While this isn’t an argument I’d make, we can still learn a few things from it. This time, the Christian responses are that this challenge can be dismissed as self-defeating and that we can’t expect certainty.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: “You can’t be certain about Christianity because truth cannot be known with any certainty.”

Christian response #1: But this is self-defeating! If truth can’t be known with certainty, you can’t be certain of the truth of your challenge.

If you’re keeping track at home, this is the third time the apologist has tried to get a challenge thrown out on a technicality. Take a charitable view, drop the claim to certainty, and you get something like, “We fallible humans can’t be certain of our analysis, so how confident can anyone be when a fallible mind concludes that the monumental claims of Christianity are true?”

This is a real problem. Christians today seeking the word of God are, in effect, looking through a telescope the wrong way. To get back to the words of Jesus, you go from the English translation to the original Greek in our oldest manuscripts. But from there, you still have about 200 years separating those copies from the originals. What changes were made during that Dark Age?

And even if you had the New Testament originals, they’re still separated from Jesus by roughly 25 years (for Paul’s epistles) to 60+ years (for the gospel of John and more). That period is filled with oral history, which changed the message in ways about which we can only make educated guesses. This turns Jesus’s message into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no box top.

Christianity is ordinary, fallible people all the way down.

Roughly 200 years separate our best Greek copies of the New Testament books from the originals. This turns Jesus’s message into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no box top. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: If you insist on certainty on every issue, you’ll be paralyzed with doubt.

I don’t insist on certainty. I go with the preponderance of evidence. But whether the standard is 100 percent confidence or just 51 percent, Christianity fails. Christianity makes perhaps the most outlandish claim possible, that a god created everything. It’s hard to top that one. Add in the 3 = 1 of the Trinity, or Jesus’s unfulfilled “ask and you shall receive” guarantee for prayer, or a petulant god who must satisfy his rage with a human sacrifice, and it just gets worse. This claim might have been reasonable in the Iron Age, but not today.

This touches on a related challenge, from my site’s Bizarro version, Frank Turek’s Cross Examined. The article asks atheists, “If you knew God existed, would you worship Him? Would you try to live the life that God wants you to live?”

Short answer: no. Far from the all-good god imagined by Christianity, the god of the Old Testament supported slavery and polygamy, demanded genocide and child sacrifice, and had the limited imagination of the inhabitants of Palestine 2500 years ago.

Back to the article. We’re told that a no answer means, “Your problem is not with regards to the strength of the evidence for Christianity or lack thereof, your problem is either emotional or moral. In other words, you simply don’t want Christianity to be true.”

Or maybe there’s just insufficient evidence for a God who wouldn’t be worth worshipping even if he did exist. I think I’ll go with that one.

God created everything? Outlandish. Add in the 3 = 1 of the Trinity, the false “ask and you shall receive” claim for prayer, and a petulant god who must satisfy his rage with a human sacrifice, and it just gets worse. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 10: You Can’t Trust the Bible Because it Was Written by Humans

For further reading:  

• Christian Cowardice and the Suicide Tactic
• New Testament Manuscript Reliability: the Visual Edition
• 25,000 New Testament Manuscripts? Big Deal.
• What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?
• The Bible’s Dark Ages
• How Long from Original New Testament Books to Oldest Copies?

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Image from Van Williams, CC license
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