If you’re earnestly doing what you think is God wants, that should be enough. How could God complain?

(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: All God expects of us is sincerity. If we’re doing our best to do what God wants, that’s enough.

Christian response #1: “God values truth over sincerity, because it’s possible to be sincere, yet sincerely wrong.”

This sincerity/truth confusion is not an issue with works. For example, you don’t sincerely think you’re digging a hole when you’re actually painting a fence. And Jesus supported good works to the point that he said that they were the key to heaven. Remember the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25. It makes clear that works get you into heaven. Jesus spoke of a king who judged everyone in the world as sheep (the good people) and goats (the bad ones). “Then the King will say to [the sheep], ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.’ ” The king explains that those sheep had sustained him during his many troubles.

The sheep were surprised and asked when they had ever taken care of him. “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ ”

Where the sincerity/truth issue does become a problem is with belief. You can sincerely believe something that is not true, especially in religion.

You can be sincere, yet sincerely wrong. However, this confusion applies to belief, not works, and Jesus said that works are enough to get you into heaven (Matthew 25:31–46). Apparently, sincerity IS enough for God.  [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Sincerity and truth are two very different things. You might sincerely believe a plant is safe to eat, but your sincerity means nothing if it’s actually toxic.

Sincerity vs. truth is an odd thing for a Christian apologist to be worrying about since Christianity practically invented the idea of being sincere but wrong. It now has 45,000 denominations, which suggests a lot of ways even within Christianity to be sincere but wrong.

Why is this? Because the Bible is ambiguous. It’s unclear. It’s contradictory. What’s worse, Jesus explicitly prayed for unity among his followers: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one. . . . I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.” That’s a prayer that went unanswered.

This blizzard of alternatives puts a lot of anxiety on Christians who must avoid the many paths to hell. Jesus said, “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

The Christian responding to these challenges can’t just demand that we find the true way to satisfy God. They should show us the way! That they haven’t suggests that their answer would be as untrustworthy as anyone else’s.

With 45,000 denominations, Christianity has a lot of ways to be sincere but wrong. Why is this? Because the Bible is ambiguous, unclear, and contradictory. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 9: Truth Can’t Be Known With Any Certainty

For further reading:

• Parable of the Sheep and the Goats: Matthew 25:31–46
• Religions Continue to Diverge. What Does that Tell Us?

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Image from r e n a t a, CC license
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In an ordinary relationship, the existence of the other person is the last thing you’d question. With God, it’s the first thing.

(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: If God existed, he wouldn’t be so hidden.

Christian response #1: Maybe God has good reasons. For example, love can’t be coerced, and God might want to step away to allow us to honestly love him rather than fear him.

It’s not a healthy relationship if the other person’s very existence is in doubt, and that Christians want to paper over this glaring problem shows the desperation of their position. The Bible makes clear that knowing God’s existence with certainty shouldn’t be a problem. Moses spoke to God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” The same was true for Abraham. The Bible offers no support to the idea that God can’t or won’t make his existence known.

In addition, the gospels tell us that the disciples were with Jesus for three years. Did that coerce their love of Jesus? Was their love not authentic somehow? If not, why can’t we also know that Jesus exists by seeing him?

If God wants a loving relationship, he must earn that love, and a perpetual game of hide and seek isn’t the way to do it. God can either deliberately remain hidden, or he can be eager for a relationship with us. Christians imagine both, but that’s not an option.

“Does the other person exist?” is what no one in a genuine loving relationship ever said, but it’s what honest Christians must ask about their relationship with God. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: We can see God, in nature: DNA, the Big Bang, objective moral laws. God is the best explanation for these.

No, God is a terrible explanation. Religion has so far taught us nothing about reality, and this isn’t religion’s lucky day. Far from being God’s signature, DNA is full of junk that no Designer would put in: pseudogenes, snippets of endogenous retrovirus, and DNA that codes for vestigial structures and atavisms. It was Science that taught us about the Big Bang (the unanswered questions that remain aren’t pointing to God). And before Christians can point to objective morality, they must show that (1) it exists and (2) humans can reliably access it. This Christian argument pretends that only a supernatural mind could explain these, but that’s just wishful thinking.

Christians have made “God did it” unfalsifiable, and by answering everything, “God did it” answers nothing. Only by withstanding attacks that could plausibly overturn it can we gain confidence in a hypothesis.

