This is Part 3 of Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Guide.
Emotion, Interpretation, and Personal Barriers#
Emotion and Reason#
As you get older, your response to your perceptions gets more nuanced as you become more aware of your emotions. You decide whether an emotion such as fear is justified in a given situation, and much of this is based on experience.
Overcoming Emotional Baggage in Apologetics#
If someone has been bitten by a dog in the past, they may now be wary of dogs. Reasoning them out of a fear of dogs would be difficult, not because you lack good arguments for not being afraid of dogs, but because the emotion of fear is too powerful and gets in the way.
In the same way, reasoning someone into believing in God is difficult if there’s a lot of emotional baggage connected to God. Perhaps someone was raised by “religious” parents who were also abusive, so they emotionally link God with pain. Or perhaps a person was raised in an atheistic household and associates God with boredom or some other negative emotion.
Even if you make a stellar, knock-down argument to someone, a strong opposing emotion can block them from accepting your conclusion. They may admit you have a good argument, but they’ll still reject it based solely on how they feel. Even if emotion doesn’t defeat reason in the mind, it may defeat reason in the heart and in how one lives day to day. People are not robots, and emotion is part of our being. Your apologetic needs to take this into account.
Arguments#
Some arguments are more convincing than others. A logical proof you can write on paper may be more convincing than eyewitness testimony, depending on who you’re talking to.
A series of strange coincidences will convince some people but not others. For example, if you’re driving down the road and you see a car with the license plate “123-ABC”, you might not think much of it. But if you see that license plate three times in one day, you might start to think it’s more than just a coincidence. Another person, however, might just pass it off as mere chance.
When it comes to evidence for Jesus being the prophesied Messiah and for the resurrection, there is a mountain of evidence. But some people will still pass it off as coincidence or fabrication. This is especially true of selective skeptics who seek to poke holes in everything except what they already believe.
Some say that only rock-solid logical proofs are acceptable, the kind you can formally write down on paper. But that very demand doesn’t have a logical proof to back it up. There is no logical proof that proves you must have a logical proof for something to be true. And if you can’t provide a proof that your own demand is sound, you can’t fairly demand the same of others.
This all ties back into emotion. The selective skeptic who demands logical proof for things he disagrees with feels completely comfortable with that demand, but when it comes to things he already agrees with, he’s perfectly happy to accept them on blind faith, making an exception to his own rule.
Many People Believe What Makes Them Feel Good#
People are prideful, and pride hates being wrong. Admitting that a belief is false rarely stays contained to just that one belief. It has threads that reach into your sense of self, your relationships, and your standing with people you respect. Most people don’t want to feel or look foolish, so they’ll hold onto a wrong belief if it makes them feel good, whether that means feeling righteous, feeling superior, or staying in good standing with people who matter to them.
There’s also a relational cost to changing your mind. If you were taught a belief by someone you trust, admitting that belief is wrong can feel like admitting you were foolish twice over, once for holding the wrong belief and again for trusting the person who gave it to you. That’s an uncomfortable position, and people tend to avoid discomfort.
Not every false belief is the product of active rationalization, though. A lot of beliefs are simply default. They were acquired young, absorbed from parents or culture, and never seriously questioned. Nobody sat down and reasoned their way into them, and nobody is actively defending them with elaborate justifications. They’re just “how I was raised,” and that status quo comfort can be just as hard to dislodge as an actively defended belief.
Christianity presents a particular problem here because it doesn’t just ask you to add a new fact to your worldview. It tells you something unflattering about yourself. Scripture says there is none righteous, not one, and that all of us have gone astray like sheep (Isaiah 53:6, Romans 3:10). That’s not a pleasant message. It destroys pride and reminds you that you are not God. Given the choice between a belief that flatters you and one that humbles you, most people will gravitate toward the flattering one, regardless of the evidence. If you want to know whether your own beliefs are well-founded, ask yourself what deeper criteria you’re actually using: are you following the evidence, or are you following what feels good?
Naturalism, Science, and Selective Skepticism#
Attempts to Obviate God#
A certain line of thinking seeks to explain away the need for God by saying something like, “We don’t understand everything, and there are some things we attribute to God. But one day we might find another explanation that doesn’t require God.” This objection usually comes up in debates about origins. At the heart of it is a dual desire.
- To withhold belief in God until something “better” (perhaps less threatening or more palatable) comes along.
- To maintain belief in the current naturalistic explanation.
It sounds rational and even sensible on the surface, but it’s really just a cop-out. Looking for an alternative explanation is a never-ending endeavor. Occam’s razor warns against multiplying explanations needlessly, which is exactly what people tend to do when they don’t like the explanation they’re presented with. The core of science is about drawing an inference to the best explanation, not just whatever plausible explanation we happen to prefer.
Selective Skepticism#
Unbelief is always based on selective skepticism. Anyone can doubt anything, but unbelief doubts only very specific propositions.
An agnostic may doubt God and Scripture, but he will not seriously doubt:
- His own existence.
- Whether that blade of grass he sees is really there.
- Whether 2+2 is really 4.
