Journey to Hell [Project 2021 - 10]

This post is part 2 of my full reply and covers 6 things 'the issue of evil', 'True Biblical Prophecy', 'Misunderstandings Over the Bible', 'Why God Cares About us', 'Faith is not blind', 'The Bible is Meant to be True', 'Responding to Hell Isn't Real '

The Issue of Evil:

In terms of the logical contradiction you bring up, I would again challenge your premise on it. Yes, God wants us to love him. But true love can only exist if you have the true choice to do so.  There's a reoccurring idea in fantasy of the 'love potion'. At first it seems like a wonderful idea, get whatever man or woman you want, and they will unconditionally fall in love with you. But the more you think about, it the more horrifying it becomes. They are being forced against their will and true desires to love someone. That 'love' isn't truly love at all. For that reason, God lets you choose to walk away from him. 

• My girlfriend and I recently broke up, I'd love to still be with her, but I can't force her to be with me, that's wrong. Forcing someone into something isn't love at all.

That gets me around to your bit about free will and sin. There's an old philosophical problem concerning gains vs a heap sand. Basically, there's no distinguishing mark between when you start counting the number of grains of sand and when it becomes a heap of sand. If we consider 1,000,000 grains of sand to be a heap, then take one away so we have 999,999 grains, it wouldn't make a difference and we would still call it a heap. A similar thing exists with the problem of evil. Let's say that God stops 1% of all evil that would have happened tomorrow, we'd probably say that's too much evil still occurring. Let's say God stops another 1% the next day, and the next. At what point would we consider the amount of evil to be tolerable? Either we'd end up in a place where we can make no choices for ourselves since God doesn't let us, or some evil would have to be allowed. Furthermore, whose to say that the amount of evil currently in the world isn't already that tolerable amount? This connect back into the love potion idea I was talking about earlier. We have the free will to choose our paths, to do good or to do evil. There's no point in having the choice to do evil if we cannot actually do it. Furthermore, what if one act of evil prevents a future far eviler act? For example, if WW2 didn't happen when it did, nuclear weapons would have been utilized in such a conflict without a true understanding of the consequences. WW2 was bad enough; I'd hate to imagine how much more destructive it would have been if the Nazi's and USSR had nukes at the ready.

• I recently went through the Book of Job with some of my friends. In it, God gives an answer to why bad things happen. His answer is that the world is more complex than we can comprehend. We weren't there when the world was formed, we didn't set its bounties nor its qualities. God was and did establish those things. God then proceeds to take Job on a tour of the sciences and details tons of knowledge about the world and the universe.  Things that all are correct and some of it we have only been able to confirm recently. For example, in Job 38:31 God asks Job if he has the ability to loosen Orians belt. That is a reference to the constellation, and when we look at the outer two stars of the belt, they are drifting apart. We couldn't tell that scientifically until the 19th century and there's no way ancient people could have figured it out earlier. They would have to be told by someone (God) who does have that knowledge since he set that in motion.

Evil also shows us how broken we are as a species. The depths of human depravity are a nightmare, but it also shows how much we need hope and a Saviour. That's even before we get into the moral argument and how evil can only be defined on objective terms (I'll touch on that later).

I also felt it worth mentioning that God did not create evil or suffering. Those are a result of our rebellion against God and disobedience towards his commands. While God is not the author of evil, sin, or suffering, he is able to use even the most difficult and painful situations for good. "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose". Romans 8:28, ESV.

Hell is not "hypocrisy" as you mentioned, it is your choice to deny God and choosing not to let Jesus take away your sins by accepting him as your lord and Saviour. If you don't want to be with God, him forcing you to be with him in the afterlife would be hell to you. You would be miserable, and your free will would have been ignored or denied. Imagine breaking up with someone you never want to see again, then they kidnap you and force you to be with them the rest of your days. It doesn't matter how wonderful those days maybe, it maybe your dream vacation every day. But you would not be happy as you are being forced into it with someone you do not love. 

