The previous post (by vjtorley) featured a video by a YouTube Christian apologist, IMBeggar, in which he attempts to defuse the problem of evil. It’s riddled with problems as you can see by reading the OP and the comments.
Out of curiosity, I visited IMBeggar’s YouTube channel and watched some of his other videos. One of them, titled “Why doesn’t God just show Himself?”, tackled the problem of divine hiddenness. It was even worse than the one that addressed the problem of evil. I was surprised to find that I disagreed with every major point.
The problem of divine hiddenness, in a nutshell, is this: God supposedly loves us and wants everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4). Salvation requires that we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior (Romans 10:9-10). To accept Jesus, you have to know about him and believe in him. God, being infinitely wise, knows the best way to get the message out and persuade people to become believers. Being omnipotent, he’s able to do it. Why then does he seem to botch it so badly? To me, the answer is obvious. God doesn’t exist, or at the very least he doesn’t have the characteristics attributed to him by Christians.
Perhaps he doesn’t want everyone to be saved. Perhaps he’s not smart enough to do a decent job of communicating with us. Perhaps he isn’t powerful enough to pull it off. Maybe he’s being thwarted by Satan, who is more powerful. Maybe the dog ate his homework. None of those reasons will appeal to Christians, because they all clash with the Christian view of God.
Thinking Christians are thus faced with the problem of justifying, to themselves and others, the fact that the all-powerful and omniscient Christian God does so poorly at this task, plus the fact that the evidence for his existence is so scant and unpersuasive. In other words, the job is to explain why he remains hidden from so many of us (hence the term “divine hiddenness”). In his video, IMBeggar (henceforth “Beggar”) attempts to spell this out for us. I address his main points below.
Could God simply reveal himself to everyone in all his glory?
Beggar says no, because he claims that we couldn’t withstand it. It would overwhelm us. He illustrates this in the video with a dramatic scene where there’s a blinding light in the sky, with people running around dazed and confused on the ground, screaming.
But if God is omnipotent he could easily modulate his appearance so that it didn’t overwhelm us, yet was spectacular enough to convince us of his existence. Or he could design humans with the ability to withstand the sight of him in his full glory.
Beggar is underestimating his omnipotent God’s abilities, which ironically is something Christians often do when searching for excuses for their deity’s behavior.
Couldn’t God reveal himself through “cosmic signs and wonders”?
Beggar says “These would probably work for a while, but let’s be honest – people are fickle, and after the 20th or 30th cosmic wonder we’d be like ‘Oh, good. The sun disappeared again as I’m driving to work. In the dark. Again.’” Once again, he’s underestimating the power of an omnipotent God. First, God could make the “cosmic wonders” impressive enough that he wouldn’t need 20 or 30 of them in a row in order to convince people of his existence. Or, if he did want to use a long series of cosmic wonders, he could arrange for each one to be more spectacular than the previous one, so that people would be rapt and waiting to see what would happen next. The whole world would be fascinated and everyone would be talking about it. God could even limit himself to a single spectacular cosmic wonder but make it absolutely unambiguous. An example I’ve used in the past is that God could rearrange a bunch of distant galaxies so that when viewed using earthbound telescopes, they would spell out something like “I, Yahweh, am God, and Jesus Christ is my only begotten son.” It’s unlikely that any entity other than God could pull off a stunt like that. Who else would have the power to move galaxies around that are millions or billions of light years away? It would certainly make me sit up and take notice.Why couldn’t God do that or something similarly convincing?
Beggar also complains that there’s nothing personal about cosmic wonders, but so what? If he was seeking personal relationships with people, nothing would stop God from staging cosmic wonders and additionally communicating with people individually. See the next point.
Couldn’t God reveal himself to each of us individually?
Beggar scoffs, asking “Doesn’t this seem a little… door-to-door salesman?” as if there were something cheesy about it. What’s cheesy about personal encounters with God? What about all the Biblical figures who had such encounters? Should they have felt insulted? At this point in the video, Beggar has already claimed that God wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. What better way to establish such relationships than by interacting with us as individuals and having a conversation with each of us?
