We’re looking at popular arguments against same-sex marriage (and a few that are just anti-gay). Conservative radio host Frank Turek provides most of the arguments. (Part 1 here.)

7. You’re infringing my religious freedom!

The sky is falling, and the religious liberty of bakers, florists, and photographers is battered down by the merciless iron fist of the Gay Agenda®. To those businesses that turn away homosexual couples, Frank warns,

If you don’t agree to celebrate same-sex marriages, you will be sued, fined, fired, and perhaps even jailed. All in the name of “tolerance, inclusion and diversity.”

Discrimination can be against the law. Break the law and bad things happen. It’s really not that hard, despite your eagerness to make it so. If your religion denied equal access based on race or carried out human sacrifice, you’d be breaking the law and your religion would lose. The unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Davis v. Beason (1890) makes this clear: “However free the exercise of religion may be, it must be subordinate to the criminal laws of the country.”

More from Frank:

Can anyone see any middle ground between 1) you must celebrate my same sex marriage, and 2) God or my conscience prevents me from doing so? There is none. So which “right” will take precedence: the real right or the invented right?

The real rights—in America, at least—are those defined by the Constitution. You’re free to imagine whatever you want within your religion, just don’t pretend that that affects any of us in the rest of society. I wonder how Frank would feel if he worked at a company run by a Jehovah’s Witness or Christian Scientist who imposed their religious views on employees by limiting their health coverage (the Hobby Lobby treatment).

No one demands that you celebrate a marriage, but you must provide equal access as demanded by the law. Your conscience tells you to discriminate and serve only some of your customers? Don’t expect much respect for those views if they run up against the Constitution.

Christians like to imagine that they’re being imposed on, but what’s being imposed on here is their ability to impose their beliefs on others. I’m not sympathetic.

But it’s not just bakers and photographers. Public speakers like Frank are imposed on as well.

Those of us who have a diverse view are being excluded because we don’t exhibit lock-step conformity to their intolerant agenda.

You have a “diverse” view? So does the Ku Klux Klan. You and they are both free to speak, but don’t confuse public pushback with infringement of your rights.

We are being fired and fined for exercising our real God-given rights. How can this be? We can’t work because of our political views—views that are firmly rooted in the biological facts of nature. Is this still America?

“God-given” rights? Talk about it in church, but don’t imagine you can impose your theology on the rest of us.

You say your opinions don’t sell anymore? Tough. Bigotry giveth and bigotry taketh away. The conservative gravy train must’ve been nice while it lasted. Remember when you could tell racist jokes without whining from the PC Police? Ah—good times!

8. Let’s overthrow the government!

No, really—that’s pretty much what Frank calls for.

America needs a state governor who still believes in America—a governor willing to take a page from President Andrew Jackson who once rebuffed [an 1832] Supreme Court decision against the state of Georgia by telling Chief Justice Marshall, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” . . . Are there any statesmen left in America?

When your interpretation of the Constitution differs from that of a state Supreme Court or a federal court, you think a governor should just flex his military muscle? Oh, Frank! You’re a real man, and I get goose bumps when you throw your weight around like that! You gonna punch the bully on the beach for me, too?

While that may create a constitutional crisis, our Constitution is already in crisis! What can be lost that hasn’t ready been lost?

What’s been lost? Are religious freedoms in the U.S. now indistinguishable from those in Saudi Arabia or Yemen? And does a coup have so little downsides that he can allude to it so casually?

The stunt Frank imagines has already been tried. It didn’t turn out well for the governor of Arkansas in 1957 when he called out the Arkansas National Guard to support segregationists opposed to a Supreme Court demand to integrate Little Rock public schools. President Eisenhower’s response was to federalize the Arkansas National Guard to remove it from the governor’s control and replace it with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Game, set, and match.

Frank is big on bravado, but he really needs to think through whom he allies himself with.

Continued in part 4.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/13/15.)

Image credit: Pavel Ševela, Wikimedia Commons

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Do you have any connections within the publishing industry?

I’ve finished the manuscript for my next book. Unlike my last two books, which were fiction, this is nonfiction. My next step is to get a literary agent. If you could make an introduction or recommend anyone, that would be an enormous help.

