Apologetic Journey Pt. 2: Questions and Objections

[Desdichado]

My dear one was a self-identified Christian for much of their life, but eventually, questions and objections seeped in. They either did not answer these questions sufficiently or did not care too. So, while I suspect a great reason why they fell away has to do with personal anecdotes and overall dissatisfaction with the Christian life, these great questions and objections served as a sort of nail in the coffin.

I had no answer to a great many of them for reasons I've detailed in my last blog piece. Here are their questions. Some easily falsifiable. Others more troubling.

If you know of a book or article that can stand up to these or even give them better context, please comment below. I'll more than likely read it or a good synopsis thereof.

With that, I'll begin. Note (mods) that I'm not advocating the following points, but rather presenting them in the interest of brotherly exchange. Iron sharpening iron.

1. Christian Argumentation +Behavior

• Christians behave inconsistently with their stated moral beliefs. They lie, cheat, kill, steal, etc. at a rate greater than that of self-identified atheists.
• Christians, in their belief of life everlasting, fail to fully embrace the opportunities of this life and fail to be truly charitable toward their fellow man. Charity, to the Christian, is a sort of hustle because the main goal is conversion.
• Many Christians embrace a sort of mysticism. They share and take seriously prophecies which never come true. They fall prey to charlatans looking to make money off the next exorcism and the like. They love and contemplate money and sex more than the non-Christian.
• Christians are cultish and cruel. They have a tendency to shun and silence the backslider rather than truly care for the state of their soul.
• Christians do not care for truth. If they did, they would be more likely to at least consider the scientific evidence for things like evolution and the theory of relativity. Furthermore, they are more likely to embrace Flat Earth lunacy more than non-Christians.
• Christian apologetical schools either lie or fail at formal logic.

2. Textual Issues and Literary Inconsistencies.

• The God of the Old Testament and New Testament are too different even to be comparable, let alone the same God.
• The Old Testament is too cruel and gruesome of a book to be written by a loving God.
• The authorship of the Epistles and Gospels are in doubt by serious scholars. The Old Testament authorship relies too heavily on oral tradition. Textual analysis disproves that many books are written by one author at all.
• Archaeological and Historical accounts of periods containing the Old Testament and New Testament are too different from the texts themselves to give them any credence. Particularly when modern information management and observational methods are demonstrably superior (SCIENCE!)
• Biblical claims are at odds with basic scientific facts, laws, and theories.
• Biblical claims to the miraculous are at odds with anything observable. Virigin births, resurrections, healed lepers, floating ax-heads, chariots of fire, angel of death swallowing entire armies, Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt, etc, etc, etc.
• The figure of Jesus is mostly myth and a lie, derived from previous religions in the surrounding area.
• The Gospels were curated to fulfill the prophecies of previous texts.
• David never existed.
• The important prophets were literary figures made from whole cloth or complete madmen.
• Other books of the Bible were considered by shoved aside for largely political reasons.

3. Redemption History's Follies

• Serpents cannot talk. Therefore, there is no way humanity can be led to sin. Therefore, there is no need of a redemption or a redeemer.
• Evolution eviscerates redemptive history by denying the historical Adam and Eve.
• Even intellectually sound Christians do cartwheels to explain away these twin facts.

3. Christianity's Moral and Historical Follies

• Smart and/or well-credentialed people believing in faith is not an argument in favor of Christianity's viability. People up until the modern age were more superstitious and fell prey to unthinkably stupid ideas.
• Christianity and religion, in general, are responsible for unmerited death and destruction. See: Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, etc.
• Morality as we know it is not a Christian innovation, but rather a product of a sort of societal evolution away from needless death and cruelty.
• The Old Testament ethic is immoral barbarism. The Gospel places an undue burden of guilt on the human consciousness.

4. Further Scientific Objections

• The heavens DO NOT declare the work of any hand. Advances in Physics have mathematically disproven the need for a Creator. Being unneeded, it is unlikely a creator exists.
• Biology, anatomy, and physiology have evolved and increased in elegance over vast swathes of time and population cullings/growths. Many structures show an element of poor design rather than a design by an omnipotent being. Eyes, for example, would work better were they structured differently. The flagella motor Intelligent Design advocates go on about is a poorly designed motor for what it does.
• Theistic evolutionists are almost never Christian. They're deists.
• Deists support a lukewarm and untenable belief system.
• Creationism is scientifically untenable- it's provable the universe and the earth are billions of years old. That life is millions of years old. That humans are hundreds of thousands of years old as a species.
• Intelligent design is just poorly-dressed creationism.

I'm sure there is more I could write, but that seems to be the extent of their issues. Some of them really do puzzle me. Others are fairly easily dismissed. Regardless, they are questions I will be endeavoring to answer in this blog series.

 

[Desdichado]

Another common feature is an argument to consensus or authority-

The vast majority of good scientists are atheists or agnostics.

Christians are only creationists of different stripes. Almost none are theistic evolutionists or believers in the whole of science.

Christian scholarship on the Bible is largely invalid because it mostly fails the test for bias confirmation and circular reasoning.

You have presented an argument proposed by such and such a person with such and such a reputation. Therefore your argument is invalid.