Craig on the problem of evil

"When you consider the extent and the depth of human suffering in the world, whether it is due to natural disasters or to man's own inhumanity to man, then I think we have to admit that it is hard to believe in God."

 

-William Lane Craig

 

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-4/excursus-on-natural-theology/excursus-on-natural-theology-part-28-the-problem-of-evil

God and morality in a nutshell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew654htG7yg&lc=Ugy6FjPwwYLqcvNTfWN4AaABAg.ANqDmMA9W-sANqLGq_TAnd 

 

In the 2015 Germanwings flight tragedy, the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane, killing himself and everyone on board. Such an act is bad regardless of anyone's opinion of it being bad (just as the moon is smaller than the sun regardless of anyone's opinion). This badness is easy to see, dissect, and understand, without appealing to God at any point.

 

First, I don't see how God is supposed to solve this puzzle. Let's label the bad / evil act mentioned above E. If I ask: What is the wrong-maker of E, how is God meant to answer this?

 

Maybe: For an act to be wrong is for God to command against it and for an act to be permissible is for God to permit it.

But 1) God hasn't commanded for or against all human acts. So how do we know which are right or wrong?

 

2) It's controversial exactly where God's commands are (the Bible? The Quran?), which ones count as commands for which people at which times (just the Israelites, or us too?), or whether they really came from God and not from humans inventing a God character. (Christians, after all, are committed to the belief that Allah is a fictional character. Or if Allah refers to Yahweh, then Christians are committed to the view that the event of Yahweh sending Muhammad as a prophet is a fictional event.)

So the "God commands it" answer to the wrong-maker question seems pretty useless. Even Christians are forced to use their own judgment when it comes to modern day moral dilemmas; God is of no help to them. The Methodist church recently had a schism over gay marriage.

And 3) Doesn't this open up the Euthyphro Dilemma? If the right-maker is purely God's command, then God could command E and that would make E right. But my intuitions say, like that of Christians, that a good God could never make such a command because the act is wrong prior to any command made for or against it. So it must be something else that acts as the wrong-maker.

 

You might play William Lane Craig's card and say that something is good when it is aligned with God's nature, and God's commands are aligned with God's nature. But this shifts the arbitrariness of God's commands to the arbitrariness of God's nature.

 

a) If God's nature happened to be pro-atrocity, then those atrocities would be good. God could transform into a swan like Zeus and rape a woman named Leda, and because God's nature happens to be pro-rape, this action is good. If God's nature happened to be pro-genocide, then God could command genocide and that command would align with God's nature.

b) If goodness is defined as that which is aligned with God's nature, then saying "God is good" is to say "God is aligned with God's nature", which is a silly thing to say. But Christians don't see themselves as saying something silly when they say "God is good."

c) We call things good all the time – good friends, good food, good movies – without invoking God. These things aren't good because they are aligned with God's nature – they are good because they are intrinsic, extrinsic, or saving goods.

Second, I say again that the badness of E is easy to see, no God required.

1) We can give a phenomenal definition to intrinsic goodness and badness. Intrinsic goods are characterized by their felt experience, same with intrinsic bads (evils).

2) Extrinsic goods are those that lead to intrinsic goods. Extrinsic evils lead to intrinsic evils.

3) Saving goods are those goods that prevent evils. Depriving evils are those evils that prevent goods.
 

4) We also use 'good' as a success term. A good chess move might not be a chess move that is intrinsically, extrinsically, or savingly good, but good because it leads to success with respect to the goal of winning the chess game. A "good" torture device is good for torture.

And so by this analysis we can easily see what the bad makers are of E. The intrinsic evils of the suffering of the victims and victims' families are bad in their essence. The depriving evils of the deaths of the victims are bad too, grounded in the self-evident concept of "better" as used in the sentence: A joy feels better than a pain.

Now the wrong-maker is trickier. A consequentialist approach could be like this: The act that produces the worst outcomes (most badness + least goodness) in a situation is the worst act, and the act that produces the best outcomes (the least badness / most goodness) in that same situation is the best act.

Assumption 1: There is no difference whatsoever between epistemic and value-based wrongness. Both amount to being incorrect or mistaken in some sense.

Assumption 2: Every morally relevant act is caused by a belief or set of beliefs, or something like a belief that could be translated into a proposition.

Idea: The wrong-maker of an act is the falsity of the false belief that grounds the act.

People often (always?) act thinking that their action is the best action they could take, the action that maximizes goodness over badness. If that belief is false, then the wrongness of that belief transmits to the action, making the action wrong too (strictly speaking, there are no wrong actions, only wrong beliefs and bad actions).

He who succeeds in believing what's right will act rightly too. There are no categorical imperatives, only hypothetical imperatives: If you want to believe what's true, and act accordingly, and if you succeed in always believing what's true and acting accordingly, then you will never do wrong. Your actions will always be grounded in true beliefs.

If you want to do what's right, then you should act according to what's true – and there we see the hypothetical imperative. "Should" always applies to goals – given the goal of doing what's right, you ought to believe what's true. If you want to maximize goodness, then you ought not commit acts that fail especially badly to maximize goodness (which we call evil acts).

Of course, we humans are ignorant and stupid, and so we constantly fail to believe what's true. So we constantly act according to false beliefs and do actions that are bad. (And our answers as to why we chose to do these bad actions are always filled with lies, falsehoods, contradictions, confusions, or irrelevancies).

William Lane Craig on the rationality of atheists

"No one is saying that it's compelling that every rational person has to believe that God exists on the basis of the evidence. I've avoided, I think if you look at my work, trying to bludgeon opponents as Keith seems to think I do. I don't think I've ever said that atheists are irrational. What I've argued is that faith is reasonable – reasonable faith – that it's rational in view of the evidence to have faith. And I don't think I've ever denounced atheists as irrational. Now, to be sure, I think that many atheists do believe some irrational things. For example, I do think it's irrational to believe that the universe popped into being uncaused out of nothing. I think it's irrational to believe, as some atheists do, that nothing ever begins to exist. I think it's irrational to think that time is not real, as some have claimed. But I've never tried to say that my opponents in these debates or the people I'm trying to persuade are irrational."

 

Reasonable Faith Podcast, "Atheism and Theistic Hypotheses", October 11, 2021, URL = <https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/atheism-and-theistic-hypotheses>.

 

"When I'm asked what is the most common misunderstanding about my work, I don't think that it would be about any particular argument that I offer. I think perhaps it would be that I regard these arguments as somehow rationally compelling, so that anyone who disagrees with me about them is irrational. And I've never said that."

 

YouTube, drcraigvideos, "The Biggest Misconception About My Work—Clearing the Confusion", June 27, 2025, URL = <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIEmLcDjxxQ>. 

Reacting to William Lane Craig's views on hell

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dCmBMQEIOD8

God pours out His wrath against sinners, as we see in the Flood and on the day of judgment as described by Jesus and Revelation (and Paul mentions God's wrath in Romans 1). But why? What's so bad about sin? Because it alienates us from God? How does sin do that? When a child makes a mistake, does their loving parent disown them, or correct their behavior? 

