Heaven and Hell are commonly presented as either the benefit or the consequence of how a person responds to God. It’s as if people think that the whole point of religion is to get people into Heaven and to keep them out of Hell. From this “religious” perspective, Heaven is Ultimate Bliss, Paradise, Perfect Beauty – while Hell is Fire, Eternal Punishment, Anguish, Torment, and The Devil’s Domain.
Can the claims of the Bible be logically sustained and even proved? We examine the five best (and most popular and widely used) objections to the existence of God.
It was C.S. Lewis who said – “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” Human experience tends to confirm Lewis’s assessment. We are spiritual beings who are intuitively supernatural. Atheists object to this assessment though. They assert that there is nothing supernatural and that the uninformed are not being spiritual but rather “superstitious”. But when Christians, who claim to be spiritual, behave superstitiously and call it “revival”, we have to think that’s an odd Gospel, or perhaps a “Todd Gospel”…
This is the question I was recently asked to address to a gathering of year 9 school students. Before I could address this question though, I needed to share some insights into how we generally answer such objections to Christianity. Before we answer a question like this we have to identify the propositions within the question. This particular question has two propositions- since it assumes something about God, and something about the world in which we live.
For a question to be reasonable its propositions must be true. For example, a question like, “Why do all criminals chew gum?” assumes that all criminals chew gum. Another example might be “If God created everything, who created God?” This question assumes that everything (including God) has been created- when logic demands that something must be eternal (it has always existed) since it is illogical that something could spring from nothing.