Arguments against the faith, with reply.

Twenty-three objections an atheist might raise, each answered in several voices.

The voices that answer

01 OBJECTION

The problem of evil

If God exists, why is there evil?

An omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God could prevent suffering and would want to. Yet earthquakes flatten cities, children die of cancer, and the holocaust happened. Either God can't, won't, or isn't there.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

— Epicurus, as paraphrased by Hume

Answered by The Logician Thomas Aquinas Francis of Assisi C.S. Lewis

02 OBJECTION

The evidential demand

There is no evidence for God.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We don't accept Zeus, Thor, or Russell's teapot on faith. The God hypothesis fails the same test: no peer-reviewed observation, no falsifiable prediction, nothing.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

— Christopher Hitchens

Answered by The Logician The Scientist Thomas Aquinas Blaise Pascal The Mystic

03 OBJECTION

God of the gaps

Science has explained everything religion used to.

Lightning was Zeus, then it was electricity. Disease was demons, then it was germs. The history of religion is the history of retreating from explanations as science arrives. God is what's left in the gaps, and the gaps are closing.

Religion was the first attempt of the human race to explain what was going on. We can do better now.

— Bertrand Russell, paraphrased

Answered by The Scientist The Logician G.K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis

04 OBJECTION

Secular ethics

We don't need God to be good.

Secular societies (Sweden, Denmark, Japan) score higher on every measure of human flourishing than religious ones. Empathy, evolutionary kinship, social contract — all explain morality without divine command. Many religious people behave terribly; many atheists are kind.

I don't believe in God and I'm not a murderer. So there.

— common formulation

Answered by The Logician Augustine C.S. Lewis The Pastor

05 OBJECTION

Crusades, Inquisition, jihad

Religion causes most of history's violence.

Crusades, Inquisition, witch trials, sectarian wars, 9/11, the Troubles. Religion poisons everything by giving people license to kill in the name of certainty. A world without religion would be measurably less violent.

Religion poisons everything.

— Christopher Hitchens

Answered by The Logician G.K. Chesterton Augustine The Pastor

06 OBJECTION

Darwin's blind watchmaker

Evolution explains design without a designer.

Paley's watch was the strongest pre-Darwinian argument. Darwin disposed of it. Random mutation plus non-random selection produces the appearance of design from below. We don't need a designer for the eye, the hand, or the human.

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

— Richard Dawkins

Answered by The Scientist Francis of Assisi Thomas Aquinas G.K. Chesterton

07 OBJECTION

Hume's argument

Miracles don't happen.

A miracle is by definition a violation of natural law. Our evidence for natural law is the uniform experience of every observer, ever. Our evidence for any specific miracle is at most a few testimonies, often centuries old, transmitted through religious communities motivated to preserve them. Bayesian arithmetic does the rest.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.

— David Hume

Answered by The Logician The Pastor C.S. Lewis Blaise Pascal

08 OBJECTION

Divine hiddenness

Why is God so hidden?

If a loving God wanted relationship with us, he could appear unmistakably. He doesn't. Sincere seekers fail to find. Whole cultures lived and died without ever hearing his name. A God who hides while demanding faith is either uninterested, nonexistent, or cruel.

Reasonable nonbelief exists; therefore a perfectly loving God does not.

— J.L. Schellenberg, paraphrased

Answered by The Mystic Blaise Pascal Augustine C.S. Lewis

09 OBJECTION

Infinite punishment for finite sin

An eternal hell is unjust.

Even the worst sinner — Hitler, Stalin, the child murderer — committed at most a few decades of finite wrongs. To punish a finite wrong with infinite torment is moral monstrosity. No human court would do this. A God who would is morally beneath us.

I would rather hell than the heaven of a god who tortures the dead.

— common formulation; cf. Bertrand Russell

Answered by Thomas Aquinas C.S. Lewis The Mystic Augustine

10 OBJECTION

The accident of birth

Religious belief tracks geography, not truth.

Had you been born in Riyadh, you'd defend Islam with the same conviction you now defend Christianity. Lhasa, Buddhism. Ancient Athens, the Olympians. The overwhelming predictor of someone's "saving faith" is the latitude and longitude of their crib. A truth this important shouldn't depend on a postal code.

If we have a knock-down argument that the others can't have, it's strange that almost no one finds it except by accident of birth.

— John Hick, paraphrased

Answered by C.S. Lewis Thomas Aquinas Justin Martyr John Henry Newman

11 OBJECTION

The Bible's problems

Scripture commands and condones the indefensible.

Slavery regulated rather than abolished (Lev. 25, Eph. 6). Herem warfare in Joshua. The Midianite massacre (Num. 31). Bears mauling children for mocking a prophet. Contradictions between Gospel accounts of the resurrection morning, the genealogies, the death of Judas. If this is a divinely authored book, the author has a great deal to answer for; if it isn't, the case collapses.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.

— Richard Dawkins

Answered by Augustine Thomas Aquinas John Henry Newman The Pastor

12 OBJECTION

The argument from scale

The universe doesn't look made for us.

Thirteen point eight billion years. A hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. And the cosmic drama is supposed to hinge on one ape species on one rock during the last two thousand years? The proportions are absurd. A universe made for humanity would not bury humanity under this much irrelevant matter.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

— Blaise Pascal (cited against the believer)

Answered by Blaise Pascal G.K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis The Mystic

13 OBJECTION

Natural evil

Earthquakes have no free will.

The free-will defense, even granted, only covers moral evil — what humans do to each other. It says nothing about the tsunami, the cancer cell, the child born with a genetic disease that kills her at four. No one chose these. They are built into the fabric of the world an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good creator chose to make.

If a good God made the world, why has it gone wrong?