If God is in control, then it's up to God whether we are alienated from Him or not. Even the New Testament depicts Jesus as eating and drinking with sinners, because just as the doctor comes for the sick, not the healthy, so does God come for the unrighteous, not the righteous (Mark 2:17). Far from pushing God away, our sin should draw God all the closer to us! That's when we need God the most, and a loving God would recognize that.

Maybe God pours out His wrath against sin because of how bad sin is, because of the pain and death that sin causes. But that demands the question: What greater source of pain than hell? If causing pain is so bad, then hell, the greatest pains with the greatest duration, is the worst evil (see David Lewis, "Divine Evil").

Jesus and Revelation paint a picture that forgiveness is impossible for the damned. Why? Either the damned are incapable of asking for forgiveness, in which case their free will has been robbed (and so the Christian cannot appeal to free will to defend the justice of hell or God's hiddenness), or they can ask for forgiveness but God refuses it, in which case God is not perfectly forgiving.

Isn't the Lockean Thesis clearly false?

Liz Jackson writes ("The relationship between belief and credence", Philosophy Compass, 2020): 

Lockean Thesis (traditional): S ought to believe p iff S has a rational high credence in p. 

    On this version of the Lockean thesis, a rational high credence is necessary and sufficient for rational belief. This does justice to the intuition that rational agents are confident in the propositions that they believe. 

    Nonetheless, worries loom. The first is the lottery paradox (Chandler, 2010; Douven, 2012; Douven & Williamson, 2006; Kyburg, 1961; Leitgeb, 2014b; Smith, 2010a; Weintraub, 2001; Weisberg, 2015, Section 5). Suppose you have a lottery ticket; uncontroversially, you should have a high credence your ticket will lose (a fair 100-ticket lottery puts your credence at 0.99, and we can increase the number of tickets). If the threshold for belief is any value short of one, then, according to the traditional Lockean thesis, there are lotteries in which you ought to believe your ticket will lose. But your ticket is not special: by the same reasoning, you should believe, of each ticket, that it will lose. Further, many think that if you should believe p and you should believe q then you should believe p and q; this is an example of a closure principle (Kvanvig, 2006; Luper, 2016). Given certain closure principles, you should believe a large conjunction: ticket 1 will lose and ticket 2 will lose and...ticket n will lose. Nevertheless, you know one ticket will win, and thus you should also believe the negation of this conjunction. But intuitively, you should not believe contradictions. In response, some have suggested that the traditional Lockean thesis is false, and you ought not believe lottery propositions, such as my ticket will lose, even though you have a rational high credence in them (Douven, 2002; Jackson, Forthcoming; Kelp, 2017; Ryan, 1996; Smith, Forthcoming; Staffel, 2015). 

Let's disambiguate the thesis:

 

*Lockean Thesis (traditional): S ought to believe necessarily p iff S has a rational high credence in p.

 

Then I should believe that each ticket will necessarily lose. But that's clearly a false belief. Each ticket will not necessarily lose, only very probably. I shouldn't believe that my ticket will lose, only that it very probably will.

 

**Lockean Thesis (traditional): S ought to believe very probably p iff S has a rational high credence in p.

 

That's better, though a) terms like 'ought' and 'rational' need to be unpacked before I understand what this thesis is saying and b) arguably it's impossible to not believe very probably p while having a high credence in p. 

 

Though that implies one cannot have credences without also having beliefs. It does seem to me that credences are by far the more complex mental state between the two, with belief being a simple and common representational mental state. Anecdotally I see folks admit to believing something (say, God's existence) much quicker than admitting to a specific confidence level in that belief.

 

See for example WLC (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/questions-on-greatest-being-theology-certainty-and-the-moral-argument):  

Kevin Harris: Here is another question, Dr. Craig:

Greetings. In your debate with Christopher DiCarlo, he asked if you could estimate your level of confidence in your belief in God, and that if your belief was as likely as a universe with no God, or if it was higher. You said your belief was higher than 50/50 but that you had no way of measuring whether it was highly probable or not. Wouldn’t this seem to be of utmost importance to the question and what you have spent your life debating? How on Earth are we to accept that you find the existence of a God more probable when you have no way of knowing what more probable means?

Dr. Craig: Well, wait a minute. I never said I don’t have any idea of what more probable means. For something to be more probable than not means you have a greater than 50% chance of being true. Right? That’s what it means to be “more probable.” What I’ve refused to do is to quantify it and to say I am 75% certain or it is 83% certain that God exists or 99% certain. I think anybody who does try to put those kind of numbers on it is being disingenuous, and you ought to be very suspicious. The fact is we can talk, I think, in only rough terms about this, and saying “I think it is very probable that God exists” or “more probable than not.” Things of that sort. I think that is quite acceptable.

So Craig is happy to say that he believes in God and is happy with vague language like "It's more likely than not that God exists" or "It is almost certain that God exists", but Craig doesn't like giving specific numbers to it, because of how arbitrary that would be.

Also consider what Craig says here (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/debate-with-dr.-kevin-scharp-part-1): 

KEVIN HARRIS: . . . The first thing that kind of struck me that I wanted to run past you is he said, “We should be formulating theism and atheism in terms of confidence levels from zero percent to 100 percent, not in terms of belief.” Kevin really complimented you on building systems.[3] He wants to build a system here it seems – a philosophical system, systematic theology, systematic philosophy. But the argument itself is going to require confidence. Are you confident in the confidence?

DR. CRAIG: I'm not! And I made that point over and over again. I have no confidence whatsoever in his claim that in order to believe in God I need to have a probability significantly higher than 51%. He gave no argument for that other than just an example. He gave an illustration that he thinks it is 51% probable that Hillary Clinton will win the presidential election. But that is not enough for him to believe that she will win. Well, fine, that is just an illustration. But in many other cases, 51% might be enough for a person to believe in something, especially (as William James pointed out) if this is a pressing conclusion that imposes itself upon you and is a matter of great urgency and importance, William James argued that in a case like that you are perfectly rational to believe in something even without evidence. This is James' famous essay, “The Will to Believe.” This idea that in order to believe something you have to be significantly more than 51% confident in it, I think is person-relative and subjective. For some people that might be true, for other people it might not. For some beliefs it might be true, but for other beliefs (as James said) it may not. 

Rejecting the Lockean Thesis has the consequence that even if something is incredibly likely to happen, say a 99% chance of rain, you can't believe that it will rain. But isn't that crazy? You totally can plan as if it will rain, act as if it will rain (toss an umbrella into your car before you drive off, etc.).

 

But of course it's silly to believe both that there is a less than 100% chance of something happening and that it will necessarily happen. Instead, you believe that there is a 99% chance of rain or that it's very likely to rain. And such probabilistic beliefs perfectly justify the same actions, or at least extremely similar actions, as the actions justified by full belief (belief in the necessity of or certainty of). 

