The Lame Sophistry of Christian Apologetics

The travesty of the Kalam argument, and the search for middle ground between Christians and atheists

In the mood to eavesdrop on Christian apologists as they devise tactics for responding to trenchant criticisms from atheists, I stumbled on an article from Christendom College’s Catholic periodical, called “Principles,” which scratched the itch.

The article is by Brandon Vogt, who is the “content director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.”

Vogt’s purpose is to counter the fact that many young people have been drawn into the New Atheist movement, “swayed by poor arguments and heated rhetoric, in particular through the internet.” So, Vogt created a discussion forum where Christians and atheists could “charitably discuss” their differences.

“With 100,000 conversations under our belt,” he says, “I have now interacted with thousands of atheists and have learned how they think, their major obstacles, and their points of resistance.” In the Principles’ articles, then, Vogt means to draw from that experience and to present “some effective tips and tactics to use when speaking with the atheists.”

Why does apologetics have to exist?

It’s worth pointing out that the very fact that apologists need to put their heads together and scheme in this way is itself evidence in atheism’s favour. God has evidently left Christians to stew for two millennia so that they must resort to sophistries and casuistries to explain away God’s apparent absence, the gross hypocrisies that distinguish Church history, the litany of failed prophecies, and the secularizing of the developed parts of Christendom.

Of course, Christians can account for this outcome since you can twist a fiction to excuse anything. That’s the power of the human imagination. But Christians’ rationale for why they’re in this mess of having to defend themselves against well-informed atheists will naturally be as convoluted and farfetched as the rest of their religion’s theologies.

Jesus’s theology was simple because he was a big-picture idealist who didn’t lead the organized religion that would later arise to disgrace itself daily with politicizations. For Jesus, there were winners and losers in society, and this distribution of power and happiness was generally unfair. But the transcendent source of this world will somehow redeem this absurd situation, so that the winners and losers will reverse their positions. We need to trust in that source even to the point of sacrificing our earthly life, as Jesus did, for greater reward in the afterlife.

From what can be gleaned from the New Testament and from the history of religions, that’s the heart of it for Jesus. But the Catholic Catechism goes on and on with abstractions and compromises, as you’d expect from a politicized theology that evolved over some two thousand years.

Still, the very existence of these apologetical pamphlets in the twenty-first century doesn’t exactly cover Christianity in glory.

Condescension and common ground

Anyway, Vogt recommends that Christians respect atheists’ intelligence. Indeed, even if atheists aren’t intelligent, Vogt says, “treat them as if they are. Don’t talk down to them or speak condescendingly, the way you might to a child. Treat them with respect and acknowledge their intelligence.”

As reasonable and civil as that may sound, we’re already through the looking glass here since the notion that a Christian would be in any kind of position to speak to an adult atheist as though he or she were a child is ludicrous.

Who’s the one with the invisible friends? Who’s the one who accepts uncritically ancient myths and cultish propaganda as though they were literally true? Who thinks a bodiless, masculine person made black holes and subatomic fluctuations? Or who thinks that that deity needed a blood sacrifice to vent his wrath and to spare us from everlasting torture for acting roughly as he made us act?

The fact that the possibility of condescension even crossed Vogt’s mind is telling since Catholicism is known for being a home for smugness.

Vogt’s second “tip” for Christians is to establish common ground. For instance, he says, “perhaps you both appreciate the value of science or critical thinking. Start with that.”

Why bother with personal common ground, though, when we have the existential condition for all informed people living in the twenty-first century? This condition could be described in question-begging ways, but the most neutral description of this cognitive default will still favour naturalists and skeptics, not dogmatic theists. Religion looked much more reasonable centuries or millennia ago than it does now.

The strongest theistic argument?

Things get more interesting with the third tip, which is to “ask good questions.” The questions Vogt would pose to the atheist amount to getting the atheist to do the Christian’s work for him.

The first question is, “Which argument for God do you find strongest, and why does it fail?” According to Vogt, “few atheists have actually read books defending God or have studied the issue at length. Therefore, they’ll usually respond by referencing a relatively poor argument or reason, one that you and I could probably quickly reject.”