Beggar also asks “And when would he do it? At what age? For how long?” as if that were a problem. Does he really think that his omniscient God couldn’t figure out the right time and duration for each of his creatures? And why would he limit himself to one encounter, if multiple encounters throughout life were more effective? Beggar has once again underestimated what an omniscient, omnipotent God is capable of.
Note to Christians: If you want to claim that your God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then think about what that means. Stop underestimating him. I realize that it’s convenient to underestimate God at times because as Beggar demonstrates, that allows you to make excuses for him. But you aren’t being consistent if you do that. God is either omni or he’s not. Which is it?
Doesn’t it make more sense for God to reveal himself to everybody at once, versus to each of us individually?
No, it doesn’t. This is yet another underestimation by Beggar. It isn’t like God needs to conserve his energy. He’s omnipotent, after all. Revealing himself to each person individually is no more taxing than revealing himself to everyone all at once. Plus, he can’t reveal himself to everyone at once, because not all of us are alive at the same time. Some people are inevitably going to miss out on this one-time event.
That problem goes away if he engages us as individuals. If he does that, every person from the dawn of time until now will have a direct, persuasive, personal encounter with God at the appropriate age, in the right place, and for the appropriate duration. What’s not to like about that?
What if God revealed himself to everyone by “infusing” knowledge of himself directly into their brains?
Beggar claims that this would deprive us of our freedom, but why? If God merely infuses knowledge of himself into our brains, that doesn’t force or obligate us to respond to him in some fixed way. We still can choose how to respond to him. Our freedom isn’t impacted.
If God interacts with us physically, he’s still infusing knowledge of himself into our brains. It’s just that he’s doing it indirectly via our senses and our thought processes. What difference does that make in terms of our freedom?
He could become one of us
Beggar says that God could “cross over into our time and space” and become “one of us”. He’s obviously thinking of Jesus here, and as you’d expect, he claims that this way of communicating with us is superior to the others he’s discussed. I’m not sure why — he doesn’t really explain it in the video.
I think it’s a terrible way for God to reveal himself, because if he becomes human, it’s very easy (and in fact sensible) to doubt that he is God. Much smarter for God to reveal himself in such a way that he appears unambiguously divine. Beggar anticipates this objection and addresses it in his next point.
As a human, he can’t just tell people that he’s God
Beggar notes that people will rightly think you’re crazy or lying if you tell people you’re God, so how does Jesus get around this problem? Beggar offers two solutions: 1) arrange a bunch of prophecies at various times and places, foretelling your arrival; and 2) perform miracles.
The problem with the supposed prophecies predicting the arrival of Jesus is that they’re not at all convincing to someone who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid, but that’s a topic for another thread.
The problem with miracles is that they need to be something that can’t be faked using magician-style tricks. Also, few people will witness them firsthand, so those of us who aren’t there at the time are stuck with secondary accounts which are notoriously unreliable. There is every reason to doubt that Jesus was God, and a book written by a believer, who himself hasn’t witnessed the supposed miracles and has only heard about them secondhand, shouldn’t be convincing to anyone without a lot of corroborating evidence.
Once again, we’re talking about an omniscient God here. Does Beggar really think that an omniGod can’t come up with a better way of getting the word out? Are dubious prophecies and secondhand accounts of miracles really the best he can do?
Is showing himself once, 2000 years ago, really sufficient?
Beggar says “I know what some of you are thinking: ‘Yeah, but that was 2000 years ago. I wasn’t there.'” His response is a non-sequitur: “Do you think God is bound by space and time?” My answer: No, but we are. God, being timeless, can appear at any time or at all times, but each of us humans is only around for a lifetime, and all but a tiny fraction of us weren’t around when Jesus was. And of those who were living at the time, only a tiny fraction in one corner of the world encountered Jesus. If God really wanted to get the word out he could have done a much better job than that.
Beggar also asks “Do you think your mind and your soul is bound by space and time?” My answer: I don’t think we have souls, but our minds are certainly bound by space and time. Even if we had souls, and our minds and souls weren’t bound by space and time, so what? In order to be saved, each of us has to get the message while we are here on earth. Jesus isn’t around anymore, so we have nothing to rely on other than dubious biblical accounts (which contradict each other anyway). If that’s the best God can do, he has really dropped the ball.