 

I'm not sure Craig is correct when he says the threshold for belief is context-dependent. But I think acting as if something will happen need not require belief. Craig mentions William James' idea of the leap of faith. But the person who leaps the gap to escape the avalanche does not believe that they will make the jump. All they need to believe to make sense of jumping is that jumping is better than doing nothing. It's not that the bar of belief is lowered based on context, it's just that what you believe changes based on context. The desperate skier who makes the jump doesn't jump because he or she believes they will make it or will very likely make it (like in ordinary circumstances), but, again, only that jumping is better than doing nothing.

 

A standard definition of belief is given by Liz Jackson in the article:

 

"To believe something is to regard it as true or take it to be the case . . ."

 

But this can sound like: "To regard something as true is to regard it as true" or "To believe something to be the case is to believe it to be the case", both tautologies. The point being that defining 'believe' in terms of 'regarding' or 'taking' (or 'accepting' or 'assenting to') doesn't seem helpful. (I'm not saying Liz Jackson's definition of belief is not helpful; I'm sure she could give a much better gloss on 'belief'; it's the standard definition that is not helpful.) 

 

So I lean toward the view that 1) Propositions are representational (i.e. propositions claim a match between external properties and "internal" properties; if there is a match then the proposition is true, if there is a mismatch then the proposition is false); 

 

2) Non-propositional beliefs are representational via mental states (i.e. the internal properties are internal to a mental state, not to a proposition);

 

3) Propositional beliefs are representational via propositional attitude (the internal properties are internal to the proposition that corresponds to the belief; OR the internal properties are internal to a mental state which corresponds [contains? represents? constitutes?] to a proposition);

 

4) Truth itself is representational, connecting truth and belief;

 

5) Beliefs do not come in degrees in the sense that you can partially believe something, but beliefs do come in degrees in the sense that you can believe in stronger or weaker claims;

 

6) In the case of believing p, not only do we believe p in the sense that our mental states represent (or attempt to represent) reality as described by p (details to be specified), but we also believe whether p is (epistemically) necessarily true or probably true (or lack such a belief, or only believe dispositionally that p is necessary, etc). Credences are levels of confidence, and are beliefs about how likely p is true. Beliefs and credences appear to come apart because the belief that p and the belief (or dispositional belief) that p is necessary (or 10% probable or highly probable, etc.) come apart, and because the additional modal belief or probability belief is not necessary to hold the belief (which is why Craig can believe in God without believing that God's existence is X% likely; granted, Craig probably believes it's not epistemically necessary that God exists).

 

Jordan Peterson infamously struggles to answer the question of whether God exists, and complains about vagueness over terms 'God' and 'exists'. (Which is fine as long as you proceed to offer some help in defining those terms, as otherwise you announce that you don't have anything thoughtful to say.) I suspect Craig similarly struggles to give God's existence an explicit percentage because of problems of vagueness. Precise attitudes don't fit imprecise propositions. There's also the problem of the complexity of the question. The more complicated a debate is, the harder it is to feel confident not only that one position is right, but it's harder to feel confident that you even understand what the debate really amounts to (is the debate itself based on false assumptions? e.g. like when 'nature' is falsely pitted against 'nurture' for explaining human behavior) and what it would mean to take a stand on one position versus another.

The Absurdity of Life Without God (June 2025)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S7n1PXVg9X0

 

1) Is Craig saying that all humans prior to Christianity should have thrown themselves off cliffs in despair over the meaninglessness of their lives? Because that would be a clearly false thing to say.

 

2) In response, Craig might say something to the effect of "Humans prior to the revelation to the Jews or prior to the Gospels could have believed in God as revealed by creation."

But this would be a bad response for the following reasons:

A) Craig himself says that you need God and an afterlife for reality to be ultimately meaningful.[*1] But Orthodox Judaism doesn't teach an afterlife, and no clear teaching of the afterlife can be found in the Old Testament. So really, even belief in the God of the Old Testament, the true God, is not enough on Craig's view for life to be meaningful. I'll say that again: Even believing in the true God is not enough to live a meaningful life on Craig's view! So all the figures of the Old Testament were living meaningless lives, including Joseph, Abraham, and Moses? Really?

 

B) The God revealed by creation is, like Hume points out, not clearly good nor evil, as life is rife with both good and evil. But if the God of creation is not clearly good nor evil, and is apparently indifferent to both our suffering and our joy, then there's no reason to think there will be an afterlife for our sakes.

More importantly, if there is no report of an afterlife revealed by God in a credible way, then there is no reason to think there is an afterlife. It would be pure speculation. So...

 

3) ...would Craig say it's okay to live a life that might be meaningful on speculation? Does life have to be absolutely certainly known to be meaningful (i.e. does God’s existence and an afterlife have to be known with certainty) for a person to rationally live it?

Surely Craig would not set the standard that high. Indeed Craig is infamous for saying that when it comes to pragmatic reasoning, the standard can be extremely low.[*2] As long as there is some chance that there is a god out there and an afterlife out there, then it's reasonable to live according to that chance. So as long as atheists aren't absolutely certain that there is no god and no universalist afterlife, as long as they believe there is a non-zero chance of these things, then they can live on the same kind of leap of faith that Craig champions when he says Christianity is worth believing in even if there were only a one in a million chance of it being true. And many atheists would admit that there is some chance of such a universal salvation, however small.

4) Is a naturalistic worldview unlivable? No! And shouldn't Craig know better, having debated however many naturalists at this point, who all clearly do not find naturalism to be unlivable? Is Graham Oppy, a “scary smart” atheist scholar, somehow irrational for living as a naturalist?

Craig claims that naturalists live as if their lives have meaning, but have no basis for this meaning. But that's not only mistaken, but I'd claim certainly mistaken. The basis for meaning that naturalists have is the same basis that all humans prior to Christianity had, and it’s the same basis that, ironically, even Christians have for meaning.

 

Why do Christians live their lives? Do Christians receive a letter from God in the mail that details their purpose on earth? Or do Christians receive a vision or a dream, or an auditory message from God that details their purpose on earth? Nope. Christians are left to figure things out on their own, the same as everyone else.

 

And so inevitably Christians end up living for: their jobs, hobbies, entertainment, family, friends, exploring the world, because their biology generates an internal pressure to survive, and so on, exactly the same reasons humans have always had for living.

 

You might say that Christians have uniquely Christian jobs like pastor, missionary, and Christian philosopher, but that's only very few Christians. Most Christians are like everyone else: Working some miscellaneous job that puts food on the table for the family. (By the way, why is God so okay with his followers working mundane jobs for decades and decades, knowing what that does to the soul, I have no idea.)

 

We are told in Revelation that in heaven there will be no more death or suffering. We are told that hell is a place of torment. This is a strikingly hedonistic system of value. If Christianity were anti-hedonism, then we could imagine heaven being filled with pain and hell being filled with happiness. After all, if it's things other than pain and happiness that form the basis of value, then heaven could be filled with those intrinsically good things (whatever they are) along with pain, and hell could be filled with those intrinsically bad things (whatever they are) along with happiness.  