Now, this question is loaded since it discounts the possibility that religion is a grotesque fraud and that all the theistic arguments are pitifully weak. To speak of the “strongest” argument for God’s existence is to assume that at least one of the arguments isn’t as flawed as the others, or that one stands out as having certain strengths. And indeed, Vogt’s earlier reference to “charitable” discussions sets the stage for this sophistry since if we were being charitable, we might steelman an argument by ignoring its apparent flaws.

If Vogt’s question amounts to asking the atheist to dream up a viable argument for God’s existence on the Christian’s behalf, that’s likely to be a tall order. Imagine a Hindu or a Muslim asking a Christian to propose the strongest argument for one of those alternative religions. Wouldn’t the Christian deem this an imposition, assuming the Christian thinks those religions are sheer demon spawns?

Sure, we should be charitable in talking to strangers, and we should steelman our opponent’s arguments. But there’s a difference between assuming something for the sake of argument, and presupposing a centrist stance, according to which the truth is somewhere between two extremes.

There’s no such center between theism and atheism. One side is right and the other is wrong. If atheism is true, why expect that any argument for theism would be at all respectable? Those arguments would all have to be sophistical at best. Each would be fallacious and misleading in different ways, but none would be strong unless by “strong” we meant the most obnoxious or dangerous.

In any case, if I had to choose the best theistic argument, I’d pick the sort of postmodern one you find in The Life of Pi, the assumption being that all truth is relative and subjective, so we’re forced to pick the better story, and theism makes for a more uplifting story than atheistic naturalism. The strength of this argument is that it compels the skeptic to defend modernity even though secular cultures are bound to be problematic.

The basis for theistic conversion

Vogt’s second question is in the same vein: “What would it take for you to believe in God?” Here again, the Christian wants the atheist to work for the Christian, which abuses charity to mask a dubious imposition.

What the atheist should say in response to this question is that if something heavy were to strike his or her head, perhaps then, under such diminished cognitive capacity, anything might convince the atheist to adopt theism or Christianity.

After all, there are generally two ways someone becomes a Christian. They’re either born into it, or they convert after a traumatic, mind-altering experience. If the atheist grew up a Christian and de-converted, this atheist might indeed revert to Christian practices, due to the lingering effects of that formative brainwashing. (Similarly, if you learn a language when you’re young, returning to that language when you’re grown up is like riding a bike.)

Otherwise, Christianity would generally be off the table for skeptics or naturalists who lack that early frame of reference. In that case, precisely nothing would make these non-Christians change their mind. They’re lost to Christianity because the religion failed to get to them when they were young and impressionable.

The exceptions, as I said, are cases in which someone goes through a harrowing trial in life and turns to theism out of desperation. Severe trauma would be like a psychedelic trip in that it could spur the brain to overhaul its core beliefs. Thus, the honest answer should be that trauma might provoke the atheist to adopt a religion.

But short of either going back in time to grow up as a theist or suffering catastrophic failure in life, which would prompt the mind to grasp at straws to retain its sanity, we should expect that nothing could convince a skeptical naturalist to believe that God exists. As Vogt says, there will always be a naturalistic explanation of evidence that might point towards theism. If you think you’re talking to God, maybe it’s just a hallucination or a trick caused by an extraterrestrial race of people, and so on.

All the debates and apologetics, then, are naturally fruitless for Christians trying to spread their message, without the meeting of at least one of those two preconditions. We rarely change our mind about an issue to which we’re emotionally committed. We can easily admit to making trivial mistakes, but if we’re talking about core principles, philosophies, and life perspectives, changing them amounts to becoming a different person.

And that’s what Christianity symbolically calls for: a rebirth or a new life. The Christian is supposed to die to their old self, to be reborn in a new body. This will happen after the Christian dies, they trust, but they’re supposed to act out that scenario in life, by pretending that their religious faith unites them with Christ or the Holy Spirit.

But if that’s so, again we should ask about the purpose of apologetics. If what’s needed is a rebirth, why expect that arguments would do the trick? Wouldn’t it be up to God to challenge atheists directly?