I’m targeting a Christian audience with the book, though atheists and “Nones” should also find it compelling. Here’s my pitch:

If Christianity is true, it can stand a little critique. 2-Minute Christianity: 50 Big Ideas Every Christian Should Understand tells you the other side of the story, what you didn’t learn in Sunday school. Fifty brief chapters, two pages apiece, introduce you to arguments for and against Christianity, the plot holes in favorite Bible stories, and evolution of belief documented in the Bible itself.

This is the conversation that others are having about Christianity. If you’re an open-minded Christian, these are 50 big ideas you need to understand.

The goal is not to deconvert anyone but simply to educate. Anyone who reads this short book will be better educated about how Christianity came to be than most Christians.

The layout of the book should be a selling point. Take a look at some of the topics here, here, and here.

If you can connect me with a literary agent who might be interested in this project, please contact me at the email address below. Thanks!

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John Warwick Montgomery was the William Lane Craig of his day. According to his web site, he is “considered by many to be the foremost living apologist for biblical Christianity.” He’s quite proud of his 11 earned degrees, including three doctorates, and he likes to be introduced using the European convention, “Dr Dr Dr Montgomery.”

I attended his two-week International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France in 2011. Despite assurances to the contrary, it didn’t make me a believer.

I went to find the best apologetics arguments. Was the good stuff backstage, reserved for the serious students of the art? I wanted to see. What I found was the same tired arguments.

Dr Dr Dr Montgomery was a guest on a Christian radio show and was asked to respond to Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God (2014). Here are a few excerpts that highlight the thinking of the “foremost living apologist.” I think you’ll agree that it’s a rich vein of crazy.

I suppose it’s nice that [Ehrman] wants everybody to love each other, but if there isn’t any god and there’s no last judgment, I’d like to know why anyone should bother with anybody else. I mean certainly, it would be looking out for Number One. . . . It would be a matter of feathering our own nest and certainly not paying attention to anybody else.

You don’t know why anyone should bother with anyone else? The reason isn’t hard to find—evolution selects for positive traits like trustworthiness, generosity, and self-sacrifice in social animals like apes (which includes us). We find those traits laudable because evolution has made that part of our programming. But the reason is irrelevant. We obviously don’t just look out for Number One, so Montgomery’s instincts have led him astray.

If being a Christian is what’s keeping some people from being thieves and murderers, I guess it’s good that they’re Christian.

Montgomery continues:

And all of the horrors of atheistic totalitarianisms could never be criticized; there isn’t any last judgment; Hitler and Stalin—they just die like anybody else, and they can get away with it.

(1) Show me just one person killed in the name of atheism. Can’t do it, can you? There is nothing behind atheism except for the lack of belief in gods—that’s all it is. Christianity and other religions, by contrast, have libraries of books analyzing their holy books and traditions—or criticizing the analysis or traditions of other sects of their religion.

(I respond to the “Stalin was a murderer and he was an atheist!” argument here.)

Atheism makes no moral claims or demands. It provides no moral framework. That’s not a lack; it’s just a fact. (Contrast it with the elaborate morality we find in the Bible that looks pretty shabby when examined in a modern light.)

(2) Montgomery says that the horrors of evil regimes “could never be criticized,” but of course nonbelievers criticize wrongdoing all the time. What he means, I’m sure, is that they can’t criticize while also rejecting Christianity’s objective morality. But that’s nonsense as well. There is no evidence supporting claims of objective morality. My moral relativism (morality is sourced inside people, not outside) has no problem pointing out errors. Where you and I differ on moral issues, I think you’re wrong—who does it any differently?

(3) He thinks that evil dictators have their way with the world and then just die, avoiding any punishment.

In the first place, that a worldview has a more pleasing view about something than another is no indication of the correctness of that worldview. I hope we can agree that truth is the bottom line.

In the second, yeah, bad people sometimes just get away with it. That bothers me, too, but what are you going to do about it? It’s reality. Aren’t we adults here? I can’t consider this view without imagining a furious red-faced five-year-old stamping her feet because she didn’t get her way.

In the third place, why is the Christian view of justice any more satisfying? Maybe Stalin or Hitler had deathbed conversions. They could be up in heaven right now, playing canasta with Jesus or giving him a foot massage. How is that justice for their crimes?

