Theses About Christianity: Why I no longer consider Christianity to be Credible

By Rob Haskell
Former Christian minister, speaker, and author
Bachelor of Theology (BTh), Prairie College
Master of Christian Studies (MCS), Regent College
Master of Theology (ThM), Regent College
Written November 2022
For comments and discussion: robhaskell@gmail.com

1. Anselm of Canterbury's (1033-1109) well known phrase credo ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand) sums up nicely the methodology of Christian thinking. Revelation is received by faith--then the reasoning begins. And this much is clear: Christians love to reason. But this movement from belief to understanding contains an important contradiction because while reason is clearly given a great deal of value in Christian thought, it is not allowed to speak to the system's foundational premises. Those are received by faith, which is to say by non-reason. This is artificial and even hypocritical because the foundational premises of Christianity can be subjected to rational and evidential analysis, as critics have shown for centuries by now. And so we have this strange situation: a tradition that values reason is built on a non-rational foundation. Christianity is a highly developed rational construct that is floating in the air.
2. Another case of Christianity’s incoherent combination of faith and reason can be seen in John Calvin's (1509-1564) widely accepted view, at least among protestants, of the distortive effects of sin on reasoning. According to Calvin, humans reject God because they hate him, and so their reasoning about him cannot be trusted. The net result of this view is that it safeguards Christianity against critical scrutiny and it even villainizes those who attempt such scrutiny. Only bad, rebellious and unregenerate people question the existence or goodness of the Christian God. But “good people" (the chosen, the regenerated, those to whom God has revealed himself) do not engage in such rebellious activities. But isn’t this just a version of the ad-hominem fallacy? And yet, when Calvin, like all other theologians, uses reason to develop his own “regenerated” theology, he does nothing different than what all human brains do when they try to make sense of the world, including those who do not find the God conclusion convincing. There is no categorically different process, and no discernible difference at all between what non-believers do with their minds and what believers do, except that they arrive at different conclusions. And so, once again, reason is valued when it comes to developing Christian thought, but reason is excluded, in this case by definitional fiat, from adjudication when it comes to the foundational premises of Christianity.
3. It was the apostle Paul who put this entire train of thought in motion in Romans 1 where, rather than provide evidence for belief in God, he instead put forward a psychological explanation for unbelief. This is the equivalent of answering a request for evidence by saying "It's your fault that you don't believe it." God's nature and existence is obvious from creation, Paul says, but people choose to ignore it to avoid worshiping, and therefore submitting, to him. But what is lacking here is any detailed explanation of how exactly creation points to God, and more specifically to the Christian God. The Bible as a whole, in fact, shows no interest in proving anything about God. It is rather a series of mere assertions. In the creation story, God already exists and no effort is made to explain or justify this. Throughout Scripture too, belief comes first and then understanding. Belief is a kind of singularity beyond which we may not look or question or reason. Reasons for belief are veiled in mystery. We are only given a series of declarations which may be accepted or rejected. And rejection is bad by definition.
4. The disciple Thomas, the Christian archetype of the doubter, stated that unless he saw physical evidence of the resurrected Jesus, he would not believe. And so Jesus provided the required evidence. Thomas was able to touch Jesus’ wounds and verify for himself that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead. But the account in John 20 ends with a kind of chastisement, lest there be any confusion: “You believed because you saw,” says Jesus. “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.” Modern people who have been schooled in the importance of using evidence and reason to determine factuality are right to ask about the rationale of this statement. Why should anyone believe anything without seeing? And by what rationale can it be so wrong to insist on verification that one’s eternal destiny hangs in the balance? Why is God so interested in having humans assent to non-verifiable information? Surely God is aware that human beings have a predilection for believing all sorts of wild and crazy ideas and that the intellectual task of verification is a healthy and necessary part of the human attempt to understand the world. So why is believing without seeing put forth as a blessed condition? One explanation might be that the reasons put forward for belief are not strong enough to command the desired conclusion. And so, an alternate theory of knowledge is produced which facilitates the conclusion. Is it the case that in Christianity epistemology has been subtly recrafted in order to allow for knowledge that cannot be verified--precisely because it cannot be verified? Credo ut intelligam.
5. The idea that Christianity presents claims that must be accepted by faith is actually heroized by Christians, as though there was some kind of nobility or admirable starkness to this ultimate choice. As the Bible says, "choose this day whom you will serve," and "put down your nets and follow me." But does the call to decision add anything to the credibility of the claims? It does not. It adds no new information. It may ultimately be a kind of psychological trick by which the human mind accedes to authoritative demands while putting aside the question of validation.