Beggar wraps up the video with the assertion that God “walked on the face of this earth as a human being” in the form of Jesus. There’s more to critique, but I’ll leave that for the comments.
Hi keiths
keiths,
I think God left pretty strong evidence for His existence. It’s mankind through hyper skepticism that has created doubt. The doubt raised is trivial for many who can see through the problems with the criticisms.
Where, Bill?
colewd:
OK, here’s one of those trivial doubts for you to tackle. Let me repost an earlier comment I made in this thread:
Here is Christian apologist William Lane Craig’s take on the issue:
It isn’t conjecture, and I can illustrate that with a geographic argument. Christians make up 86% of the people in Alabama but only 1.3% of the people in Mongolia. Does Craig really want us to believe that God provides evidence to every single person in Alabama and every single person in Mongolia that is strong enough to rationally convince them to become believers? That it’s only the Mongolians who overwhelmingly do the irrational thing by rejecting Christianity, despite the fact that the evidence is there for everyone? It’s ludicrous. God is clearly failing the Mongolians, and he could definitely increase the number of Mongolian converts by providing better evidence.
Also, most people who convert to Christianity do so for emotional, not rational, reasons, so it isn’t just evidence that God needs to supply. He also needs to provide the right emotional stimulus to those who require it. But the problem is the same: are we really expected to believe that all Alabamians and all Mongolians receive the necessary emotional stimulus, but that Alabamians are overwhelmingly receptive to it while the Mongolians are stubbornly resistant? It’s a ridiculous notion.
I should hope we are expected to believe that overwhelming evidence is apparent only to those predisposed to see it, which depends almost entirely on what our parents believe and how they raise us to believe. If Alabamian and Mongolian parents’ beliefs were switched, then the Mongolians would see the overwhelming evidence.
I take your point as arguing that religious belief is entirely emotional, and if it were entirely rational, religion would vanish within a generation. Alabamians see overwhelming evidence for the Christian god for the same reason they tell pollsters Trump is the more honest candidate. Rationality and evidence have nothing to do with it.
Flint:
Right, which means that religious belief is largely an accident — it depends on where and by whom you are raised. Suppose two thousand Turkish infants are up for adoption. A thousand of them — let’s call them Group A — are adopted by Alabamian parents. The other thousand, Group M, are adopted by Mongolians. Does anyone doubt that most of Group A would become Christians, while most of Group M wouldn’t?
If Christianity is true, belief is a prerequisite for salvation. That means that most of the kids in Group M are going to be denied salvation, and (depending on which version of Christianity you believe) might even go to hell. For nothing more than the “sin” of being adopted by the wrong parents, which is something over which they had no control, being infants at the time.
The challenge for Christians is to explain why a perfectly loving, omnipotent God would allow that to happen. They’ll tie themselves in knots trying, but the solution is actually quite simple: God doesn’t exist, or if he does, he doesn’t have the characteristics that Christians attribute to him.
Seen through an evolutionary lens, for cultural religion to have developed and persisted over millennia, there must be interaction between niche and population that produces an adaptive bias, both to maintain shared belief and (currently in developed countries) to reduce it. Perhaps we underestimate the rôle emotion plays in our decision making.
keiths,
Will see where this goes. 🙂
Bill,
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. No matter how fast the church is growing, the fact remains that most Alabamians are Christian and barely any Mongolians are. If those Mongolians had been born in Alabama, most of them would have become Christian. Do you think they should be denied salvation (or worse still, consigned to hell) for the “sin” of being born in Mongolia? Why would a perfectly loving God do that?
If you had been born in Mongolia, what are the odds that you would have become a Christian? It’s pretty unlikely. Would you just shrug and say “Them’s the breaks” when you died and found yourself barred from heaven?
Your “perfectly loving” God has got some splainin’ to do.
keiths,
Hi Keiths
From a human perspective you make a persuasive argument.
As humans don’t know how salvation is given or denied. This is a very tough call from the “well” we live in.
NDA’s for what they are worth show agnostics being united with Jesus. What we think results in salvation could be completely wrong.
colewd:
If God doesn’t tell us how salvation is given or denied, then that’s even worse. What could be more important than that? What happens if you guess wrong? It’s more bad luck, like being born in Mongolia.
