The questions that do not close

The order, and why it is this one

Join anywhere. Each stop carries the route with it, so the foot of every question here offers the next one and the way back to this page.

1. 01What happened after the crucifixion?By the time Paul joined the movement, people who had known Jesus were saying he had been raised, and Paul later met two of them in Jerusalem. That the claim was made early is documented. Whether the claim is true is not the kind of thing a document settles.Abyssdepth, meaning: Fundamental questions where our understanding is extremely limited.Unknown. Humanity does not currently have a satisfactory answer.Read
2. 02Did the first Christians expect the world to end?The expectation is in the earliest letters in the first person. Whether it was a mistake, a misreading, or a different kind of statement is an argument that starts inside the New Testament.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
3. 03Could a miracle ever be evidence?The texts present signs as evidence meant to persuade. The standard philosophical objection is not that miracles do not happen but that testimony could never be good enough to establish one. Hume aimed it at religion, but the argument is about the structure of evidence.Abyssdepth, meaning: Fundamental questions where our understanding is extremely limited.Unknown. Humanity does not currently have a satisfactory answer.Read
4. 04Does prayer do anything?Randomised trials of intercessory prayer for strangers have found no clear effect, and the largest prospective one found more complications in the group told they were being prayed for. What that settles, and what it does not, is worth being precise about.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
5. 05Why does a good God allow suffering?The argument was set out in four clauses in antiquity, and philosophers now argue a newer, evidential form of it alongside the old one. No evidence has settled either the answers or the objection, which is why this page is about what each position actually costs.Abyssdepth, meaning: Fundamental questions where our understanding is extremely limited.Unknown. Humanity does not currently have a satisfactory answer.Read
6. 06What happens when you die?Where the Hebrew Bible speaks of the dead, it mostly describes death as the end of awareness. A bodily resurrection appears late and becomes central in Christianity. The popular picture of a soul going somewhere is a third thing again, with antecedents in Greek philosophy and in later Jewish writing.Unknowndepth, meaning: Questions where we may not even know what an answer would look like if we found one.Unknown. Humanity does not currently have a satisfactory answer.Read
7. 07What does Christianity mean by faith?Faith is routinely defined, by its critics and by some of its defenders, as believing things without evidence. The documents do not use it that way, and one of them stakes the whole claim on an event it says would falsify everything if it did not happen.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
8. 08What about people who never heard any of it?Two churches, two documents, two answers in opposite terms, both citing scripture. This is the clearest place to see what a denominational disagreement actually looks like from the inside.Abyssdepth, meaning: Fundamental questions where our understanding is extremely limited.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
9. 09Where did hell come from?The picture the word usually calls up is only partly in the texts, and the texts do not agree with each other closely enough to produce it. What is on the page is three different things, two of them flattened into one word by translation, and an argument about their meaning that was already old in the fifth century.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
10. 10Where did the devil come from?The figure changes across the collection, in a direction anybody can follow, and one of the clearest cases is a single event that two books attribute to two different agents. Most of the familiar picture, including Lucifer as a name for the devil, comes from outside the texts.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read