I stumbled on an old, yellowed document in my drawer in the recording studio at the STR office recently. It listed 83 challenges that come up frequently for believers that many Christians don’t know how to respond to when confronted with them.
As I looked over the list, though, it occurred to me that many of those challenges required only a simple response that could easily be learned by Christians who want to be ready for them. Consequently, I’ve decided to devote a few issues of Solid Ground to answering some of those concerns, giving my responses as if I were fielding them in a “rapid-fire” challenge session with skeptics.
Some of my answers may surprise you. Here they are, in no particular order.
“It’s wrong to judge others.”
Well, that depends.
Yes, Jesus does say in Matthew 7:1, “Do not judge.” It’s one of the few passages skeptics seem convinced is genuinely inspired since they cite it so often against Christians. The problem for the challenger is that Jesus doesn’t stop with those three words. He qualifies his command.
Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” and behold, the log is your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:3–5)
In this passage, Jesus does not condemn all judgments. Indeed, his own directive is a moral judgment—as is the skeptic’s scolding that we shouldn’t judge. Rather, Jesus is taking issue with a certain kind of arrogant condescension characteristic of religious leaders of that time. They were quick with criticism for minor offenses, yet their own lives were steeped in vice. To Jesus, this was nothing more than rank hypocrisy.
A judgment is an assessment. Sometimes it’s entirely proper to render an assessment on behavior, especially wicked conduct. Jesus himself regularly upbraided the people for their evil (e.g., John 7:7, Matt. 23:13–33). Sometimes it’s right for us to do so, as well. In those cases, Jesus would approve.
In short, Jesus is not condemning all judgments. Rather, he’s instructing on how to judge properly. In his own words, “Judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24).
“Does faith save?”
No, it doesn’t. Faith itself accomplishes nothing.
The notion that faith saves is a common misconception among Protestants, but it’s easily rectified with an illustration. Imagine venturing out on a frozen lake with full faith and confidence that the surface will bear your weight. Will that profound belief alone keep you safe? No. If you’ve stepped out on thin ice, you’re heading for a cold soaking no matter how unshakable your conviction is.
The world is filled with people overflowing with unwavering religious belief. Yet their confidence will be useless if that which they’ve trusted in has no ability to save them. They’ve strayed onto thin ice.
Faith by itself, no matter how strong, cannot rectify false hope. It benefits nothing. As I have written elsewhere, “If we are reaching out with the hand of faith to grasp a fantasy, then there will be no one there to rescue us, no matter how strong or sincere our faith is.”[1]
Though sola fide—“faith alone”—is part of the bedrock of our Christian confession, its point is to distinguish trust in Christ from personal merit. Works don’t rescue us; Jesus does. “Sola fide” reminds us that faith is the lone means of connecting to the redeemer who gathers us to himself and saves us. When we rely on Jesus rather than our own efforts, we find safety. He does for us what we could never do for ourselves. Jesus is thick ice.
To be most precise, then, we should say that Jesus saves us, not our faith, but he saves us through our faith. Our salvation is not grounded on our faith. It is grounded on the capable rescuer in whom we place our trust.
“You can’t legislate morality.”
If morality is not the basis for the proper use of legislative power, then what is? Personal whim? The interests of the elite? The private preferences of those in power? The fact is that morality is the only thing we can justifiably legislate.
Aristotle observed that all law rests upon the necessary foundation of morality. Legitimate legislation enlists the power of government to advance the common good. Law not based on morality is tyranny.
Note the preamble of the US Constitution—the legal document establishing the mechanism for proper legislative action for our national community. It’s thick with moral intention:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Of course, not every moral good can be legislated. It would not be possible for governments to compel every virtue and prohibit and punish every vice. Nevertheless, every law that is enacted must be intended as a vehicle for moral purpose, or else it is illicit.
“An acorn is not an oak. Therefore, a fetus is not a human being.”
Prolifers frequently encounter this canard. It’s an attempt to parry their case that abortion is morally inexcusable because it takes the life of an innocent human being. I call it a canard because it’s erroneous and misleading.
