Contra Apologetics

I used to love Christian apologetics. At an incredibly early age I began to read about all the objections to Christianity and found all these incredibly neat, tightly wrapped answers. It provided comfort to know that there was an answer for every objection out there. While there was a wink and a nod to the “I don’t know,” on issues of importance such an admission was rarely allowed. I loved this study so much that in college I began to study philosophy to really drill into the thought process behind Christianity. I read the Church Fathers, Christian and non-Christian philosophers, and began to study history. As I came to confront the objections to Christianity – not confined to a strawman in a book, but presented from the actual critics – I found my apologetics to be more difficult, but not impossible.

The thing about most apologetics that some Christian philosophers, like Alvin Plantiga, notice is that you have to presuppose an existence of a God for most of the arguments to work. The idea of Biblical inerrancy – which is farcical prima facie – rests on the idea that God exists. The idea of God as the first mover or the creator of everything rests on the idea that the universe must have a beginning. So much of Christian theology requires you to presuppose certain worldviews that are, honestly, archaic. But to be a part of the “in-group” you have to accept the answers.

For me, apologetics became more a group signifier than anything else. Were you willing to accept the answers you were fed no matter how much the answers left you unsatisfied? Were you okay with embracing the paradox of the Trinity and confessing it even though “one essence, three persons” doesn’t make a lot of sense even within the Greek worldview from which it originated? In other words, apologetics wasn’t a way to defend the faith from outside attacks, but rather a way to play on the presuppositions of believers and defend the faith from within.

One thing that stood out to me was that doubt was openly embraced. When reading Francis Schaeffer he argued that if it could be proven that the Christian story wasn’t historically correct, then the whole faith was wrong. But as I progressed in my studies, I began to realize that doubt was only embraced and accepted so long as it took place within the framework accepted. You could doubt anything, but if you kept the presuppositions of the faith, everything could have an answer. The issue came when questioning the presuppositions themselves. And even then, the presuppositions strain under their own system.

How can one look at all the evil in the world and not for one second begin to question God? Even within the presuppositional system of Christian apologetics the answers (theodicy) are often highly, highly unsatisfactory and so intellectualized as to remove any of the existential reality of evil. Any proper theodicy of evil ultimately takes on, ironically, an almost gnostic-like lowering of the importance of the here and now. We call God the Father, but if any of us treated our children the way God treats us or the neglect he shows towards his creation, we’d have social services called on us.

Apologetics will only convince the most gullible and those who have failed to think through their presuppositions. Because we live in a culture that has inherited the Christian tradition, multiple people are predisposed to the Christian worldview than any other, and so apologists enjoy this fact. However, with the advent of quantum physics it’s possible to conceive of an “eternal” universe, or an infinite series of events, because time itself is a dimension. We can say, “Ah, this is proof that God can exist outside of time,” to which I would say, yes, but it’s also proof that the universe didn’t need to “begin” at any point. There was no “beginning” until the Big Bang. The idea that there had to be a cause that happened in time and space is based on an old, outdated understanding of physics.

If God is not necessary for creation, that undercuts quite a few presuppositions within Christian apologetics. It’s why there are the aesthetics arguments, a Jesuit approach that – honestly – I appreciate. It attempts to say that things like love, beauty, and other aesthetical values are indicative of there being a God. After all, how can we have a concept of these things when there’s no physical manifestation of them?

But this argument relies on the Platonic idea of forms, or of everything having some “perfect” form behind it. Again, it requires the presupposition that there be some perfect “form” of beauty for us to understand what “beauty” actually is. The appreciation of beautiful objects, or having a concept of beauty, seems to be a side effect of higher intelligence. Why? Well, I don’t know. But that’s the thing, if we don’t know the solution isn’t to then use conjecture and act as though we can somehow know from the conjecture.

That’s the beauty of science vs apologetics. Apologetics comes up with an explanation and then defends that explanation and shapes the facts to fit the explanation. Science, when done properly, will begin with a hypothesis but shape the hypothesis based on the facts. When you get to a point where you need a theory but the information is sparse, it’s completely acceptable to say, “I don’t know.”