6. Christian apologists provide "reasons for faith." But these reasons cannot ever entirely bridge the gap between evidence and belief. There must always be a leap of faith. On the one hand, if we can reason ourselves directly to faith, well, it isn't faith anymore. It's just a rational conclusion. On the other hand, the object of faith (God, revelation, Jesus, the claims of the Bible) is supernatural and as such it cannot be deduced from the natural world in which evidence is discerned and weighed. That is the entire point of the thing. So, while reasons for faith might remove misunderstandings and explain attendant circumstances, these reasons can never prove anything definitively. In the end, one must simply have faith despite the lack of evidence. It seems, further, that no supernatural claim can ever be verified by humans, for humans inhabit the universe of cause and effect and have no conceivable way of determining whether a supernatural claim, which breaks the laws and principles of our existence, is true or not. The Apostle Paul insists in Galatians that even if an angel from heaven were to preach a different gospel, we should not believe it. But why? Isn't it obvious that we are sitting ducks for any supernatural entity to abuse and manipulate? How could we possibly discern between the many claims that supposedly come to us from supernatural sources? It is clear, again, that in the religious realm one must believe first, and only then understand. Which is to say, one must first accept things that cannot be proven and then use them as the starting point for reasoning. Thus to believe in a supernatural source would always, by definition, involve a leap of faith.
7. An important question now presents itself: why should we believe anything without sufficient reasons? Where is the “oughtness” of the Christian command to believe, if the claim cannot be demonstrated? On what is the demand that belief is better than non-belief based? In the face of this question, Christianity loses its claim to truth, because truth demands to be believed by force of rational and evidential necessity. But where faith is involved, where reason and evidence are insufficient, the claims lack necessity, and rational necessity is replaced by a divine command which cannot be verified as being divine. This is the question that cracked that case wide open for me, so to speak. I could not think of any good answer to this question: why should I believe something without sufficient reason? And on reflection, I realized that my entire life I had been making allowances for the Christian worldview, making excuses for it, and even ignoring that leap of faith that was always there, undeniable, and unbridgeable. Now, I no longer feel compelled to believe in anything that does not have sufficient reasons.
8. The concept of hell that Christians teach and believe today is much more developed than the Biblical teaching. In the Old Testament, Sheol is the shadowy world that everyone, good or bad, goes to. This is in keeping with views of the afterlife in the ancient Near East, but it is nothing like how hell is presented in the New Testament. In the New Testament hell is described in a variety of ways, sometimes as destruction (annihilation), other times it is unending torture, and several passages also speak of a place of darkness, which is hardly compatible with hell as a place of fiery punishment. And yet Christians today, following medieval Christianity, have a very definite view of hell: it is a place of eternal torment in fire, perhaps most famously described in Revelation as the lake of fire. For me, this traditional idea of hell was always challenging, both theologically (why would a loving God need this?), but also, if I was honest, it just seemed too childish. In spite of this, it still held a great deal of sway over my thinking, such that I did not allow myself to stray too far from orthodoxy because there was always in the back of my mind the idea that if hell is real, I had better be very very careful. I'm not sure how exactly it happened, but one day I realized I just didn't believe it anymore. I couldn't even force myself to believe it. It just seemed too ridiculous. But my point is this: the reason that, in spite of the biblical variety of images, hell is invariably painted by Christians as the most exquisitely horrific vision of pain that is humanly imaginable is that it is a necessary counterbalance to the lack of evidence for Christianity as a whole. Or let me put it this way: only those who lack proof resort to threats. And where much proof is lacking, extreme threats are required. I am not suggesting that the concept of hell was cynically deployed to keep the faithful in line. It is just something that naturally evolved over time as a response to the burden of subjectivity that Christianity must bear.
9. Christians often argue that it is inconsistent to single out religious faith for criticism when everyone "believes something," and without some kind of generic faith no one would know anything at all. Secularists, so the argument goes, must have faith in the regularity of the world, or in the reliability of reason, or in the accomplishments of other humans. So why is Christianity being singled out for doing what everyone does? But first, the argument does not help Christianity's claim to truth. It only places everyone on the same subjective playing field. If everyone believes something, there is still no good reason to believe in Christianity over any other religion or worldview. When you are accused of being subjective, answering that everyone is subjective adds nothing to your claims. But it is part of the Christian DNA, straight from the mouth of Jesus, that Christianity is The Truth, not just an equally subjective belief among many. Second, while it is accurate to say that humans, because we are finite, must always rely on knowledge that is incompletely vetted, there are still levels of certainty which can be achieved within that field of knowledge. Disciplined observation based on experimentation has proven to be far more reliable than the opinions of ancient people collected in religious books.
