how do we know God is good?

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A basic assumption for theodicy is the idea that God is good, why should we assume that? I offer three reasons

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Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said…
the problem may be the post is on the other blog,
6/06/2020 12:46:00 PM
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The early Christians Did not believe in adoptionism

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Pixie said: "The early Christians believed Jesus was adopted as God's son, not born that way (though Paul believed that happened at the resurrection). His childhood was relatively normal, born to two Jewish parents, the oldest of four brothers and some sisters too." [1] There is no historical basis for that belief.There is no document that says  this.  Adiptionism arises in the second century there is no recognized bastion of that view in the first century. [2] The only basis anyone has is gained by interpreting passages in Mark and written by Paul to seem to take an adoptionist view. [3] Of course they have to ignore the testimony of the church in all it's many facets. It is not hard to imagine that before the creeds and the controversies that shaped Trinitarian doctrine the average Christian probably did understand something like an adotionist view. That does not mean that the Gospel of Mark  or Paul taught this view. There is no passage in Mar...
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Was Paul a Liar when He quotes Jesus in Acts 20:35?

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One of the most popular posts on the CADRE Comments site is a short piece I wrote in February 2006 entitled Where did Jesus say, “It is better to give than receive”? This single post usually receives between 100 and 300 views each month. Since I first posted it, almost none of the more than 2000 visitors have posted a comment…until now. Anonymous (*sigh*) wrote: Unfortunately, the Gospels do not report that Jesus ever said this expression. Only Paul, who never met Jesus at all, says that Jesus said these words. But Paul is not recorded anywhere in the Gospels as being a direct witness to anything Jesus said or did before the resurrection. In other words, Paul either made this up or is reporting what he heard from someone else. This is called hearsay. But is Paul to be trusted? No he has been caught lying many times. For example, he claimed Christ abolished the Law (Romans 6:14, 7:4, Ephesians 2:15-16). Yet the Gospels say that Christ did not come to abolish the law at all (Matt...
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Ignatius' Reliance on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians And More

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On the Prior Probability of the Resurrection

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Recently a friend on Facebook argued that Christians have no business declaring the Resurrection of Jesus to be the most probable ( a posteriori ) explanation for the relevant facts, since they are unable to first pin down the prior probability of the Resurrection independent of those facts. I think that's a reasonable enough objection and deserves a reply. After all, posterior probability by definition is a function of both likelihood on the evidence and prior probability. [1] Clearly, then, one cannot determine posterior probability without some idea of the prior.   My friend went on to say that the prior probability of a hypothesis is typically established as a ratio of previous instances of the event and total opportunities for the event to have occurred: "Normally we determine the probability of X by how many occasions of X we have seen out of how many opportunities for X there have been. Is the resurrection of Jesus some kind of exception?" This amounts t...
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More evidence for the Historical Truth of David and Goliath

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The Last Superstition: Atheism

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The Bogus Gandhi Quote

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I first made this post in 2012, and since then I've made a sort of mini-career out of tracking down bogus quotes like this one (including a video version below). It's a sort of fun microcosm of the way information is mishandled in the Information Age. ** I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mahatma Gandhi A Christian can probably expect to get this quote thrown at them at least once in their lifetime, and waved in their face many more. I had it put to me recently, but my experience with this sort of thing immediately led me to wonder -- is it real? The evidence at this point seems to be no. The first signal of a problem was that anywhere I found it, no source was given. That's often a sign that something is being passed around uncritically. Whether online sources or books, no one seemed to have a source for this quote. A second warning was that the quote has been given more than one context. As ...
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Jesus in the Talmud part 1

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Resurrection harmony

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The purpose of this argument is merely to establish that the events described in the four canonical Gospel resurrection accounts can be construed as a coherent event. Atheists are always harping on the many differences in the accounts. They seem to feel that these amount to insurmountable contradictions, marking a totally contradictory story. But I will argue that we can pull together the events described in all four Gospels to create a unified harmony which shows that there was a single coherent event taking place.This may not mean that call differences vanish away, but most of them can be explained by the process of eye witness testimony and story telling based upon the accounts of eye witnesses. There may be a couple of loose ends, but I will argue that these are not important when one considers the over all agreement and ensuing harmony, (for harmony table click here) * my model: (1) women go to tomb find stone moved, immediately  they suspect the Romans or Sa...
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The True Christian Concept of The Supernatural

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rose window Notre Dame, Paris The New atheists constantly mock the SN as though they know what it is. When they discuss it they include anything not naturalistic. The modern conception is that SN is everything from Bigfoot to the resurrection, include  ghosts, UFOs and Psychic Powers. It never occurs to them Christians were using the term before the modern concept of naturalism so it can't just mean everything that's not naturalistic. Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. He is also an apologist for atheism. Coyne says something more interesting than than Dawkins does, however, he says that SN could be studied by science. [1] Although, I'm sure Dawkins probably agrees with his reasoning. If SN could not be so studied it would be unreasonable to fault the notion for not having scientific evidence. Coyne asserts that modern science's tendency to set religion aside as belonging to a different order of reality (magisteria) thus being...
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