Science has unanswered questions, but this gives no support for the God hypothesis. Scientific conclusions are always provisional. That’s why science is so successful.

Christians have made “God did it” unfalsifiable, but by answering everything, it answers nothing. Scientific conclusions are always provisional, but that’s why science is so successful. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: How many times have we misattributed God’s help in our lives as a coincidence, medical misdiagnosis, or close call?

This is a biased question that presupposes God. And look at the trickster they’ve invented. God becomes like the Norse god Loki. When we see something spooky in our lives, maybe that was God. Or maybe it wasn’t. If a bad thing happened, maybe that was God taking a roundabout route to something good. And if a good thing happened, maybe that was Satan’s route to something bad. Nothing is solid in a world with supernatural pranksters lurking in every shadow.

Take a step back and consider the three responses this argument uses to rationalize God’s hiddenness: God must be hidden to make love authentic, God is behind phenomena at the frontier of science, and God is behind daily surprises. The God-as-parent analogy is out the window, and God is no longer someone you could have coffee with. He’s become the clockmaker who’s wound up the clock and is now long gone.

Notice the concession. This argument admits that God is hidden, and these weak arguments are the best that Christians can find to rationalize this odd trait. This evanescent mirage is the loving God you’re to bring your problems to. If God existed and wanted a relationship with us, as we’re assured he does, he’d do it like humans do. He doesn’t because he can’t, and this god is indistinguishable from nonexistent.

If God existed and wanted a relationship with us, as we’re assured he does, he’d do it like humans do. He doesn’t because he can’t. This god is indistinguishable from nonexistent. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 8: All God Expects of Us Is Sincerity

For further reading:

• 4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil (2 of 2)
• Why is God Hidden?
• The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity
• The Design Hypothesis, DNA, and Dysteleology
• “DNA is a Program, and Programs Demand a Programmer”: a Response
• Argument from Design BUSTED!
• How Does the Kalam Cosmological Argument Fail? Let Me Count the Ways.
• How Much Faith to Be an Atheist? A Response to Geisler and Turek (Part 2).
• Another Attempt to Explain God’s Hiddenness (or Nonexistence) Fails
• “God Did It” Explains Everything … or Maybe Not
• Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell?
• When Christianity Hits Reality: the William Lane Craig vs. Sean Carroll Debate

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Image from Vlad Fara, CC license
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Do Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity all take you to the same place?

(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: All religions lead to the same place.

Christian response #1: Some mushrooms are good for you, and some are toxic. The same applies to religious worldviews.

The mushroom/religion analogy won’t illustrate your argument until you show that the points of comparison are valid. Yes, some mushrooms are healthy and others not. Why conclude from that that some religions are true and others not? Maybe they’re all wrong.

Don’t send someone on a quest to sift through religions, looking for the ones that are spiritually okay to eat and avoiding the ones that are toxic, before you’ve shown that any are okay to eat. Scientology and Mormonism are just pretend. And Baha’i and Shinto. Why imagine that Christianity is the lone exception? The burden of proof is yours.

Religions aren’t like mushrooms, with some good and some bad. They’re more like snakebites. Some are very poisonous and some are not, but none are good for you. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “The major religious worldviews disagree far more than they agree. They could all be wrong, or one of them could be right.”

Don’t look at just the handful of major religions. Consider the entire landscape, both throughout the breadth of human societies today as well as throughout human history. Human society has invented religions by the thousands. The “just one of them could be right” option looks a lot less likely.

You’re right that there’s a lot of disagreement between religions. They can’t even agree on the number of gods, the name(s) of the gods, or how to placate them. The primary debate isn’t Christianity vs. atheism. The first order of business is for believers in the supernatural to get their own house in order, and your argument about religious diversity emphasizes this point.

I’m no Christian, so I’m happy to dismiss “all roads lead to God” pantheism. Religions continue to fragment, making clear that there’s no supernatural force nudging humanity toward a single cosmic truth. This fragmentation is a problem for Christianity, too. If Christians can’t unify, it’s obvious that the Bible delivers no single, unambiguous message.

Human society invents religions by the thousands. Why imagine that just one (your favorite) is correct? Far likelier is that they’re all inventions. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 7: If God Existed, He Wouldn’t Be so Hidden

For further reading:

• Religions Continue to Diverge. What Does that Tell Us?
• The Perplexing Monty Hall Problem and How It Undercuts Christianity

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Image from Mike Scott, CC license
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Let’s run through a few Bible contradictions and consider what real eyewitness testimony would look like.

