In this issue of Solid Ground, I continue to offer what I’ve called “rapid-fire” critiques—brief responses as opposed to feature-length treatments—to common pushbacks to Christianity that you might face in conversations with others. Hopefully, these vignettes will clarify some issues for you and also give insight on how particular challenges misfire.
“I’m basically a good person.”
The vast majority of Americans believe in Hell, apparently, but almost no one thinks they’re going there. Their reason? “I’m basically a good person,” they say. They’re only little sinners, by their reckoning, since their good deeds vastly outweigh their bad ones. Their misplaced confidence is based on two points of confusion.
The first confusion comes from defining “basically good” according to human standards. God, on this view, is concerned with what kind of individual one is “on average.” If there’s more good than bad—if good is predominant—then God winks at the occasional moral lapse.
But justice never works that way, does it? The law demands that each person obey every law always, not most laws most of the time. No amount of good behavior can pay for bad behavior. Period. Law requires consistent compliance, and that which is already owed—obedience—cannot be used to pay for past errors.
A person may be an upstanding citizen all his life, but one single crime is still going to bring him before the court. He’ll never get a letter from the DA saying, “You’ve been a good, law-abiding citizen for five years. Go out and beat up a few innocent bystanders and rob a few gas stations—on us. You’ve got credit in your account.”
If you’re still not clear on this point, ask yourself what commandment of God—or any law of any country, for that matter—one can violate with impunity without fear of punishment.
God, like all lawgivers, requires nothing less than moral perfection. “But that’s impossible,” you say. You’re right. That is why we need a Savior. That’s the only way we can be right with God when we’re not thoroughly good.
The second confusion is tied to math. The “basically good” person simply hasn’t run the numbers and needs to do the calculus. For example, counting only the sins he’s committed from, say, his tenth birthday to his sixtieth—just fifty years—how many sins would he have committed if he’d only sinned ten times a day?
Of course, ten sins a day is a modest projection. Keep in mind we’re not only talking about rape, pillaging, murder, and theft. Sin includes the full range of human moral failings before God—heart attitudes and motives as well as actions, including failing to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength and failing to love others as ourselves.
If a person sinned just ten times a day for only 50 years, what would his rap sheet look like? He would have amassed 182,500 infractions of the law. What judge would turn anyone loose with a record like that? And that is a best-case scenario. In reality, each of us would fare much worse.
Whenever you’re tempted to trust in your own ability, take a good look at the standard, God’s Law (you’ll find it in Exodus 20), then look at your own rap sheet. To use Paul’s words, the Law “has shut up everyone under sin” (Gal. 3:22). It’s closed our mouths, and we all have become accountable to God (Rom. 3:19).
The psalmist says, “If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Ps. 130:3). Saved by our own goodness? Hardly. God’s Law gives us no hope.
“God is too big to fit into just one religion.”
I saw this one on a bumper sticker once. It’s clever at first glance, but on further reflection, it’s an odd objection since it treats God and religions like physical objects. Precisely what is God’s size? And how much space is there in a religion? Of course, these two questions are nonsense questions because they’re guilty of what thoughtful people call a “category error.”[1]
God can’t “fit” into every religion because religions have contradictory teachings on what God and his world are actually like. They are inconsistent with each other.
“Pro-lifers want to force women to be parents.”
One challenge to the pro-life view is that restrictions on abortion actually force women to become parents against their will. This, of course, sounds like an unconscionable intrusion of government into private life.
I agree, no woman should be forced to become a parent against her will, but this is not the situation we face in abortion. If the unborn is a human being, then pregnant women already are parents. It seems morally self-evident that no parent should escape her responsibilities by disposing of her unwanted children. The only legitimate way to escape from already being a parent is through adoption.
Clearly, the issue isn’t unwanted parenthood. If the unborn is a human being, the woman already is the child’s mother. She should not be permitted to end his life just because she doesn’t want him. She should give him to someone who does.
“If God showed me a miracle, then I’d believe.”
