There is no logical paradox or contradiction in the Christian conception of God.

Apologetics is largely a task of making up things. Why is it that Superman can fly faster than the speed of light to travel back in time but doesn't simply do that all the time when he messes up? Well clearly, it's very hard to do or might damage the spacetime continuum or something of the sort. Much of what my opponent offers falls into the categories of Middle Knowledge. All the premises follow, but the conclusion doesn't because I've just made up factoid X. These do not actually sort out any logical paradoxes or contradictions within the story but serve to try and confuse the issue or violate one of the premises in a stealth fashion. -- God cannot be all-powerful and all-good if evil exists. Claiming those are true and then inserting a middle knowledge idea of "free will" doesn't actually salvage anything. Using it as a theodicy (a proposed solution to the problem of evil) raises a number of flags and problems. First, it says that God isn't all powerful if he can't violate free will or isn't all good if he won't prevent evil. So whether God doesn't violate free will because he can't (not all-powerful) or because he won't (not all good) it still finds a contradiction ready and waiting for it. The only other alternative is that Free Will is somehow a greater good, that it's okay if a rapist rapes and murders a ten year old girl because God couldn't or wouldn't violate the free will of the rapist. What about the free will of the girl? Isn't it possible to respect the rapists choice while still preventing the innocent from being harmed? If God had the ability to stop it and didn't, isn't that the definition of evil? A necessity to accept the theodicy is that all evil in the world must be a result of free will. But, a good number of terrible things happen without any free will. A quarter million people were killed during the Boxing Day Tsunami. It swept in ripping children from the arms of their mothers to wash back ashore a few days later partly rotten, bloated, and white. What free will existed there? Why was God prevented from helping in that instance? Couldn't he have stealthily prevented the tsunami altogether? What kind of "respect" for the free acts of rapists, can be maintained and yet allow one to be considered good? Is there some reason that his "unyielding honesty" should really force him to stand by and allow the Nazi gas chambers to keep functioning? What about the Bible stories where God does interfere? God repeatedly hardens the pharaoh's heart after he freely chose to let Moses' people go. He respects free will enough to violate it to get Pharaoh a few more plagues and kill his men but not enough to stop the holocaust? What of all the walking around and talking God does in the Bible? Further, we could still choose. Even if God just told all the gas chamber attendants "You know you're going to go to hell for that." They would still have a choice. However, odds are good that things would be far better off. Letting evil abide until the end of days doesn't fix anything. If we could be flawless and heavenly then there is a better state we could be in. We could simply have souls created in heaven and bypass the entire Earth and Hell things. If God knows the future and knows who is going to do good and who would do evil, why not make the good souls and just put them in Heaven? Invoking free will simply muddles up the waters, it doesn't solve the problem or make the paradoxes not paradoxes. --- Likewise with regard to the Argument from Unbelief, there is no violations in free will to give people good reasons to believe. There is every reason to suppose that God is nothing more than a bronze-aged myth thought up by tribal goat-sacrificers who didn't understand anything about the world and made up myths to comfort and entertain them... just like every other people in the world. Why do we find fantastically good evidence for dinosaurs some 64 million years ago and an entire planetary history when the Bible says the universe was created about 2000 years after the Sumerians first brewed beer? Why should unbelief be completely reasonable? There is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is round. However the Flat Earth Society still exists. There's unquestionably good evidence that evolution took place and still polls show that about half of all Americans have doubts. Why not simply give good evidence and allow people to reasonably make the choice to save their souls? The Christian conception of God is not consistent with a world that, in every way it can, attests to that conception being astoundingly shortsighted. There is certainly some middle-ground between absolutely every reason to doubt and evidence that magically compels belief. As each improvement in the quality of evidence would save countless souls from the torture and pain of hell, we should live in a world with reasonable evidence with room for doubt. Rather we live in a world with no evidence where unbelief not only exists but is the logical conclusion of the evidence. Let us not forget the other problems with free will, in that if violated in totality, everybody would believe and nobody would be damned to hell for all eternity. Every soul and person who goes to hell is a person who could have been spared an eternity of torment and pain if God had helped. If Free Will is, as you are suggesting, a ticket to evil in the world and an eternity of hell... then it isn't a gift to mankind but rather the product of evil itself. --- The Godhead doesn't save you from the omnipotence paradox. Could God the Father create a rock so heavy that God the Father couldn't lift it? It doesn't matter which part of the Godhead does what. One part of the paradox is violated either the rock wasn't created to be too heavy to lift or the rock wasn't lifted. If God the father created the rock so that God the father couldn't lift it, then that alone violates the paradox. --- With regard to the Biblical problems, why does God's enduring love not simply not fault them in the first place? If God would happily drown the world in a giant global flood, why not kill a few Nazis in their cribs? Couldn't you create a better world, still with free will but with considerably less evil? Does heaven have free will? If not, is Earth better than heaven? If so, then isn't heaven better than Earth? Justice to whom? God wouldn't let sin go unpunished? It is justice to punish somebody else for the crimes of another? Is it justice to fault the descendants of some original sinners, who themselves have done nothing wrong. -- I thank my opponent for his previous arguments, and though I do not agree with them, they do go great distances to explain his conception of God. Given his understanding, I now need to add a few contradictions. Free will is generally a doctrine accepted by most of the protestant faiths with the exception of Calvinism and a few other groups. There isn't any actual scriptural support for the idea and it was largely invented whole-cloth by Augustine. So I couldn't include these initially. --- Free Will Paradox. -- If God knows what you are going to do before you do it then you never really had a choice anyway. God knew before he created Adam and Eve that they would choose to eat the fruit. They are faulted for being created in full knowledge of their actions. If you can make a choice between choosing A or B, but God knows you will choose A. You cannot actually have free will in the matter. Free Will Omnipotence. -- God cannot violate free will. God therefore cannot do everything. God is unable to go against his nature and violate free will therefore he cannot be omnipotent. Evil Omnipotence. -- God cannot do evil. There is an inherent contradiction between being all good and being all powerful. The nature of being omnibenevolent prevents one from properly doing the things and malevolent things in the world.