Once more from Montgomery:

A society without a foundation in a belief in God and in the last judgment is a society in which people will try to get away with anything they possibly can, and it’s simply an invitation to chaos, bedlam, and anarchy. Poor Ehrman is obviously entirely unaware of the consequences of the belief system that he represents.

Chaos, bedlam, and anarchy? I’ll keep that in mind if I need a name for a band. Or a blog.

Evolution nicely explains why people don’t always try to get away with murder. And history is full of non-Christian societies from around the world where people were sort of good and sort of bad, just like today—ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, for starters.

As for clueless Ehrman bumbling through life unaware of what his belief system means, I often hear this obnoxious and groundless confidence. I guess you double down on confidence when you don’t have an actual argument.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/19/14.)

Wikimedia / Image public domain

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The Argument from Desire looks at innate desires and sees the shadow of God. We feel hunger, so therefore there must be food. We thirst and therefore there’s water; we yearn for companionship and therefore there are companions; we yearn for god . . . and therefore there is a god.

C. S. Lewis said,

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. . . . If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Lewis was popularizing a concept that theologians have expressed for centuries. John Calvin referred to the sensus divinitatis—a sense, not of the environment like sight or smell, but of God. Blaise Pascal proposed a “God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man.”

This apologetic is easy to understand and has an intuitive appeal, but it fails under closer inspection.

1. Why do we fear death? If our inclinations are a reliable instinctual pointer to the supernatural, then why the fear of death? If we instinctively know that there is a god and an eternal place for our soul to live after life on earth, humans should differ from other animals in having an ambivalence about death or even a longing for it. We don’t.

2. The puddle problem. Lewis imagined that hunger points to the existence of food, but it’s the other way around. Consider Douglas Adams’ puddle, which marveled at how well-crafted its hole was: “Fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well; must have been made to have me in it!”

Lewis’s error is the same as the puddle’s backwards thinking. We don’t notice hunger and then conclude that food must exist; rather, creatures need food to survive, and evolution selects those that have a hunger to successfully get it.

3. Desire for God isn’t an innate desire. If the desires for food, water, sex and other basics are never fulfilled, the human race dies out. The “hunger” for the supernatural has nothing to do with survival. Lewis doesn’t show that this very different desire for God logically fits in with the fundamental desires necessary for life.

4. This is just a deist argument. If you find this argument compelling, this should point you to deism. Like many other arguments, this one only claims that there is some anonymous clock maker behind the universe. There is nothing here to argue for the Christian god over any other god or supernatural pantheon. (More here.)

If you argue that this god desire actually does point you to the Christian god, you must explain the myriad ways God belief plays out in practice. And why would the Christian god give you a vague sense of some sort of celestial clockmaker instead of pointing our desire specifically to him? What we see instead is that the specifics of god belief are just a local custom. (More here and here.)

5. Consider what else comes along with the argument. C. S. Lewis said, “It would be very odd if the phenomenon called ‘falling in love’ occurred in a sexless world.”

And would it also be odd if the phenomenon “belief in magic” occurred in a magic-less world? It’s not odd at all, because that’s the world we’re living in. Belief in magic is still widespread and was even more so a few centuries ago. We in the West shouldn’t be too smug that we’ve largely turned our backs on magic, because our thinking is still influenced by superstitions and evidence-less beliefs in things like coincidences, fate, and homeopathy.

We don’t need to puzzle over falling in love, because we know that love and sex exist in our world. But, despite Lewis’s efforts, the God belief looks like just another human belief poorly grounded in evidence.

6. The Ontological Argument again? You can imagine perfect justice, world peace, or a loving god, but that doesn’t make them reality. As with the Ontological Argument, thinking of it doesn’t make it so.

7. What is “innate”? Proponents of this argument list fundamental innate physical needs and drives like food, drink, sex, safety, and sleep. They may also throw in higher-level desires for beauty, justice, knowledge, friendship, love, and companionship.

The skeptic can retort with demands for Aladdin’s lamp, Shangri-La, or superpowers. Because they’d be great to have, does that mean that they exist? To avoid this, the apologist may distinguish between innate desires (the first sort—things that actually exist) and contrived desires (the second).