To many skeptics, God has “hidden” himself. If he’d just come out of hiding, they say—if he’d just work one dramatic miracle for them—then they’d believe. This kind of person overestimates himself. Even dramatic miracles can be denied or dismissed.
Just before Jesus’ passion in Jerusalem, he was called to nearby Bethany to help his friend Lazarus, who was dying. By the time Jesus arrived, though, Lazarus was gone. In a dramatic scene, Jesus called him forth from the tomb, alive yet still wrapped in burial clothes.
Lazarus’s resurrection was a spectacular miracle performed in public for all to see. Yet what was the response of the Jewish leaders? They decided they needed to kill Jesus. They said, “This man is performing many signs. If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:47–48).
Jesus, however, wasn’t the only one they needed to eliminate. They also had to get rid of another piece of evidence: Lazarus. “But the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death also; because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and were believing in Jesus” (John 12:10–11).
Instead of falling to their knees in response to this obvious display of Messianic power, Jesus’ opponents conspired to kill the very man whose public resurrection was proof positive of their error. This is unbelievable unbelief.
Some think that if God just did a miracle, that would be enough to change their rebellious heart. Don’t count on it. Jesus said, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31).
As one wag put it, if the Almighty materialized in front of a skeptic, he would not seek God; he’d seek a psychiatrist.
Oh so true. The sun melts butter, but it hardens clay.
“Consciousness is an illusion.”
Consciousness is a serious problem for atheistic materialists.
Two concerns plague anyone whose worldview requires that every element of reality be reduced to something physical. One, consciousness is one of the most salient and undeniable features of reality. Two, consciousness is not something physical.
These two facts create such a difficulty for materialists that New York University philosopher—and committed atheist—Thomas Nagel stunned the establishment when he released his public lament on the dilemma. His book bears the scandalous title Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Playing completely against type, Nagel argues that naturalistic approaches are utterly incapable of accounting for the central feature of human experience—human consciousness:
Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science…. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture.[2]
Thomas Nagel is refreshingly candid about the conflict. Erstwhile New Atheist Daniel Dennett,[3] though, was not so forthright. How does a dyed-in-the-wool atheistic materialist like Dennett deal with an obvious feature of reality that has no place in his worldview? He has only one refuge. He must deny that it’s real. Consciousness, he said, “is an illusion of the brain, for the brain, by the brain.”[4]
Dennett’s “solution” shows just how big of a bind materialists are in with consciousness. To make his physicalistic worldview work, Dennett must deny the reality of the most obvious feature of reality, our own self-awareness. His dismissal is surprisingly easy to dispatch since it’s self-refuting in an interesting way.
Often the first step in dealing with a challenge, though, is to get crystal clear on what is being claimed. Since consciousness is being dismissed as an illusion, we need clarity on what consciousness is and what an illusion is.
Your consciousness is your internal, first-person, subjective awareness of yourself and your mental states—your sensations, your thoughts, your beliefs, your desires, your intentions, and your acts of will (your volitions).
Notice two obvious features of consciousness. First, your conscious self is the thing you have more direct contact with than anything else in the world every waking moment of your life—and many of your sleeping moments, too. Simply put, consciousness is real—obviously.
Dennett’s first blunder, then, is dismissing the existence of something that’s unmistakably real to every other member of the human race. To save his foundering worldview, Dennett is forced to deny the most striking detail of human existence.
Second, consciousness is not physical, as Nagel grudgingly admits. The contents of our minds do not extend in space. They do not have weight. They are not beholden to the laws of physics and chemistry. Consciousness simply cannot be reduced to anything material.
Think next about exactly what an illusion is. It’s a false idea or belief or an experience of a deceptive appearance or a misleading impression. Simply put, illusions happen when a person’s conscious mind is being appeared to in a false way. They are errors of perception, conjured by your mind or fabricated by mistaken sensations distorted by your senses.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but illusions themselves are conscious states. If consciousness is an illusion, then what is it that’s experiencing the illusion of consciousness? On Dennett’s view, our consciousness is perceiving the illusion of our consciousness. The illusion is having an illusion? Hardly.
