with the idea of OmniGod, and what he has created. These are good arguments, I believe, and I would love to see my readers interact with them, and I would love to see theists of all natures take them to task to see if they stand up. Bookmark this page and return to it, if you will – there’s quite a lot here! I would like to see this as a growing compendium.

Problem of Evil: Suffering Necessary for Good

The Problem of Evil (why is there so much suffering in the world given an OmniGod?) is sometimes answered by theists that suffering has to exist so that people have a working knowledge of what bad or evil is in order to know what good is, or indeed that pleasure cannot exist without pain.

God: JUST create heaven, for crying out loud

One of my arguments in my God on Trial talk is the argument concerning photosynthesis which I think is a powerful Problem of Evil argument. Basically, when we look at all the suffering in the world, we often forget about the millions and millions of years’ worth of suffering which has taken place on account of carnivorousness.

How can we mere mortals state what God SHOULD do?

This is essentially the point, I believe, which has come out of, or driven, much of the conversation over the last few days between labreuer, Andy Schueler and myself on another thread. We popped down many rabbit holes, including free will, slavery, epistemology, history, the problem of evil and oughts. The conversation was quick and frenetic, so I decided to move it here, and start not afresh but with a streamlined trajectory. Here is what I think was labreuer’s core gist (his own comment):

Heaven, hell, and philosophical zombies

In the recent google hangout with Counter Apologist and Reasonable Doubts’ Justin Schieber, we were talking about the great argument against hell. I will set this argument out again, as I have done previously, before getting on to my main point. This is an argument brought up by Ray Bradley in a debate with William Lane Craig.

Pope Says Atheists Go to Heaven?

The new leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has been making plenty of news since taking over in March. Not only is it the case that he may have exorcised demons in public very recently (very old school), but now he seems to have blessed the infidels (not-so old school).

In his Wednesday sermon, he stated the following:

Is there a gender schism in heaven?

Here is a great question I saw in the Guardian which raises a whole set of other questions, like all good questions do:

Are Christian souls in the afterlife as segregated by gender as we are on earth?

Souls. What are they, and do they engender gender, so to speak?