Part 3: Barriers and Objections to Belief

This is Part 3 of Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Guide.

5. Emotion, Interpretation, and Personal Barriers

5.1. Emotion and reason

As you get older, your response to your perceptions gets more nuanced as you become more aware of your emotions. You decide whether an emotion such as fear is justified in a given situation. And much of this is based on experience.

Overcoming Emotional Baggage in Apologetics

If someone has been bitten by a dog in the past, they may now be wary of dogs. Reasoning them out of a fear of dogs would be difficult, not because you lack good arguments for not being afraid of dogs, but because the emotion of fear is too powerful and it's going to get in the way.

In the same way, reasoning someone into believing in God is difficult if there's a lot of emotional baggage there connected to God. Perhaps someone was raised by "religious" parents who were also abusive, so they emotionally link God with pain. Or perhaps a person was raised in an atheistic household, and associate God with boredom or some other negative emotion.

Even if you make a stellar knock-down, drag-out argument to someone, a strong opposing emotion can block them from accepting your conclusion. They may admit you have a good argument, but yet will reject it based solely on how they feel. Even if emotion doesn't defeat reason in the mind, it may defeat reason in the heart and in how one lives day-to-day. People are not robots, and emotion is part of our being. It's crucial that your apologetic takes this into account.

5.2. Arguments

Some arguments are more convincing than others. A logical proof you can write on paper may be more convincing than eyewitness testimony, depending on who you're talking to.

A series of strange coincidences will convince some but not others.

Some say that only rock solid logical proofs are acceptable. But that very demand doesn't have a logical proof to back it up. You can't demand a logical proof for something when you won't provide such a proof for your own assertion that you need one.

5.3. Many people believe what makes them feel good

6. Naturalism, Science, and Selective Skepticism

6.1. Attempts to obviate God

A certain line of thinking seeks to explain away the need for God by saying something like: "We don't understand everything, and there are some things we attribute to God. But one day we might find another explanation that doesn't require God." This objection usually comes up in debates about origins. At the heart of this objection is a dual desire:

1. to withhold belief in God until something "better" (perhaps less threatening or more palatable) comes along, and
2. to maintain belief in the current explanation

It sounds rational and even sensible on the surface, but it's really just a cop out. Looking for an alternative explanation is a never-ending endeavor. Occam's razor warns against multiplying explanations needlessly, which is exactly what people tend to do if they don't like the explanation they're presented with. The core of science is about drawing an inference to the best explanation, not just whatever plausible explanation we happen to like.

6.2. Selective skepticism

Unbelief is always based on selective skepticism. Anyone can doubt anything, but unbelief doubts only very specific propositions.

An agnostic may doubt God and Scripture, but will not seriously doubt...

• his own existence
• whether that blade of grass he sees is really there
• whether 2+2 is really 4

Unbelief based solely on doubts or selective skepticism is intellectually dishonest. If we were to disbelieve everything we could conceivably doubt, we'd believe nothing and know nothing. If you doubt your senses, how would you know the words you're reading are what is actually written? Or that the memory you have of what you heard so-and-so say is accurate? Fake skeptics who practice selective skepticism don't doubt the things they already agree with and want to believe.

6.3. Science is a field of diminishing returns

The idea in modern methodological naturalism is that if we just keep looking, we'll eventually be able to explain everything in a way that requires no supernatural cause or intervention. This stems from simplistic and reductive thinking that assumes science and technology will continue to advance exponentially, peeling back the onion one layer at a time until we get to the center, which (according to atheists) cannot be God. It's a shortsighted view that assumes a priori that the supernatural doesn't exist. This view lacks a historical perspective of the methods and philosophy of science.

We have learned a lot in the past several hundred years, and technology has advanced exponentially in that time, but the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know and how many things our technology can't do. If you have bad vision, everything might look blurry. Trees, people, birds, bugs, mammals, and other things might just appear as blobs from a distance. But once you put on your glasses, you can see the details, and realize how much you didn't know. Your improved vision gives you new information, but it also gives you the realization that there are things you don't know about the things that you didn't know were there. For example, you might not have realized a dog was standing in the distance until you put on your glasses. Once you did see the dog and noticed its collar, you realized that you don't know who the owner is or what the dog's name is. As our ignorance shrinks, so it seems to grow.

Technological Limits and the Illusion of Infinite Scientific Progress

Our more advanced technology is already hitting the hard limits of physics. Computers are not getting any faster. Moore's Law, which stated that computing power would double every two years, has not held true since 2016.

Quantum computers were supposed to revolutionize computing. The first quantum computer was developed in 1998, and yet here we are almost 30 years later struggling to get these machines to work without requiring extremely low temperatures. We don't even have practical uses for the ones that do work. All the useful things that quantum computers can do now can be done better and cheaper by classical computers.

Even safe self-driving cars are proving difficult, not to mention the utter lack of flying cars, which people expected to be in mass use decades ago. The 1960's cartoon "The Jetsons" envisioned a future with maid robots and flying cars. Instead we got Roombas and Teslas.

Science as a Method of Trial and Error

People sometimes paint a picture of science "marching on" and trampling thousand-year old myths. The reality is that science is treading water, slowly navigating the vast ocean of the observable universe, and drawing a map through a process of trial and error. Science is the discipline of methodically trying things hoping to find something that works, and then developing explanatory theories. It is true that science occasionally has breakthroughs that lead to new and exciting discoveries, but those discoveries lead to more questions, and humble us by showing how much more there is that we don't know.

