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.
- 01
It can be rational to believe something on faith alone, with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
- 02
One should never believe anything on insufficient evidence.
the principle famously pressed by W. K. Clifford.
- 03
Belief in the Loch Ness monster is irrational so long as there is no evidence in its favour.
- 04
Belief in God can be perfectly rational even if there is no evidence in its favour.
- 05
The sheer scale of apparently pointless suffering is real evidence against an all-powerful, all-loving God.
- 06
No possible observation could ever count as evidence against the existence of God.
- 07
A being worthy of the name God must be able to do absolutely anything at all.
- 08
God could create a stone so heavy that God could not lift it.
- 09
An act is wrong purely because God forbids it; had God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good.
- 10
Torturing the innocent for amusement is wrong in itself, and would stay wrong whatever God commanded.
- 11
Atheism is, in the end, just as much a matter of faith as belief in God.
further reading
- the ethics of belief stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- the ethics of belief wikipedia