— C.S. Lewis (citing the objector before answering)

Answered by Thomas Aquinas C.S. Lewis Augustine Francis of Assisi The Catechism

14 OBJECTION

The many-gods rebuttal

Pascal's Wager doesn't pick a winner.

Even granting the wager's logic, it cannot select between mutually exclusive faiths. Bet on Christ, lose to Allah. Bet on Allah, lose to Vishnu. Bet on the Christian God, and a sincere Calvinist will tell you you've still gone to hell for picking the wrong denomination. The wager only works if you've already, by other means, narrowed the field to one candidate — which is the entire question.

The wager works only if the choice is already binary. It is not.

— common formulation; cf. William James, "The Will to Believe"

Answered by Blaise Pascal C.S. Lewis John Henry Newman The Logician

15 OBJECTION

Neuroscience of the divine

Religious experience is just brain chemistry.

Stimulate the temporal lobe, get a mystical experience. Take psilocybin, meet God. Epileptic seizures produce conversions; brain tumors produce visions of angels. If we can reliably trigger encounters with the sacred by poking neurons, the encounters tell us about the neurons, not the sacred.

Mystical experience tells us about the brain, just as a dream tells us about the dreamer.

— paraphrase of contemporary cognitive science of religion

Answered by The Mystic C.S. Lewis Thomas Aquinas The Scientist

16 OBJECTION

Prayer doesn't work

Tested under controlled conditions, intercessory prayer fails.

The 2006 STEP study (Templeton-funded, ten years, 1,800 cardiac patients) found no benefit from intercessory prayer — and a slight negative effect for those who knew they were prayed for. Amputees never regrow limbs. Catholic and Protestant child mortality rates track local medicine, not local devotion. If prayer is real communication with an omnipotent friend, the silence on the line is deafening.

The proper, if somewhat ungainly, formulation is: those who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

— STEP Project, 2006

Answered by C.S. Lewis Thomas Aquinas Augustine The Pastor

17 OBJECTION

The pleasure principle

Why would God make it feel good if it's wrong?

The Catholic prohibitions on sex outside marriage, masturbation, contraception, and homosexual acts all run into the same wall: the activities in question are designed, by the same God who allegedly forbids them, to be intensely pleasurable. Either pleasure is a reliable signal that something is good — in which case the prohibitions are perverse — or pleasure is not a reliable signal, in which case God built a system designed to deceive us about our own good. Neither option flatters the believer.

If God didn't want us to enjoy it, he had a strange way of showing it.

— common formulation; cf. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

Answered by Thomas Aquinas C.S. Lewis The Catechism G.K. Chesterton

18 OBJECTION

The cosmic father

Religion is psychological projection.

We invented God because we miss our actual fathers, fear death, and want the universe to be on our side. The doctrine of providence is the wish that someone is watching. The doctrine of heaven is the wish that we don't really die. The doctrine of judgment is the wish that the wicked don't really get away with it. Strip the wishes away and there is no residue.

Religious ideas are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.

— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Answered by C.S. Lewis G.K. Chesterton The Logician Thomas Aquinas

19 OBJECTION

Belief without evidence

Faith is the abdication of reason.

Science proceeds by evidence, falsification, and revision. Religion proceeds by faith — which means believing things you have no good reason to believe. The two are not complementary; they are opposites. A scientist who believed things on faith would be drummed out of his field. The religious person celebrates as a virtue what every other domain treats as a vice.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

— Richard Dawkins

Answered by Thomas Aquinas John Henry Newman The Logician C.S. Lewis

20 OBJECTION

Jesus never existed

Christ is a recycled myth.

The story of a dying-and-rising god born of a virgin, performing miracles, and being resurrected on the third day predates Christianity by centuries. Horus, Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, Attis — the parallels are legion. The Gospels were written decades after the alleged events, by partisans, in Greek, far from Palestine. There is no contemporary non-Christian record of Jesus. The simplest explanation is that the figure is fictional, assembled from the mythological raw material of the Hellenistic world.

Did Jesus exist? You probably think this question is settled. It isn't.

— Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus

Answered by The Historian C.S. Lewis G.K. Chesterton Thomas Aquinas

21 OBJECTION

The corrupt church

Your institution is morally bankrupt.

The Catholic Church spent decades concealing the systematic sexual abuse of children by its clergy. The Borgia popes ran the Vatican as a criminal enterprise. The Vatican Bank has been implicated in money laundering across multiple decades. Inquisitors burned dissidents. Bishops blessed colonial conquest. An institution with this record is not a credible vehicle of divine truth, regardless of what its doctrines claim on paper.

The Church has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

— common formulation; cf. Boston Globe Spotlight investigation, 2002

Answered by The Pastor John Henry Newman Augustine G.K. Chesterton

22 OBJECTION

Faith is for the unintelligent

Smart people grow out of religion.

Studies consistently show a negative correlation between religious belief and measures of intelligence and education. The most accomplished scientists — National Academy members, Nobel laureates — are overwhelmingly secular. Religious belief tracks with lower education, lower income, and lower scientific literacy. Whatever else religion is, it is a position that intelligent people increasingly find untenable.

The higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious.

— Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg, Intelligence (2009)

Answered by G.K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis Thomas Aquinas The Logician

23 OBJECTION

The submission objection

Religion suppresses critical thinking.

Religion teaches you to defer to authority — Scripture, tradition, the magisterium — rather than to think for yourself. It rewards belief and punishes doubt. The catechism is a list of conclusions to be memorized, not arguments to be tested. A worldview that demands submission of the intellect is incompatible with the intellectual maturity that defines an adult.

Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason — that is the motto of enlightenment.

— Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?

Answered by Thomas Aquinas John Henry Newman The Catechism C.S. Lewis