Does God Tempt People to Evil?

According to James 1:13, “Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one.” Skeptics, aiming to disprove the Bible, may reply that God certainly does tempt people to do evil, and his actions during the Israelite's exodus from Egypt is proof of that. Let My People Go!   In Exodus 3-4 God calls Moses from his life as a fugitive in Midian and tells him to return to Egypt in order to lead the Israelites to... Read More

Cosmology and Creation: Contrasting Notions

NOTE: Yesterday we shared a guest post on cosmology from one of our top non-theistic commenters, Paul Rimmer. Today, we're posting a response from Fr. Andrew Pinsent, Research Director at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.     As a Catholic priest, and former particle physicist at CERN, I thank Strange Notions for the opportunity to respond to Paul Rimmer’s article on the Big Bang. For those hoping for instant controversy, I am sorry to have to... Read More

Answering Two Objections to Aquinas

I'd like to share an excerpt from my new book Answering Atheism, which answers two common objections to Thomas Aquinas’s first way of proving the existence of God. This way is usually called the argument from motion. Objection #1: What moved God?   The “new atheists,” like Richard Dawkins, sometimes make a caricature of Aquinas and claim he is arguing that, “Everything needs a cause. Therefore, there had to be a first cause called God. God is the exception and... Read More

Is God Pro-Life or Pro-Death?

This is the second in a series of posts on the “dark passages” of the Bible. These are texts which understandably raise the eyebrows of both nonbelievers and believers who encounter them and say, “How can that be in the Bible if it is God’s own word?” In my previous post I took up the problem of violent Old Testament passages in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s claim that violence is contrary to God’s nature. My book Dark Passages of the Bible likewise deals with this and various... Read More

Will We Have Free Will in Heaven?

Will we have free will in heaven? If so, does that mean we might sin and fall again? If not, what kind of free will would we have there? And if God can harmonize our free will and sinlessness in heaven, why doesn't he do so in this life? Here are some thoughts . . .   A Robot "Loves" Me. Big Deal. NOTE: This is part of a series on the problem of evil. Click here to read the previous posts in the series. In a previous post, we looked at a common answer to the problem of evil--that God... Read More

Skeptic Benjamin Radford on the Fátima Miracle

Paranormal investigator Benjamin Radford has written a piece for Live Science on the The Lady of Fátima & the Miracle of the Sun. Mr. Radford is the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and a Research Fellow with the non-profit educational organization the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Mr. Radford answers the question: What really happened at Fátima?   On October 13, 1917, between 30,000 to 100,000 people gathered near... Read More

Would God Create a Gigantic Universe?

Some critics claim that if God existed, then the universe would not be 13.7 billion years old or be 93 billion light years across as it is currently. Hasn’t science shown that this immense universe was not created for us but that we are an inconsequential part of an uncreated universe? The problem with this argument is that science can show us only the universe’s dimensions; it cannot reveal any meaning or lack of meaning inherent in those dimensions. In response to this argument,... Read More

Why Does God Allow Sin and Suffering?

The most perplexing problem in apologetics is the problem of evil: Why would an all-good, all-powerful God allow evil to exist? There is a real mystery here, and we can only give partial answers. Here are some of mine . . .   Two Kinds of Evil We need to recognize that there is more than one kind of evil. When we use the word "evil," we often mean moral evil (sin), but historically it was frequently used for other things, such as suffering. These two forms of evil are linked: It... Read More

No One Sees God

Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of You and, by myself, I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You. If I imagine You, I am mistaken. If I understand You, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy. The darkness is enough. - Thomas Merton If God exists, why doesn't he make it more obvious? Why doesn't he stop more evil, answer more prayers, or perform a steady stream of miracles - or better yet, all of the above? Why all the darkness and silence,... Read More

Being, Miracles, and God: Answering a Reasonable Atheist

In the course of a discussion on my personal blog about the existence of God and of the miraculous, an unbelieving reader (who strikes me as open to reasonable discussion) wrote me to say: "All I’m saying is that people everywhere demonstrate a powerful desire to believe that there is intervention in the material universe from outside the material universe." Except that’s not true.  Lots of people also demonstrate a powerful desire to believe there is no intervention in the material... Read More

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