The error becomes obvious when you ask a simple question: If an acorn is not an oak, then what is it? It’s a seed, of course. Yes, but what kind of seed? An oak seed, obviously. In other words, an acorn is an oak in the seed stage, its sprout is an oak in the sapling stage, and the full-grown tree is an oak in the mature stage. An oak goes through different stages of development over time, to be sure, but it remains what it is—an oak—from beginning to end.
The same insight applies to a fetus. What kind of fetus is it? It’s a human fetus. That individual human will progress from fetal stage to newborn stage to adolescent stage to adult stage, yet it remains the same individual human being from beginning to end—from conception to adulthood. Every living thing looks different at different stages of its development, yet it still remains itself throughout the process.
All this claim amounts to is that earlier stages of the development of a living thing are not the same as later stages of the development of that living thing. Simply put, an infant is not an adult. This is true, of course, but it’s a trivial observation that’s irrelevant to the question of the humanity of a fetus.
Terms like zygote, embryo, fetus, etc., are purely human inventions marking general stages of biological development. Embryology—and common sense—tells us that the very same individual is present at each stage, regardless of the arbitrary terms we use to distinguish the stages.
“All views have equal value, and none should be considered better than another.”
This is a claim about opposing views and how we should treat them. The claim is that we should treat all views as equally meritorious.
Here’s my question: Is this claim a view? Of course it is. The claim, then, applies to itself just as much as it does to views that compete with it.
Surprisingly, the challenger is offering a view that he thinks is superior to the opposite notion that some views have more merit than others. Fair enough. The moment he does, though, he falls on his own sword since the view he’s advancing is equally deadly to itself.
For a challenger to be consistent in advancing the view that all views have equal value and none should be considered better than another, he would have to immediately affirm its opposite—that all views do not have equal value and some are better than others—since both, according to him, have equal merit.
This, of course, is nonsense. The claim is hopelessly contradictory. It can’t be taken seriously since it negates itself.
“Can a non-Christian go to Heaven if he is sincere in his beliefs?”
Most people hold their beliefs—whatever they happen to be—with complete sincerity. Their sincerity, though, cannot make those beliefs true. Some people have accurate beliefs, and some do not. The difference matters.
When it comes to the spiritual truth of salvation, sincerity cannot rescue. Note the apostle Paul’s lament about his brethren, the Jews:
Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Rom. 10:1–4)
Paul’s Jewish kin were filled with sincere zeal regarding their convictions, but their sincerity could not save them. They were lost because their zeal was not according to knowledge. Their views were false.
“Abortion should not be banned since nobody really knows when life begins.”
The time when an individual human life begins is no mystery to anyone marginally schooled in embryology. A human being’s life begins at conception. This is scientific orthodoxy and is not a matter of debate with anyone familiar with the issue.
If you make this legitimate appeal to authority, though, you’re likely to be contradicted and dismissed, as I was when interviewed on abortion by a particularly hostile BBC reporter during an international broadcast.
If that happens to you, don’t worry. There’s a workaround. The important question with abortion is not when life begins, but whether or not the unborn is alive when an abortion takes place.
Here is the question I ask when confronted with this challenge: Is the offending “tissue” growing? Of course it is. Well, if it’s growing, then it’s alive. End of issue.
Abortion kills a living thing. That’s the point of abortion. It doesn’t just terminate a pregnancy. It terminates an individual life, regardless of the precise point of time that life began.
“If God is able to do anything, can God sin?”
The capacity or potential to sin is not an ability; it’s a disability. God has no disabilities. Therefore, God cannot sin.
Think of it this way. We all err now and then when doing our sums. Does our “ability” to get our math wrong constitute a meaningful skill we possess? Of course not. It’s not a skill; it’s a flaw.
To say someone possesses the propensity to err is a positive way of stating a negative thing. It’s like saying, “I can fail.” This statement is not really about what one can do (fail), even though it’s stated that way. Rather, it’s an obverse way of stating what one can’t do (succeed). It’s not a strength; it’s a weakness. It’s a debility, not an ability. Since God lacks nothing good, he lacks no genuine ability.
