Criticisms of Christianity: Five Common Objections Answered

Editor’s note – Every generation recycles the same objections to Christianity and calls them new. This piece continues a series unpacking common critiques of the faith – the claim that science disproves God, the dismissal of the Bible as myth, the “crutch” charge, the demand that God perform on command, and the accusation of hypocrisy among believers. The author doesn’t dodge the sting in any of these; he traces each one back to its hidden assumptions and asks whether those assumptions can bear their own weight. That kind of scrutiny is exactly what a confident faith should welcome.

Last week we looked at the critique that Christianity is “too divisive.”

And we saw that the accusation rests on a deception. Because the real charge against “division” can be just as easily lodged against any claim of objective truth.

The real question under the superficial criticism is whether we want to live in a world where we can make truth claims and pursue a shared understanding of what that means.

That’s the kind of world we need in order to make claims like the following:

• Serving your own self interest through theft is wrong
• Providing care for needy widows and orphans is good

The proper framing shifts our thinking so we can evaluate the claims of Christianity on their merits rather than what we might feel emotionally.

This is not the only criticism of the Christian that falls apart on closer inspection.

Here are five others.

1. “Science Tells Us There Is No God”

Atheists like Richard Dawkins have argued the question of the existence of God is a testable hypothesis and that the results show us it’s highly improbable that God exists.¹

This is called a category mistake, a logical flaw where something that belongs to a certain conceptual group is treated like it belongs to another group.

Imagine you’ve explained the game of American football to someone who has never seen it.

You cover the basic objective, the rules, and the positions on the field. And, because you’ve read Paul Roebber’s study “On the existence of momentum in professional football,” you explain the real influence that can come through momentum swings and the rising and falling spirit of the crowd.²

Your football newbie friend asks where he can see this “spirit” relative to the physical location of the players on the field.

He’s treated a real, but abstract, concept as something that has physicality. It can’t be understood in the same way as the physical players on the field.

In the same way, science and faith exist in different realms.

Science is for studying the natural, material world. Faith exists in the “supernatural” — a realm outside of what can be understood in the natural.

Science is simply not built to understand the supernatural and it is an exercise in futility to act like it is.

How to spot the lie: Ask yourself why there were, and are, many brilliant scientists who claimed Christ.

This includes not only lifelong believers like Blaise Pascal, but former atheists like Francis Collins and Allan Sandage.

Editor’s note – The category-mistake point deserves real weight: demanding that God submit to a laboratory test asks the supernatural to behave like the natural, which by definition it does not. Scripture never promises God will be provable in a test tube; it promises He can be known.

2. “The Bible Is a Collection of Fairy Tales”

This is a common but intellectually lazy critique.

Why is it lazy?

There is a vast amount of archeological and historical evidence that corroborates the Biblical narrative.

One particularly telling example is the existence of Belshazzar, the last king of Babylon before the Neo-Babylonian empire fell to the rising Medo-Persian empire.

For a long time he was thought to be proof of the falsity of the Bible. All of ancient and modern history “knew” him to be a fabrication.

Then the Nabonidus cylinders were discovered in four corners of a ziggurat and conclusively proved that he had been real all along.³

Here’s what Nabonidus (Belshazzar’s father) had written on those four identical cylinders:

“As for me, Nabonidus, king of Babylon, save me from sinning against your great godhead and grant me as a present a life long of days, and as for Belshazzar, the eldest son -my offspring- instill reverence for your great godhead in his heart and may he not commit any cultic mistake, may he be sated with a life of plenitude.”

Later discoveries (including the Nabonidus Chronicle) would demonstrate that Belshazzar was not only the eldest son of Nabonidus, but truly was the last king of Babylon just as the book of Daniel described.

The skeptics who had previously denounced the Bible over the “error” of Belshazzar never issued a formal retraction of their prior claims.

Another interesting story:

Bible skeptic Julius Wellhausen quietly shifted his focus from modern Biblical criticism to Arabic and early Islamic history after the Amarna letters demonstrated his claims about early Canaanite literacy were off by hundreds of years.

He also never said anything in public about how wrong he had been.

How to spot the lie: Revisit some of the Biblical accounts that were once thought to be mythological but have since been demonstrated to be real.

Pay attention to what was once believed about disputed Biblical stories and figures and then see how the skepticism shifts after the Bible was proven to be reliable.

Editor’s note – The Belshazzar story is worth remembering the next time someone calls a Biblical detail unhistorical. Archaeology has a track record of eventually catching up to what Scripture already said, and that pattern should temper how quickly we treat a current “problem passage” as a permanent one.

3. “Christianity Is Just a Crutch”

Here we have an attempt to explain why people believe without addressing whether or not the belief is actually true.

It bypasses the actual issue at hand and reframes it as something that seems simpler to attack.

But even if we allow the objection to stand, we can see two things:

• The critic is partially right in the underlying assumption that the Christian worldview ultimately provides hope and power for living. It can be a journey to actually realize it, but Jesus truly does walk with those who follow Him. (Thank you, Jesus!)
• The critic fails to see the great irony in the criticism. In the short term at least, a secular worldview may be far more effective than Christianity at dishing out doses of mental comfort.

Consider the following:

If the God of the Bible does not exist, there is no ultimate moral authority to which we need to subject ourselves. People are then able to freely choose to serve only their own whims and pleasure.