Unbelief based solely on doubts or selective skepticism is intellectually dishonest. If we were to disbelieve everything we could conceivably doubt, we’d believe nothing and know nothing. If you doubt your senses, how would you know the words you’re reading are what is actually written? Or that your memory of what you heard so-and-so say is accurate? Selective skeptics don’t doubt the things they already agree with and want to believe.
Science Is a Field of Diminishing Returns#
The idea behind modern methodological naturalism is that if we just keep looking, we’ll eventually be able to explain everything in a way that requires no supernatural cause or intervention. This stems from simplistic, reductive thinking that assumes science and technology will continue to advance exponentially, peeling back the onion one layer at a time until we get to the center, which (according to atheists) cannot be God. It’s a shortsighted view that assumes a priori that the supernatural doesn’t exist, and it lacks a historical perspective on the methods and philosophy of science.
We have learned a lot in the past several hundred years, and technology has advanced exponentially in that time. But the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know and how many things our technology can’t do. If you have bad vision, everything might look blurry. Trees, people, birds, bugs, mammals, and other things might just appear as blobs from a distance. But once you put on your glasses, you can see the details and realize how much you didn’t know. Your improved vision gives you new information, but it also reveals things you don’t know that you didn’t even know were there. For example, you might not have realized a dog was standing in the distance until you put on your glasses. Once you did see the dog and noticed its collar, you realized you don’t know who the owner is or what the dog’s name is. As our ignorance shrinks, so it seems to grow.
Technological Limits and the Illusion of Infinite Scientific Progress#
Our most advanced technology is already hitting the hard limits of physics. Computers are not getting any faster. Moore’s Law, which stated that computing power would double every two years, has not held true since 2016. The reason is physical, not a lack of engineering effort. Transistors have shrunk to the point where they’re approaching the size of individual atoms, and at that scale you run into quantum tunneling, where electrons start behaving unpredictably and leaking through barriers they’re not supposed to cross. Heat dissipation is another hard wall. Cramming more transistors into the same die generates more heat in the same tiny space, and there’s only so much heat you can pull out of a chip before it either throttles itself or destroys itself. These aren’t problems that better funding solves. They’re problems built into the physics of matter and energy.
Quantum computers were supposed to be the answer. The first quantum computer was developed in 1998, and yet here we are decades later still struggling to get these machines to work without requiring extremely low temperatures, often colder than deep space. We don’t even have practical uses for the ones that do work. All the useful things quantum computers can do now can be done better and cheaper by classical computers.
Even safe self-driving cars are proving difficult, not to mention the utter lack of flying cars, which people expected to be in mass use decades ago. The 1960s cartoon “The Jetsons” envisioned a future with maid robots and flying cars. Instead, we got Roombas and Teslas.
Science as a Method of Trial and Error#
People sometimes paint a picture of science “marching on” and trampling thousand-year-old myths. The reality is that science is treading water, slowly navigating the vast ocean of the observable universe and drawing a map through a process of trial and error. Science is the discipline of methodically trying things, hoping to find something that works, and then developing explanatory theories. It’s true that science occasionally has breakthroughs that lead to new and exciting discoveries, but those discoveries lead to more questions, and they humble us by showing how much more there is that we don’t know.
Science is trial and error based on a methodology guided by loads of philosophical assumptions. At its core, science rests on beliefs about the universe that can’t themselves be proven scientifically, things like order, causation, and the uniformity of nature. These are essentially religious commitments about the character of reality. It’s worth remembering that many of the founders of modern science were not just Christians, but young-earth creationists. Johannes Kepler, who worked out the laws of planetary motion, believed he was uncovering the order God had built into creation. Robert Boyle, a founding figure of modern chemistry, wrote extensively defending the Christian faith alongside his scientific work. Isaac Newton, who gave us classical physics and the laws of motion, wrote more about theology than about science. Michael Faraday, whose work on electromagnetism underlies nearly all modern electrical technology, was a devout Christian who taught Bible classes. Trying to use science to disprove Christianity is like trying to use milk to disprove the existence of cheese. It’s a self-defeating endeavor.
Abandoned “Facts”#
Many naturalistic “explanations” for origins and phenomena have popped up over the years that atheists believed (and taught) as indisputable scientific facts. A more aggressive argument atheists use is that science has already explained away the need for God in many areas, and they’ll cite some outdated “facts” in support of that claim. What all of these “facts” have in common is that we now know them to be wrong. Let’s take a look at some of them.
The Big Bang#
The “Big Bang” cosmology is the most common one, and it’s almost always presented as an explanation of how the universe came to be. That’s a common misconception about the theory. In fact, the “Big Bang” assumes matter and energy already existed in a “singularity” (it doesn’t explain where this singularity came from) which inexplicably expanded into the universe we know today. But the theory is so full of holes, and is contradicted by so much empirical evidence, that even many secular cosmologists no longer hold to it. Professor Lior Shamir published a study around 2024 presenting observational evidence that challenges the standard Big Bang model in favor of alternatives like tired light theory. There is no good naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe, let alone everything else.