10. In rejecting the claims of Christianity because they are non-verifiable, I am not "switching teams" to another religion, metaphysical system or metanarrative. I am simply an observer of life who finds that most, if not all, grand claims to truth lack sufficient basis. What I do know, because I experience it, is that the physical world can be understood through experience and reason and can be usefully harnessed for human wellbeing. And that is probably all I really can know or need to know.
11. The foundational premises of the Christian worldview are received by faith, their denial is considered to be a result of sin, and said denial is punished with everlasting torment. Doesn't this all seem a bit suspicious?
12. But let's consider the evidence, to show just how lacking it is, and just how large a leap is required to land on the shores of faith, starting with the miraculous. Since Christianity is founded on a miraculous revelation, its credibility would be bolstered if it could be shown that it is regularly accompanied by signs and wonders. This is a compelling idea. However, it falls flat on the evidence. The daily experience of believers does not unambiguously proclaim to the world that God is at work in supernatural ways among them. Most Christians are simply accustomed to attributing normal, explainable, phenomena to God. And that is really all there is to it. Once a person believes in miracles they see them everywhere. Even Scripture does this as, for example, when David slays Goliath with a slingshot. This is not a miracle, but the Bible attributes it to God. So also the battles of the Old Testament: if the Israelites won, it was because of God's intervention on their behalf. If they lost, it was because there was "sin in the camp." Some features of the natural world can give the impression that "something else is going on," but on further inspection we find that chance, luck and the foibles of human reasoning can account for almost all purported miracles. And then there's the pesky problem of things about the natural world which we do not yet understand. The unknown unknowns. I am personally intrigued by the psychological factors that lead to the recognition of miracles: how we remember successes better than failures, for example, and are therefore more likely to remember answered prayers than the unanswered ones. Also, consider that the human body can do healing. But if we pray for healing first, the healing is attributed to a divine agent. There are many more factors like these that make it extremely difficult to say, when a miracle is reported, that a miracle has actually happened. I have cataloged these and can provide a full list on request.
13. The biggest problem with miracles is why they are not more common. According to Christianity, over a billion people on planet earth are living supernatural lives on a daily basis, and experiencing supernatural power regularly. Where, then, are all these miracles? Out of all those billions of supernatural events, surely there would be at least a handful of well-known and well-documented contemporary miracles. And now that about half the world has a video recording device on their person at all times, why aren't there many well documented, completely obvious and watchable miracles for all of us to see? Why didn’t the mobile phone prove once and for all that miracles are real? If miracles were really happening, we would all know about it. But the current state is exactly what we would expect if many people believed in something that wasn't real. There would be a lot of indirect evidence, second hand stories, tendentious interpretations, unlikely claims, hype, and even outright fraud. I would love to believe in miracles, but after a lifetime of living a "supernatural life" I have to admit that I have not seen or heard of anything that compellingly demonstrates the reality of miracles or the supernatural world.