Here is the critical question: How can consciousness be an illusion if consciousness is necessary to have an illusion to begin with? Things that lack consciousness (rocks come to mind) do not have illusions. Only conscious creatures can be “appeared to” falsely. If you cannot have an illusion unless you’re conscious, how can consciousness itself be an illusion?
Dennett’s second blunder—the self-refuting element—is beginning to become obvious. On his view, a purely physical thing that lacks real consciousness can possess a false idea or belief, or be aware of a deceptive appearance or a misleading impression, yet each of those is a feature of consciousness itself. Dennett’s dismissal of consciousness is self-defeating because he must presuppose what he’s trying to deny in order to deny it.
Consciousness is your direct, subjective experience of the contents of your own soul. Your soul is your irreducible, first-person self that is the possessor of all your mental activities—including whatever illusions and mental deceptions you may possess.
Daniel Dennett is mistaken, and Thomas Nagel is correct. Dismissing consciousness as mere illusion won’t do. Since consciousness is real, and the selves—the souls—that are conscious are real, too, the entire naturalistic picture of the world unravels.
“The Bible was written by men, and men make mistakes.”
This common criticism of Scripture misses the mark for two reasons.
First, it does not logically follow that because humans were involved in the writing process, the Bible must necessarily be in error. Mistakes may be possible, but not necessarily so. To assume error in all human communication is also self-defeating. The humanly derived statement “The Bible was written by men, and men make mistakes” would be suspect by the same standards. The fact is that human beings can and do produce writing with no errors. It happens all the time.
Further, the challenge that men make mistakes ignores the main issue—whether or not the Bible was written only by men. The Christian accepts that humans are limited, but denies that man’s limitations are significant in this case because inspiration implies that God’s power supersedes man’s liabilities.
A simple question—Columbo style—serves to illustrate this: “Are you saying that if God exists, he’s not capable of communicating what he wants through imperfect human beings?”
This seems hard to affirm. The notion of an omnipotent God not being able to accomplish such a task is ludicrous. If, on the other hand, the answer is “No, I think he is able,” then the objection vanishes. If God is capable, then man’s limitations are not a limit on God.
Of course, this doesn’t prove the Bible is inspired. It only means inspiration cannot be denied simply because humans were involved.
The divine inspiration of Scripture automatically solves the problem of human involvement. If God ensures the results, it doesn’t matter if men or monkeys do the writing. They will still write exactly what God intends. That is part of what it means for the Bible to be divinely inspired.
“Abortion protects unwanted children from becoming victims of child abuse.”
This particular defense of abortion is probably the most twisted I’ve ever encountered. It surfaced years ago in the “Letter to the Editor” section of the Ohio State University Lantern as a response to an article by a pro-life Christian student.[5]
The pro-abortion author, Shane Ahmed, spends the bulk of his article attempting to tie the horrors of abuse, molestation, and sexual slavery to the pro-life movement. Bewildered, he states, “I have never heard a pro-lifer speak on child-molestation.”
First, Ahmed’s entire approach is a red herring. I promise you, women do not choose abortion because they’re afraid they’re going to neglect, abuse, or molest their children.
Second, as far as I know, my neighbors have never spoken out against child molestation, either. Am I justified in assuming they may be a little soft on the issue? Or is it safer to presume that as civilized human beings, they abhor such behavior like the rest of us, even though they have not joined a public campaign against it?
Third, what Ahmed must actually show—and not simply insinuate—is that the children who might have been killed through abortion turn out to be the same children who parents molest, torment, or otherwise abuse. This correlation has never been demonstrated. Indeed, abuse has risen dramatically (as Ahmed vividly points out in his missive)[6] precisely when abortion has been available to anyone for any reason.
The most serious problem in Ahmed’s approach, though, is the moral equation he offers as a solution: It’s justifiable to kill human babies who we suspect might have a miserable life.
Ahmed writes, “So what does all this have to do with me thinking it’s okay to kill babies? Because I am willing to make the hard choices…. I care more about…what they will experience than the need to simply bring them into this world.”
