Why are Christian Apologists’ Arugments SO BAD?

Christian apologists have an appalling tendency to badly misrepresent counterarguments to their views, especially atheist positions. You see this all the time on social media, and even in live debates. The reason is probably that, in their echo chamber, they convince themselves that these are good arguments, or at least good rhetorical strategies. The reality is, they are neither. The best we can say about these apologists is that they haven’t thought things through. More likely, though, they are being deliberately deceptive. Making dishonesty a hallmark of your supposedly-morally-superior religion is not a great look, really.

Here’s an example. Unsurprisingly, a few Christian apologists on Twitter responded to my post, The New Testament is Morally Wrong and Factually False, in defense of their religion. One of them did so by saying that slavery in the Bible is not morally wrong; part of his defense of slavery (!) was that in the Bible slavery was merely indentured servitude. First, that’s false; second, that’s hardly a moral defense. He went on to suggest that since the Bible gives instructions for how to treat slaves with a minimum of decency (clothe and feed them, beat them but don’t kill them, free them after a long enough time), slavery isn’t morally bad. I feel like the existence of those instructions makes my case for me. If God had wanted to do the right thing, he could have simply said, “Don’t own slaves.” Yes, that would have gone against social norms at the time, but Christians are often proud of how “radical” Jesus’s message is and how difficult it is to be moral in the way he instructed—so why not mention the moral badness of slavery along with the other culture-challenging stuff? And while you are back on Earth to save everyone, why not overturn the terrible misogyny of the culture? Just as the Ten Commandments are a missed opportunity, the whole of the New Testament is a missed opportunity to advocate an actually moral framework. Don’t get me wrong: There are some good moral ideas in both the Old and New Testaments. But that doesn’t justify the claim that everything in those books is morally correct. Twisting the facts of history and contorting arguments to make them fit your preconceived position is not good argumentation.

Another example of the Christian apologist tendency to misrepresent opposing views is in the accusation that atheists are inherently immoral, simply on the grounds that they don’t believe someone else’s religion. Besides being a false claim since there are many highly moral atheists, and a hypocritical claim since there are lots of immoral Christians, this sort of assertion commits an argumentative fallacy called “poisoning the well of discourse.” It commits the fallacy of ad hominem circumstantial, too, but the main thing I want to point out here is that making such an accusation means that you have made it impossible to have a genuine discussion with your opponents, since you take them to be bad people. I don’t think theists or apologists are inherently bad; some of them can come to see the errors of their ways and become more reasonable, more human in their interactions with those they disagree with. Most of them seem not to want to do that, however.

Another recent example from Twitter: “Dear atheists, how can you claim that your belief is based on logic, yet also claim that everything we have today came into existence randomly and from nothing?” (@erichovind, Feb 19, 2023). This is mere deceit, or maybe it is trolling for engagement. But if it were a genuine attempt at argument, it would be an abysmal one.

Atheists don’t claim their beliefs are based on logic alone—the usual atheist claim is that the evidence for theism is unpersuasive or insufficiently persuasive, and evidence is about factual not merely logical claims.

The fault here might be due to Christian apologists’ tendency to take the Principle of Sufficient Reason (nothing comes from nothing) as a necessary/logical truth; they use it to infer that there was a First Cause, which they assume is God. (See my critique of these arguments in my post, Aquinas’s Epic Fail.) But that isn’t how atheists (or epistemic naturalists in general) think about the origin of the cosmos. Atheists don’t say they know the cause of the universe, they say that we don’t know and probably it is beyond our ability to know.

Denying the vacuous theistic claim, “God did it,” is not the same as making a positive claim about what caused the universe. Atheists say that the laws of nature are at least as good an explanation of the origin of life as “God did it”—better, even, since the naturalist explanation does not require postulating an invisible and unknowable “something” that works in some mysterious way. Using the laws of nature to explain the origin of life leaves open the possibility of discovering the exact path or mechanism in the future. Theists can never get that, since “God works in mysterious ways” leaves those ways mysterious. Substituting a non-explanation for a lack of an explanation does not seem like intellectual progress to me.

Saying the origin of the universe could have been a random event is not the same as saying it was a random event. Rather, saying that is simply recognizing that we do not know what caused the universe—the evidence we have is consistent with a whole bunch of different possible explanations. (A quantum fluctuation, an eternally existing universe, the result of a committee of minor gods, the result of good and evil gods battling each other, the result of a baby god playing in the equivalent of a sandbox, etc.) We have no proof of any of those possibilities, because we have no access to what happened before the earliest moments in the universe. It is worth mentioning that some of these possibilities are better explanations of the facts we know than is the idea that there was an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-etc., being responsible for making the universe. David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion makes this case in a detailed and amusing way.

I suppose part of the explanation for why Christian apologists often do such a bad job making and critiquing arguments is that they are arguing not to seek the truth but to come up with rationalizations for positions they already feel sure are correct. This is sometimes called “motivated reasoning.” The problem with motivated reasoning is that it can make you blind to the flaws in your arguments, since you are so focused on the conclusion that you already take to be true. This is a very human tendency that theists and atheists alike need to consciously work against.