The Christian may turn here to Matthew 7:7, which says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Supposedly, God expects us to meet him halfway since he already met us partway by dying on the cross for us.

Alas, that begs the question since whether God thusly entered nature in first-century Palestine is part of what’s in dispute between Christians and atheists. As far as atheists are concerned, God hasn’t given them any sign, so there’s no bargain that’s been put on the table.

Then again, if the atheist playacts as though God were real, as Pascal recommended, perhaps the atheist might find themselves wanting to adopt theistic beliefs in earnest to save face or to cover for having thereby started to make a fool of themselves.

Yet this would be a psychological or sociological matter that again would be taken up by sophists rather than by theists who argue in good faith. Atheists’ behaviour might become theistic, under certain scenarios, but that wouldn’t necessarily be in response to a good reason to believe that God exists or that Christianity is true.

The sophistry of pragmatic theism

As for the arguments themselves, Vogt says we shouldn’t expect scientific evidence for God’s existence since God is supposed to be a supernatural entity. Luckily, he says,

scientific evidence isn’t the only type of evidence. Many truths that exist we cannot prove through physical evidence. For instance, we don’t have physical evidence that life is meaningful or that murder is wrong. Of course, we understand these statements to be true, but not because we have found physical evidence to support them. We believe these truths on the basis of another sort of evidence.

The same holds for the existence of God.

So theistic belief, for Vogt, is like the feeling that life is meaningful or that murder is wrong. These matters are all taken on “faith,” presumably.

Again, though, why bother arguing about it in that case? Do you argue with a psychopath who assumes that murder is fine? If one person’s an optimist, and another’s a cynical pessimist, what’s the point of them arguing about the nature of life? Each would just be expressing his or her respective character and life experience. What would be the purpose of Christian apologetics if God’s existence were a matter more of feeling than of reason?

Is there a fact of the matter of whether murder is wrong? As David Hume pointed out, we could never perceive the wrongness itself if we were to witness a murder. We’d perceive signs that most people are horrified by murder, so we’d have empirical grounds for knowing that we don’t approve of that act. But the moral claim about the act’s wrongness is a social convention, a myth or collective fiction that regulates the social enterprise. Speaking of immorality is a shortcut to saying that society won’t tolerate certain acts and that we each choose to value our life because that’s how we evolved and because we’ve got places to go and things to do.

Consequently, Vogt is dangerously close to conceding that his case for theism is only pragmatic. At best, theism would be good for society, so this belief’s truth status would be irrelevant. Again, the heart of Catholicism would be the sort of condescension that played out in a tradition of horrid disneyfications that the revolutions of reason and liberalism eventually terminated.

In any case, Vogt does recommend that Christians offer what he calls a “strong argument.” Oddly, before he presents it, he says, “I want to note that if terms like arguments or evidence disconcert you, you might instead consider these arguments as clues that converge and point to a common conclusion, much the way road signs guide you to a specific destination. A sign doesn’t prove that the destination exists, but it does point the way. These arguments are signposts to God.”

Why would the talk of arguments or evidence disconcert a Christian? Is it because the Christian is supposed to think that worldly wisdom is foolishness to God, and that spiritual matters should be spiritually discerned, as Paul said? In that case, again, what’s the point of apologetics? The answer is that it’s so much sophistry, so the “arguments” and “evidence” are all offered in bad faith, just as they were in Paul’s convoluted bouts of salesmanship.

As Paul said in 1 Cor. 9:19–23,

I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews…To those not having the law I became like one not having the law…so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Save folks “by all possible means”! Hence, the torrent of Christian sales tactics that have appalled so many secular humanists, skeptics, and naturalists.

The travesty of the Kalam argument

Anyway, the “strong” argument in question is just the very lame Kalam cosmological argument. This argument runs like this, in Vogt’s words:

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. Premise 2: The universe began to exist. Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

As he goes on to clarify this simple argument, Vogt seems proud of how it avoids saying that everything has a cause, which would entail that God too must have a cause. No, Vogt points out, the argument assumes only that everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Alas, that qualification is of no consequence after the advent of Einsteinian physics, according to which time isn’t a universal, transcendent dimension for measuring natural events. Time is part of a fabric that includes space and that evolved. Hence, the earliest, subatomic event wasn’t in time. According to scientific cosmology, then, the universe didn’t begin to exist. Time, too, was created with the Big Bang.