 

As it stands, we don't find that description of heaven and hell in the Bible or in Christian tradition. So we're left with a hedonistic picture of Christian value. But if hedonism is true, then happiness forms the basis of meaning. That which is meaningful is that which makes life worth living, and vice versa (this is the meaning in life sense of meaning). Happiness makes life worth living. So that which imparts happiness imparts meaning. And this is exactly what we find in the world: all human motivation can be understood in terms of pursuing certain kinds of happiness and avoiding certain kinds of pain.

 

The reason why I say that it's certainly the case that life is meaningful is because not only is it certain that we experience happiness, but because it is certainly the case that our actions make a difference (this is the difference-making sense of meaning). Craig claims that our lives make no ultimate difference if death is the permanent end. But there is a difference, and a certain one at that, between happiness and pain. The real moments of real flourishing that real people really have—that's the difference-maker, and it's a difference that we have direct access to via immediate experience.[*3]

5) So a naturalistic worldview is certainly livable for the same reasons that life in general is livable, including Christian life. But is a Christian worldview livable? A person can find Christian worldviews to be unlivable for the following reasons:

A) To be a Christian you must select a denomination but it can seem like there are no good reasons to select one over the others.

 

B) When you try to do theology to discover which denomination is best, you discover that there are severe challenges to the coherence of all Christian doctrines, including the doctrines of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Salvation, Sin, Eschatology, Heaven, Hell, Creation, Faith, Ecclesiology, etc. 

 

B) There are moral horrors in the Old Testament, horrors that Craig happily defends.[*4]

 

C) Jesus says things that are arguably straight up false, including His teachings on divorce (Mt. 19:9), that the "meek shall inherit the earth" (Mt. 5:5), that "whoever is not with me is against me" (Luke 11:23), "how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him" (Mt. 7:7), and "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12).

 

On that last one you might try to wriggle out of it by saying that it refers to only the disciples, but a) it specifies "the one who believes in me", not just the disciples, and b) the disciples did not go on to perform greater works than that of Jesus.

 

You might respond by saying "works" refers to spreading the gospel, and "greater works" refers to how greater numbers of people will be reached by the gospel than what Jesus reached during His earthly ministry. But the term for works, τὰ ἔργα, found in John 14:11, refers to miracles. 

 

D) If someone is committed to a pragmatic theory of truth, and if being a Christian is pragmatically false, then Christianity is false for that person. Some people have found being a Christian to be detrimental to their mental health (religious trauma, hell anxiety, etc.) and success in life. (Why would God give us this heuristic of looking to what works for guidance on what to believe and what to do with one’s life and then allow for Christianity to not work for so many people, I have no idea.)

 

E) Christianity commits one to unbelievable supernatural elements, including:

 

E.1 - Figures in the Old Testament living to hundreds of years;

E.2 - The Nephilim;

E.3 - The Divine Council;

E.4 - Angels;

E.5 - Demons;

E.6 - Satan as a demonic ruler of the world;

E.7 - Hell as a literal, physical place;

E.8 - Heaven as a literal, physical place;

E.9 - The bread and wine of the Eucharist being the literal body and blood of Jesus, if the Catholics are right about transubstantiation;

E.10 - Various miracle stories like talking animals, the flood, the plagues, Jonah and the Fish, pillars of fire, the miracles of Jesus, John's Revelation, etc.

 

F) Many folks who are LGBT report experiencing Christianity to be unlivable, and even non-LGBT folks find Christian ethics to be impractical and naive.

 

G) Infernalistic versions of Christianity are seen as unlivable because a) it's impossible to socialize with people you believe are going to hell; b) it's impossible to believe that the large majority of humanity is going to hell, including close family and friends; c) it's impossible to envision one being happy in heaven knowing so many people, or even a single person, is in hell.

 

6) Speaking of hell, life in hell is, if the accounts of the Bible and tradition accurate, not worth living. A life not worth living is a meaningless life. So life in hell is a never-ending meaningless life! So Infernalistic Christianity is far more guilty—infinitely more guilty—than naturalism of producing years of meaningless existence. If God as a perfect being entails that all existence is meaningful, and if life in hell is not meaningful, then God's existence entails that infernalism is false and there is no hell, an indictment of orthodox Christianity.

 

7) Not only does naturalism not entail a meaningless life, but Christianity does not entail a meaningful life. Christian belief can cause the believer to develop a sense that this life is pointless, because life doesn't truly begin until the end of the world and the new heaven and new earth come. This can cause the Christian to develop a lifestyle of passivity, of waiting for the end of the world. This is exacerbated by the pain of effort and risk of injury. Ambition and achievement go out the window, and the Christian lives an empty life waiting for God to do something or waiting for the Rapture – for life to really start. How tragic!

 

If Christianity ends up false, then these Christians will have wasted their one chance to fight for meaningful experiences in this life. Even if Christianity ends up true, it's still the case that these Christians failed to live well in this life. God, sensitive to these things, should encourage Christians to live for this world, say, by granting special protections to the Christian, allowing them to live more fearlessly. Instead, God allows Christians to be persecuted, martyred, and ridiculed for their beliefs. (And allows them to end up stuck in mundane jobs, as mentioned – an important point, considering how meaningless working a mundane job is, at least for those of us who dream bigger. Let me put it this way: Personally, if God revealed himself to me and gave me a dream job, I would believe in Him and devote myself to Him in a heartbeat, because that would be a fast way to know that God is real. Ironically though, such a dream job would involve doing philosophy research full time, research that happens to have led me to the conclusion that Christianity is almost certainly false).

8) Craig worries about atheists living an inauthentic life. Surely Craig can appreciate the fact that there are Christians and even pastors who live inauthentically? There are testimonies of pastors and seminary teachers who lose faith but keep the Christian mask on to keep their employment. That’s an inauthentic life, not because it’s inwardly atheistic, but because it’s inwardly atheistic in combination with being outwardly Christian!

 

If the concern is strictly with authentic living, then you would demand many people to leave Christianity, because their Christian life is not authentic. It is exactly because of problems of authenticity (both in terms of one's own cognitive dissonance as well as the observed cognitive dissonance in other nominal Christians) that many people stop going to church and leave religion altogether. How many of us have experienced the inauthenticity of Christians, who preach one thing but practice another? I suspect it is exactly because of the problems mentioned of the livability of Christianity that results in these hypocrisies. The falsity of Christianity causes a clash between reality and the Christian's beliefs, and these clashes often manifest in contradictions in the Christian's attitudes and behaviors.

