For nearly all of American history, Christianity has enjoyed undisputed dominance over mainstream culture and media. But with the arrival of the information age, this status has begun to falter as more and more believers find themselves falling away from the faiths of their parents. Christian apologists have therefore organized a dedicated campaign of lectures and debates in order to publicly defend their faith and preserve their status. It’s a crucial aspect of our politically-charged culture war with far-reaching social consequences. After all, if God is real, especially the Christian God, then we owe it to ourselves to understand this God and worship Him as best as we can. It means the Holy Bible is the pure and righteous word of God, and we all need to start praying and studying, lest we find ourselves rotting in eternal torment after this life is over. However, if God is not real, then millions upon millions of our friends, family members, neighbors, and countrymen are all taking part in a massive, self-inflicted delusion - a delusion that not only demands time, money, and sacrifice to sustain itself, but also the political authority to legally impose itself on everyone else. All of us, everywhere, have a serious stake in this issue and would do well to understand it as best as we can.
I’m a professional scientist and engineer with a Doctorate of Philosophy from an accredited American university. I have several publications in refereed journals, and I make a decent living by solving problems and pushing the limits of human understanding. It's a matter of professional interest that I understand what it means to test my beliefs against the dictates of reality, and to correct them when nature tells me I’m wrong. I have no personal stake in any of the beliefs I hold, but simply in the rational assurance that whatever beliefs I do hold are indeed correspondent with reality. I therefore measure my beliefs through a well-defined set of epistemic rules, and I make no exceptions under any context. That’s what it takes to make new discoveries and build the knowledge of humanity.
Yet when it comes to religious affiliation, you don’t have to bother with any of that stuff at all. Your beliefs are practically decided for you at birth and then grounded on little more than tradition, naïve intuition, social pressure, and authority. Why else would religious faiths around the world segregate into such distinct cultural and geographic boundaries? This is entirely unheard of in the world of physical and mathematical science, but it’s practically a defining feature in the world of religion. It’s a dead giveaway that when all is said and done, religious belief has nothing to do with an objective understanding of reality, but instead is a purely cultural phenomenon of human making.
Ordinarily, this would not be so terrible, except for one problem. By its very nature, religion, and especially Christianity, is never satisfied with merely sitting back and enjoying a life of quiet worship. Christian doctrine itself requires believers to “spread the Word” to everyone else, and even threatens them with eternal damnation should they ever desert the cause. This problem is further amplified by the constant push to exercise legal force as a blunt instrument for imposing a narrow interpretation of Christian morality onto the rest of the nation. Intelligent design, traditional marriage, abortion, and abstinence-only education are just a handful of the current political controversies that are heavily motivated by the religious convictions of Christian conservatives. So if there's any truth to this stuff at all, then it's a good idea to find out what that truth is so we can make good decisions accordingly - and if not, then abandon those beliefs and correct them so we can stop wasting political capital on pointless, dogmatic superstitions. That’s why I feel personally compelled to understand this controversy as best as I can, and to share my professional insights with the rest of the world. Not just to casually analyze a few political and philosophical arguments, but to critically expose the very core of what it is that Christian apologetics ultimately represent.
It's important to realize that the debate on God’s existence is more than just a philosophical controversy between academic egos. It’s a battle over the very rules of epistemology itself. Because in the world of science, if you expect to build a reliable understanding of reality, then beliefs must be rigorously justified in accordance to very explicit requirements before they can ever promote to the status of knowledge. But when it comes to religion, there are no epistemic rules to speak of. No one converts to Christianity through the pure force of evidence and argumentation, but plenty of people do convert because of tradition, upbringing, and social pressure. So for Christian apologetics, the goal is not really to convince nonbelievers through brute intellectual force. Rather, the only really meaningful goal of apologetics is to rationalize the validity of a preconceived conclusion in order to slow the ever-increasing tide of apostasy [1,2,3].