What kind of proper explanation could this be, though, which somehow accounts for the universe without positing a prior cause? That would be a good question. The theoretical physicist’s likely answer is that instead of positing God, scientific cosmologists posit math. The subatomic fluctuation that broke some initial symmetry in the gravitational singularity was due to an abstract structure corresponding to certain arcane mathematical generalizations that make up the physicist’s theory.

Is that “naturalistic” rigmarole better than just settling for theism? As counterintuitive and perhaps suspicious as the theoretical physicist’s Platonic speculations might be, they are indeed superior to theism in at least one respect: they’re not nakedly naïve in being human-centered personifications. At least the mathematician’s formal structures needn’t be so conveniently like us, making the scientific theory more like a childish outburst.

Regardless, there are other problems with the Kalam argument. The second premise speaks of “the universe” as if it were a thing. Yet not only was the early universe very different from the present state of galaxies, neither stage is a thing, as in something within a set of more things. The universe isn’t within itself. Instead, “the universe” is a rough way of talking about everything there is. And absolutely everything isn’t the same as just something.

Is a gravitational singularity a “thing”? How about the fluctuation of a virtual particle? Does the commonsense concept of causality in space and time apply to these primordial conditions? Why should it when science has proved to be counterintuitive in countless respects?

Finally, there’s the obvious problem with the conclusion, which is that it doesn’t include the word “God.” Vogt thinks that’s alright since

the cause of the universe must be something beyond the universe, something beyond all matter, energy, space, and time. In other words, it must be transcendent (beyond the universe), it must be immaterial (beyond matter and space), it must be eternal (beyond time), and if it has created something so massively complex as the universe, it must be tremendously powerful and intelligent. Well, a transcendent, immaterial, eternal, supremely powerful, and intelligent cause of the universe — what does that sound like to you?

Again, the formal structures that theoretical physicists posit take care of the transcendence, immateriality, and timelessness, so none of those qualities entails a deity.

As you may have recognized, Vogt drops the ball when he says that if the first cause “has created something so massively complex as the universe, it must be tremendously powerful and intelligent.” Vogt seems unaware here of the Big Bang theory, which is that the early universe wasn’t as “massively complex” as the present state of the universe. No, the universe evolved from a simple state to more complex states. It took billions of years for the present complexities to emerge by natural processes of star formation and the like.

Hence, Vogt’s implicit reliance on the design argument doesn’t go through. If intelligence is needed to explain the apparent order in any complexity, no such intelligence would be needed to explain a simple state that doesn’t yet show any such complex order. (No such intelligence is needed to explain all present complexities either since we now know that most of them naturally evolved.)

Moreover, leaping to the theistic conclusion to specify the nature of this first cause doesn’t help since it turns theism into a pseudo-explanation. Maybe mathematical forms can be transcendent, immaterial, and timeless, but why think a person could be so? Yes, consciousness is mysterious, and we like to think consciousness could survive the body’s death. But that intuition is naïve and wishful compared to scientific knowledge. Consciousness is tied to the brain, and the brain isn’t transcendent, immaterial, or timeless.

Personifying the first cause, then, may be reassuring since personhood would be back at the center of things even after all the scientist’s disenchantments of nature. But if Vogt’s lame sophistry is needed to perform this trick, we should suspect that the impulse to which this apologetics caters is flawed.

The Kalam argument, then, isn’t strong at all. No theistic argument is strong — not, at least, in the twenty-first century. There is indeed an awesome mystery at the universe’s origin, just as the cosmic scales in space and time are mind-blowing. This is yet more common ground between theists and atheists and likely leads, as I argue elsewhere, to the meeting ground of pantheism.

I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing in that way. The newest one is Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, and its 600 pages include 99 recent, wide-ranging articles of mine.