To end this section, I want to address what you mentioned in your TL:DR of 'an omniscient omnipotent being is ultimately partly responsible for everything'. This line of argument completely overlooks the aspect of free will. We have the ability to make choices that impact us and others. While God is ultimately sovereign, he chose to give us that gift of free will, which means we are responsible for our actions and the consequences. There is also a difference between allowing something to happen and causing it to happen. Responsibility only exists with causality. 

• Consider this example, if I am trying to talk a guy who is considering suicide by jumping off of a bridge, and he jumps. I may have allowed that to happen (I could have tried to grab him and pull him away or something). However, you could not claim that I have responsibility for the fact he jumped since he made that choice on his own. I could have even been the one who constructed the bridge, who dug the valley that he fell to his death in. But you still could not claim I was responsible for the man jumping from it (otherwise everyone who's built a bridge would be in big trouble). We have free will and God respects that. So, if we want to do something stupid, dangerous, sinful, evil, he allows us to do that for the reasons I've outlined in this section. That being said, we cannot blame God or cast responsibility on him as it was our choice to do those things. It was our choice, so we bare responsibility.

True Biblical Prophecy:

Prophecy is something very specific (history given in advance) and not just anyone can claim to be a prophet. Deuteronomy 18 lays out the rules, someone claiming to be a prophet is not to be trusted unless they have prophecy that has come true. Until prophecy comes to pass, we don't take that person seriously. If they do prophecy something that doesn't come to pass, or ends up being false, that person is a false prophet "...you need not be afraid of him" (Deuteronomy 18:22, ESV). To be a prophet you need to have a 100% success rate, which is only possible if you have that foreknowledge given by God. The Bible has well over 1,000 prophecies, ~300 that were related to and fulfilled by Jesus. Every prophecy has either been fulfilled or is still waiting to be fulfilled (see the Revelation Of John). There is no prophecy in the Bible that ended up not happening. These aren't vague prophecies either, for example, it was prophesied that Jesus would be crucified, this prediction came before crucifixion was even invented and confirmable by the Dead Sea Scrolls (which predate Jesus), see Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. In Daniel 11 hundreds of years of future wars are predicted and play out in exactly the way he prophesized.

Furthermore, new prophecy must be consistent with the Bible. God is all knowing, he's not going to have a prophet make a claim in his name, wait thousands of years, then tell you something different or opposite. This is one of the major ways we rule out false prophets. As Galatians 1 points out, there is only one Gospel. The Revelation of John goes further and says that we cannot add or take away from the Bible.  

So sure, you can claim to have a conversation with God over coffee. But unless you are able to back that up by making a specific and verifiable claim about the future (like Daniel 11) no one will believe you about that. And since you are saying God told you something that completely contradicts the Bible, you would be labeled as a false prophet always.

Funny enough, your objection to prophecy shows precisely why the Bible has these rules are in place. If you are going to object to the idea of prophecy and prophets, then you need to actually deal with the Biblical definition of these things. Otherwise, you end up with what is called a 'strawman' where you create a weak position to knock it down rather than dealing with the actual position. You've done that a lot in your response, this just so happens to be the most egregious of them.

Misunderstandings Over the Bible:

Misunderstandings do exist, healthy debates exist over what specific parts of the Bible mean. Yes, God is beyond our comprehension in some ways. What I do for a living is beyond the comprehension of my dog. That doesn't mean I somehow don't exist and what I do for a living is a logical contradiction. There is a less of a difference between my dog and me, and God and me. That's why we have the Bible, it is God explaining to us a number of things. How to live good lives, how to be better people, how to worship, and why we should have faith. Just because misunderstandings exist doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand. Since every claim it makes that can be verified is, we can trust what it says about everything else. If you choose not to believe in 'Near Death Experiences', that's fine. Since the Bible is accurate in everything else we can test, we can have faith that is it true when it talks about Heaven and about Hell.