Let’s work with that distinction. In several ways, God desire does not appear to be innate.

7a. The category of innate desires is those things for which there is a clear target of the desire. No one doubts that food and drink exist, but there’s plenty of doubt about superpowers. (Guess which bin God desire fits into.)

7b. Everyone must satisfy the needs of hunger and thirst. Not everyone finds satisfaction for a God desire, and not everyone even has such a desire. The apologist may respond that that might also apply to the higher-level desires such as beauty and justice, but this only makes the innate category seem more arbitrary.

7c. Another way of seeing the innate/contrived distinction is that the innate desires (for food, sex, and companionship, for example) are those we share with other social animals. Since no animal desires God, why call that desire innate?

8. Don’t let your desires run away with you. We must be skeptical of fluffy arguments guided by desires.

Even C. S. Lewis himself argues against trusting too much in desire and Joy because the sane, rational person must be very suspicious of where moods and emotions might lead: “Unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.” The C. S. Lewis of this passage would insist that we regard our inner states, including desires and Joy, with suspicion if not discount them entirely. (Source: About.com)

Searching for the best spin on this argument

If the list of innate desires were 10,000 long, the apologists’ argument would have some weight. They’d say, “Every single item on this enormous list is a desire for which we know that a corresponding target exists! The only question left is our yearning for god. How likely is it that this one thing is a counterexample?”

But even with the cerebral desires (justice, love, etc.), the list of innate desires is maybe a dozen items long. At its foundation, this is a weak argument. And given the problems highlighted above, the argument no longer has credibility.

God belief is a poor fit as an innate belief, but here’s a better comparison. Wishful thinking in religion is like wishful thinking in the health and beauty aisle, or in diets, or in end-of-life care. What’s the loss of a little money when you could look better, be thinner, or live longer? Hope springs eternal, in religion as in more mundane areas. It’d be great to look younger or more fit, and it’d be great to have an all-powerful Friend looking out for me. That doesn’t make it true.

As with claims for cosmetics and cure-alls, we must be skeptical.

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This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/19/14.)

Image via Dawn, CC license

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Let’s wrap up our exploration of stupid arguments Christians would do well to avoid (Part 1 here).

Stupid Argument #23: Atheism is an empty philosophy.

“There is no basis in atheism for morality. A consistent atheist would admit that the holocaust was not evil based on atheism. All that he can say is that stuff happens” (from commenter Al).

No basis in atheism for morality? There’s also none in chemistry, but so what? Atheism doesn’t propose to define or explain morality; it is simply the lack of god belief (or some close variant). That’s it. If you’re looking for a formalized approach to secular morality, consider the Humanist Manifesto or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Seriously, Christians, avoid this one. It invites a critique of your own worldview which, unlike atheism, does claim to provide moral guidelines. And they suck. With a God that commands genocide and condones slavery, your morality lives in a glass house.

Stupid Argument #24: You really believe in God.

You must just hate God. Or you’re an atheist because you are too proud to bend the knee. Or because you had a bad father. Or you don’t want to give up your hedonistic lifestyle. Or you had a bad experience with a religious person.

“You really believe in God, you just hate him” was the laughable punch line in the move God’s Not Dead. The mean professor, when a child, pleaded with God to not take away his mother, but she died anyway. (My review here.) Someone who believes in God is not an atheist. And not me.

Some Christians seem determined to begin with “all men are without excuse” from Romans 1:20. If there is no excuse, then atheists’ arguments must somehow be invalid, and they must actually be believers who willfully reject the truth.

I’ve responded to the weak “atheists must’ve had a bad father figure” argument here. The same kind of Freudian analysis by which some Christians imagine that atheists had a poor father figure (and so reject their supernatural father) just as easily argues that Christians who grew up with strong fathers invent a supernatural father to avoid the fear of being alone.

Here’s another angle on this idea that atheists are actually believers. From a pastor (quoted by Friendly Atheist):

How many atheists do you know that want to fuss and fight with you about trolls, and about Smurfs, and about fairies? None of them. They all want to fight about God. Why? Because you don’t fight stuff that’s non-existent. You fight stuff, that, in your conscience, you know is existing.