Also, as a Christian, don’t you believe that Jesus was right when he said the following?
How many Mongolians do you think are baptized? And please, no ridiculous amniotic fluid rationalizations.
Or do you think the Bible got it wrong, and Jesus never said that?
What about Paul?
How many non-Christian Mongolians are going to meet Paul’s requirements? How many of them are even going to know Paul’s requirements?
colewd:
NDEs support a whole variety of religious (and nonreligious) interpretations, not just Christian ones.
As I noted above, that just makes the problem of divine hiddenness worse. Why wouldn’t a perfectly loving God make the way to salvation crystal clear to us?
keiths,
Why would a perfectly loving parent punish his child? Why would a perfectly loving parent let a child figure out his own path vs giving him the instructions where thinking is not required?
Isaiah 55 8,9
colewd:
You mean lock them out of the house and torment them forever for the “sin” of not knowing something you never bothered to tell them in the first place? I don’t know, Bill. Why would a perfectly loving parent do that? If a human parent did that, we’d call Child Protective Services.
As we all know, loving parents let their toddlers play in the street, where they can learn about the dangers on their own. Who are we to deprive them of the opportunity to “figure out their own paths”?
If Jesus is to be believed (see John 3:5 above), the only path most of his Mongolian children ever “figure out” is the path to eternal damnation. He lets it happen. Does that sound like love to you?
keiths,
It depends on how you interpret being “born of water and the spirit.”
colewd:
The straightforward interpretation is that Jesus was referring to baptism, especially when you consider that afterwards he immediately went out into the countryside and started baptizing people.
Paul himself points to the problem I’ve been talking about:
How can those Mongolians “believe in the one of whom they have not heard”, and call on him, and be saved?
keiths,
Salvation is a gift from God.
Ezekiel 36-26,29
The symbolism of baptism is a method of changing hearts as God revealed to the prophet Ezekiel. So is communion as first served to Abraham in genesis 13. Your argument assumes that baptism is the only method.
These videos starting from Genesis to Revelation helped me better understand Gods plan.
https://bibleproject.com
colewd:
I’m just taking Jesus at his word:
“No one” and “unless” are pretty unambiguous, and by “born of water”, he’s clearly referring to baptism, especially when you consider that afterwards he immediately went out and started baptizing people.
But here’s the thing: if there are multiple possible interpretations of that passage, then that in itself is an indication that God isn’t perfectly loving. If he were, he would make that passage unambiguous. After all, he’s telling us how we can be saved! The stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. This is not something to be vague or ambiguous about. Why doesn’t he care enough to make it plain?
Of course, everything makes sense if you just accept that the Christian God doesn’t exist, Jesus wasn’t God, his word isn’t gospel truth (so to speak), and the Bible is a mishmash of contradictory books written by humans.
And you still haven’t responded to that passage from Paul:
I’ll ask again: how can those Mongolians “believe in the one of whom they have not heard”, and call on him, and be saved? No one is preaching to them. Paul is telling you that they therefore cannot believe and that they will not be saved. Is he right, or is he full of it? It sucks to be born in Mongolia, doesn’t it?
keiths,
What does not make sense is how the prophet Ezekiel matches Jesus symbolic ritual which matches the symbolic ritual of the Hebrews starting with Abraham if the Bible was not divinely inspired. The project is not asserting your opinion based on a single quote which is not in the original language. It is putting all the pieces together to understand the theology from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation and putting all the hyperlinks together.
Yes the Bible is not simple with simple instructions. Either are you Keiths or the universe that God created 🙂
colewd:
First, you omitted the relevant verse from your Ezekiel passage:
Now ask yourself, how many different cultures in the world understand that you can use water to clean things? Or more appropriately, how many cultures don’t understand that? Zero, of course. You’re arguing that the Bible must be divinely inspired because it repeats and ritualizes something that everyone already knows — something that is utterly obvious. That doesn’t support divine inspiration at all.
