This question does have a philosophical dimension, in so far as it forces us to confront the question in what sense belief is or can be voluntary: Can you simply choose to believe something absent a decent reason to do so? Many philosophers would say that you cannot, that belief is not really voluntary in that sense. But there are a number of other points worth making here, too, since much confusion seems to exist on this score: I don't myself know what is supposed to be meant by "the Christian God". Presumably, one means God as understood by Christianity, but there is no such thing. Christianity is a many-faceted and incredibly diverse collection of faiths and modes of living, and there are untold conceptions of God even within Catholicism (despite the repressive efforts of the church hierarchy). That so many people think that belief in God is somehow in conflict with the modern world is testament to the influence, especially in the United States, of one particular brand of religion,...

The standard sort of response to this question is that God does not will evil. There has been a fair amount of discussion of this in connection with question 1 and question 80 . That said, it's another question whether one finds the resulting position at all plausible.

It's also worth saying that, although the Biblical accounts can be read in very different ways, and the Gospel accounts themselves conflict, all the Synoptics (Matthew 26:57-67, Mark 14:53-63, and Luke 22:66-71) present the Jewish authorities as rather upset with Jesus for claiming to be the Messiah and, indeed, as calling for his execution on those grounds. John presents the story rather differently, but agrees on this broad point. So it's not obvious Jesus himself was uniformly praised, and quite independently of the question I'll discuss next, it's clear enough that he was not. Self-proclaimed Messiahs were pretty common in those days, and they generally came in for rough treatment. There is quite a lot of controversy among scholars about exactly what role the Jewish authorities might have played in Jesus's arrest and execution, but the general view is that they probably played less of a role than the Gospels make it appear they did. Indeed, the remark in John 18:14, that Caiaphas had suggested ...

I guess I find the question strange, because I don't think of beliefs as "serving purposes". One might simply say that, if God exists, then the belief that God exists is true, and that's quite good enough. Then again, there is an interesting question what "belief in" something is. Zoltan Gendler Szabo has written a paper "Believing in Things" on this question.

It's also not clear why, if your mind were "cloned" in this way, the resulting creature would be you . If your thoughts and memories can be transferred in this way to another body, then they could presumably be so transferred while you remained as you are. That other person is not, I take it, you, so why should that person be you if your thoughts etc are so transferred but your current body is destroyed? This kind of puzzle has been much discussed in the literature on personal identity. See Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons for a start on it.

Just to echo Joe and Alex, it's not at all clear to me why the following isn't a coherent possibility. Suppose that, for convenience, we divide time into equal intervals, says, seconds, and let's suppose that time is infinte in both directions. (That may be false, as a matter of physical fact, but it's not an incoherent supposition, so far as I can see.) Let's suppose that at each time t n there exists exactly one object, n , which has but one purpose in life: to bring into existence the object n +1 which will exist for the next second. That's definitely a boring universe, but, as I said, it doesn't seem incoherent, and in it each thing has a cause. If our universe is temporally infinite in both directions, then maybe things are similar in it. If I remember correctly, Aquinas, who (as Alex implied) gave a version of this argument as one of his "Five Ways", considers this kind of reply. His answer is that the whose series of things needs a cause for its existence, but it's hard to...

There's another distinction that needs to be made here and that is relevant to the objection to explanation (1): We need to distinguishdifferent sorts of necessity. Nowadays, most philosophers and logicianswould agree that there is nothing whose existence is logically necessary, even the objects of mathematics, although their existence is mathematically and even metaphysically necessary. Even God's existence would not be regarded as logically necessary, even by philosophers who accept God's existence. Perhaps we should regard it as agreed, then, that, if God exists, God exists by metaphysical necessity. If so, then there is no contradiction in holding that it is logically possible that God should have existed. Whether it is consistent to hold that it is metaphysically possible that God should have existed depends upon whether one thinks the so-called Brouweresche axiom of modal logic holds for metaphysical necessity. (Axiom B says that, if it is possible that it is necessary that A,...

There are many simple creatures that are sensitive to light: Theywill move toward it or away from it. I believe there are some suchcreatures that are single-celled. In any event, such creatures are so simple that it's hard to think of them as being "conscious" at all, andbiologists can tell a very convincing story of why these creaturesbehave as they do. The explanation rests upon the fact that there somechemicals that react to light: They are "photo-sensitive". There areother, slightly less simple creatures that have very primitive sorts of"eyes" that are simiilarly sensitive to light, but the reaction ofthese creatures to light is more complex, because these creatures haveprimitive nervous systems. And between those creatures and cats, birds,fish, and human beings are all kinds of other creatures with "eyes" ofvarying complexities. It is, perhaps, hard to imagine how exactlyorgans with the complexity of eyes evolved—for one thing, the time scale is immense—but one can see in thedifferences among...

There are a few distinctions we need to make before we can addressthis question. The work we need to do to make these distinctions is anice example of how philosophy can help us be clearer about whatquestion we're asking. Ask first: Could π have been a different number? Most philosophers today would answer that it could nothave been, just as Richard Nixon could not have been someone other thanRichard Nixon. The expression "π" is a name of a certain number, andthat number is whatever number it is; it could not have beena different number. That this is the right thing to say is somethingthat has been widely appreciated only for about the last thirty yearsor so, as a result of groundbreaking work by Saul Kripke. If that is right, then God could not have madeπ anything other than π, for then π would have been something otherthan π, which it could not have been. That'sprobably not the intended question, though. Rather, the intendedquestion was probably: Could God have made it the case...

This is a version of an old problem, one discussed endlessly by theologians. In its simplest form, it goes like this: Can God make a rock both big and small? Obviously not. So God isn't omnipotent. If you think that's a cheat, I'm with you. It's not possible for there to be a rock that is both big and small, so it's not limit on God's power that God can't make a rock like that. We have to be more careful in how we understand omnipotence. It's a delicate question how we should understand it, but a first stab might be: A being is omnipotent if, whenever it is possible that p, that being can bring about that p. The puzzle your roommate presents you is of this same form. If Fred is omnipotent, then it simply isn't possible for a rock to be so big that Fred can't lift it. So it's no limit on Fred's power that he can't create a rock that big. Of course, maybe Fred isn't omnipotent, and maybe it's not even possible for there to be a being that is omnipotent. But the argument your roommate offered does...