God looks a lot like no God

We are willing to claim things don’t exist. I don’t mean atheists; I mean thinkers in general. Do you believe in unicorns, Santa, leprechauns, the tooth fairy or the Flying Spaghetti monster? I know they’re cliché examples, but that is intentional: I want you to realise these arguments aren’t new, but apologists have been ignoring…

Book excerpt: Knowing a Good God

This says of God that It is, at a most polite evaluation, completely asympathetic. There is no suggestion from the behaviour of species or the criteria of survival that God sympathises with our experience in this life.

A Non-intervening God and The Problem of Suffering

Epicurus asked if God physically can stop suffering and whether He emotionally wants to. If God can stop suffering, clearly He doesn’t want to; if God wants to stop suffering, clearly He can’t. Else, if He can stop it and wants to, where is it coming from? But this problem removes particular definitions of God:…

Does God Value our Freewill?

In my last post I explored the idea that it made sense humans would be free to act negatively towards each other, if God cares about our freewill. The main idea was that if you act on me and I will you not to then we live in a moment where you violate my will and…

Freewill and human moral evils

Human moral evils1 are things intentionally done by people who cause suffering. If a god capable of altering our will prioritises our freedom to commit these evils over our wellbeing, such evils—like child abuse—must be fostered so long some people will to do it2. Alternatively, human moral evils are part of a god’s toolkit for…

Euthanasia: rights and responsibilities

The argument around euthanasia is a complicated one, and I want to add a new element to it. The current questions are about whether one has the right to choose to take a life if it is their own; whether another person has the right to take the life of a consenting person; when consent…

Follow-up on ‘Morally Sufficient Reason?’

In an earlier post I argued that the oft-used “morally sufficient reason” rebuttal to the problems of suffering and the hidden God is a bad rebuttal. The way these discussions tend to go is summarised below, starting with the problem of suffering: Your definition of a God is incompatible with all the suffering we see.…

Happy and Ignorant or Miserable and Knowledgeable

In my last post I said I would choose happiness and ignorance over misery and knowledge, if somehow those were my options, almost without hesitation. But it wasn’t without hesitation. I took many years to overcome my sense of pride that I associate with knowledge and to recognise the true bliss of just being happy.…