Not a Christian, but I can't help noticing that while God is posited to be omniscient and omnipotent, people are also posited to have free will. But, if people have free will, then God cannot, by definition, be omnipotent: if you have free will, you have some of the power, however small a sliver, and God does not have literally all of the power, which is what "omnipotent" means.
You can't solve a logic problem if the premises of the logic problem contradict each other.
If one treats this as a logic problem, and tries to resolve the contradiction in the premises by assuming that people have free will and God is only Really Powerful, not literally omnipotent, then it's entirely logically consistent to posit a universe where people can decide that they are going to go to Hell and God can't do anything about it.
Why would an omnibenevolent God set up a universe like that? I'm not a Christian so I'm not going to worry about it too much. But I will observe that any universe God creates where people have both meaningful free will and the ability to meaningfully affect each other, will be a universe whose people have the ability to make choices that are... suboptimal... for each other. And maybe you don't want some of the people who have shown that they consistently make choices that are suboptimal for each other going to Heaven. Especially since God's not legally obligated to scrupulously follow the descriptions of Hell in medieval literature when making it.
Maeglin8 t1_iyeqcf1 wrote
Reply to comment by ThymeParadox in For The First Time, Less Than Half Of UK's Population Is Christian: Report by khushraho
Not a Christian, but I can't help noticing that while God is posited to be omniscient and omnipotent, people are also posited to have free will. But, if people have free will, then God cannot, by definition, be omnipotent: if you have free will, you have some of the power, however small a sliver, and God does not have literally all of the power, which is what "omnipotent" means.
You can't solve a logic problem if the premises of the logic problem contradict each other.
If one treats this as a logic problem, and tries to resolve the contradiction in the premises by assuming that people have free will and God is only Really Powerful, not literally omnipotent, then it's entirely logically consistent to posit a universe where people can decide that they are going to go to Hell and God can't do anything about it.
Why would an omnibenevolent God set up a universe like that? I'm not a Christian so I'm not going to worry about it too much. But I will observe that any universe God creates where people have both meaningful free will and the ability to meaningfully affect each other, will be a universe whose people have the ability to make choices that are... suboptimal... for each other. And maybe you don't want some of the people who have shown that they consistently make choices that are suboptimal for each other going to Heaven. Especially since God's not legally obligated to scrupulously follow the descriptions of Hell in medieval literature when making it.