14. Ironically, it was Protestantism's tendency towards cessationism that first trained me to view the miraculous skeptically. Protestants have an odd relationship with the miraculous. On the one hand, they are extremely critical of the credulity of charismatics, who readily accept speaking in tongues, revival meeting healings, prophecies and visions, and many other things as valid, contemporary, supernatural events. Strangely though, these “fake miracles” are not so different from the ones described in the pages of the New Testament. But if the same types of miracles that Protestants now reject as being the result of credulity, hype, and mass hysteria were present in the ministries of Jesus and his apostles, it is inconsistent to resist drawing the same conclusion there. The most explicit cessationists insist that miracles were only for the New Testament era. Now that we have the Bible, they say, there is no further need for miracles. And yet these same people will still pray for God to heal, or to “guide the hand of the surgeon.” They will still hear the “still small voice” of the Spirit, see God’s supernatural guidance and supervision in their lives, and claim to receive supernatural insight from the sermon on Sunday morning. They will also affirm the theological miracle of regeneration at the moment of salvation, the supernatural life of the spirit in sanctification throughout the life of the Christian individual, and claim that God is supervising world events for his purposes. The result of all this is to effectively place the miraculous beyond all possible scrutiny, verification or falsification. Externally visible, witnessable, miracles are treated as invalid, and all that is left over is hidden miracles which only occur by interpretation or by definition. Similarly, the Catholic church has at the center of its liturgy the miracle of transubstantiation, which happens every Sunday all around the world, in front of millions of people, but cannot be verified or falsified by any conceivable means. How is it that a purportedly supernatural religion which claims to be deeply enmeshed in spiritual principles and powers cannot produce one single, clearly non-physical, witnessable miracle on a regular basis, or on demand? The answers that it doesn’t work that way, or that God is not a vending machine, or that skeptics wouldn't believe anyway, and other variations on the same theme, only sound like convenient excuses. Let's just cut through all the theory. If Christians could follow the biblical example of Elijah and bring down fire from heaven we would at least have something concrete to talk about. But all we ever get is triumphalistic proclamations about the miraculous followed by theories and explanations about why the miraculous is less obvious and reliable than advertised.
15. Biblical miracles are often given a category of their own, as if they were super miracles which by their epic power stamped the Bible with a miraculous seal of approval. I have to admit that if this were the case, it would make for a great argument. Then Christians could say, "Yes, it is true that our system of thought is not based on reason, but look at the compelling displays of supernatural power that surround the foundational revelation!" That would be compelling to me. In fact it was for many years. But here's the problem: once you realize that a billion people today are probably wrong about miracles, historic miracles become even less likely. They are 2000 years or more removed, so we have no venue for further enquiry. All we have is a text produced by a much more credulous age, and this single text, the New Testament, is all that we know about Jesus, his deeds and his claims (save for some very brief footnotes by a couple ancient historians). And the vast majority of this information comes from just the four gospels. Christians are putting an inordinate amount of faith in that single collection of ancient religious writings about which very little is in fact known.
16. The resurrection of Jesus is often positioned as the one great miracle which cannot be dismissed. One popular argument posits that the early church could never have developed as it did without the firm conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead. Or that first century monotheistic Jews could never have accepted the divinity of Jesus without the extreme kind of proof that the resurrection provides. As if epistemology could be equated with ontology. It may be true that the early Christians were motivated by their conviction that Jesus rose from the dead. That doesn't mean that he did. Even today people passionately lay their lives on the line for things that they believe to be true but are not. Look no further than the January 6 insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the US government because they believed in the lie of a stolen election. Many of them were willing to die for this cause. But their passionate error does not prove "the Big Lie" any more than the early Mormons’ belief in Joseph Smith's angelic visitations proves his story, or any more than the beliefs of early followers of Muhammad proves his verses were inspired by God. And how would anyone, in the ancient world, determine the truthfulness of a resurrection story anyway? It would be difficult enough to do today! I wouldn't go so far as to say that anyone was lying. It's not necessary. People getting carried away in a moment such that miracles stories take on a life of their own, particularly as they are recounted many times over a period of decades--this is hardly difficult to imagine from what we know about human nature. In fact, from what we know of human nature and physiology, people getting carried away is vastly more likely, and attested to, than resurrection from the dead.
17. The question of the authorship and timing of the books of the New Testament is extremely important for the credibility of the miracles that it describes. Evangelicals argue consistently for early dates of production and for the traditionally assigned authors, all of whom are also mentioned in the pages of the Bible itself. Mark was written by John Mark, known from Acts. Matthew was the disciple Matthew. Luke was the companion of the Apostle Paul, etc. They all wrote within their lifetimes. This all makes for a very tight connection between the events of the life of Jesus in the early years of the first century, and the testimony to those events (the New Testament), in the following decades. But what if this is not the case? If the time between the events and their writing is stretched out, and the authors were not those traditionally assigned, the opportunity for slippage increases. Now it is much easier to imagine how well-intentioned people might have come to believe and repeat things that never really happened. Viewed just from a historical perspective, it is difficult to say one way or another. However, there are reasons to question the traditional perspective: as synoptic studies show, the stories and sayings that make up the gospels existed and probably circulated independently of the gospels, and were eventually collected and edited into their current forms. This does not seem like the work of an eyewitness. An eyewitness tells what they saw. They don’t just collect and organize what others are saying. Further, the practice of writing books in the name of known religious figures was common enough before, during and after the first century. Look no further than the book of Enoch, First, Second, Third, and Fourth Ezra, and the Gospel of Judas, among many others. Evangelical scholars are happy to come to the conclusion that these works are pseudepigraphical, but the option is off the table when it comes to canonical books.