A variation of this challenge suggests that if God can’t sin, then he doesn’t have the freedom we have to do what we want to do.
Two thoughts. First, freedom to sin is not freedom. It’s slavery. Jesus said that everyone who commits sin is slave to sin (John 8:34). Second, God always does what he wants to do. Because God is perfectly good, though, all of his desires are noble. Consequently, God is the most free because he is never encumbered as we are by evil desires or evil actions.
“There is no truth.”
There’s one question that immediately comes to my mind when I encounter this frequent claim: Is that statement true? Is it true that there is no truth?
You can see the problem immediately. The claim that there is no truth is self-refuting. Since it self-destructs, nothing more is needed to dispatch the challenge than to simply point out the problem.
Since this insight is lost on many when you draw their attention to it—they think it’s a word trick—sometimes you’ll need to clarify the concern. Try something like this.
“I’m confused. I’m trying to figure out how you want me to respond to what you just said. I think you want me to take you seriously. I think you want me to believe you’re right. But if I were to say you’re right, I’d be saying your statement is true, and that’s the very thing you won’t let me say. Now what?”
A truth is a fact. To claim there is no truth is to say there are no facts—including the “fact” that there is no truth. That’s the self-refuting part. Plus, it turns out there’s a multitude of facts we know and live by every single moment.
Humans are truth seekers by nature. Each day, in thousands of ways, we’re observing, testing, and assessing to determine one thing: truth. Our lives depend on it. Animals are guided by instinct. For humans to survive, though, we must use our minds to discover what’s true. It’s why we fault ignorance.
The claim “There is no truth” says all such attempts are fruitless since there’s nothing to discover. This is obviously false. It’s also dangerous. It’s like convincing someone there are no germs or diseases before inviting them to dine in a dump.
If you’re convinced there is no truth, there’s nothing to protect you from being destroyed by lies. And there are lies. And they do destroy.
“Who created God?”
Kids ask this question all the time, but a surprising number of PhDs trot it out, too, when they ought to know better. It usually shows up when a Christian argues that the origin of the universe is an event that requires God as the adequate cause.
The argument has force for the theist because virtually everyone—believer and atheist alike—agrees the universe has an age. The cosmos came into being sometime in the distant past.[2] If the universe had a beginning, then it must have had a beginner. Simply put, a Big Bang needs a Big Banger. That’s the argument, and it’s a good one. [3]
The atheist tries to apply the same reasoning to God. “Okay,” he says, “then who created God?” Since the Christian argues the universe must have a creator because it began to exist, therefore—the atheist thinks—God must have a creator, too.
The reason PhDs should know this is not a proper question about God is because the theist’s argument only applies to things, like the universe, that begin to exist. No one—even the atheist—thinks that if God actually existed he’d need a beginning.
The kind of God we’re talking about is eternal, with no beginning and no end. Since God had no beginning, it makes no sense to ask where he came from or who created him. This doesn’t prove God exists, of course, but it does show that certain questions about God make no sense.
“Why would a good God make a bad place like Hell?”
The simple answer to the question of why a good God would make a bad place like Hell is that it’s precisely because God is good that he made Hell. Further, Hell isn’t a bad place. It’s a good place.
I realize that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true.
No good government allows guilty criminals to roam free. It locks them up in prison. Incarceration doesn’t just isolate felons, though, preventing them from harming law-abiding citizens. It also punishes them for the wrongs they’ve committed. Any government that didn’t sentence outlaws wouldn’t be good because it wouldn’t be just.
In the same way, God would not be good if he simply let evil people go free. When people are punished in God’s court, they get exactly what they deserve. The books of death are opened for all to see.[4] Every wrong anyone has ever committed is recorded there.
