I threw out a few quick responses to this top 10 list. I’m actually a little sympathetic in that many Christians offer bad answers that fuel the atheists’ arguments.
Biblical literalism is inconsistent with scientific knowledge.
Straw man. Check Genesis for the number of stars, for example (countless stars are referenced several times, not the 1,100 most ancients believed), let alone the concept that the universe came into being at a point in time. That’s just for starters from a book not even designed to be a science text. Just lucky, eh?
Biblical interpretation proves the book to be a human invention or the god to be incompetent.
False.
Biblical law is immoral as it condones slavery, genocide, xenophobia, incest, rape, and misogyny.
Only if you don’t know how to read it properly. Of course, as usual, the atheist worldview has no explanation to explain why these things are wrong.
Biblical scholars’ god is very different than the layman’s god.
Sometimes true, but irrelevant.
We are fully capable of rational and critical thought yet we are only rewarded for blind faith and obedience.
Straw man. The Bible applauds the use of reason and the faith in the Bible is not blind faith but faith in something with evidence to back it up — Open-mindedness and Christianity
Historical evidence for Jesus outside the bible is largely thought to be forgeries or too ambiguous.
You couldn’t be more wrong. The existence of Jesus is a fact of history. Those who deny that tip their hand at either ignorance or disingenuousness.
Evangelical Christians give huge amounts of money to the church and are the poorest and least educated of all the major denominations. So much for the Prosperity Gospel.
Wow, great example of abusing statistics. Oh, and the prosperity Gospel is a false teaching, so that point wouldn’t be valid anyway.
If we are all loved equally by this god why was Thomas and Paul given much more evidence than me?
Good question. If you are seriously interested, go study the Bible in depth. Romans 1 is a good place to start (i.e., you’ve been given more evidence than you care to admit).
Many of the sins in the bible are arbitrary and lack any founding in reason.
Says the clay to the potter.
The idea of Hell and an infinite punishment for a finite crime make very little sense when sinners could just be annihilated.
Again, says the clay to the potter, plus the fact that life-long rebellion against an infinite God would not be a finite crime.
Filed under: Apologetics | Tagged: Apologetics, atheism, Bible, God, Jesus, religion
Nice, concise rebuttals. I’d be more inclined to offer a 4-6 page dissertation (complete with footnotes) dealing with each subject individually, if only I had the time. Each one of those so-called “problems with Christianity” has been refuted many times over by apologists and run-of-the-mill Bible scholars.
Happy 4th of July! Now go fire up your grill already!
I left a couple sample comments to see if they were interested in the truth. No luck so far.
One guy who apparently graduated from the Da Vinci School of Theology with a “C” average insisted that Jesus’ divinity was fabricated in 650 AD. I pointed out that the Council of Nicea was in 325 AD and that the debate wasn’t over his divinity but with some who claimed He was divine but not human. That bounced off him and demonstrated that he wasn’t seeking the truth at all, just rattling off objections from the Big Book O’ Atheist sound bites. If people are really searching I have lots of time for them. When they are not it is pearl holding / dust shaking time.
Enjoy the 4th!
The Gnostics (circa 90AD) thought Jesus was divine…so – definitely not 650AD
Einstein said: simple. not simpler. and you’ve done well here.
For this one,
“Many of the sins in the bible are arbitrary and lack any founding in reason.”
A request for examples would have been good. Most atheists have trouble with the sexual sins because most of the rest seem to be self evident. That is, it’s easy to see why murder, theft or lying is wrong. But in today’s world, I think it’s equally plain to see why ignoring Biblical prohibitions against certain sexual behaviors is VERY reasonable. STDs, out of wedlock births, teen mothers, suicides, abortion, etc etc etc. One needs to be lacking in reasoning skills to not get it.
Yep. The violation of God’s plan for human sexuality is at the root of a vast amount of the suffering in the world.
Throughout the Old Testament sexual immorality and paganism go hand-in-hand. And I don’t think that’s an accident.
Nor am I surprised to see our sexually perverted culture becoming more and more pagan, especially on television. Deep down humans know that sexual license is immoral, and they need an entirely new moral system to try and silence their conscience… and moral systems can not be separated from religion.