18. There is nothing miraculous about the content of the Bible. I have studied New Testament exegesis to the ThM level, all along dutifully working to interpret this text in its original historical context. This is where the meaning of the text lies, I was told. But this became a double-edged sword: the more I studied the Bible in its historical context, the more it read like a product of its historical context. There is no need for the inspiration hypothesis to account for the text of the Bible. It is, rather, a fitting and natural product of its own time and place. Or times and places. Consider how the Dead Sea Scrolls prefigure many of the themes found in the New Testament. Here is an apocalyptic community waiting for the return of God based on their reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. We don't attribute their ideas to revelation or inspiration. But the same themes, which provide a backbone to the New Testament, are treated as revelatory there. It would be very difficult indeed to point to any single doctrine or idea in the Bible that could only have come from a supernatural agent. Even the most sublime and unique teachings of Jesus connect to first century cultural values and ideas and a first-century Jewish take on the Hebrew Scriptures, as many scholars have shown in recent years. And even the most notable and moving teachings of the New Testament can more readily be attributed to keen human insight or even to human "religious genius" (after all, there is such a thing as very insightful people) than to divine inspiration. Similarly, the Hebrew Scriptures bear the marks of the times and cultures in which they were produced, even using the same name for God and drawing on the same themes for its creation story, flood story, its view of warfare, kingship, the afterlife, psalmody, and its legal code. Some elements are virtually the same, while others have been modified in a unique way. But there is nothing here which screams out to us "only God could have done it." In other words, there is nothing miraculous about it. In matters of science, the Bible is famously wrong about, or famously omits, various important issues like evolution and clarity about the nature of the universe and the solar system, but instead functions well within the cosmology and "science" of its historical context. Genesis makes perfect sense when read in the light of the Ancient Near Eastern religious scene, and nothing more than that is needed to account for its content.
19. A host of superficial and highly subjective ideas are used by Christians to bolster the divinity and miraculous nature of the Biblical text. Like, for example, the way in which the Bible both makes prophetic predictions and notes their fulfillments. Left out is the completely obvious fact that the fulfillment was recorded after the prediction, by people who were looking for a fulfillment. Or the idea the Bible has "the ring of truth," to quote the older scholar J.B. Phillips, and similar notions. Of course it would, in a culture that gets all its religious ideas from the Bible. Or the observation of just how skillfully its themes are woven together, such that entire academic disciplines exist to sort it all out. And how countless highly intelligent people have labored over its lofty ideas. However, it is the Christian religious and intellectual ecosystem that drives all this cogitation, not so much the Bible itself. Pick up any religious academic journal and look at the copious footnotes if you doubt. The Bible does lend a hand here, to be sure. It is unsystematic, and often only mentions cryptically or in passing issues that become extremely important to subsequent generations--probably because the Bible "doesn't care" about those issues. But we do, and so books must be written. Christians also feel that they get personal communication from God through the Bible, sometimes via extremely creative exegesis. This translates into a highly personalized view of its divine provenance. But isn't this little more than an emotional feedback loop that only uses Biblical phrases and ideas incidentally? For years I struggled with the question, "Why does God reveal himself to people by using such horrific exegesis?" Well, the reason is that he doesn't. People just read their own ideas into the text and are heartened to find them there. Finally, much is made of the fact that the Bible is a collection of many books written over a long period of time which all, amazingly, teach the same thing. What this leaves out is that each book of the Bible clearly relies on the previous ones. It is an evolving tradition, not a random assortment of books which just so happen to line up. And whether they teach the same thing or not is debatable, but any problems are covered over by an appeal to “progressive revelation.”
20. The authority of the Bible is only vaguely understood by the vast majority of Christians. They don't even think of the Bible as a historically embedded text. It's just "the word of God." It is a repository of timeless truths and teachings for both the world and the individual. Surely one of the reasons for the popularity of the King James Version, and the ridiculous KJV only arguments, is the mere fact that it sounds old and magisterial. The human mind is easily influenced by such superficialities. For the average Christian, the mere existence of the Bible and the fact that it is revered by others is its only claim to authority. Push for something more substantial and you will come up empty-handed. In some cases, you might get the superficial appeals I already mentioned. This is a massive intellectual failure on the part of Christianity. And yet, it will never be corrected because all the additional historical information that is available to scholars does not add any real substance to back up the authority of the Bible. The authority of the Bible does indeed hang in the air. It is only believed because of its own tradition of being believed.
