Hello Virag,

Great questions! Thank you for being willing to solicit input from others and being willing to read responses from others. I think many of the already provided answers to your questions are very helpful, and I agree with most of them. Instead of adding my two cents to each question, I’d like to reply to a few of your questions and then end with a question for you.

Before I offer my couple of pennies worth of thoughts, here is a quick preface about my worldview: I believe the Bible is God's inerrant, infallible, and inspired revelation. I don't read the Bible literally but literarily. With that in mind, my entire worldview stands or falls with the veracity and truthfulness of the Bible. I’m aware of this. That might sound fragile, but it is also amazingly freeing since I’m not making up my own opinion but just trying to understand the Bible and teach it to others as clearly as I can. Do with it as you’d like.

If you’d like, I have a free publication here on Medium where I tackle topics outside the box of traditional Christianity with answers I have discovered inside the book of the Bible. My publication is called Outside the Box, Inside the Book, and its free. Ok, onto your questions 😊 (some of them):

Question #4:

There are uncontacted tribes that live isolated from the world. If they live in peace, and they probably haven’t heard of Christianity, let alone God or Satan, how come they are just fine without any of that?

How you have worded this question seems like if people are “fine” without religion, all is good. This makes truth/pursuit of truth to be dependent on how one feels about their own life. It doesn’t take into account that Christianity might be true regardless if they have never heard of it or are doing just fine without it. There are many people in the world today who have heard of Christianity, reject it, and also say they are doing just fine without it. However, if the message of the Bible is true, then living life without a saving knowledge of Christ will end very badly for them.

A follow-up question might be, “Then how will these uncontacted tribes” hear of the gospel of Christ while living in complete isolation?” My answer is in 4-parts:

a) God determined that these tribes are to live exactly where they do in order to find God (Acts 17:26-27).

b) Each person living in complete isolation still has the knowledge that a Creator exists (Romans 1:20). The Bible is God’s special revelation to humanity, but general revelation is that God reveals himself in nature throughout this world we all live in.

c) Per Romans 1:20, since they can clearly perceive God’s eternal power and divine nature in creation, they are without excuse (this is why I wrote earlier that apart from a saving knowledge of Christ, their lives will end very badly for them).

d) God is not limited like humans. A prisoner could be chained to the wall and his prison door opens. A jailer stands in the opening. The prisoner is not able to walk over and touch the jailer because he is chained to the wall. That doesn’t mean that the jailer is not able to walk into the jail cell and touch the prisoner on his nose. Again, our limits are not God’s. The gospel of Jesus Christ bringing salvation to all who believe is not limited to human travelers teaching others. The Holy Spirit can bring the gospel to isolated people through a vision or a dream. He has done it in the past (Acts 9:1-9), He can do it again.

Question #5:

Who is Yaldabaoth?

The God of Gnosticism according to tradition, but you already knew the answer to this question, right? 😉

https://medium.com/excommunications/demiurge-a-k-a-yaldabaoth-the-god-of-gnosticism-abd6194442e5

Question #7:

Why is evolution such a big topic in Christianity? It doesn’t disprove or prove the existence of God at all, so why is it often problematic?

There is the view that God created evolution, which, to the point of your question, doesn’t disprove of God’s existence. How a Christian reads the creation account in Genesis 1-2 matters, but it doesn’t have to eliminate God.

I wanted to answer this question because I think there’s more to it than that. The way you asked your question, in my experience, doesn’t reflect the worldview of many who do believe in evolution. In other words, there is an evolutionary worldview that requires atheism. Discerning your question, it would seem like that’s not the case for you. Fair enough. But evolutionists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens are atheists. Thus, I think the point of contention is not on creation/evolution but on whether God exists or not (deism, theism/atheism).

Now, if one holds to an evolutionary worldview and is an atheist, then the discussion is a big topic, not solely due to its evolutionary component but more because of its atheistic component. What’s so problematic about God not existing? There are many answers to this question, I’ve written at length about one of the main ones here: https://medium.com/outside-the-box-inside-the-book/the-morality-conundrum-for-atheism-a83ad4377a67

I appreciate what you said in another article when you wrote,

“However, he chose Christianity — the absolute truth. My issue with that is that I could say the same thing. God doesn’t exist — that’s the absolute truth — there you have it. What now? Words and claims mean nothing without evidence to back them up. You can say anything, but if you have no evidence for it, it’s all emptiness.”