(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: The Bible is full of contradictions.

Christian response #1: There’s a difference between a contradiction and a variation. Two reports about the same thing may not be identical, but that doesn’t mean they contradict.

The gospels all have women telling the disciples about the empty tomb, except for Mark. In that gospel, the women are told by a man in the tomb to report the resurrection to the disciples. But “trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” And there Mark ends. That’s a contradiction.

Here’s another. The second Commandment against worshiping idols has this: “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:5). In a more sober frame of mind in a later book, God changed his mind: “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16). That’s a contradiction.

There are thick books like The Big Book of Bible Difficulties that have rationalizations for hundreds of cases like these, but this shouldn’t give the Christian much solace. These books admit the apparent contradictions, which is precisely what a book inspired by the perfect Creator of the universe should not contain.

There are rationalizations for hundreds of Bible contradictions, but this shouldn’t give the Christian much solace. These rationalizations admit the APPARENT contradictions, which is precisely what a book inspired by God should not contain. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “Why wouldn’t there appear to be contradictions in the gospels? This is the nature of all reliable eyewitness testimony.”

All reliable eyewitness testimony has contradictions? That’s doubtful. Contradiction seems to be the nature of legend and fiction much more than eyewitness testimony. Which of these two categories seems the better fit for the Bible?

Surely we should have higher standards for a book that claims to be inspired by God. At no stage was God’s divine hand apparent: not at the writing of the originals, not by preserving through copying, not through flawless translation. Every opportunity God has to show that he exists, he ignores. The Bible is error-prone at every step because it’s people all the way down.

Here’s what eyewitness testimony looks like: “I Simon Peter and Andrew my brother took our nets and went to the sea” (from the Gospel of Peter). “I Thomas, an Israelite, write you this account” (the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down” (the Gospel of Thomas). But this is apparently unconvincing because these books aren’t in the New Testament! And Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have no clear, identified eyewitness claims like these.

At no stage of the Bible was God’s divine hand apparent: not at the writing of the originals, not the copying, not the translation. The Bible is error-prone at every step because it’s people all the way down. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 6: All Religions Lead to the Same Place

For further reading:

• Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions
• A Convincing Holy Book? Not Possible.
• Because there’s a book called The Big Book of Bible Difficulties
• God Has 2 Heels, and They’re Both Achilles’

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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When the Christian declares that everything must have been created and that God was the creator of the universe, the atheist can reply, but who created God?

(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: Who created God?

Christian response #1: This question is nonsensical. God is uncreated by definition.

Give God whatever properties you want—zero calories, organic, lemon scented, made of soap bubbles, whatever. You still must justify those claims. Some Bible verses suggest that God is eternal, but that’s not evidence. You can start by showing that God exists.

We’ve seen this trick before, in Bite-Size Reply 1, where the apologist tries to disqualify an argument to avoid having to address it. “Who created God?” is a reasonable question that follows naturally from the apologist saying, “Everything must have a creator, and in the case of the universe, God is that creator.” Or if the argument is, “Everything but God has a creator,” then justify that.

Give God whatever properties you want (like “uncreated”), but you still must justify them. You can start by showing that God exists. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Everyone believes in something eternal—if not the universe, then what caused it. Christians just believe that cause was personal, which explains the personal attributes of existence.

Christians believe? “I believe” here is in the same category as “I have faith,” but it’s better to let belief follow from sufficient evidence. Let’s rely on evidence-driven science, the discipline that has taught us what we reliably know so far about reality.

Science doesn’t call the universe eternal. Time in our universe had a beginning, though there’s likely more to be discovered. Science has unanswered questions about the universe, but it has the track record of providing reliable answers. Religion also has answers, but each religion’s origin story is incompatible with the next, making none worth believing in.

Pointing out the gaps in scientific knowledge does nothing to bolster religion’s claims (for example, undercutting evolution does nothing to strengthen Creationism). If Christianity wants to provide answers to science’s unanswered questions, it needs to do the heavy lifting itself. “But science doesn’t have an answer!” is no argument.