 

Living authentically includes living according to what you believe to be true, and not according to what you want to be true or according to what people around you pressure you into believing. The echo chambers of church life can produce intellectual dishonesty. The desire to be with God, for heaven to be real, for there to be ultimate justice, and the desire for one's devotion to a religion to have not been a waste, can each produce bias that encourages someone to dishonestly stay in their worldview. If Christians were honest, they would realize that 1) They want Christianity to be true more than anything, and 2) This produces a deep bias that seriously compromises the intellectual honesty of the Christian. Do you truly actually believe that Christianity is true, or are you just in it out of fear of death, or desire to see a loved one again? (I don't mean this in a patronizing way in the least. When I was a Christian I wanted to be with God more than anything, and in some sense I still feel that way, although I also grapple with Graham Oppy's remarks on the irrationality of wanting God to exist. See "Naturalistic Axiology", Chapter 5 of Four Views on the Axiology of Theism.)

---

 *1 - See Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, pg. 74: "So it's not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither."

 

*2 - See: Reasonable Faith Question of the Week #800. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/raising-and-lowering-the-epistemic-bar 

 

*3 - You might think of flourishing and suffering as more sophisticated and involved notions of happiness and pain, and it's really flourishing, not happiness per se, that we should maximize, and it's really suffering, not pain per se, that we should minimize. A very rough approximation of flourishing might be like the following:

 

A human is flourishing when:

 

1) Their basic needs are met, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.

 

2) Their more advanced psychological needs are met, including feeling accepted by and well-integrated into a community.

 

3) They experience happiness on a regular basis.

 

4) They do not experience pain on a regular basis.

 

5) The pains they do experience are instrumentally good, such as the natural pains that accompany self-improvement and the establishing and maintaining of a eudaimonic system. The instrumental goodness easily outweighs the intrinsic badness of these pains. In other words, they do not experience higher-order pain, only lower-order pain.

6) The happiness experienced is instrumentally good and not instrumentally bad. In other words, they experience higher-order happiness, not just lower-order happiness.

 

Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for suffering. Note: I'd claim that we have direct access to whether we are happy or in pain, but we don't necessarily have direct access to whether we are flourishing or suffering.

 

*4 - See "W.L. Craig Defends the Slaughter of Canaanite Children" on the @CosmicSkeptic YouTube channel.   

William Lane Craig on why there aren't miracles today

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6u_tx3fFuYU 

 

"God has given evidence sufficient for those with an open mind and an open heart, but it's sufficiently vague so as to not compel those whose hearts are closed."

 

This claim is problematic for a number of reasons.

 

1) If someone's heart is closed, then no amount of evidence would be sufficient. For example, if there were an absolute proof that Christianity is false, many Christians would probably just ignore it or claim it's not a proof because their hearts are closed to the possibility of Christianity being false. So if God wanted to prove that non-believers have closed hearts, God should provide such an overwhelming amount of evidence for His existence such that only a person with a closed heart could reject God. But we don't see that overwhelming amount of evidence. Indeed, given the problem of evil, we see an overwhelming amount of evidence that there is no loving God.

 

2) Belief does not compel a relationship. James 2:19 says "Even the demons believe". So God could make his existence undeniable knowing that mere belief is not enough for love, desire, allyship, and so on.

 

3) While belief in existence is not sufficient for a true relationship, it is, arguably, necessary. How can you have a relationship with someone who doesn't exist? How can you have a relationship with someone who might not exist? Even some Christians admit that God might not exist. So how can you act as if God does? You can only act as if God probably exists, but doesn't relationship require certainty in the existence of the beloved? Otherwise, you are only loving the idea of God, not the person (or persons) of God. But if that's right, then not only do Christians have to argue that Christianity is true, they have to argue that it is certainly true! That God certainly exists! No Christian can come close to meeting that standard.

 

4) A popular view in philosophy is called doxastic involuntarism, which is the view that we cannot choose what we believe. We cannot choose our intelligence, our background knowledge, or what arguments make sense to us. Since what we believe is a function of those things, we cannot choose what we believe. But if that's right, then all belief is compelled belief, compelled by circumstances beyond our control. God, who knows this, knows that by keeping the evidence for his existence vague he is compelling people to conclude that God does not exist, or probably does not exist, or just as likely exists as not, or only probably exists, depending on the exact psychology and circumstances of the person.

Two short clips vs William Lane Craig

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PDSNfzJBZKE

Here Craig defends God's command of the mass killing of Canaanites, including Canaanite children.

There are obvious consequentialist reasons why a good God would never command the horrific commandments of the Old Testament. But even on virtue ethics, God should be disturbed by the fact that his followers would have the character such that they would be willing and able to kill children. And on deontology, God is treating the Canaanites (and other enemy tribes) as means to ends (God's glory, God's justice, letting his chosen people know that God favors them) rather than ends unto themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-afEhw7c0

This is about the "Low Bar Bill" controversy. Here Craig backpedals on what he said about Christianity being worth believing in even if there were only one in a million chance of it being true. In context, this is Craig's conversion story, where he converts to Christianity at 16 years old. So I would think that Craig would say something to the effect of: That's what I believed then, but now I believe that it would not be reasonable, or even psychologically possible, to believe in a worldview if you believe there really were only a one in a million chance for that worldview to be true. And then he would go on to say that Christianity is very likely true. Maybe Craig would say this if questioned on it.

But bizarrely, he doesn't give this clarification, and in fact says something even more confusing. He says: "And so for me I was saying that, really if there was any sort of reasonable chance of believing in Christianity, it was worth it, in view of the promise that it holds out and the tremendous benefit of knowing God and finding eternal life." (I take it he means reasonable chance of Christianity being true. "Reasonable chance of believing" doesn't make sense.)

Does Craig think that a one in a million chance is a reasonable chance? What odds would Craig give rival worldviews, like atheistic naturalism? Surely, a number of worldviews must add up to 100% for Craig, right? (At least, worldviews that roughly correspond to worldviews defended by various authors on earth.) Unless Craig thinks there is a yet-to-be-discovered worldview that will dwarf all current worldviews in probability, then this is right, and obviously as a Christian surely he would put Christianity at 100% or at least very high. 

Elsewhere I've seen him refuse to give such a percentage. I believe this happens in his debate against Kevin Scharp. Looking it up... Well, the transcript doesn't show that exactly (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-evidence-for-god), but Craig seems to think that you need at least 51% confidence to believe in something:

"If you think it’s more probable than not, if you think this is more probably true than false, I would guess I would say that is enough for belief." (Now, Craig has just recently released his Volume 1 of his Systematic Theology in which he discusses belief and faith. So he may have updated views. I'll see if I can get my hands on a copy and return to this topic.)

So for Craig, a one in a million chance would not be anywhere near sufficient confidence for belief. And yet for Craig, belief is required for saving faith. (See: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/can-an-agnostic-be-a-christian)

There are a number of confusing items here, so let's take them one at a time.

First, Craig says that you can be an agnostic and a Christian. Yet, in the same post, he says that saving faith implies belief. That's a contradiction.

Second, most Christians would not consider you to be a Christian if you were agnostic. If your answer to Jesus' resurrection and/or God's existence is "maybe" or "I don't know," it's really hard to consider you to be "baptized in the Holy Spirit" or "regenerated" or "a new creation in Christ," or a "Child of God," or any spiritual term describing a saved Christian.