I would LOVE to engage with you in a conversation about epistemology, but maybe that’s for another time. I don’t believe in blind faith – facts strengthen our faith daily. There are presuppositional and evidential reasons for my belief, but it is still belief/faith. Neither the Christian nor Atheist can go back to the beginning and view with our own eyes the origin of the universe (if God created evolution, or created, or the Big Bang started it all). But, as a Christian, once I have that particular faith, the Bible provides me with answers not available anywhere else. One answer is that only faith in the Christ of the Bible will save you from your sins, which is an exclusive claim. Then again, all truth claims are exclusive in their nature.

I do not abandon critical thinking in order to believe in Christianity. If anything, I implore all my thinking power (which is not much). Then I studied the Bible hard and prayerfully, then I began to see what I couldn’t see before (2 Timothy 2:7). Jesus said the greatest commandment ever was to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). With all of my mind I’m to love God. God is very much in favor of rigorous study as an expression of my love for him. I love to ask challenging questions about God and the Bible. God can handle it, you know? He can handle my complaints and my being real with him. He’s big enough to handle my and your questions.

Question #9:

What’s the difference between a coincidence and a divine plan?

Intentionality.

Question #11:

I’m only answering part of your questions since I’m about to write an article about all of this at length. For the sake of brevity, I would say that according to the Bible, God is in complete control of everything while still maintaining his sinlessness and holiness.

Side note about “Free Will”: The word “free” is problematic to me according to the Bible. It has helped me to think of it as humans have a will, but it's not autonomous. The freedom one has in their will is that he/she is free to do whatever they desire. What makes it not autonomous is that one is not able to choose what one desires.

For example, a rabbit and a vulture are in separate rooms. In front of the rabbit is a dead carcass. In front of the vulture is a head of lettuce. The only way for the rabbit to will to eat the carcass is by metaphorically exchanging its heart with the vulture. Humans are born hating God, according to the Bible. The only way for humans to find God attractive, appealing, and desirable is by giving the human a new nature, which is what happens at the moment of genuine faith (see Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus in John 3 about “born again”).

Regarding “Why does God need worship?” God doesn’t need anything. C.S. Lewis wrestled with this concept before becoming a Christian, too. To him, the Psalms were filled with “Praise the LORD,” and he read those verses as if God was saying to humans, “Praise Me! Praise Me!” To Lewis, God sounded like an egomaniac desperately looking for approval and applause from his creation. Then in his book Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis writes:

“The most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me…. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise…lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside…. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we cannot help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment… In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.”

So, the very nature of praise is the consummation of joy in what we admire. Pursuing joy in God and praising God are not separate acts. “Praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment.” Worship is not added to joy; joy is not the by-product of worship. Worship is the valuing of God. And when this valuing is intense, it is joy in God. Therefore, the essence of worship is to delight in God, which displays His all-satisfying value. We get the joy; He gets the glory.

The problem is that we are far too easily pleased as we search for joy/satisfaction in anything other than what our soul hunger for – God. Check out this section from the first page of Lewis’ The Weight of Glory:

“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

My question to you:

Some of the articles you’ve written are for the publication ExCommunications which is described as “Stories from ex-believers, doubters, and those recovering from religion.” My question is, why do you still love “having conversations with theists about their faith and their worldview?” I know it’s harder to sense emotion through written words, but I’m only asking out of curiosity.

I read what you wrote here, and I was moved to tears.

https://medium.com/excommunications/respect-or-disrespect-thats-the-question-63ed9237c119

I’m a 43-year-old husband and father of three remarkable teenagers. We’ve been through some traumatic stuff at the hands of the church. When my kids were really young (like 4 years old), I began asking them each this same question that I would continue to ask even to this day, “Why do I love you?” One might answer, “Because I’m smart,” and another might say, “Because I’m good,” and sometimes I’d hear, “Because I’m funny.” Their answer to why they thought their dad loved them was precious to me… To be able to see what they think they need to be, become, or maintain in order to keep my love. And every time they would give me their answer, I would say with a smile, “I love you because you’re my son.” When they were younger, I would hug them and say, “And you’ll always be my son.”

Like I said, we’ve been through hell and back during these teenage years. But I still ask them why I love them. The reason that question is vital to me is this: In order for my kids to have my love and acceptance, they just need to exist. There’s nothing they need to do or accomplish in order to have my love, which conversely means there’s nothing they could do to lose my love and acceptance. They’re on solid ground. And when a few of them told me they aren’t Christian, how they hate the church and hate Christians, I told them that I understood and am so sorry for the pain they’ve had to endure. I’ve even been explicit and told them, “You don’t have to be a Christian in order for me to be your dad and to love and accept you for who you are.” And I meant it. That’s what brought tears to my eyes when reading your article. Children should be loved and accepted by their parents and family with no strings attached, which cultivates a safe environment to be yourself.

Thank you for reading all of this, Virag.