They do this with good reason, too. There’s big money in this stuff and even tremendous political power, but it only works as long as you can maintain a reliable pool of gullible believers to support you. That’s what makes education and outspoken criticism so crucial in this controversy. It's the only way to break the cycle of belief and disrupt the political machine that works so hard to intrude on our lives. This is also why religious groups around the world fight so hard to indoctrinate their children at such young ages. It’s a deliberate ploy designed to unite religious affiliation with personal and social identity. Giving up one's religion is never as simple as casually admitting some trivial cognitive error, but the psychological equivalent of cutting off an entire arm or a leg [4,5]. Religious criticism is therefore often met with a hypersensitive, irrational resistance, such that many believers will flatly refuse to ever change their minds under any condition, whatsoever. For example:
“The way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the witness of the holy spirit in my heart, and that this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that Christianity is true, wholly apart from the evidence. And therefore, if in some historically contingent circumstances the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don’t think that that controverts the witness of the holy spirit. [6]:”
This may sound like a harmless assertion of spiritual faith, but it's also an open admission that facts simply don’t matter - that subjective personal experiences supersede any and all physical evidence which may ever emerge to the contrary. Remember that these are the exact same people who want the rest of us to believe as they do and live as they do - people who abjectly refuse to even admit the mere possibility of error in their beliefs, yet insist on legislating their spiritually-based morality onto the entire nation. Rather than engage the discussion sincerely and work together to formulate a functional understanding of our universe, Christian apologists, whether they realize it or not, are far more interested in engineering conformity to a foregone conclusion.
So if we’re going to take the issue of God’s existence seriously, then we need to remind ourselves that the actual existence of God Himself is not important. If He’s real, then great. Let’s believe in Him and worship Him and study Him to the best of our ability. But if God is not real, then that’s great too. We can stop wasting our time at boring sermons on Sunday and start making better use of our short, mortal lives. All that matters is that, whatever beliefs we do hold, those same beliefs can justifiably reflect reality. It's a bitter pill of humility to be sure, but if truth matters, then we should all be able to agree on this much at least.
Now to be fair, Christians do possess a whole slew of impressive-sounding arguments for God’s existence, but their entire position boils down to just that: arguments. They're empty words shrouded in a thin veil of philosophical jargon without verifiable power in the real world. That's why it's so easy to discredit each and every argument that Christians have ever come up with. Because in the world of science, when we want to convince people of a controversial idea, no one ever bothers with cutsie philosophical rhetoric - we make testable predictions and present our findings! So despite the huge volumes of sophisticated philosophical posturing, no Christian apologist has ever provided a single, verifiable instance of any supernatural force manifesting in the real, physical world. It's as if the entire Christian apologetic tradition is built on the naive supposition that merely concluding God is the same thing as demonstrating Him.
So please join me as together we dissect the great beast of Christian apologetics. Not just because we have a bone to pick with Christianity per se, but because Christianity is simply the most well-organized and focused of all the apologetic traditions [7]. Doing so brings us face-to-face with the very foundations of knowledge itself and forces us to enumerate the most basic rules of epistemology in a concise, unambiguous template. Only by basing our beliefs on a functional reflection of reality can we ever expect our decisions to have a positive impact on the real world. It’s a simple, practical question about how exactly we intend to justify the choices we make. Are we going to rigorously hold ourselves in accordance with strict epistemic rules and then modify our beliefs in the face of new, ever-changing information? Or are we going measure our beliefs through the lens of cultural traditions and subjective personal perceptions, never changing them under any conditions to speak of? The answer we choose as a nation, and as a species, will have immeasurable repercussions for years to come.
Notes/References:
- Apologetics.com exists to remove intellectual impediments to Christian faith, thereby enhancing believers' confidence in, and weakening skeptics' objections to, the gospel message, Apologetics.com mission statement.
- Catholic Answers is an apostolate dedicated to serving Christ by bringing the fullness of Catholic truth to the world. We help good Catholics become better Catholics, bring former Catholics “home,” and lead non-Catholics into the fullness of the faith. - Catholic.com mission statement.
- Reasonable Faith aims to provide in the public arena an intelligent, articulate, and uncompromising yet gracious Christian perspective on the most important issues concerning the truth of the Christian faith today. - Reasonable Faith mission statement.
- Guenther, C. L. and Alicke, M. D, "Self enhancement and belief perseverance," Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, Vol 44 (2008)
- Cohen, C. L., Aronson, J., and Steele, C. M., "When beliefs yield to evidence: reducing biased evaluation by affirming the self," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 12, No 9, 1151-1164 (2000)
- William Lane Craig – “Dealing with Doubt”
- And once you understand the one, you pretty much understand them all.
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