21. If there is nothing miraculous about the writing of the Bible, neither is there anything miraculous about its formation and transmission. Take for example the formation of the canon. Why do we have certain books and not others? And why are there several different "Bibles" in different Christian traditions? The answers to these questions involve church councils, and historical religious developments which are all very human processes and cannot bear the weight of the authority that the Bible has been granted. It all comes down to the fact that one faction or another won the argument. The popular notion that the church "recognized" the cannon only affirms that a group of people decided that the books they liked were the best ones. Nothing miraculous about that. The idea that God supervised the textual transmission of the Bible is interesting but there is again no miracle required in order to explain this situation: a popular religion left behind many artifacts of its most valued possession. On the other hand, we are right to wonder about how chaotic and error-prone the transmission process has been. Such that most Christians throughout history have had highly inaccurate bibles, and a great deal of intellectual labor was required to arrive at something that approximates the originals. And these autographs, as they are called, are a kind of metaphor of the entire Christian edifice: no one has seen these foundational documents, and they probably don't exist. But everyone talks as if they are readily at hand. The bible is indeed a source of authority that floats in the air. There is no "there there." The fact that the text of the Bible is ancient adds to the mystique, but not to the substance. There is nothing about the Bible that demands the conclusion that it must be inspired or miraculous in its production or that its teaching could only have come from the God it proclaims. There is nothing about the Bible to suggest that it is anything but a collection of ancient religious writings produced by ancient people. In other words, there is no reason to believe that it is the word of God.
22. The veracity of Christianity depends entirely and completely on the existence of God. The Bible does not attempt to prove, but merely affirms, the existence of such an entity. This is why philosophical arguments for the existence of God which do not rely on the Bible are used by theologians and apologists to bolster the credibility of Christianity. Most of these arguments can be classified as “cosmological” because they argue from the present existence of the world to the necessity of a creator: the argument from design, the anthropic principle, the necessity of an eternal being, the teleological argument, and others. The ontological argument, in various versions, seeks to demonstrate the logical necessity that the greatest possible being must exist. The moral argument suggests that only God could be the source of the human experience of morality. These arguments may or may not be valid. In truth, most theologians don’t even spend a lot of time on them due to the complex, multidisciplinary nature of the subject. Instead, arguments for the existence of God are relegated to a handful of experts. But I’m more interested in what they can’t prove for Christianity, even if they are valid. The existence of a creator entity, if there is such a thing, who acted 13.7 billion years ago and put into motion this incomprehensibly large universe says nothing about the validity of the Biblical story, which was the product of ancient people starting some mere 3000 years ago. The presence of design in biology, if there is such a thing, does not in any way validate the biblical creation story. The designer, again if there is such a being, might have been any number of candidates, including fellow non-supernatural inhabitants of the universe, or demigods, or demiurges. The universe may indeed have been formed by an incomprehensibly powerful being who a) may or may not still exist, b) may or may not still care (deism), c) may or may not have been the one true god, d) may or may not have revealed himself to humans e) may or may not have even noticed us on tiny earth. Nor does the existence of a creator deity demonstrate or necessitate the attributes of omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, or even eternality which are crucial to Christian theology. There might be an eternal God, but it wasn’t the one who created the universe. As for all the omnis: it is not necessary for a creator to know all things about his creation, to be present in all of his creation, or to be all powerful in that creation. The big bang singularity cannot as of yet be penetrated, so we know nothing of what lies on the other side. It is natural that people will read their own favorite story into that blank, but is this valid? When Christians present arguments for the existence of God as though they bolster Christianity, they are only practicing confirmation bias on a cosmic scale. There is nothing about these arguments that, even if true, makes the Biblical story any more likely than it already is. Which is to say, not very likely. If, on the other hand, the arguments all fail, they do call into question the Biblical story. After all, the story does depend on a creator entity.