Apparently, Ahmed actually believes it is worse to abuse children—if that actually turns out to be their lot—than to kill them. He really thinks that molestation is more evil than murder. Indeed, he offers the second as an antidote for the first. He advocates killing children to save them from any possibility of physical abuse or sexual assault.
This, Ahmed argues, is the moral high road compared to the pro-life position. Really? Is this the best solution he can come up with? Kill children now to protect them from possible harm in the future?
I would like to offer an alternative to Ahmed and anyone else tempted by this bizarre justification for abortion.
If Ahmed really believes that “every single life should experience love, enjoy fullness, happiness, and meaning,” as he writes, he should dig into his pockets and spend some of his own hard-earned money to make that a reality, like millions of pro-lifers do.
If he really cares “more about children’s ‘lives’ than their mere existence,” then he might donate his time at a care center, like thousands of pro-lifers do.
If he really is “willing to make the hard choices,” then he should make the hard choice to actually do something for those children he says he cares about rather than arguing to save them by killing them.
“If there’s so much evidence for Christianity, then where is room for faith?”
This objection never made any sense to me, though atheist and Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer thought it was important enough to raise during a three-hour national radio dialogue we had together.
That didn’t surprise me since the objection trades on a substandard definition of “faith” commonly held by atheists.[7] What surprises me is that an alarming number of Christians hold the same view. For most atheists—and many Christians, unfortunately—biblical faith and well-justified knowledge are inversely proportional: an increase in knowledge means a decrease in faith.
According to this view, the more evidence there is supporting a belief, the smaller the faith investment. By contrast, the more dubious, uncertain, or unsupported a claim may be, the greater the faith required. Giving reasons for faith, then, would be a contradiction by definition since convictions based on solid evidence require no real faith at all.
Here’s why this objection is biblically silly no matter who raises the concern, unbeliever or believer. Two odd conclusions follow from this kind of thinking.
First, apologetics—giving reasons and evidence to justify belief—would actually be detrimental to faith. Worse, since without faith it’s impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6), and evidence diminishes faith by providing more certainty, then making a reasonable defense for Christianity would displease God. Yet Peter tells us to always be ready to give an apologia, a defense, for the hope that is in us (1 Pet. 3:15), a task the apostle Paul says he was specifically appointed by God to accomplish (Phil. 1:16).
Second, the more evidence against Christianity, the more virtuous it would be to keep believing it. Believing in the teeth of every shred of evidence to the contrary, then, would be the greatest faith of all.
So, what kind of information would completely falsify Christianity? Finding the bones of Jesus in a grave. On this view, then, God would be most pleased with someone who knew Jesus did not rise from the dead, yet still believed he did.[8]
The apostle Paul called such a person pitiful, however: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins…. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:17, 19).
Biblically, faith in Christ is not at odds with reason or evidence. Rather, reason and evidence are the basis for our confident trust in the Savior.
[1] A category error treats something as if it’s in a different category than it’s actually in—e.g., “How much does the color yellow weigh?” Weight is one category, and color is a completely different category not applicable to weight.
[2] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35.
[3] Dennett passed away in April 2024.
[4] Daniel Dennett, “Dennett Unglues the Binding,” EvolvedAtheist, January 3, 2010, YouTube video, 2:57, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in2FXOjq7g8.
[5] Shane Ahmed, “Pro-Choicer Claims Life Is More Than Birth,” The Lantern, May 10, 2001, https://www.thelantern.com/2001/05/pro-choicer-claims-life-is-more-than-birth/.
[6] Ibid. “Child-molestation [is] a dark disease that has become so common and accepted now that people aren’t even shocked by it anymore.”
[7] The basic definition atheists currently insist on is that faith is believing something without any reason or evidence. Otherwise, according to them, faith would not be faith. For more details, see “It’s Time to Forget ‘Faith,’” Stand to Reason, August 1, 2024, https://www.str.org/w/it-s-time-to-forget-faith-.
[8] I owe this excellent observation to J.P. Moreland.