We push back against Christians because Christianity (at least conservative U.S. Christianity) is the bull in society’s china shop. Christianity supports hateful social policy and attacks the separation of church and state that protects both Christians and atheists.

Stupid Argument #25a: Rationalization.

“Life is . . . like a ray that starts with a point called birth and extends on into eternity. . . . That gives you a very different perspective on suffering, on evil, on anything bad that might happen to you in your life. . . . Any period of suffering . . . becomes smaller and smaller relative to eternity [as you proceed along the ray of life—it becomes] a quick, brief instant.” (from Christian podcaster J. Warner Wallace)

Any injustice you might experience in the world? Just shake it off because we should compare it relative to the all-you-can-eat buffet and bottomless coffee that is heaven. (And you thought Christians didn’t view moral arguments from a relativistic standpoint!)

The Bible puts it this way: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). This is analogous to punching someone and then giving them a million dollars in compensation. Yes, you’ve given compensation, but that doesn’t justify the injury! In the same way, “God compensates for the injustice in your life” doesn’t get God off the hook, since he still caused that suffering.

Rationalization has its place. If you have conflicting claims X and Y and you are certain that X is true, it makes sense to assume that Y fits in somehow. The problem is when X (for example, “God exists”) is assumed true with insufficient evidence.

C.S. Lewis’s rationalization for the Problem of Evil was, “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” He can’t imagine a bungling god and he can’t imagine no god, so somehow evil must be there for a good reason. Here again we have the Hypothetical God Fallacy where God is presupposed so that we can imagine that omniscient God must have good reasons for things we just don’t understand.

The Bible itself has these rationalizations. Remember when Jesus predicted the imminent end? Rationalization becomes damage control when it doesn’t happen on schedule.

In the last days scoffers . . . will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” . . .

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:3–8).

So Jesus was wrong by 2000 years and counting? Well, yeah . . . but . . . but that must’ve been part of the Plan® all along. Yeah—that’s what it was! All along, God wanted to bring as many believers as possible to the Kingdom, so he’s just delaying the inevitable. So rationalize a catastrophe by assuming God’s plan is right on course.

Or take the embarrassing conquest of first Israel and then Judah. What happened to Yahweh’s protection? Was he weaker than the gods of the other countries? Well, you have to understand that Yahweh was just using the Assyrians and Babylonians to teach God’s people a lesson (Ezekiel 36:19, for example). Yep, he was in charge all along. No other option is conceivable.

(Ideas on avoiding rationalization here.)

Stupid Argument #25b: God as the unfalsifiable hypothesis.

“Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter” (Christian apologist William Lane Craig).

If prayer works, that’s because of God, and if it doesn’t work, that’s also because of God.

If good things happen, God is blessing you, and if bad things happen, God is testing you.

If God does something good, praise the Lord, and if God does something bad, you just misunderstand (because it was actually good).

Heads, God wins; tails, God still wins. For some people, nothing will falsify God belief. (I’ve written more here and here.)

Conclusion

Christians, get out of the echo chamber. These arguments sound good only before they’re tried out in the real world. Arming yourself with these arguments is like walking the Hollywood set of a Western town—everything is pretend.

But the good news is that now that we’ve gotten these bad arguments out in the open, no Christians reading this will use these useless and embarrassing arguments, right? Surely, that’s the last we’ll see of them.

Christian apologists might say that these 25 arguments (and the ones I’m sure to be blogging about in the future) are ridiculous. Who would use them? I’m afraid that I’ve seen these arguments and more. If you’re saying that these arguments are ridiculous, yes, that’s the point. Spread the word.

But wait! There’s more!

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/20/14.)

Image via Casey Hugelfink, CC license

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Let’s continue with our exploration of stupid arguments Christians shouldn’t use (Part 1 here).

Stupid Argument #17: Failure to acknowledge the incredibleness of the Christian claim.

So you think the Big Bang just happened? And you accept evolution saying we got here by chance and life came from nonlife? That’s crazy—I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist!

Correcting the many confidently asserted scientific errors isn’t our goal at the moment. The problem I’d like to focus on is apologists expressing doubt over a naturalistic explanation when their God hypothesis—that a supernatural being created the universe and came to earth as a human and that this was recorded in history—is perhaps the most incredible explanation imaginable.