“But science doesn’t have an answer!” is no argument. If Christianity wants to provide answers to science’s unanswered questions, it needs to do the heavy lifting itself and make a strong case. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Person A borrows from B, but if B doesn’t have it, they borrow from C. At some point in the progression, someone must actually have the thing. When the thing is existence, that someone must be “a self-existent, eternal, necessary Being.”

Borrowing existence isn’t like borrowing a hammer or a cup of sugar. What does “borrowing existence” even mean? Let’s find a charitable interpretation and see it as a variation on Thomas Aquinas’s Argument of the First Cause: you can’t pass the buck forever, and the buck stops with God. God grounds existence.

That has a common-sense feel to it, but relying on common sense at the frontier of science is to bring a knife to a gunfight. The Big Bang, the event that brought the universe as we know it into existence 14 billion years ago, might’ve been a quantum event, and quantum physics throws common sense out the window. It is completely counterintuitive—events without causes, virtual particles popping into existence, quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, quantum superposition, and so on.

Before you hypothesize a Being that is the source of existence, show that natural explanations are insufficient. That is, don’t simply say that science has unanswered questions about the origin of the universe (yes, it does). You must show that no natural explanation is possible. Otherwise, the consistent record of failure of supernatural explanations means that we have no reason to expect such a thing.

Thomas Aquinas argued that you can’t pass the buck forever, and the buck stops with God. God was the First Cause. This has a common-sense feel to it, but relying on common sense at the frontier of science is to bring a knife to a gunfight. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 5: The Bible is full of contradictions  

For further reading:

• “But Who Created God?” an Atheist Fallacy?
• Wikipedia: Thomas Aquinas’s Argument of the First Cause
• Search for “Why is there something instead of nothing?” here

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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Are Christians consistent in the standards of truth they use for Christianity vs. what they use for other religions? Or do they hypocritically apply an easier standard for their favorite religion?

(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: Christian hypocrisy proves Christianity is false.

Christian response #1: And does atheist hypocrisy prove atheism false? Everyone is hypocritical!

The hypocrisy that I notice is Christians giving their god a pass that they’d never give another religion. For example, there’s a worldwide pandemic right now, which would be an excellent opportunity for God to do something, anything, in an overt and public way. But he’s perpetually hidden, and his human handlers can always invent some excuse. Would Christians accept this from another religion?

Or think of the many clues that we don’t live in a world with a god. God needs praise and worship. Religious beliefs are just cultural traits. Life on earth is trivial in an unimaginably vast universe. Prayer doesn’t work. There is unnecessary pain. Does this look like a world with a god?

Or consider Bible contradictions. The Bible tells us that Christians sin (or don’t). Women proclaimed the news of the empty tomb (or didn’t). No one can see God (or can they?). Faith saves (or maybe it’s works). Jesus predicted the End in the lifetime of his hearers (didn’t happen). People deserve punishment for their ancestors’ sins (or not).

Christians don’t see the double standard but would spot these problems in an instant in another religion.

God is hidden, the Bible contradicts itself, and our world looks like a world with no god. Christians don’t see the double standard but would spot these problems in an instant in another religion. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: The Christian moral standard is grounded in God’s perfect moral nature. Of course Christians will fall short of the mark!

“God’s perfect moral nature”? Guess again. Any person who committed the atrocities that God did in the Old Testament isn’t moral. God defined the rules for slavery, creating an institution pretty much identical to slavery in the United States. He called for genocide. He demanded child sacrifice from the Jews. He imposes eternal punishment in hell. His morality in the book of Job was “might makes right.”

What moral standard does God follow? Certainly no moral standard acceptable in the Western world today. Maybe God’s morals weren’t bad compared to other Bronze Age gods of the Ancient Near East, but that is far from perfect morality.

As for people falling short of the mark, blame my imperfections on my Creator. That God created imperfect people and then is outraged that they don’t meet his high standards is a doctrine unworthy of any thoughtful person. Christopher Hitchens lampooned this by noting that, in Christianity, “We are created to be sick and commanded to be well.”

Maybe God was pretty good compared to other Bronze Age gods of the Ancient Near East, but that is far from perfect morality. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 4: Who created God?

For further reading:

• Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions
• 25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God
• Yes, Biblical Slavery Was the Same as American Slavery
• God ♥ Genocide
• God Loves the Smell of Burning Flesh: Human Sacrifice in the Bible
• Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell?

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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