At that great white throne judgment, God dispenses perfect justice—punishment for everything a person has ever done wrong, and God misses nothing. Those whose names are written in the book of life, though, do not get punished since Jesus has taken their punishment for them. They receive perfect mercy—forgiveness for everything they’ve ever done wrong, and God misses nothing. Either Jesus pays, or we pay. That’s the calculus.
Hell, then, is a good place in the same way that prisons are good. It may not be subjectively good—it’s no fun going there—but it is objectively good because a good purpose is accomplished there: justice.
“The fact that the apostles gave their lives for what they believed in is not good evidence for Christianity. Islamist suicide bombers die for their beliefs, too.”
There’s a point here. If Christians were merely arguing that the apostles’ beliefs must have been true because they died for their convictions, then suicide bombers would have equal standing for the same reason. Unfortunately for the skeptic, that’s not the argument.
Agreed, many people have died for a lie. How many people, though, die for a lie when they know it’s a lie? That’s the meaningful distinction. The 9/11 terrorists all died for a lie they were convinced was true. If Jesus didn’t rise bodily from the grave, though, there were at least 11 people who knew it: his closest surviving disciples.
Not every apostle died a martyr’s death, though many did.[5] The historical record makes it clear, however, that martyrdom was a risk for everyone preaching the gospel in the early days, and many suffered brutal persecution for their efforts. Here’s the question: Why would those men suffer so much for a lie that they perpetrated? That doesn’t make sense.
The basic rule about lying is one every schoolboy understands. If you make up a story, tell one that gets you something good for your efforts. Don’t invent a story that gets you beaten, whipped, stoned, crucified upside down, or beheaded. That’s not a good lie. The simple truth is that myths don’t make martyrs when the martyrs are the ones who made the myths in the first place.
The disciples claimed they had seen the risen Christ. They had met with him. They had broken bread with him. They had talked with him many times over in many different settings. They were willing to sign their testimony with their own blood. Many did.
Here is the question. What would transform a group of cowering disciples who had abandoned Jesus into vibrant witnesses for Christ standing firmly in the face of the authorities who threatened to flog them for their testimony?
In the final analysis, no explanation fits the evidence better than the one given by those previously gutless disciples who were now putting their lives on the line for this testimony: He who was dead is alive. He has risen.
That is the argument.
“All religions are basically the same.”
The first time I fielded this question was at a lecture I gave at the University of California, Irvine.
When I heard it, I simply turned around to the chalkboard behind me and drew two small circles of equal size. I asked the student if these circles were basically the same. She said yes. I then drew a line from the first one and labeled it “aspirin” and from the second one and labeled it “arsenic.” Then I asked the same question: “Are these basically the same?”
She got the point. “The similarities between religions are not really important,” I said. “It’s the differences that matter.”
Any person who claims all religions are basically the same has not taken a close look at all religions. They are wildly diverse, conflicting and competing with each other on essential points in their attempt to give an accurate account of reality. For example, some affirm a personal God, others a nonpersonal one. For still others, God is not a factor at all.
Given that diversity, some have searched for a common spiritual principle uniting all faiths. The Golden Rule—allegedly taught by all religions—is the most popular candidate. Here is Jesus’ version: “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12).
Unfortunately, as sound as this moral maxim might be, it’s certainly not enough to map ultimate reality. Worldviews are characteristically constructed around four key concerns: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. A minimalistic moral principle like the Golden Rule speaks to none of those foundational elements.
In the next issue of Solid Ground, I’ll answer more “Rapid Fire” challenges.
[1] Gregory Koukl, The Story of Reality (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 137.
[2] How far in the distant past the universe came into existence is a matter of debate between well-intentioned Christians, but that issue is irrelevant to this argument for God. Ironically, both believers and unbelievers agree on the critical point: The universe had a beginning. That’s all that’s necessary for this argument to get a foothold.
[3] This line of reasoning is a version of a case for God based on the existence of the universe. It’s called the kalam cosmological argument.
[4] See Revelation 20:12–13. I call them “the books of death” because they’re contrasted with the book of life, a record of all the redeemed.
[5] For historical details, see Sean McDowell’s helpful The Fate of the Apostles.