Third, arguably faith requires more than mere belief, but something closer to certainty.

Fourth, Craig says Kierkegaard and Karl Barth both were agnostic and yet "personally knew God." That doesn't make any sense.

Fifth, Craig says you can believe something and have your belief be rational even if the belief is not justified by argument. I think that's right, because we rely on foundational beliefs in order to even be capable of making an argument. These pre-argument beliefs cannot be supported by argument without circular reasoning, and I reject circular reasoning. Craig mentions phenomenal conservatism, which is a form of foundationalism which says it's rational to believe something if it seems true to you, provided there are no defeaters. There are defeaters for Christian belief, many of them, so it's weird for Craig to offer phenomenal conservatism as a way to justify Christian belief apart from arguments. Plantinga's properly basic belief also requires an absence of defeaters, which Christianity doesn't have. I don't like "warranted true belief" as a model of knowledge anyway, preferring explanationism or infallibilism.

Sixth, if Craig thinks Christian belief is properly basic apart from arguments, then why would he call Kierkegaard and Barth agnostics? If they personally knew God then they had belief that was properly basic and thus rational despite not having arguments.

Seventh, if Christian belief can be justified apart from arguments, then why care about the probabilities of Christian belief at all? Why not say, "Yes, there is only a one in a million chance that Christianity is true. Doesn't matter. I don't need arguments. Evidentialism is false." Or say: "Christian belief cannot be one in a million because I have a properly basic belief that it's true and there are no defeaters." Or if a belief's being only one in a million counts as a defeater, then on Craig's own view it would not be rational to believe in Christianity.

React: WLC on Abortion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQdya6etl1I

1) How do you reconcile the doctrine of hell with the idea that humans (including the damned, presumably) have intrinsic value? Wouldn't damnation be treating humans as a means to an end, that end being God's justice, instead of as an end unto themselves? (Craig, rejecting universalism, backs himself into a corner from which he cannot escape.)

2) When you say humans have intrinsic value, what does the word 'intrinsic' mean here? What would be lost if we simply said humans have value? If you mean that humans are _instantiations_ of value, then this is clearly false. We can imagine a world where God sends every human to hell where they are tortured forever. How can humans be instantiations of value when all they do is generate misery? A nightmare world full of infinite pointless suffering is infinitely worse, more disvaluable, than a world with nothing in it. Not only do humans not add any value whatever to the nightmare world, but they drive its disvalue through their pointless suffering.

Ah, so it's positive experiences, or happiness, not persons, that are instantiations of value, and negative experiences, or pains, that are instantiations of disvalue. Humans are extrinsically valuable, and the value states they generate are intrinsically valuable.

3) How does forced birth treat pregnant women as an end unto themselves and not as a means to an end of reproduction?

4) What are rights? Are they abstract entities floating in a Platonic realm somewhere? (Craig rejects Platonism, so no). How does having intrinsic value (which humans do not have, as that makes no sense) transfer one of these magical rights to you? Rights are social, legal constructs granted and revoked by states, nothing more.

5) Practically speaking, let's say you force millions of unwanted pregnancies [over the years. In the US there are roughly one million abortions a year. At least, that was the rate prior to the overturning of Roe v Wade]. How does that work out? Are pro-lifers forced to pay for childcare costs and build and volunteer at foster homes, since they are the ones who believe in forced birth? If you force those who vote pro-life to put their money where their mouth is, I guarantee you overnight nearly everyone would vote pro-choice.

RF Response and my reply

In the following post I left a comment reacting to William Lane Craig's thoughts on the problem of evil: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/03/react-william-lane-craig-on-problem-of.html

An RF admin left the following response:

We can grant per hypothesis that there can be no morally sufficient reasons for God to actualize the conditions in your thought experiment (max suffering, max sufferers, max duration). That merely shows that God would not actualize such conditions. And, according to both Christianity and everyday experience, the actual world does not have such conditions. There could have been greater degrees of suffering in the world. There could have been more sufferers in the world. And there could have been a longer duration of suffering in the world.

In your last paragraph, you abandon the thought experiment by limiting the scope to max suffering. But then it's unclear whether God could have a morally sufficient reason for actualizing a max duration of max suffering of fewer than the max number of people, or a limited duration of max suffering of fewer than the max number of people. Perhaps there is a moral infraction so great that it merits such suffering, say, disobeying God himself or intentionally drawing others away from him.

You claim that the greatest good that could come from max suffering would be deliverance from or prevention of max suffering. However, this is readily answered by a free will defense. For those who freely disobey God and reject his forgiveness, max suffering just is the good of divine justice. God cannot make people freely choose things because that's a logically incoherent state of affairs. This also entails that the greatest possible good is not outside our ken, even though we can reject it and bring on ourselves max suffering. So, if God decides to create free creatures, then the evil choices of those creatures plausibly entail that they are responsible for their own max suffering, not God. So long as this is even logically possible, then max suffering and the existence of God are not logically incompatible. - RF Admin

I left the following reply (with slight changes to formatting, and added comments in brackets):

I do not "abandon" my thought experiment, but I identify the relevant feature of the nightmare world that proves the God of the nightmare world unloving to be maximal suffering. The number of sufferers and the duration of suffering is irrelevant, because if the suffering of the sufferers is low enough, and if the low-enough suffering appropriately grounds greater goods (in magnitude or order), then the suffering can be justified. It's the max suffering that's causing the problem, because max suffering cannot possibly ground a good greater in magnitude or order. (We can think of orders of goods and evils in terms of "salience", and we can think of salience in terms of the most relevant moral interest of a creature. More on that below.)

"For those who freely disobey God and reject his forgiveness, max suffering just is the good of divine justice."

I think this is the hopeless corner the theist is backed into. They have to say that justice is more important than people. I hope that the Christian, ever sensitive to the importance of love, immediately recognizes that it's people who are more important than justice.

Josh Rasmussen has given the following thought experiment (I don't have a citation; it's in a YouTube interview): Would I allow my children to play in the front yard if I knew there was some chance they would fall into a bottomless pit forever? No, I would not. That would be profoundly unloving.

So too would a loving God never give us freedom if that meant running the chance of our freedom leading to our maximal suffering. Our freedom is not as valuable to us as our freedom from maximal suffering. This makes perfect sense. What possibly could be our greatest moral interest if not for freedom from maximal conscious suffering? [Or: What could possibly be of greater moral urgency than freedom from maximal conscious suffering?]

Josh Rasmussen and his wife Rachel wrote the book When Heaven Invades Hell. There they defend the view that justice serves people; people do not serve justice. And isn't this the spirit of what Jesus was saying when Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath?

And so to say that goodness ultimately finds its foundation in justice is to say something deeply false. We must ground goodness in persons -- in conscious experience. If I'm not mistaken, Craig says goodness is basic and cannot be analyzed. I think that's mistaken. We can analyze goodness in terms of direct conscious awareness. I'm currently reading a book that roughly defends my views: The Feeling of Value by Sharon Rawlette.