23. The moral argument for the existence of God posits that there must be a lawgiver who both serves as a higher authority over humans and guarantees compliance through ultimate judgment. It also claims to make sense of moral experience: why all humans are to some extent moral, and why it is that many moral principles are shared across most cultures, peoples and times. However, another explanation for the existence of morality is readily at hand: morality may just as well be the result of the human brain and how it tries to make sense of the conflicts that arise from communal living. If any human is asked to come up with a set of principles that maximizes everyone’s happiness and wellbeing, they are bound to land on things like we should not kill each other and we should respect each other’s things. The moral world of the Bible is simply what one culture developed over many years and attributed to its favored deity. Truly, it is ironic that those who argue for the necessity of a lawgiver and who claim to have his laws in hand, have discarded vast swaths of those laws. Christians, it is well known, do not obey the laws of "the Old Testament," even though they are presented as forever principles in those books and even though the rationale for setting them aside is not entirely clear or systematically explained in the New Testament. Another more likely interpretation of this situation is that over time people changed their minds about what laws worked and what laws didn't work, and then they created theological rationalizations to dismiss the outmoded ones.
24. No defense of Christianity is complete without an appeal to personal experience. And often this is the highlight, the most compelling part of an argument. Personal experience is in fact the main driver of conversions. This is what Christians are taught when they study evangelism. People are not converted by intellectual arguments (perhaps, the subtext reads, because they are not very convincing). What moves people is a personal testimony: how Jesus changed my life, how I stopped drinking or cheating on my wife, how I now have purpose and joy, etc. I will also include growing up Christian in the personal experience category. Because this is, after all, a personal experience. In fact, my claim that Christians believe first and then understand should be expanded. What typically happens is that people first have an experience or a set of experiences, then they believe, and then they understand. But ironically, even Christians themselves have a critical view of personal experience. Evangelicals will often enough tell each other not to rely on experience or emotion, but on the “objective” Word of God. This is because experience, they know, is unreliable. What one day has us walking in the clouds, the next day seems tawdry and uninteresting. And whether something strikes us as exciting, revelatory, or manifestly insightful and life-changing is no guarantee at all of its veracity. The criticism that all religions produce sublime experiences is well-known, and the presence of such consistent experiences in multiple belief systems tends to neutralize their value for verification. Who can adjudicate whether a Buddhist has a more authentic experience than a Christian or a Muslim? Or whether the Mormon “burning in the bosom” is a surer guide to truth than the “still small voice of the Spirit” that is heard by Evangelicals. Surely a more likely interpretation of religious experience is that it is a feature of the human brain. People who have such experiences interpret them using their preferred religious framework. But they are effectively content-neutral, and not reliable guides for determining the accuracy or truthfulness of a system of religious thought. And so Christians have an odd relationship with experience. On the one hand, it is presented as a proof of God’s miraculous work in the life of believers. But on the other hand, since it is not entirely reliable, it is also minimized when it does not work. This amounts to nothing more than special pleading.
25. The habit of believing first and then understanding is intellectually deficient and leaves its practitioners wide open to manipulation by charlatans and charismatic individuals. Christians don’t, on the whole, feel the need to confirm claims that are made by their leaders, despite occasional noise made about “the Bereans.” This explains why Evangelicals and Catholics enthusiastically supported Donald Trump, who was not a Christian himself, lied blatantly and copiously, and treated people in a way that was incompatible with a Christian ethic. He was a narcissist with fascist tendencies who would have happily destroyed American democracy without a second thought if it kept him in power. And I asked myself throughout all of this, how could Christians be so completely blind to the hypocrisy of supporting someone with bully morals and a passing acquaintance with truth? How could they allow themselves to be manipulated so easily? How could they think so childishly? The answer is now plain to see: Christians are habituated to believe first and then to understand. And they tend to believe whoever is the most outspoken or exudes the greatest level of conviction. This is how ideas and information are processed by Christians. For confirmation, look no further than the “MAGA extremists,” election deniers, and far-right conspiracy theory purveyors. A significant number of them are Evangelical Christians. They have believed a grand religious conspiracy theory for their whole lives and are accustomed to defending it with a hodgepodge of moralistic appeals and dubious factual claims. Not only are they ripe fields for the seeds of other conspiracy theories, but Christianity can even provide an overarching umbrella for them all, with the devil behind every plot. What is unique about this moment is that in the past, Christian irrationality was fenced in and only applied to religious ideas. A Christian might have been subjective about their faith, but when it came to real world issues, they used reason. But now many Christians have simply applied the same style of reasoning with which they process their religious beliefs to the world of politics. The result is a large percentage of the US population that does not need any serious evidence in order to become passionately convinced of a political claim. Another way of saying it is that political claims have achieved a religious status among many evangelicals, and in so doing, they have transcended the mundane need for anything like verification. All that is needed is a compelling affirmation.
