Why not?
There are cavemen on Riverworld.
“Heaven, so easy even a caveman can do it.”
Many Christian religions have a concept of default salvation for those who were never given an opportunity to make the choice (children who die young, etc.). Under that principle, I would think that cavemen would make it to heaven.
That doesn’t sound “all good” to me. In fact, He sounds like a callous psychopath.
This is simultaneously inane and meaningless. You say “it could be argued”, but what exactly are you arguing? Yes, god may be a Tralfamadorian, this is not a novel idea, what does this have to do with the OP’s question?
There may be - but I have it on good authority that there ain’t no beer.
bickering aside, has anyone offered an answer other than “no, because heaven doesn’t exist.” ??
koxinga, bob, and blake. you all seem to be on the “heaven exists” side. what do you think?
No kidding people don’t agree with each other, that’s why I posted this in a forum for DEBATES.
What I want to know is, for those who believe in both heaven and cavemen, at what point did humans become eligible to go to heaven? To the people who believe cavemen do go to heaven, at what point did God make the distinction between them and their more primitive ancestors?
Also, how happy would cavemen be in a Christian heaven?
They will be in Caveman heaven, but you could probably visit. Since everyone gets the heaven they want, if you want cavemen, then you can have some.
No, you haven’t actually demonstrated anything, merely asserted it.
You are assuming a number of things are true - that Homo erectus entered Heaven, that it was by virtue of their beliefs, and that those beliefs were diverse. And that diversity of belief disqualifies one from Heaven.
Assuming it to be all true, sure, but that is not a syllogism, it is a tautology.
What I am asking is your justification for assuming that Homo erectus had diverse beliefs, and that diverse beliefs disqualify one from Heaven.
Using your method, it is child’s play to prove the proposition is true. Assume Homo erectus are in heaven. Therefore, the necessary conditions must have been met. Thus, there are cavemen in heaven. QED.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m actually playing devil’s advocate. I’m a recovering Christian IRL. But as far` as the OP goes, that depends upon what flavour of Christianity you prefer.
If we look at the largest brand of Jesus followers then they have no problem with belief in cavemen, and they have no problem believing they can get into heaven. Cavemen are absolutely no different in Roman Catholic to the people who lived between Cain and Abraham. As far`as I can tell the theology is that they had no requirement to follow specific laws or worship in specific ways as post-Abrahamic people did, and were judged based upon their actions, their love of God and the state of their hearts, ie their righteousness.
Just as people like Seth or Methuselah are presumed to be in heaven despite never having entered into the Covenant or accepted Jesus as savior, so too people like Og and Thug are presumed to be capable of entering into heaven if they were righteous.
The only possible caveat is that Catholic theology is quiet about precisely when humans were given souls, but adamant that they were given souls at some point as an act of special, divine creation. But so long as we equate man with “something that has a soul” the there’s really nothing new being added by increasing the gap between Fall and Crucifixion by several orders of magnitude. Whatever arrangements were made for the souls of Methuselah and Enoch will equally apply to the souls of Thag and Zog.
And that really sums up the whole debate. The fate of the people who lived between the Fall and the Crucifixion has surely been hashed out i every religion more than a few weeks old. If those religions also accept the existence of cavemen then they fall into precisely the same category. Calling them cavemen adds nothing new to the question that I can see.
Not to me. To stop evil would revoke the gift of free will. Would you rather that humans were a bunch of robots?
I’d rather evil wasn’t created in the first place.
Yeah, I think that’s pretty explicitly stated in the Bible.
You can’t have one without the other. Accepting that Free Will exists, then it necessarily entails the freedom to perform evil acts. Evil was created by men, not God, and it was created as the result of the practice of free will.
Saying that you’d rather a world where free will exists and evil hadn’t been created is no different to saying that you’d rather a world where triangles exist but they don’t have three sides. Grammatically correct but actually gibberish.
Lib, brave as ever, is the only theist I have come across who actually hazards a guess for this threshold here: Roughly, when cultivation techniques allowed Homo sapiens (not, presumably, Neanderthalis or Erectus) to construct permanent buildings rather than the makeshift shelters necessitated by a nomadic lifestyle.
Like I say, it seems extremely arbitrary to me, but I admire his refusal to avoid what is IMO one of the most difficult questions a theist must confront.
RAA is a means by which statements are proven false. You cannot deny this, though you may well deny what RAA has or has not shown here regarding Homo Erectus beliefs and heaven. I have merely presented something for us to explore.
I’m assuming the first two for the sake of a RAA argument - I don;t believe them myself. I am proposing that their beliefs were diverse because it seems so absurd to consider that an entire species’ beliefs (if they had ‘beliefs’) would be uniform. If you don’t consider uniformity of belief among Homo Erectus to be absurd, well, let us debate it.
No, a tautology cannot be false. All of the propositions I am exploring could be false, indeed I actually believe them to be so!
Because uniformity of belief throughout an entire, worldwide species seems absurd. Agreed? If you disagree, we can debate it.
For the last time, I do not actually believe in Heaven in the first place. I am not tying to prove that there are or are not Homo Erectus men in heaven. I am exploing the logical consequences if there are Homo Erectus men in heaven. If you disagree that what I set forth follows logically, we can debate it.
We are a bunch of biological robots, IMO. A being who could prevent some such robots committing acts of unspeakable evil on others, but doesn’t, is not “all good” in my book. If I programmed even the possibility of evil into a fleet of electronic robots just to gain some satisfaction when such evil didn’t happen to come to pass, I would not be “all good”. I would be a fucking sociopath.
An argument that’s always repulsed me. You can have Good vs. Indifference rather than Good vs. Evil. There aren’t always two choices at every juncture, but an infinite number. You can have Choosing the Correct Thing vs. Choosing the Indifferent Thing, rather than Choosing the Evil Thing. The flip side of Civic Virtue is not Actively Working for the State’s Destruction, but Not Doing Anything.
I can easily imagine a universe where the existence of Puppies and Kittens isn’t balanced by the existence of cancer and Birth defects
sorry for this Hijack of a Hijack.
Simple answer is, “I don’t know.” Trusting that God is a loving God and all people have the opportunity to enter his grace, I just have to assume he has his own plan for them. And of course, that assumes that there is a God. If you believe there isn’t, OK, I respect that as well; but I don’t think the OP’s question has any impact on the question of whether there is a God or not.
Also, I think the terminology is a bit fuzzy. By “cavemen” do we mean pre-agricultural Homo Sapiens? Do we mean non-human cousins & forebears like Neanderthals and Homo Erectus? At any rate, I’ve also found it curious that out of the hundreds of millenia of human existence we only have knowledge of the past five thousand or so.
Angel’s advocate, surely? 
Then we are exactly back to where we were when I posted first to this thread.
Please present the evidence that indicates that Homo erectus had beliefs, and that those beliefs were diverse.
If by “absurd” you mean self-contradictory, you have not demonstrated anything of the sort. If you mean that you have some kind of evidence, what is it?
You claimed
What leads you to be so sure that Homo erectus beliefs were more diverse than beliefs are now?
Regards,
Shodan
I have no idea why you quoted me prior to posting this particular rant, since it in no way addresses what I stated`rather clearly.
I can only assume that you are constructing an argument based on the premise that Puppies and Kittens exist as a result of free will. Because if you aren’t then this entire rant is a gigantic non sequitur.
Scratch that, because you are attempting to use it to rebut my argument it’s a giant straw man.