It’s ambiguous, plus some people are never exposed to it, and that’s precisely the problem. A loving God who wants everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) would make sure that everyone knows exactly how to be saved. Otherwise there would be people (including our unfortunate Mongolians) who would be damned, through no fault of their own, simply because God didn’t bother to inform them of what they needed to do.
It wouldn’t be very loving, would it? Yet your supposedly perfectly loving God does exactly that. Why? It doesn’t make sense.
What can we conclude? One possibility is that God isn’t perfectly loving and doesn’t care if those Mongolians go to hell. Another is that he’s a shitty communicator who can’t figure out how to get his message across (and the slipshod Bible fits that hypothesis). Still another, and the one that makes the most sense overall, is that the Christian God doesn’t exist.
You believe that he does exist. How then do you explain all those hellbound Mongolians who don’t know how to be saved?
keiths,
From Wikipedia
10000X Growth in 19 years. Looks like they are on their way. :-).
How do you explain the 10000X growth that occurred after the government stopped religious suppression. Who was suppressing religion? It was certainly not God.
This is all work in progress which we all can be part of. I am certain there are still places in the world like Mongolia was 20 years ago.
When you put the pieces together it is quite straight forward
Mark 12:30-31
colewd,
You’re not getting it. “Christianity is growing in Mongolia” doesn’t solve the problem. Every day, if the Bible is true, Mongolians are being sent to hell, where they will suffer forever for the “sin” of being born in the wrong country. A country where they were never told how to achieve salvation. That happens every single day despite the fact that Christianity is growing.
Imagine you’re talking to one of them who died today and learned that she was going to spend eternity in hell. She’s terrified and despondent. She protests “Why am I being sent to hell? I didn’t know how to be saved. No one ever told me. Why didn’t God make sure I knew?”
What do you say in response? Try saying this to her: “Wow. Damnation for all of eternity. That’s going to suck. But it’s all right because Christianity is growing in Mongolia.” Then you can add “By the way, God loves you. He knows you’re going to suffer forever simply because no one shared the gospel with you, and he’s fine with that.”
How do you think that will go over? Is she going to marvel at the depth of God’s love for her?
Meanwhile, some woman in Alabama will die today. Unlike the Mongolian woman, she got lucky — she was born in a place where 86% of the people are Christians. She was exposed to Christianity from childhood on, and she accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. So she goes to heaven for an eternity of bliss while the Mongolian is tormented forever. Again, God is perfectly fine with that. Does that sound like a perfectly loving God to you?
Hi keiths
I don’t see strong theological support for your claim here. Here is an article on the subject by known theologians.
https://www.drtimwhite.net/blog/2023/10/6/new-what-is-the-eternal-fate-of-those-who-never-hear-the-gospel
Interesting article. Of course, you have to believe a hundred preposterous things before you can even get to the deep theology of how God (imaginary) manages the afterlife (also imaginary) and assesses our righteousness in life (also imaginary). I wonder what the learned theologians of some other faiths might have to say about this. You know, those who take every silly detail of their religion for granted, as the starting point for their theology.
I’ll get to Bill’s article later, but in the meantime I’ll share this rationalization from apologist Frank Turek:
Lol. I guess God corrals the future infidels and sends them to places like Mongolia to be born.
It raises some questions. Let’s assume that libertarian free will exists and that we have souls.
1. Does God know prior to creating someone whether they would freely respond to the Gospel?
2. If so, why doesn’t he refrain from creating those he knows won’t respond? Then nobody will have to go to hell.
2a. Better still, why doesn’t he refrain from creating anyone who will sin? Then there won’t be any moral evil in the world.
He could do either or both of those things without depriving anyone of free will.
3. On the other hand, if he doesn’t know until after he creates someone whether they’ll respond to the Gospel, then there’s a problem. In that case he’ll have to create their soul first before deciding what kind of a body to stick it in. To see why, suppose he’s intending to create a woman in Alabama. He creates her soul and then determines that she’s going to reject the Gospel. That wasn’t what he was hoping, because the ‘slot’ he was going to stick her in is one in which she’d be exposed to the Gospel, and he wants to reserve that slot for a future believer. So now he’s got a future infidel whose soul he has to stick somewhere. He chooses Mongolia, but of course if he wants her to be born in Mongolia, he needs to stick her in a Mongolian body. So that’s what he does.
