Apologetics: The Christian Dilemma (That Isn’t a Dilemma at All.)
As I’ve been trying to branch out more into other topics on my YouTube channel, one of the videos I looked at to respond to was some dude laying out what he believes is a dilemma that disproves the existence of God. In the 54 second video, he says that God can’t exist because the Bible claims that God is All-Loving and All-Powerful. But if God allows people to go to Hell and won’t stop them, then He can’t be All-Loving; and if He can’t stop people from going to Hell, then He can’t be All-Powerful. This person also brought up the argument that this can’t be solved via free will since the choice between Heaven and Hell isn’t a fair choice, and that God still can’t be All-Loving because he doesn’t give a second chance to get out of Hell.
However, this isn’t a dilemma that disproves God’s existence, and here’s why.
To start, we need to clear up what Hell is and how free will ties into the equation. Hell is a place of eternal torment and separation from God. Going there is the punishment for a lifetime of breaking God’s rules and continuously rejecting Him. Whenever we sin or willfully reject God, we’re basically saying, “I don’t need you. I can do my own thing.” Thus, going to Hell is the logical end point of that. It’s God giving you what you want after you spent a lifetime ignoring the evidence for Him, wishing He’d go away, and running off to do your own thing.
Because of this, free will is not negated. Had God created us to serve Him always and given us no choice in the matter, that would have been coercion. Instead, because He loves us, He gave us the choice: follow Him and stick with Him or run away from Him and be separated from Him in the end. Thus, using the analogy of an abusive boyfriend saying, “Love me or get beat up,” doesn’t work, since God allows you to get what you want in the end.
With that out of the way, we can address the dilemma. This entire argument is based on the idea that we don’t have free will with God. However, if there is free will, then both parts of the argument fall flat. The claim that God can’t be All-Loving if He won’t stop people from going to Hell collapses since if He were to forcibly stop someone from going to Hell, then He would be infringing on their freedom to choose, making Him unloving and evil. Sure, they would be saved from Hell, but it would be under means of coercion.
Additionally, this argument collapses even further since God gives us a myriad of reasons to believe in Him. Often, He puts people and events in our lives to call us back to Him. It’s our choice if we’ll acknowledge those wake-up calls and escape Hell by doing what the Bible says and putting our faith in Christ, or if we’ll continue to ignore them. We have plenty of chances to make that decision, but our chances end when we die.
On the other half of the dilemma, we have the idea that if God can’t stop us from going to Hell, then He isn’t All-Powerful. This half banks on a misunderstanding of God’s character, namely the idea that because He’s All-Powerful, then He can do literally anything. What it fails to understand is that God, though All-Powerful, only does things according to His character, which is just and good. And since He’s All-Loving, while it would be easy for Him to force us into Heaven, He doesn’t because that would be evil since that’s – once again – coercion. If He did that, then He would be removing all free will from that person and would be going against His own character.
Moreover, forcing a person into salvation is unjust either way you look at it. If God never punished us in Hell for our sins, then He couldn’t be loving or just because the evil of the world would go unpunished. Likewise, if God forced people to repent (since repentance from your sins is necessary to go to Heaven), then He would be unjust because not only is it forced, but because it’s a forced repentance, it’s not real. Can a person truly repent if they don’t have a choice not to? In either case, sin would go unpunished.
This also rolls into the reason why we don’t get a second chance to repent after we die. If we died and found out that we were going to Hell, but God gave us a second chance to repent, then it would be a form of coercion as well. You would be repenting solely out of fear, not out of a recognition that you had done wrong and need forgiveness.
On these grounds, this is a false dilemma built on a misunderstanding of God’s character and the nature of free will.
Until next time,
M.J.
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