The Best Evidence For and Against Christianity
Bulletin Roundtable
Bulletin Roundtable Question
In this Bulletin Roundtable, our contributors answer the question: What do you believe is the most compelling evidence or argument for Christianity, and what is the most challenging objection to Christianity?
Paul Copan
The word “compelling” may be somewhat person-relative. A sound deductive argument will be logically compelling. That is, its premises are true, and the argument is valid; the conclusion necessarily follows. That is not person-relative. However, what evidence might strike one as a persuasive argument or evidence for the truth of the Christian faith may not have that same effect on another person—for any number of reasons, including background, how a person is “wired,” and what more readily “speaks” to a person. For example, someone like the late literature professor Louise Cowan, who was drawn to the gospel through reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky rather than philosophical arguments. She needed another way of “seeing.”
If I had to pick an argument for God’s existence, it would be the moral argument. (I’m confident that my Worldview Bulletin colleague Dave Baggett takes the same view!) Indeed, this is the lead-in topic in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity—a clue to the meaning of the universe—on which he builds his case for the plausibility of the Christian faith. Indeed, I often begin there—with the help of the Lord—as a helpful lead-in to speak to others about the great things of the gospel. In fact, just this week I sat on a plane next to an agnostic Iranian doctoral student and was able to do just that.
Beyond a more general case for theism, what I consider the most persuasive evidence for the Christian faith and one to which I most frequently gravitate, I would say is the bodily resurrection of Jesus. If this crucial historical event did not take place, then we have no Christian faith. As 1 Corinthians 15 puts it, our faith is empty and worthless, we are preaching falsehood, we are still in our sins, and we are to be pitied above all people; so let’s just eat, drink, and be merry.
The basic facts surrounding the first Easter—accepted by a large swath of historians of all stripes—are these: Jesus was crucified under Pilate’s orders and buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb; Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty, and both friend and foe believed this; groups of Jesus’ followers experienced appearances of Jesus after his death; and the early church suddenly emerged, announcing the message of Jesus’ resurrection in the very city in which this proclamation could be most easily falsified. We can add to this the historical supports of Paul’s and James’s conversions.
These are not “supernatural” facts. These are historical facts, which only leave us with the question: which explanation best explains those facts—a naturalistic or supernaturalistic one? I am strongly persuaded that the thesis that “God raised Jesus from the dead” furnishes the simpler, more wide-ranging explanation. By contrast, the various naturalistic explanations on order (e.g., hallucination or swoon theory, Jesus’ followers going to the wrong tomb, Jesus’ resurrection as a copycat myth of dying and rising gods in the Mediterranean world) all fail abysmally. Given the weightiness of the adduced evidences for Jesus’ resurrection, to explain this away is far more challenging than to accept the traditional explanation of bodily resurrection. That is, what is more likely given the evidence—that Jesus did or did not rise from the dead? I find that answer to be quite clear.
Most Challenging Objection
I suspect that the problem of evil and suffering in one form or another would be the top pick of many critics of the Christian faith—not to mention the deepest point of struggle for believers as well. And what complicates matters is that the problem of evil covers a wide range of issues beyond the logical and evidential problems of evil with their attendant concerns such as moral and natural evils as well as the notion of gratuitous:
· How do I deal with personal suffering in the face of my loved one’s terminal disease/death?
· How could God command the driving out of the Canaanites?
· What about those who have never heard the gospel of Jesus?
· Why isn’t God more obvious?
· If God made a good world, how could evil possibly emerge?
· If we are all born damaged by sin through no fault of our own, how could this be just?
· Why would God create a being like Satan, who would eventually rebel against God and wreak such havoc?
· What possible justification could there be for God to permit the Holocaust, the Ukrainian Holodomor (in which my own grandfather died), the killing fields of Cambodia, and so on?
In my recent Worldview Bulletin ten-part series on the problem of evil, I gave a number of reasons why a world in which God/Christ and evil coexist is much less of a problem than one in which evil exists without God. [You can find Dr. Copan’s series in our archive. The first article appeared in our January 2020 newsletter, and concluded in our October 2020 newsletter. — ed.]
David Baggett
I am always struck with what Paul said in Acts 17, namely, that the hour of ignorance was over because of the resurrection of Jesus. That was a game-changer, Paul insisted, rendering ignorance culpable. Fascinating he said this in Athens, of all places, where Socrates several centuries before had made professions of ignorance his veritable mantra. I doubt the irony was lost on Paul’s audience.
For a long while I have thought the case for the resurrection to be the centerpiece of Christian apologetics, but there’s another piece of evidence I intend to discuss momentarily that, at an existential level, is profoundly compelling.
First, though, what’s the most challenging objection to Christianity? Again, the most obvious answer is the problem of evil. It’s at least likely to be the deal-breaker for most of those who resist Christianity. Even more existentially pressing than the theoretical challenge of evil, though, is the personal or psychological struggle with evil. We may have perfectly adequate reasons to think that the sufferings of this world don’t preclude a good God, but that’s a far cry from being able and willing to emotionally cope with real instances of heart-wrenching loss and grief.