If you’re not gratefully living out of the grace of God today, ask yourself what framework seems easier to live with:

• There is a God in Heaven who loves me deeply and cares intensely about how I live my life. This God is a consuming fire of perfect and jealous love. He died on a Roman Cross for my sin and now calls me to follow Him and find new life through the death of my old self.
• There is actually no God and I am free to live my life however I want to. In fact, there is no ultimate authority higher than myself.

How to spot the lie: The critique fails to pass its own test.

Editor’s note – The honest question behind the “crutch” charge is really about what a person wants to be true, not what is actually true. If there is no God, there is also no one to answer to – which is precisely the comfort many people are chasing.

4. “If God Exists, Why Doesn’t He Just Show Himself?”

This critique assumes that finite human beings have the right to demand that an infinite God appear in a way they find convenient.

It shifts the question from whether God exists to an implicit claim about what humans are entitled to.

Further, it ignores the fact that God has already revealed Himself.

How?

• In Romans 1:19-20 we learn that God has revealed Himself through His creation.
• In Amos 3:7 we read that God reveals His plans to His prophets.
• And most centrally, in John 14:9-10, we learn that God has personally revealed Himself through Jesus.

The criticism also ignores that God seemingly will not allow Himself to be “proven” in a way that all people would be forced to accept. As Hebrews 11 makes clear, God desires faith. And faith is the assurance of the things unseen.

This is why the person who demands that God show Himself shouldn’t expect any answer different than what Jesus gave the Pharisees in Matthew 12:38-39.

How to spot the lie: Consider that the Christian life is about learning to live on God’s terms instead of your own. Ask yourself if it’s logically consistent that God would reverse that so He only serves your wishes.

5. “Christians are Hypocrites”

I admit, I actually agree with this in many ways.

Many people (like the author) who have claimed to be Christians have acted in ways that are deeply contrary to the Christian faith. Let’s come back to that in a moment.

But there’s an issue to deal with first: on what grounds can the skeptic define a moral rule book from which to cast judgment?

It’s intellectually incoherent to demand a high moral standard from the community of Jesus followers while disbelieving in an objective moral foundation defined by God.

But let’s say we assume the critic isn’t arguing from a place of their own beliefs, but only critiquing as one would from inside of Christianity.

That’s a reasonable objection, and that deserves further reflection from any of us who claim to be Christians.

Because Jesus does indeed say that those who love Him will do what He says. And the book of James makes it clear that the person who claims to have faith without any outward evidence has the same kind of faith that a demon has.

This is sobering. But there is an important factor to keep in mind.

The path of change in the Christian life can be hard and slow. Evaluating the effectiveness of Christianity in making someone a “better person” can only be evaluated against who that same person was before they met Jesus. Through a lifestyle of humility and repentance in Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit yields fruit in the Christian.

It’s only if we see no evidence of fruit, however slow it might be in growing, that there is cause to question whether we actually know Jesus.

How to spot the lie: For both the skeptic and the self-professed Christian, the key is to look to Jesus for the answer.

He plainly stated what it looks like (and doesn’t look like) to be justified before God. The requirement is not about cultivating an image but actually walking the walk.

Editor’s note – The distinction between a slow work of sanctification and a finished product matters here. Judging a Christian’s fruit against who they were before Christ, not against some flawless standard, is the fairer and more Biblical measure – and the one Jesus Himself used with His own disciples.

Wrapping Up

The claims Christianity makes do deserve careful scrutiny.

Former atheists like Alister McGrath, Lee Strobel, and C.S. Lewis all came to faith by investigating the faith and finding that it held up to scrutiny.

For McGrath, it was determining that Christianity provided a more intellectually coherent framework for reality than atheism. For Lewis, it was the cumulative evidence of human mythology and the existence of objective morality. For Strobel, it was the evidence for the death and Resurrection of Christ.

They took their doubts seriously and their doubts were overcome through rigorous study, conversation, and reflection. Ultimately, they all came to Jesus.

Rather than evaluating Christianity based on a collection of imperfect people, including some who are false disciples and only pretending to know Jesus, the critic should look first to the life and claims of Christ.

The Gospel of Luke is a great place to start.

Sources and References

1: Dawkins makes his argument in his book, The God Delusion. He lays out the case most specifically in Chapter 2 (“The God Hypothesis”) and Chapter 4 (“Why There Almost Certainly is No God”)

2: On the existence of momentum in professional football: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0269604

3: Cylinders of Nabonidus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinders_of_Nabonidus

A Word from the Editor
None of these five criticisms actually settle anything once you look closely at what they assume. That doesn’t mean Christians get a pass on hard questions – Peter tells us to always be ready to give an answer for the hope we have, and that means doing the work, not just feeling superior about it. But the burden of proof runs both ways. The skeptic who says “prove it” owes an account of his own certainty too. First Peter 3:15 puts it exactly right: whoever asks deserves a reasoned, gentle answer – not a dodge, and not a bluff.

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Editor Comment: Faith is the assurance of what is unseen, not a hypothesis for a lab, and that distinction is exactly why science and faith operate in different realms. However, one has to ask where the "dot" of the birth of the universe came from and how one can ignore the logic and order of creation that calls out for a Creator. It it my opinion that the more precise science becomes the more it moves toward a Biblical Christian worldview.

This article appeared on Medium and is reprinted with modifications and by permission.