26. The hardest falsehood to spot is the one that has the most truth in it. And following this pattern, the falsehood of Christianity is difficult to discern precisely because Christianity uses the language and hallmarks of truth, but lacks the substance. Christianity has always been good at making grandiose claims which bedazzle the human mind and distract it from questions of substance: that God cares about every person, that he supervises history, that he punishes evil, and that the future of believers is bright and glorious. The mere ambitiousness and audacity of a claim can feel self-confirming. The mind is caught up in an emotionally appealing vision of reality before any confirmatory data can be considered. Christianity also aggressively critiques other worldviews and shows how they lack rationality, or compassion, or coherence. This is another spectacle that distracts from Christianity’s own lack of substance because showing that the opposition is wrong tends to suggest to the mind that “we” are right. However, this does not follow (all parties might be wrong). In this way, critiques of other religions and worldviews by Christians create the feeling that Christianity must be true without providing any real basis for its own claims. The bulk of Christian discourse involves rehearsing and amplifying the rational system of doctrines and ideas that have been built on faith throughout the centuries. This is yet another distraction from the foundational intellectual poverty of Christianity because when every moment is spent in rational discourse, this cements the idea that the system is in every way rational. But it is not. The starting point is non-rational, non-provable, and beyond human scrutiny. It has to be accepted by faith. The fact that a rational system has been built upon this non-rational foundation does not make the foundation any more rational, credible or demonstrable.
27. Christianity has always positioned itself as the possessor and purveyor of Truth ("with a capital T"). Christians bemoan the state of the world where “postmodernism” and “subjectivism” and “moral relativism” run rampant. But when Christians defend the Truth, they do it by appealing to subjective factors, most notably faith. Christians, in fact, do not defend truth itself, defined as “that which is in accordance with reality,” nor are they particularly interested in doing the hard work of sorting out facts from fantasies. Christians, rather, defend the Doctrine of Truth, the idea of Truth. The essence of this Christian Doctrine of Truth is that there must be objective claims about the world and there must be objective moral standards in order for human beings to thrive and for society to work. This might be the de facto ideological core of Christianity today as it confronts secular society. But this all hovers over the surface of the factual world without addressing the root concern, namely, whether Christian ideas really are “in accordance with reality.” And it confuses the desire for Truth with its existence. Christians spend all their time talking about how much sense it makes that there should be Truth. But just because it would make sense for there to be Truth does not make it so. Similarly, the popular adage that "Truth is a person," which is a reference to Jesus and a restatement of his own words in John 14:6, is hoplessly muddled. Claiming that a purportedly divine individual is Truth essentially changes the definition of the word. No longer does truth denote that which is accurate about the world, but it becomes a repository for unprovable religious dogmas. In doing this, Christians have effectively made the term "truth" subjective, for they have populated its content with things which cannot be demonstrated as true or accurate. For Christians "Truth" just means "our ideology" and that is all. This is why the greatest proponets of Truth found themselves supporting the most epic liar in recent American history, Donald Trump, aptly illustrating that accuracy is not included in the definition of the term. This leads us to the greatest irony of the Christian position. Obsession with having objectivity and Truth distracts the Christian mind from the subjectivity that is inherent in the system. For, as we have seen, Christianity is a rational system without rational foundations. The Christian claim to truth is ultimately subjective and based on beliefs which cannot be verified. Christianity is a subjective worldview wrapped in the trappings of objectivity.
28. Any modern society that respects freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, rightly makes room for Christian belief and practice, along with many other religious expressions. I personally am not on a quest to rid the world of Christianity or of religion. I only ask that Christians acknowledge the nature of the faith that they themselves proclaim and adjust their thinking and engagement with non-Christians accordingly. Faith implies subjectivity. There is no way around this. Beliefs that are accepted by faith cannot be demonstrated, verified or proven. Therefore, the choice to embrace Christianity should be understood as a mere choice, a mere personal preference. It should not be construed as submitting to reality, nor as bowing to The Truth, nor as accepting a view of the world that should be normative for anyone else. That would be a significant overreach. How can one person demand of another person something which cannot be demonstrated as true or factual? That would be a mere imposition of will. The choice to be a Christian should be seen as nothing more and nothing less than a subjective decision to embrace a set of ideas and behaviors that seem personally meaningful.