If we grant this analysis of goodness (and I admit that this is a big thing to grant; it's a theory that must be defended like any other), then it does logically follow that the most salient goods, the goods of greatest moral interest and urgency for conscious beings, are conscious goods. And God's justice is not a conscious good. So it's not logically possible, in my view, for God and max suffering to be compatible. [I could have said: therefore, it's not possible for the good of justice to be as salient as the good of deliverance from maximal suffering.]

[I could also have asked the following question to promote intuitions: God's justice is good. Good for whom? Good in what way?]

Elsewhere, I argue that free will is not possible either. But that's a massive debate in its own right. For our purposes here, all we need to say is that free will, whatever it is, cannot possibly be more valuable than freedom from maximal conscious suffering. Simply ask yourself: Would I rather be free with a chance of being tortured constantly for eternity, or determined and safe from such a bad fate? 

Christians seem to think the worst possible thing that could happen to a person is to lack free will (which I find funny because, on my analysis, we must and do lack free will anyway, and there are no good reasons to fear the idea that we lack free will, and in fact free will skepticism leads to a more beautiful, and more accurate, picture of the world. Bruce Waller defends this idea in his book Against Moral Responsibility). But we can easily imagine a fate worse than lacking free will: falling into a bottomless pit. And falling, and falling, and falling, with no chance of ever getting out.

React: William Lane Craig on the problem of evil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuBXmn7AO7s

I left the following comment on this video:

I argue there are cases where it is not possible for God to have morally sufficient reasons to allow certain kinds of evil. Take for instance the following thought experiment: God tortures an infinite number of people for an infinite amount of time. So you have max suffering, max sufferers, and max duration of suffering. I know Craig doesn't like actual infinities, so posit potential infinities instead. Still, you have max suffering, max sufferers, and max duration of suffering.

In this nightmare world, it is not possible for God to have morally sufficient reasons to allow for these evils, because the greatest possible good for a member of the nightmare world is to be saved from the nightmare world. No other good comes close. So it's impossible for a person to both be a member of the nightmare world and to enjoy some good greater than the good of being delivered from the nightmare world.

I argue that this generalizes across cases of max suffering. God can never allow max suffering, because God only allows those evils for which there are grounded and greater goods (greater either in magnitude or in kind or order, as there are lower and higher order goods and evils). But the greatest possible good (in magnitude or kind) grounded in max suffering is the deliverance from or prevention of max suffering. And just as max suffering is within our ken, so too is its deliverance within our ken. It's impossible for the greatest possible good in the case of max suffering to be outside our ken.

So all we need to ask is: Is there max suffering in the actual world? If there is, then this proves that there is no perfect God. Max suffering is suffering so bad that it makes death preferable to life for the sufferer. Clearly, there is max suffering in this world. But a perfect God is incompatible with this particular kind of suffering, even if a perfect God is compatible with, as I myself would argue, many other kinds of suffering.

React: William Lane Craig on Christianity and assurance of salvation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcoXaNy3QIQ

"This is a very common Christian experience, that persons who have come to know Christ and experienced His life-changing power have an assurance, deep down, that their sins are forgiven, that they have eternal life, that they are quote-unquote 'saved' and going to be with God in heaven for eternity. That doesn't mean they don't have doubts, but they do have this deep-seated fundamental assurance, and I think that that is borne by the witness of the Holy Spirit to you."

What on earth could this "deep-seated fundamental assurance" be if not certainty? How can you have this assurance and yet have doubts too?

Craig has claimed that the Christian can know Christianity to be true by the self-authenticating inner witness of the Holy Spirit. This immediately runs into the challenge of epistemic hypocrisy. The Christian would never accept that the Muslim or Mormon has a self-authenticating inner knowledge of the truth of their religion. So how can the Christian make such a claim for themselves without being a hypocrite?

Craig's answer:

"Now certainly, Mormons will speak of something similar, a burning of the bosom when the Book of Mormon is read, but I would say that whereas we do not have defeaters for the witness of the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament sense, we have overwhelming defeaters for the truth of Mormon belief. For anyone interested, read a book on Mormonism, its history, doctrine, and Joseph Smith -- I think that there is just no chance that Mormonism could be true."

But then it follows that not only should the Christian believe that there are no defeaters for Christianity, but that they should be certain that there are no defeaters for Christianity. But surely such certainty is irrational, as there are a host of potential defeaters for Christianity, from problems of evil, divine hiddenness, disturbing Bible passages, the lack of supernatural verification of Christian doctrines, and so on.

 

I would argue that these are real defeaters. But the point is it's not enough for a Christian to merely believe that there are no defeaters for Christianity, which is bad enough. For the Christian to have an assurance of salvation, and assurance that they are not committing epistemic hypocrisy when they reject the assurances of members of competing religions, then they must have certainty that all of the potential defeaters for Christian belief are really not defeaters after all.

 

But surely the defeaters for Christian belief are issues to be investigated, not decided beforehand. The Christian would never accept a Muslim or a Mormon having a similar certainty, prior to investigation, that all potential defeaters against their religion are not defeaters after all. So again, the Christian falls into hypocrisy.

Physical possibility vs Metaphysical possibility vs Logical possibility

We start with three kinds of possibility: Physical, metaphysical, and logical.

Alex Malpass says he's not sure what the difference is between metaphysical and physical possibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsErbEt9MOQ - 52 minutes

I have been frustrated by this same question. When I hear someone describe something as metaphysically impossible, it just sounds like it's physically or logically impossible to me. As Alex Malpass gestures toward in the interview, we might put it like this:

Do the laws of logic exist? Yes. That which is logically impossible is that which violates the laws of logic.
 
Do the laws of nature exist? Yes. That which is physically impossible is that which violates the laws of nature.
 
Do the laws of metaphysics exist? Uh... no? What would those be? (You might think of principles like causal finitism or the principle of sufficient reason as being (alleged) metaphysical laws. But I'm not sure.)

I have found what I think is the first place I've heard of the distinction: William Lane Craig's 2016 Question of the Week #463. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/struggling-with-the-ontological-argument

Here Craig shares what Plantinga calls 'narrow logical possibility' versus 'broad logical possibility'. The idea seems to be that contradictions are explicitly in the form of A & ~A, but there are some things which are impossible and yet not explicitly contradictory. We might say they are implicitly contradictory, but not explicitly so. But this would mean metaphysical impossibility = implicit logical impossibility. So this would reduce metaphysical possibility to logical possibility.

Plantinga gives the example of a Prime Minister made out of prime numbers. This doesn't involve an explicit contradiction (you're not saying it's a Prime Minister that is not a Prime Minister), but it does involve an implicit one (prime numbers, which cannot materially constitute anything, do materially constitute a Prime Minister; or, that-which-cannot-be-made-out-of-numbers is made out of numbers).