Science is trial-and-error based on a methodology guided by loads of philosophical assumptions. At its core, science is based on religious beliefs about the universe: order, causation, uniformity of nature, etc. Many of the fathers of the sciences were not just Christians, but young-earth Creationists. Trying to use science to disprove Christianity is like trying to use milk to disprove the existence of cheese. It's a self-defeating endeavor.

6.4. Abandoned "facts"

Many naturalistic "explanations" for origins and phenomena have popped up over the years that atheists believed (and taught) as indisputable scientific facts. A more aggressive argument atheists use is that science has already explained away the need for God in many areas, and will then cite some outdated "facts" in support of their claim. What all of these "facts" have in common is that we now know them to be wrong. Let's take a look at some of them.

6.4.1. The Big Bang

The "Big Bang" cosmology is the most common one, and it's almost always presented as an explanation of how the universe came to be. This is a common misconception about the theory. In fact, the "Big Bang" assumes matter and energy already existed in a "singularity" (it doesn't explain where this singularity came from) which inexplicably expanded into the universe we know today. But the theory is so full of holes, and is contradicted by so much empirical evidence, that even many secular cosmologists no longer hold to it. There is no good naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe, let alone everything else.

6.4.2. The Eternal Universe

As an alternative to the "Big Bang", some people hold the view that matter and energy are eternal, but this theory has its own problems. The universe certainly doesn't look eternal, but rather like it had a starting point and is still in flux, which would not happen if it has always existed. To be clear, most atheists don't subscribe to this theory in part because it conflicts with the "Big Bang" theory they hold to.

People who do believe in an eternal universe are likely to ascribe to the universe some sort of deity, as is done in Hinduism and other eastern religions. Proponents of an eternal universe tend to be pantheists who see the universe itself as supernatural.

6.4.3. Common Descent (a.k.a. evolution)

Common descent, more commonly called just evolution (or neo-Darwinism in academic circles), is another theory that gets invoked as obviating the need for God. The evidence against evolution, the lack of evidence for it, and its many unanswered problems are all too much to mention here. But just as with the "Big Bang," many secular scientists recognize that it's no longer a viable theory, and they're seeking an alternative explanation that would, unfortunately, still preclude God. To be clear, most atheists still believe in neo-Darwinism as an alternative to special creation (God directly creating different kinds of life), but discoveries in biology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and especially genetics have made neo-Darwinism untenable.

6.4.4. Vestigial Organs

It's worth mentioning that the science curricula of schools around the world is very outdated. For example, biology and health books falsely claim the appendix has no function, when medical doctors have known for decades that the appendix is a part of the immune system. Consequently, there are millions of people walking around today that still think the appendix is a vestigial organ left over by evolution.

6.4.5. "Junk DNA"

There's also the false claim that most human DNA is "junk" that has no function, when in fact we've known for over a decade that's false. After sequencing the entire human genome, we know that all DNA has a function.

6.4.6. Spontaneous Generation

Spontaneous generation is the idea that life can arise from non-living matter. It's a very old idea that was debunked by Louis Pasteur in the 1800s, but it was taught in schools as an example of abiogenesis in support of evolution.

6.5. Pride goes before science

Scientists are constantly developing and marketing new theories which develop a loyal and devout following. Then a new generation of scientists comes along, pokes holes in the popular theory, and develops its own. Science, which is a fairly modern invention, operates on the same ancient rules of politics and warfare, all of which stem from the same basic problem: humans wanting to be their own god.

The Role of Bias and Peer Review in Science

This doesn't mean science is bad or that it always yields wrong ideas. It just means that its reliability is going to depend on the people carrying it out. Peer review was supposed to help curb the influence of bias, but as we all know, it's not hard to game a system, especially one in which there are financial rewards for pushing a certain agenda. Again, this is why it's critical to locate and weigh the evidence for yourself.

As an aside, a huge red flag is when someone discourages you from doing your own research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were some shady people mocking anyone who did their own research to decide the best way to handle their own personal risk. These mockers were essentially saying that the general public wasn't qualified or smart enough to make this determination, and that they needed to listen to "the experts." As history taught us, many of these "experts" were wrong.

There's a lesson there for those who question Christianity on the grounds that "experts" say it's false.

6.6. The Fallacy that Wasn't

"God of the Gaps" vs. "Darwinism of the Gaps"

Atheists are fond of dismissing any explanation that credits God, claiming that it's the "God of the gaps" fallacy. This misnamed "fallacy" is not a fallacy at all, but an instance of logical inference that everyone (including atheists) uses every day. The best way to understand this is with some examples:

• When attempting to explain a biological feature, such as eyesight, creationists will credit God with designing it. They'll point to features that look designed and seem to have a purpose.

• When attempting to explain eyesight, atheists will credit evolution.

In both cases, nobody directly observed how eyesight came to be. Both sides have to draw an inference. The creationist infers a Creator, while the atheist infers evolution. So if the creationist is guilty of the "God of the gaps" fallacy, then the atheist is guilty of the "Darwinism of the gaps" fallacy. Q.E.D..

Inference to an explanation is not a fallacy. But we have to go beyond a single inference and look at what theory best fits the evidence overall.

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