- Either something came from nothing or something was always here. As a Christian, I choose the second of these completely absurd, exhaustive possibilities. But God existing forever is genuinely ridiculous; I have no idea how that could possibly be the case.
- Sometimes I’ve been really submitted to God. Other times I’ve been totally faithless and unrepentant; worse than backslidden. Does it really matter which of those times I die in? Is my eternal fate really resting on the fact that I didn’t get hit by a bus in my best year? That seems ridiculous. Alternatively, do I only really have to have one moment of genuine submission? Then, what of ‘finishing the race’? And couldn’t anyone have just a moment of anything?
- I have a hunch that a) free will exists, and b) it should exist. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the faculty of free will could entail. I can’t properly conceive of something that is sufficiently independent of circumstantial causalities, without producing something problematically close to randomness or arbitrariness. I do not know what it would mean for me, or God, or anyone, to freely choose to do something.
- Unless God creates omniscient beings, there is always a subset of information which his creations do not have access to. It is always at least possible that this subset contains the data “everything the creations believe is a lie”. As a result, non-omniscient beings can always rationally doubt everything, and therefore faith is their necessary condition. I spoke about this at Tyndale in Cambridge once, calling it the “reiterative creation problem”. But a lack of certainty, as a permanent condition, seems an evil. So, we must become omniscient if eternity is good. I do not understand which part of this argument goes wrong; I also do not understand how God rendering us omniscient is viable, and particularly, if it is, why we aren’t already so.
- Existing is always necessarily non-consensual, for God and for anything He makes. Is this problematic or is consent just not a big deal?
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