But this is where I might make a Copan-like maneuver and emphasize ways in which the evils of this world provide, in their own way, a pointer toward Christianity. Evil is a morally thick term, and it usually means more than suffering alone. There’s a moral component; the world is not as it ought to be. This basic assumption resides at the heart of the problem of evil, and gives it much of its punch. But why think the world should be any different from what it is? Christianity provides a good reason for thinking the world is broken and yet will be set right, but a view like naturalism offers nothing of the kind.
Taking seriously the moral thickness of a notion like evil, too, reminds us that the right worldview should be able to provide a robust foundation for morality. This is the topic on which I have devoted the bulk of my professional work. I am convinced that a vast swath of moral phenomena—objective moral values, binding moral duties, unalienable human rights, moral regret, moral freedom, moral knowledge, moral transformation, moral rationality, etc.—are best explained by theism generally and Christianity particularly.
Finally, what is best characterized as good or evil are not states of affairs, but persons. Accidentally smashing my thumb with a hammer is bad, but nonmorally bad, not morally bad. But someone intentionally smashing my thumb with a hammer is morally bad. Moral goodness and badness are categories most fitting of persons. And the fact is, if God were to immediately obliterate the evils in this world, as some suggest any loving God would have to, that would mean the destruction of you and me. We ourselves are part of the problem.
Clay Jones has read a great deal about various historical atrocities and genocides, and he is struck by the fact that those carrying out such evil deeds tend to be average, normal people who find themselves in a situation in which they think doing so will serve their own interests and they will get away with it. History has revealed that human beings are desperately, well, sinful—and not just others, but you and me, too. As Clay puts it, we’re all born “Auschwitz-enabled.” Something is broken within us and a doctrine like original sin explains just what it is.
Unless we see ourselves as having fallen short of an unbending moral standard, as people in need of both radical forgiveness and transformation, the Christian message doesn’t come alive and speak to us. So much of the force of the problem of evil derives from taking moral badness seriously. So it is finally confused when the problem of evil is taken as decisive evidence against Christianity, when, in fact, it is Christianity that ultimately offers principled hope for its deepest solution.
Paul M. Gould
What is the best argument for God? That is a good question! It is hard to answer, not because there is any shortage of good arguments for God, but because the perceived strength of one argument or another is person relative. I tend to like all the usual suspects: cosmological, teleological, moral, existential, and so on. But, since you asked, and I have to choose, I’ll pick the design argument. There are many different versions of the design argument. This is why I like them. You can run different versions of the argument with different pieces of evidence in view. So, for example, you could focus on the evidence from biology and give an argument from the origin of new body plans over the history of life on Earth (i.e., the origin of species) to an intelligent designer.
But suppose that there is a mechanism or set of mechanisms that can explain the origin of new species without appeal to a divine designer. No problem. There is another version of the design argument that focuses on the origin of life itself—that critical juncture when something special happened and inanimate material suddenly becomes animate. One can’t appeal to some Darwinian mechanism when it comes to the origin of life, for those processes only kick in after we have living cells. Of course, there might be non-Darwinian processes one might appeal to in explaining the origin of life. I’m skeptical that any of those processes have much of a chance at explaining the origin of life.
But suppose they do. Well, there is still another version of the design argument that could be run, and the evidence under consideration is far removed from biology or chemistry. I’m thinking of contemporary argument from the fine-tuning of the universe for life to a fine-tuner. The fact that the laws, constants of nature, and the initial conditions of the universe are balanced on a razor’s edge for life strongly supports theism. The more I’ve studied the evidence from cosmology, chemistry, and biology, I’m convinced that there are multiple successful versions of the design argument. Depending on a person’s interest or expertise it might be helpful to run one particular version instead of another in making the case for God.
What is the best argument against God’s existence? I think it is the problem of divine hiddenness. The problem is this. If God is all-loving, why does he hide? Why is God, if he exists, silent? If a child called out for his mother, surely the mother would quickly respond. Yet God, it seems, is unresponsive to our cries. Better to think, as the argument goes, that there is no God in the first place.
I certainly understand the force of this argument against God’s existence. It does often feel as if God is absent from the world and our lives. But I do not think this argument, in the end, is successful. There are good reasons for God to hide. One reason is that God doesn’t want us to merely believe that he exists, rather he wants our hearts. He wants us to know him experientially, and this requires that we seek him with all of our being. As the Baylor university philosopher C. Stephen Evans puts it, the evidence for God is widely available yet easily resistible. It is there for us to see. But we must interpret it. And God wants a heart willing to worship him as Lord, not mere verbal assent to a propositional belief in God.
Much more can be said, of course. Bottom line: there is no objection or argument that Christianity can’t handle. The arguments—for and against God’s existence—are important. They press us to clarify our views, weigh the evidence, and genuinely seek truth. But in the end, I believe, if we faithfully follow them, it will become clear that the cumulative weight of evidence on the God question strongly points to theism.
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Resources
Video: Reasonable Faith: The Kalam Cosmological Argument - Part 2
View manuscripts of the Greek New Testament with the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts’ newly updated manuscript viewer.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Apologetics (a helpful overview of about a dozen apologetics arguments written by leading thinkers. Our own Paul Gould writes on cultural apologetics).
Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible.
Master Class: Can We Trust the Gospels? Evidence for the Gospels' Historical Reliability by Peter J. Williams (a five-part video series on the reliability of the Gospels).
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