Once we get away from exclusive fidelity to our God, loss of fidelity to a spouse (even if not yet married) will soon be lost.
I think that last one re sinners being just annihilated.
brings to mind -
“You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.” C.S. Lewis.
“You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.” C.S. Lewis.
Oddly enough, he’s almost right. Phenomenologically speaking, I’m not the body, I’m awareness, which is no-thing. In awareness the body appears, the world appears, thoughts and feelings appear, all in a unified field. Awareness is all of it and none of it.
C.S. Lewis got one other thing right: he wrote an effusive foreword for the then-unknown, still-little-known Douglas Harding’s “Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.” It was very perceptive of him, because from his perspective the book must be rank heresy. I recommend Douglas Harding to all, he’s a delightful writer. He builds a deeply idiosyncratic yet classical mysticism on the deadly serious assertion that he has no head. I’ll say no more. Truly unique, and as I say, in delightful prose.
I don’t mean this to be disrespectful seas, but I am disturbingly well read in philosophy including phenomenology.
I do not know one phenomenologist that would assert that at all.
LCB said: I do not know one phenomenologist that would assert that at all.
You’re right — cos they don’t meditate, to do phenomenology up proper.
I say “phenomenological” just to distinguish that I’m making no claims about the ontological or neurological status of awareness etc.: I’m speaking only of what can be directly observed in first person — without reference or inference, through simply looking much closer than our preconceptions. ‘Cording to wiki: “as envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s ‘lived experience.’”
It seems to me that Asian religious philosophy is deeply phenomenological — trusting meditative and naive self-observation more confidently than it trusts ladders of logic, though they use those too. Shankara, Buddha, Nagarjuna, Huang Po, they’re phenomenologists by any other name.
Here’s at least one official phenomenologist making such assertions: “The Disinterested Witness: A Fragment of Advaita Vedanta Phenomenology,” by Bina Gupta. It’s hard going though, I wouldn’t recommend it for purposes of getting a handle on Advaita. For that, turn to the colloquial and practically oriented (rather than philosophically systematic) religious teachers. Nisargadatta’s “I Am That” is a good one … I can give tailored recommendations in the unlikely event that anyone’s interested. Neil, though, you should take an interest in the nondual traditions if you plan to give a comparative religion lesson again at your church. (My compliments on your delivery in that video, you’re skillful. You misunderstood some Asian doctrine though).
I haven’t read more than a few paragraphs of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty etc. I’d like to. Feel always welcome, LCB, to share your understanding of phenomenology or any other area of philosophy, I’ll always accept a free lesson.
Very poetic and very incorrect.
Actually it’s completely unavoidable. How could awareness appear *in the body,* phenomenologically? The body obviously wouldn’t appear at all, unless in awareness. How could awareness appear *in the world,* phenomenologically? The world wouldn’t appear at all unless it appeared in awareness.
Awareness is no-thing: could awareness be a thing, phenomenologically? No, for then it would be something appearing in awareness, not awareness itself. Yet the reality of awareness is the most undeniable fact there is; it’s not nothing, not nonexistent, it’s no-thing.
On the other hand, could anything that appears be something besides awareness? Obviously not. Awareness is everything then, without a hair’s separation between; but not any particular thing, not dependent on any appearance, not stained by any appearance.
My self, my life, time, appear in awareness; they’re not the subject themselves, the ultimate “I.” The ultimate “I” doesn’t feel like an “I” at all, in having no shape of any kind, in entirely lacking the tension and boundary of having a *life* (while in another sense it’s the only complete life, it’s the completion of every moment’s life), and nothing with which to keep the whole world out … while remaining pristinely untouched.
(I won’t claim that last sentence is unavoidable in the way the other conclusions are).
This isn’t original. It’s more or less the basic Vedantic argument.
Hmm, mildly off-topic perhaps. I’ll let you have the last word therefore as long as you don’t call me any names.
–After I note that Hitchens recommends Harding too, which has got to be some kind of record: a Vedanta-ish mystic praised by both Hitchens and Lewis. Check him out, y’all.