no. 534

The Daily Aporia

belief & religion

battleground god

can your beliefs about god survive a walk across logical terrain?

There are no right answers here, and you will not be told what to believe. The aim is narrower and stranger: to see whether the things you already believe sit comfortably together. Mark each statement true or false. If two of your answers cannot both be reasonable at once, you have "bitten a bullet", and we will show you exactly where.

  1. 01

    It can be rational to believe something on faith alone, with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

  2. 02

    One should never believe anything on insufficient evidence.

    the principle famously pressed by W. K. Clifford.

  3. 03

    Belief in the Loch Ness monster is irrational so long as there is no evidence in its favour.

  4. 04

    Belief in God can be perfectly rational even if there is no evidence in its favour.

  5. 05

    The sheer scale of apparently pointless suffering is real evidence against an all-powerful, all-loving God.

  6. 06

    No possible observation could ever count as evidence against the existence of God.

  7. 07

    A being worthy of the name God must be able to do absolutely anything at all.

  8. 08

    God could create a stone so heavy that God could not lift it.

  9. 09

    An act is wrong purely because God forbids it; had God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good.

  10. 10

    Torturing the innocent for amusement is wrong in itself, and would stay wrong whatever God commanded.

  11. 11

    Atheism is, in the end, just as much a matter of faith as belief in God.

further reading

← back to all experiments