That the conclusions of science offend their common sense is irrelevant and unsurprising. If science were nothing but common sense, no one would need to spend years getting a PhD. Unfortunately, none of these science skeptics seem motivated to end their perplexity by reading a textbook on the relevant subject.

Science has given us plenty of surprising explanations—the earth goes around the sun, germs cause disease, plate tectonics, quantum physics, and so on—that aren’t on Christians’ radar only because they don’t step on their theological toes.

And when apologists object to a natural explanation for some aspect of the Christian story (the resurrection, say) they ignore that not only is their supernatural explanation less likely than even an outlandish natural explanation, there isn’t even an accepted category of supernatural events that we can all agree to. Science has found the evidence to reject countless supernatural explanations in favor of natural ones, but the reverse has never been true, even once.

The plausible natural explanation always trumps the supernatural. (For a response to Geisler and Turek’s book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, click here and here.)

Stupid Argument #18: Christians are better people.

Christians give more to charity (or are nicer or have fewer divorces or have fewer abortions or are better looking or have fewer weeds in their yards or whatever).

In the first place, many of these proud claims wither under closer scrutiny.

• Christians are not more generous.
• Divorce rates for evangelicals and fundamentalists are the highest of any group.
• Teen mothers disproportionately come from red states.
• Red states consume the most antidepressants.
• Atheists have better mental health than religious people.
• Atheists know more about religion than Christians do.
• Religious belief is even inversely proportional to innovation and intelligence.

A study by Gregory Paul compared 17 Western countries on social metrics (homicides, suicides, STDs, and so on). The U.S. came out at the bottom of this comparison of social metrics but on the top in religiosity (more). Proving a causal link is difficult, but Paul suggests that poor social conditions cause the high religiosity, and religion remains the opium of the masses, helping people deal with their pain.

I have no interest in getting into a citation war, where you show me studies that rebut any of the points above. Select any subset of the population, and you can probably find at least one thing on which they’re better than average. I’m confident we could find one or more positive traits that Christians have to a greater degree than atheists.

But so what? “Christian belief gives benefits; therefore God” is the pragmatic fallacy. This fallacy argues that if it is beneficial, it must be true.

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned, but I first want my beliefs to be true. I think I can handle the consequences of believing true things.

Stupid Argument #19a: God’s making himself plainly known would impose on your free will.

You couldn’t then make a free choice to follow him or not. As C.S. Lewis observed about God making himself known, “[God] cannot ravish; he can only woo.”

Knowing of the existence of no one else offends my free will; why should it be different for God? Satan knows about God in great detail, and he’s still free to not follow him.

The Bible record many instances of God imposing on people’s free will. “God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (Romans 9:18). He hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 9:12), for example, and he gave ungrateful humans over to “shameful lusts” (Rom. 1:26). “The Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples” (Psalms 33:10). Following the Ten Commandments and the rest of the 613 Old Testament laws is mandatory, which was a substantial imposition on human free will.

And these Christians will be quick to say that belief is the work of the Holy Spirit, so even coming to belief is not something we do freely.

This is a pathetic attempt at avoiding the Problem of Divine Hiddenness and celebrating faith (that is, belief without sufficient evidence). Faith serves no purpose in any other part of life and is always the last resort. Defending an invisible God and celebrating faith is precisely what Christians would do if their religion were manmade (more).

More in response to this free will argument here and here.

Stupid Argument #19b: “All that are in Hell, choose it” (C.S. Lewis).

People send themselves to hell—don’t blame God. God is a gentleman, and he won’t impose himself on people. If they don’t want to be with him, he respects that. The gates of hell are locked from the inside.

Are we talking the same God who imposes genocide? Not much of a gentleman.

I understand the motivation to downplay the eternal torment that the loving God has planned for the majority of his greatest creation, as C.S. Lewis does with his quote above. There may be Bible verses by which liberal Christians imagine a kinder, gentler hell, but the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus gives the traditional view. When the rich man is sent to hell, he says, “I am in agony in this fire.”

That’s one person who wouldn’t be in hell if he could choose otherwise, and Lewis’s argument fails.

Continued in part 6.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/13/14.)

Image via Scott McLeod, CC license