(Maybe: numerical properties are immaterially causal, because they play a causal role in the bringing about of contingent immaterial objects, namely our thoughts about them. But numerical properties cannot play any kind of material causal role, because they are immaterial. Except substance dualists say that our thoughts, though immaterial, do play a material causal role, as they have effects on our bodies.)

I take it then that Craig would say that square circles and married bachelors are implicit contradictions, and therefore metaphysically impossible. Because square circles and married bachelors are so clearly contradictory, it's easy to take them as logically impossible. But you still have to tease out the contradiction: a square circle is an object-with-no-angles with angles (or an object-with-angles without angles). A married bachelor is a man-who-is-not-married who is married.

So that's one option: reduce metaphysical possibility to logical possibility by defining the former as implicit logical possibility and the latter as explicit logical possibility.

In the interview, Wes Morriston gestures toward the idea that metaphysical possibility has to do with the possibility that the laws of nature could have been different. So 'metaphysically possible' means something like "Physically possible according to a counterfactual set of laws of nature".

But Malpass responds, suggesting something roughly along the following:

Something is logically possible if it's consistent. So as long as there's a set of the laws of nature that are consistent, then we have a logically possible set of laws.

But if 'metaphysically impossible' means "possible according to an impossible set of laws of nature", then 'metaphysically impossible' means "possible according to a logically impossible set of laws of nature". But if something is possible only in a logically impossible scenario, then it's logically impossible. So metaphysical impossibility again reduces to logical impossibility.

So we can get down to just two kinds of possibility: physical and logical. But can we reduce things farther? Maybe.

Because of the problem of contingency, I suspect we need a necessary foundation of the universe. This will entail necessary laws of nature (this is debatable; I'm going with Graham Oppy who chooses the 'necessity' explanation in the face of contingency, fine-tuning, and the uncanny applicability of mathematics). 

The argument from contingency is a logical argument, so if it succeeds, then it will be logically necessary that there is this foundation. This will then logically entail the laws of nature (again, debatable). That would mean necessitarianism is true and all counterfactual sets of laws of nature are logically impossible (I don't mean to suggest Oppy thinks necessitarianism is true. Here I'm invoking Amy Karofsky).

If all of that works, then it's logically necessary that the foundation of the universe be what it is, it's logically necessary that this foundation would produce the laws of nature it does, and thus the laws of nature themselves are logically necessary. All counterfactual sets of laws of nature would be not only impossible, but logically so, as ultimately they lead to the contradiction of saying the logically necessary foundation has its particular nature and does not have its particular nature. But then that would mean what's physically impossible just is what's logically impossible.

Sure, we can imagine physically impossible things in a way we cannot imagine logically impossible things. But some things have their logical impossibility more and less immediately accessible; some things are more obviously contradictory than others. That's the point of the distinction of explicit vs implicit contradictions. So physically impossible things are not ultimately consistent, but they are apparently consistent at first. That "surface level consistency" is why we can imagine some impossible things to some degree, but other impossible things cannot be imagined to any degree.

We can imagine a group of people who stumble upon the idea of a square circle. They can conceive of a square circle... partially. They can conceive of its squareness. They can conceive of its circularity. But they cannot conceive the whole thing all at once. They are unsure whether the object is impossible or not, because they must first investigate all that it means to be a square and all that it means to be a circle. At first, they cannot see the contradiction. Eventually, through investigation, they realize that circles cannot have angles, and squares must have four right angles, and thus by definition the square circle is self-referentially incoherent; it's a contradiction.

That could be like us with God. Because of the ontological argument, God is either metaphysically necessary or metaphysically impossible. Which, per the above discussion, means God's existence is either implicitly contradictory, or God's non-existence is implicitly contradictory. No one thinks God's existence or non-existence is explicitly contradictory. God is, and has been, a common belief among humans. So clearly we can at least imagine God partially. But even Christians emphasize how we cannot conceive of God in God's entirety; God is too great a being for our earthly minds to comprehend. So like the simple people and the square circle, we must investigate all that it means for something to be God, and see if there are any contradictions therein. This is the area of philosophy called the coherence of theism, and many tensions have been noted between God's attributes. Some philosophers suspect that God is incoherent (if you're an atheist, then you must suspect this, because if God does not exist, then God is impossible per the ontological argument), and some may even outright argue that way. But I don't think any philosopher would say God is as obviously incoherent as a square circle or a married bachelor.

I've heard of the distinction between something being epistemically possible versus logically possible. If something is epistemically possible, then that means, for all I know, or for all I can tell, that thing is possible. In the case of the simple people and the square circle, the existence of the square circle was epistemically possible for them; for all they knew, there were square circles. But after they conducted their investigation, square circles became epistemically impossible; they came to see that they cannot exist. Likewise, some objects could be epistemically possible to us at first until investigation reveals they are not. While it's easy to see the whole picture when it comes to square circles or married bachelors, and thereby see their impossibility, it's much harder to see the whole picture when it comes to more complicated ideas like God.

So when we imagine fictional objects like Harry Potter and Hogwarts, we can imagine these things to a degree. They aren't explicitly contradictory. But really we are only partially imagining them. We run into problems when we try to really take Harry Potter seriously. Think of all the parodies made and plot holes pointed out about Harry Potter. This is how it is for any fiction (and, dare I say, for theology) when you take it too seriously. It falls apart and stops making sense. To truly imagine fictional stories as real, we'd have to imagine history having unfolded differently. We'd have to imagine different laws of physics, ones that allow magic or sci-fi technology. When fans ask lore questions, they are testing the fictional world in exactly this way, for consistency, and to see how far they can make sense of the fictional world. The more sensible the fictional world is, the more seriously we can take it. The less sensible the fictional world is, the more vulnerable it is to parody.

I cannot fully comprehend the real universe, so of course I cannot fully imagine a counterfactual universe down to the smallest detail, which is what I'd have to do to take any fiction fully seriously. This is why we can only partially imagine fictional objects, why they are only partially possible. To imagine the fictional whole, we'd have to imagine a different past and different laws of nature, which would mean imagining, via the argument from contingency, the logically necessary foundation of the universe being what it must be and not being what it must be at the same time. And there we have our contradiction, reducing physical possibility to logical possibility.

***

Since I'm going through Alyssa Ney's introduction to metaphysics, I might as well record what she says about possibility. In chapter 10, on modality, she gives two definitions:

Nomological possibility: What's possible according to the laws of nature. (nomos means law in Greek)

Logical possibility: What does not entail any contradiction.

Notably, Ney uses round squares and married bachelors as examples of logically impossible things. She uses the example of an object moving faster than the speed of light as an example of a logically possible but physically impossible thing (special relativity precludes it).

Ney never mentions metaphysical possibility.

Alex O'Connor recently uploaded a video questioning where the laws of logic come from. They "come from" the necessary foundation of reality, or are part of it. But it does sound weird to say the laws of logic are logically necessary. That sounds circular. But if we just say the laws of logic are necessary, it sounds like we're saying the laws of logic are metaphysically necessary. But we can't say that if metaphysical necessity reduces to logical necessity.