Our ability to love likely stems from our evolution as a species. Our evolution, from the difficult childbirth to being physically fragile, required deep cooperation. Love is a side effect of those deep bonds, and that doesn’t make it any less special or any less magical! It is, after all, a part of our evolution. It’s a part of our survival. The fact that we still form these bonds even though we live in an time of abundance, that we don’t form them out of necessity but out of a genuine want to be with this other person is still an incredibly beautiful thing. We know what love is because the social bonds we call love form the foundation of our survival as a species – I don’t see why one needs to evoke God for this to be the case.

Another is how Christian hermeneutics often work. One mantra that was often repeated in seminary is “Scripture must interpret Scripture.” In other words, you take one piece of the Bible and compare it to all others to find out what it means. Whenever I had to engage in interpreting a passage of Scripture, I’d have dozens of verses to cross-reference my point. I wasn’t letting the passages guide me or taking the passages on their own, instead I was guiding the passages toward the conclusion I needed them to draw.

Of course, you must presuppose what the overall meta-meaning is that the Bible is trying to convey, find the passages that support your presupposition quite a bit, and then go from there. Everything gets interpreted through the lens of “this has to be true, therefore it must mean this.” It’s why even within Christianity there isn’t an agreement over what any particular passage usually means because everyone is approaching it with their presuppositions.

Presuppositions aren’t necessarily wrong, but they ought to be questioned and tested from time to time. I presuppose that God does not exist. Everything I approach, every problem I encounter, the implicit belief is “There is no God.” That means my answer to anything won’t be “trust God” or “pray.” It also means that if an apologetical defense of Christianity requires the presupposition of God, they’re going to first have to defend that presupposition. And my is one that I arrived at rather than grew up with – I was raised a very conservative Christian, I had to arrive at my agnosticism. I’ve had time to think it over, it’s an earned presupposition that’s been challenged and forged through years of wrestling with these ideas.

Ultimately, the problem I have with Christian apologetics is that in all of its defense, often times you don’t get the actual criticism and you get incomplete answers. Because apologetics serves as an identity-marker to show “I’m one of the Christians” and not as an actual field of study, it must commit itself to strawmen and incomplete answers. I found out the hard way in my teenage years and early 20s that most of the people I went up against weren’t using the set-up arguments in the Josh McDowell book I had read, or that the arguments were oftentimes vastly more complex than the few paragraphs of answers I was given.

When I began to encounter the actual criticisms from the critics themselves, I found my apologetics began to morph and become more…humanist. For a while I butted heads with people from the Emergent Movement – a movement in Christianity in the 2000s that sought to bring about an alternative and more open view of Christianity – and would always write amazing papers about them. Yet, when I spoke with them their arguments were far more nuanced and complex than what I had presented. Why? Because it was challenging and too many of the issues they raised would require me to say “I don’t know” to many of my presuppositions.

Ironically, it wasn’t the intellectual objections to my faith that broke me away from my faith. The reality is that I was rather qualified to debate people and good at it. I was able to get around most objections and play down the weaker points of my arguments. My study of philosophy and apologetics is likely why I remained a Christian long past really believing in any of it – I had to rework my mental framework to match the world I was witnessing. No, what caused me to leave the faith entirely was realizing that Christianity, like all other religions, was little more than a way to gain power.

Certainly, not all Christians act this way. There are Christians who have their own apologetics and beliefs and reasons for their beliefs. They have their presuppositions and views on the universe. And they don’t try to force those views on anyone else, they stick to themselves and are all around good people. Who am I to judge another highly evolved ape for how they choose to get through this life on Earth?

But often apologetics is used as a way to boost the masses and ensure them that, no, there is good reason for what they believe. No, they aren’t crazy. And, most importantly, you absolutely shouldn’t question this faith or anything in it. Apologetics becomes another control mechanism to keep people trapped within the faith – even when you see the hypocrisy, the greed, and everything else, apologetics serves to trap you into believing that this is the only way in this world.

Ironically, apologetics creates an intellectual foundation for Christianity while ignoring the heart of the problem, that Christians simply do not act like their Christ. Of all the arguments against Christianity, I think that is what I ultimately found most compelling.