So God is creating souls, determining their possible futures, creating appropriate bodies for them, and shuffling them all around the world in order to get them born in the right places.
It’s a ludicrous rationalization, but that’s the sort of thing that desperate Christians must resort to to avoid the obvious (and biblically supported) conclusion that their God is unfair and not perfectly loving.
Next question regarding the above:
The Christian God is omniscient and omnipotent. Instead of engaging in this weird shuffling business, why doesn’t he simply arrange for everyone on earth to be exposed to the Gospel?
The obvious answer is that the Christian God doesn’t exist. Human missionaries are running around proselytizing for a false religion, but there aren’t enough of them to preach to everyone. That’s why some people never get the message. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a religion invented by humans and propagated by humans. There’s no God you have to make excuses for. He doesn’t exist.
As you point out at great length, IF the Christian god exists, and IF it does what Christians generally imagine, the world would be totally different in nearly every respect.
So why conjure up a god who is such a flagrant mismatch for the reality we experience? I can see the wishful thinking about a world where all the ills and evils weren’t such a big part of our everyday lives, but I can’t see why we would imagine a god both capable of, and desirous of, banishing all this unpleasant reality. As you say, it’s hard to rationalize a god who both CAN do the job, and who WANTS to do the job, but who still doesn’t do the job. So what is it waiting for anyway?
If it were up to me, I’d come up with a god with both the power and the intent to create exactly the world we live in. That way, no evidence could refute my god. As it is, the Christian god is totally, comprehensively refuted. As Richard Dawkins tells us, “there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence.” But still, why not dream up a god who fits the evidence? This would present the apologists with a no-brainer.
keiths,
You and Flint are following Richard Dawkins argument style containing circular reasoning by starting with a bald assertion. While you started, unlike Flint, and attempted to make an evidence based argument you defaulted to bald assertion. Maybe someday you will understand this pattern of circular reasoning you have fallen into.
Oh the irony, Bill!
None of this is, ultimately, decidable. Shall we meet up in the afterlife and compare notes? I will be stardust, in peaceful oblivion.
Alan Fox,
Hi Alan
You are doubling down with a bald assertion?
VJT is trying to support evidence based argumentation and Keiths was following his lead for a while. I think VJT he has the right idea to help this site survive.
Alan Fox,
Nothing more peaceful than the heat death of the universe.
Unless it is cyclical.
Well, let’s make it a party!
I am. Nobody knows.
colewd:
OK, I’ll bite. What is this “bald assertion” we’re starting with?
My argument stands, and you’re welcome to refute it if you can. Right now it looks like you’re trying to dodge it rather than refute it.
Help me out by pointing to the circularity. How am I assuming my conclusion?
Flint:
Christians, particularly the fundagelicals, would be better off if they weren’t so wedded to the authority of their scriptures. It’s easier to modernize your beliefs if you aren’t constrained by what your scriptures already say. Prime example: the contortions Christians go through to justify the fact that while we now believe that slavery is immoral, the Bible actually condones it. Rather than defending the Bible, why not just admit that it’s wrong on slavery?
keiths,
This is the assertion that you are circling back to. While you, unlike Flint, attempt arguments your arguments are not well supported.
This claim is problematic for three reasons.
-It does not have theological support as is shown by a discussion I cited
-It does not follow that God does not exist because Mongolians have not had a chance to hear the Gospel.
-It does follow that Mongolians that have not heard the bible are going to hell.
All you are left with is your assertion that results in your argument being based on circular reasoning.
All this being said you have made an attempt to support your argument which is ahead of where Alan and Flint are at this point.
keiths:
colewd:
No, my reasoning doesn’t depend on the assumption that the Christian God doesn’t exist. Quite the opposite — I start out by assuming (for the sake of argument) that the Christian God does exist, and I show that it leads to an absurdity.
