I would like your opinion. Obviously this topic is an example of biblical gray area. So for issues like this:

Why does god not grant prayers of biblical clarity? I mean why would god not grant full understanding of the entire bible upon such prayers by christians? Why would it be necessary to spend a lifetime studying the bible?

Furthermore, we’ve had many many generations of christians who have undoubtedly prayed for direction in their spiritual life, why have these people not gotten identical directions from god? Why would god tell one man to be a morman and one to be a catholic, and one to be a baptist? Doesn’t god really talk to them? Don’t all of these believers swear that god has spoken to them?

Of course, I believe it’s all just their imagination, but surely this question has come up in history, how have the ancient apologists answered this?

Actually, all you need to do to come up with a version of God that comports with empirical reality is to ditch the “all loving” nature of God.

No.

A being that is both omniscient and omnipotent is logically contradictory (how could this being falsify its knowledge? ).

Infinite mercy = eternal torment
Infinite love = total abandonment
Infinite power = inability to act at all

I have found over the years that every single argument that attempts to justify the all loving, all knowing, all powerful God in the face of the collection of empirical data we call “reality” falls into one of three camps:

1) Redefining the word “omnipotent” to mean something other than “all powerful”
2) Redefining the word “omniscient” to mean something other than “all knowing”
3) Outright denial that God is all loving and instead insisting that God only loves a subset of humanity and so is only willing to extend his omnipotence and omniscience to this group of Elect that he loves.

Of these only the folks in the third camp seem to be intellectually aware of what they’re doing. The folks in the first two camps never seem to actually realize that they’re limiting God’s power to explain why he doesn’t act in the way a loving parent actually would.

God is wise above all the imaginations of men, and if He did demonstrate a callous disregard for the value of a human life, it’s because it was ultimately destined to bring about the greater good (for values of “good” that are not incompatible with suffering, disease, death, sin, and the eternal damnation of most of God’s children).

I really hate that argument, because it shows that the person making it doesn’t believe that God is omnipotent, despite their own claims to the contrary.

If God can’t bring about the greater good without performing acts that seem evil right now, then He is not omnipotent, by definition. Omni-potent means (roughly) “capable of doing anything”; if He is not capable of doing this, then He is not omnipotent. I’m not sure how that escapes people.

Another one I hate is the argument from free will: namely, that God must let us choose to do evil, because He doesn’t want to stomp on our free will. And yet they don’t realize that saying an omnipotent being “must” do anything is a contradiction in terms.

Further, it also leads to the rather unfortunate implication that God doesn’t really care if we’re good people or not; you can choose to do bad, and the only repercussions will come from our society. Try to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, though, and you’ll find it’s utterly impossible. Why shouldn’t this be the other way around? It would make our lives a lot better.