The Eternal Universe#
As an alternative to the “Big Bang”, some people hold the view that matter and energy are eternal, but this theory has its own problems. The universe certainly doesn’t look eternal. It looks like it had a starting point and is still in flux, which wouldn’t be the case if it had always existed. To be clear, most atheists don’t subscribe to this theory, in part because it conflicts with the “Big Bang” theory they hold to.
People who do believe in an eternal universe are likely to ascribe to the universe some sort of deity, as is done in Hinduism and other Eastern religions. Proponents of an eternal universe tend to be pantheists who see the universe itself as supernatural.
Common Descent (a.k.a. Evolution)#
Common descent, more commonly called just evolution (or neo-Darwinism in academic circles), is another theory that gets invoked as obviating the need for God. There’s far more evidence against evolution, and far more unanswered problems within it, than can be covered here (see creation.com for a deep catalog), but a few examples make the point.
The supposed old age of the earth still isn’t enough time for evolution to work, even granting punctuated equilibrium, which requires many beneficial mutations to cluster together in short windows without any detrimental change destroying the organism along the way. The fossil record is missing the transitional forms evolution predicts, and it’s not for lack of fossils. Fossils are common, not rare, so the “we’re lucky to have any at all” excuse doesn’t hold up. The order in which fossils appear doesn’t fit the evolutionary timeline either. The Cambrian explosion drops a huge diversity of complex body plans into the record with no gradual buildup beforehand, and flowering plants show up abruptly with no clear ancestral lineage. Evolution of the scale taught in school has never been observed, and by the theory’s own timeline, it can’t be observed, since it supposedly takes millions of years. Underneath all of this sits an even more basic problem: the mechanism of random mutation driving natural selection is unexplained. Randomness isn’t a cause. It’s a classification, like calling something “other” when you don’t know what it is. Assuming random mutations pushed forward by natural selection is an assumption that can’t be tested or directly observed.
Just as with the Big Bang, a number of secular scientists have publicly broken with neo-Darwinism. Denis Noble, an Oxford physiologist, stated in 2024 that “neo-Darwinism is dead.” Biologists Lynn Margulis and James Shapiro have likewise argued that the standard mutation-and-selection story can’t account for the biological complexity we observe. To be clear, most atheists still hold to neo-Darwinism as their preferred alternative to special creation, but discoveries in biology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and especially genetics have made the classic version of the theory increasingly hard to defend, even among people with no religious stake in the outcome.
Vestigial Organs#
It’s worth mentioning that the science curricula of schools around the world are very outdated. For example, biology and health books falsely claim the appendix has no function, when medical doctors have known for decades that the appendix is part of the immune system. Consequently, there are millions of people walking around today who still think the appendix is a vestigial organ left over by evolution.
“Junk DNA”#
There’s also the false claim that most human DNA is “junk” that has no function, when in fact we’ve known for over a decade that this claim is false. After sequencing the entire human genome, we know that all DNA has a function.
Spontaneous Generation#
Spontaneous generation is the idea that life can arise from non-living matter. It’s a very old idea that was debunked by Louis Pasteur in the 1800s, but it was still taught in schools as an example of abiogenesis in support of evolution.
Pride Goes Before Science#
Scientists are constantly developing and marketing new theories that develop a loyal and devout following. Then a new generation of scientists comes along, pokes holes in the popular theory, and develops its own. Science, which is a fairly modern invention, operates on the same ancient rules of politics and warfare, all of which stem from the same basic problem, which is humans wanting to be their own god.
The Role of Bias and Peer Review in Science#
This doesn’t mean science is bad or that it always yields wrong ideas. It just means its reliability depends on the people carrying it out. Peer review was supposed to help curb the influence of bias, but as we all know, it’s not hard to game a system, especially one in which there are financial rewards for pushing a certain agenda. Again, this is why it’s critical to locate and weigh the evidence for yourself.
As an aside, a huge red flag is when someone discourages you from doing your own research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were people mocking anyone who did their own research to decide the best way to handle their own personal risk. These mockers were essentially saying that the general public wasn’t qualified or smart enough to make this determination, and that everyone needed to just listen to “the experts.” As history has taught us, many of these “experts” were wrong.
There’s a lesson there for those who question Christianity on the grounds that “experts” say it’s false.
The Fallacy That Wasn’t#
“God of the Gaps” vs. “Darwinism of the Gaps”#
Atheists are fond of dismissing any explanation that credits God, claiming it’s the “God of the Gaps” fallacy. This misnamed “fallacy” is not a fallacy at all, but an instance of logical inference that everyone, including atheists, uses every day. The best way to understand this is with some examples.
- When attempting to explain a biological feature, such as eyesight, creationists will credit God with designing it. They’ll point to features that look designed and seem to have a purpose.
- When attempting to explain eyesight, atheists will credit evolution.
In both cases, nobody directly observed how eyesight came to be. Both sides have to draw an inference. The creationist infers a Creator, while the atheist infers evolution. So if the creationist is guilty of the “God of the Gaps” fallacy, then the atheist is guilty of the “Darwinism of the Gaps” fallacy. Q.E.D.
Inference to an explanation is not a fallacy. But we have to go beyond a single inference and look at what theory best fits the evidence overall.
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