Why God Cares About us:

God cares about us since we are his creation, and we are created in his image. We are not God; we are not on his level in any capacity. Technically we are beneath him, yet Jesus still was a servant to us and washed our feet. Jesus led by example, and we are following what he did. The ideas of being 'above' or 'beneath' something doesn't directly correlate to whether you care about it or not. You can pick what you care about. God chooses to pick us, to love us (love is ultimately a choice). Just because you don't understand why God does something doesn't invalidate it. My dog doesn't understand me, does not mean I don't exist.

The devil rebelled against God and failed. As a result, he hurts people as a way of trying to hurt God. One common trope in storytelling is when the bad guy goes after the hero's family as a way of hurting him or her. I like to think of it like that. If the devil can keep us from God he will, if he can make our lives miserable through sin or distractions he will. If he can try to hurt God through hurting us, he will.

God does care about what you believe, just like me, he created you too. And you certainly have some interest in the subject, I don't know why else you'd have a long form essay conversations with a complete stranger over the internet. Everyone's testimony starts somewhere, everyone's journey to faith has a point where they weren't in faith. There are millions and millions of people who had doubts and questions like you, but they came to faith in Christ in-spite of that.

Faith is Not Blind:

Faith is not blind (saying so is actually a personal pet peeve of mine). Faith is trusting in what you have reason to believe is true.  Or putting it another way, faith is trust based on knowledge founded in evidence. That is the Biblical definition of faith, for example, consider John 20:30-31 "Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name". In that passage, John clearly states that belief is built on evidence, "...written so that you may believe...". There is a mountain of evidence to support Christianity. From the archeological evidence, the verifiable examples of history given in advance (see the dead sea scrolls and what they said about Jesus), the philosophical arguments, the lives still being changed by Christ today, and so on. You can claim the evidence is inadequate for you, but you can't claim it doesn't exist, nor can you claim that faith is blind.

The Bible is Meant to be True:

Christianity is meant to be correct. Jesus claimed to be 'the way, the truth, and the life' (John 14:6). There's no purpose in claiming to be true if you do not also indent to be right. I agree, we should focus on doing good, but the concepts of "Good "and "Evil" must be rooted in something. That's the moral argument I mentioned earlier in my response. Good and Evil have to be defined in some objective way otherwise they become meaningless. People have tried to define Good and Evil on their own terms and it has led to some of the greatest atrocities in history. When we look at the last century, we see a lot of atheist regimes enacting what they thought was 'good' and what was punishing 'evil'. We see Hitler in Nazi Germany murder millions, we saw Stalin in the USSR murder millions, we saw Mao in China murder millions too. It's estimated that the atheist regimes murdered between 90 million and 100 million people because they thought it was 'good' and 'right'. The concepts of good and evil can only be justified when they are linked to an objective level, and are unchanging. The only way to do that is through religion. Otherwise, they become loose and flimsy concepts where anything can be argued as 'good' or 'evil'. Morality itself would become nothing more than an opinion.

• Note: I am not saying that atheists cannot be moral people. I'm saying that they cannot justify it. For example, most people can use a smart phone, but very few people understand how the operating system (OS) that runs the phone works. You can use mortality, but you can't justify it. When you try to make up your own definition of morality, you end up with something disconnected from the truth. That's how we get Hitler, Mao, and Stalin believing what they did was 'good' and not 'evil'.

Responding to 'Hell Isn't Real'

Lastly, in your response you have claimed 1) That the afterlife is a black box and we really don't know what happens and 2) Hell doesn't exist. You can't believe in both of those things. You cannot both claim to know and that it cannot be known. If you want to play an agonistic card and claim that we 'don't know' that's one thing and I would argue the evidence points to us knowing. However, claiming that 'Hell Doesn't Exist' is a legitimate blind faith claim since you don't have any evidence to support it.

Closing:

As I closed with last time, I'm not forcing you to do anything, you have free will and can make a choice for yourself. All I'm asking you to do is consider the evidence that does exist.

If you are still reading this essay of a response, I very much appreciate it. I'm willing to answer any questions you have on this.

I'll continue praying for you!

God Bless!