I’ve presented the argument more than once in this thread. Here’s one version. Note that I actually assume the truth of Christianity (in bold) for the sake of argument:
keiths:
colewd:
Let’s walk through this again. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus said:
You believe that Jesus is truthful and that the Bible accurately records his words. If so, that means that what he says above is correct: unless you are “born of water and the Spirit”, you can’t enter the kingdom of God. That includes Mongolians. They won’t be admitted unless they are born of water and the Spirit. That’s the only way, according to Jesus. Therefore, if you want to argue that they will be admitted to the kingdom, you have to explain how it is possible for them to be born of water and the Spirit. It’s simple logic.
How do you, colewd, explain this, using your own words? How is it possible for the Mongolians to be “born of water and the Spirit”? What is the scriptural support for your claim?
colewd,
I just finished the Tim White article you linked to.
Did you even bother to read it? He reaches the same conclusion as me! Those Mongolians are screwed. He says:
And:
And:
It sucks to be born in Mongolia, doesn’t it?
keiths,
I asked you before what does being born of water and the spirit mean and pointed you to Ezekiels prophecy. We don’t know who is and is not saved. Does Jesus say “only those that are baptised”.
Your argument is based on your own interpretation of the passage. Your argument is based on your own definition of a “Loving God”. You have not scratched the surface of dealing with the claim ” The Christian God does not exist”.
All this being said I respect your attempt here but I think the claim you made is very difficult to defend.
If you made the claim that Gods love is different than human love then you might generate a more coherent argument.
colewd:
We’ve been over this before. I already told you that “being born of water and the Spirit” is clearly a reference to baptism, because immediately after saying that, Jesus goes out and starts baptizing people.
The only reason you want Jesus’s words to mean something else is because if you take him at his word, it means that people are ending up in hell because they had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place. It’s actually worse than mere bad luck, in fact, because the sovereign God decides where they’re going to be born. It’s effectively a death sentence imposed by God. An eternal one.
That’s immoral and unfair, but you don’t want God to be immoral and unfair, so you and your fellow Christians go hunting for ways to make Jesus’s words mean something other than what they clearly mean.
I’ve answered the question. Now it’s your turn. I asked you above:
colewd:
Are you making that claim? Do you think it’s love when God sentences Mongolians to an afterlife of eternal torment for something they had no control over? What kind of twisted love is that? If that’s what God’s love is like, he’s clearly less loving than many humans.
God supposedly wants everyone to be saved:
Yet the Bible is clear that you’re toast if you don’t believe in Jesus, in a passage starting with the famous John 3:16:
The Mongolians are “condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” How could they believe, when they’ve never heard the Gospel?
Paul sees the problem clearly:
He goes on to say:
If no one preaches to you, you can’t hear. If you don’t hear, you can’t believe. If you don’t believe, you can’t call on the name of the Lord. If you don’t call on the name of the Lord, you won’t be saved. Those Mongolians are in trouble.
Mark reinforces the message:
More bad news for the Mongolians.
In the Tim White article, he tries to argue that God is loving despite the fact that people end up in hell merely through the bad luck of being unexposed to the gospel:
In other words, he died for everyone but saves only those who explicitly believe in him (sorry, Mongolians). The fact that he died for everyone supposedly gets God off the hook as far as loving is concerned. No big deal that some people suffer eternally because he didn’t bother to have them born in the right place. That ain’t love.
“I love you and I died for you, but I’m not going to save you, because I didn’t arrange for you to hear the gospel. Off to hell you go. I love you!”
If God said that to you, would you feel loved?
Here is another view.
What do think not believe means? How do you “not believe” in something you know nothing about?
The Mongolians may already have a “new spirit” in them. How would we test this. By following how they treat each other.
Mathew 5:40
colewd,
Regarding the Matthew passage: Sure, the Christian God can do anything that’s possible. He’s omnipotent, right? That doesn’t mean he chooses to do everything possible. He could save every single person in the world, but he chooses not to.
He chooses to impose restrictions on who can be saved. The Bible informs us explicitly of those restrictions. I’ve quoted a bunch of relevant verses in this thread, including Mark 16:16:
You ask:
It’s easy. Five minutes ago I knew nothing about the goddess Chinnamasta. If you had asked me then whether I believed in Chinnamasta, I would have said no. I didn’t know anything about her, and I didn’t believe in her. The Mongolians we are talking about haven’t heard about Christ and don’t believe in him, just as I hadn’t heard of Chinnamasta and didn’t believe in her.
