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, drag-out 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#
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.
Quantum computers were supposed to revolutionize computing. The first quantum computer was developed in 1998, and yet here we are almost 30 years later still struggling to get these machines to work without requiring extremely low temperatures. 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 religious beliefs about the universe such as order, causation, and the uniformity of nature. Many of the fathers of the sciences were not just Christians, but young-earth Creationists. 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. 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. The evidence against evolution, the lack of evidence for it, and its many unanswered problems are all too much to mention here. But just as with the “Big Bang,” many secular scientists recognize that it’s no longer a viable theory, and they’re seeking an alternative explanation that would, unfortunately, still preclude God. To be clear, most atheists still believe in neo-Darwinism as an alternative to special creation (God directly creating different kinds of life), but discoveries in biology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and especially genetics have made neo-Darwinism untenable.
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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