If I were a Christian (part 1)

On the bus ride home yesterday, I was reading Richard Swinburne's Providence and the Problem of Evil. This got me thinking, if I became a Christian, what type of Christian would I be?

First, I would generally agree with Swinburne's view of the Christian God. He believes that God is all-knowing but doesn't know the future with absolute certainty. The reason why he holds this view is that he believes no being can have an incorrigible belief about what a free being will do in the future. This is because for a being to truly have free will, he must have the power to make any person's belief about his future actions false. Say for example that God believes I will go to school tomorrow. Sure, there is a high probability that this will happen since I have class tomorrow. However, since I have free will, I must have the power of not going to school tomorrow. I must be able to make false God's belief that I will go to school tomorrow. So whatever belief God may have about my future actions, I must have the power to make them false. Therefore, as long as it's possible that God's beliefs about my future actions are false, he cannot know them with absolute certainty.

There is a couple ways around this but none of them seem plausible. One can say that my future act caused God to have a past belief about my future act. So, my future act of going to school tomorrow caused God today (and forever stretching back into eternity) to have the belief that I will go to school tomorrow. The problem that Swinburne shows with this in his book The Christian God is that causes must always precede their effects. You can never have an event at a certain time t cause something to happen at a time before t. Another way to get around the free will problem is to say that God is outside of time so he sees all the events that have and will happen at once. However, as Swinburne points out in The Christian God, it is hard to make sense of the idea that a being can be outside of time.

In general, I would agree with Charles Seymour's idea of hell that he gives in A Theodicy of Hell. Generally, Seymour believes that God sends some people to hell to punish us for our past sins. Since we only committed a finite number of sins and each sin is only finitely wrong, we can only receive a finite amount of punishment. However, once the damned get to hell, they still have the free will to sin and God will punish them for those sins too. It is possible for those in hell to get out of hell and into heaven if they become good enough such that at some point in the future, they would have experienced all the punishment they deserve. I agree with Seymour that this view is compatible with a loving God. Here, I wrote a review of the book and here is a link where Charles Seymour summarizes it.

I think one can believe in the Christian God and still believe in evolution, as Swinburne does. I don't think there is much problem with interpreting some of the bible as fiction or interpreting some of it in a non-literal way. For example, one could believe the Garden of Eden never existed but still believe that there was a first man (call him Adam) who committed the first sin. This latter belief is compatible with evolution.

I'd say that's about it, that's the most plausible view of the Christian God I can see. (There's more to Swinburne's beliefs like those concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation that I didn't talk about here. I think those beliefs are plausible as well)