Mark says that they won’t be saved unless they believe and are baptized, and if they don’t believe, they will be condemned. That’s pretty clear, and whether the Mongolians have a “new spirit” in them isn’t mentioned. Belief and baptism, Bill. The Mongolians don’t qualify.
One problem with assuming one’s conclusion is that when it comes to gods, the assumptions that they exist or that they don’t assume the conclusion either way. Keiths assumes they don’t, colewd assumes they do (or at least, the one (of many possible) gods he prefers exists).
The common mathematical proof, of assuming a postulate to be true and then showing this leads to a contradiction, can’t work here because the evidence for gods isn’t observational, it is axiomatic. For Keiths, every conceivable observation refutes the Christian (biblical) god, and for colewd every conceivable observation is prima facie proof of the existence of the god to which he attributes every conceivable observation!
I think colewd runs into difficulties as soon as he starts constraining his god to have a specific past, specific goals and preferences, and exercises specific powers. Then it is not hard to show that the world as we know it bears no feasible resemblance to the world colewd’s god would create or maintain. The world is an exact match with the creation of the god I would prefer; there would be no contradictions or inconsistencies…but there’d be no need for such a god in the first place!
I am often amused by the complex, intricate superstructure of religious tenets avowed by the thousands of sects of Christians – all of which rest firmly on a few bald axioms – assertions (like the existence of gods) presumed true from the start and not subject to doubt or open to debate or discussion.
(Incidentally, this is why Raphael Lataster says that the debate over whether Jesus existed as a human is necessarily a debate among atheists. It’s simply not possible for a Christian to enter this debate in good faith, and willing to entertain the notion that Jesus was either a fiction (Mark) or purely celestial (Paul). If indeed Jesus is a fictional character, they’d have to jettison an entire lifetime of belief and supplication.)
Flint:
I don’t make that assumption, as it would be an obvious example of circular reasoning. My atheism is a conclusion, not an assumption.
Proof by contradiction not only works fine in axiomatic systems, it actually works best in them. After all, proof by contradiction is one of the most powerful tools in mathematics, and math is based on axioms, right?
Also, evidence for gods can be observational. Think of the fine-tuning argument. You can debate whether that argument succeeds, but it’s clear that the argument is at least strengthened by our observations of the constants of nature and their effects.
Every conceivable observation? Gas was five cents lower at the pump today, therefore the Christian God doesn’t exist?
And conforms to certain scriptures, especially if those scriptures aren’t self-consistent.
And divine hiddenness problems, like the one we’ve been discussing, are not what you’d expect to see if the perfectly loving Christian God existed and desired that everyone be saved.
I disagree with Lataster. Christians can entertain the possibility that Jesus was fictional for the sake of argument despite not believing it, just as I, an atheist, can assume the existence of the Christian God for the sake of argument despite believing that there is no such God. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing in this thread.
My problem is that, even as a child, when presented with religious concepts (through the lens of the Church of England, failing empire but still morally superior), I was entirely unconvinced by the people promoting them. I never met a religiously inclined authority figure that I didn’t find at least mildly repellent. I emphasize – the people rather than the ideas. But, though controllable, it is an emotional reaction, now I think of it, tending to a form of racism. I’m not proud of it.
I have adopted Kantian Naturalist’s terminology of apatheist. I don’t worry what others believe per se (so long as they don’t intend to impose their ideas on others) but I still have a mild visceral reaction on encountering them in person or in print.
The religious stories? The ones I’ve encountered so far are so clearly human invention that there is nothing to discuss. But atheism as a logical position is no more evidence-based than belief in “something else, something after, this can’t be all there is”. None of this is ultimately decidable.
Yes, you seem quite driven. Is the goal to save religious people from themselves?
Alan:
Lol. This is The Skeptical Zone. You’ll get the hang of it one of these days.
Yes, you seem quite driven. Is the goal to save religious people from themselves?
You offer that as if it explains something. Anyone else wonder why keiths is so keen to demolish logic when the motives are emotionally based. I see little to differentiate keiths style from proselytism.
How will Mongolians profit, for example? More time for horse riding?