My Case Against Christianity

After my exchange with Jason Engwer and my resultant apologies for the tone of my posts, I have come to realize something: I have never put forth my actual case against Christianity. I have never really contributed to "debunking" in the sense of any fault-finding or critiquing Christianity. Once I tested out an argument here, and then I started a series on visions and defending them, but I haven't actually contributed to debunking Christianity.

What, then, do I consider the case against Christianity to be? What would be my case against the Christian faith?

The chief two reasons I believe that Christianiy is false is because I believe that the Bible is errant, both internally and externally, and I believe that the Christian God is logically incoherent because the attributes of such a god are logically inconsistent. Let me outline my case as follows:

Argument One: The Bible is Errant Internally

I believe that the Bible is errant in several ways. I consider many passages claimed to narrate historical events to contradict each other such as the resurrection narratives, the infancy narratives, when the fig tree was cursed, when Jesus was annointed by the woman, how the Field of Blood got its name, how exactly did Peter deny Jesus after his arrest, etc. These discrepancies, I believe are not limited to the New Testament. I believe that the creation accounts conflict in Genesis as well as the Flood accounts. I believe that the Hebrew Bible conflicts over when the name of Yahweh was known to the Hebrew patriarchs, whether or not God approved of sacrifices when he called the Hebrews out of Egypt, as well as others.

I also believe that the Bible contains failed prophecies. I believe that the land promise failed in the books of Joshua and Judges. I believe that the prophecy of an eternal kingdom for David failed. I believe that the prophecy of Ezekiel against Tyre failed as well.

I also believed that Jesus made several mistakes, assuming that the passages in question are authentically attributable to Jesus. I believe that Jesus erred in Mark chapter two, not only by saying that it was in the days of Abiathar that David went to the high priest but also in suggesting that David had men present with him. I believe that Jesus erred in suggesting that Jericho's daughter was asleep and not dead. There are other examples I could cite and most likely will.

Argument Two: The Bible is Errant Externally

I believe that the Bible teaches a flat-earth, geocentric cosmology and that this has been invalidated by modern cosmology. In fact, I believe that a chief reason that Christianity survives today is because of Galileo. It was Galileo, I believe, who suggested that the Bible be understood as having a "language of appearance". I believe that Martin Luther was justfied in condemning heliocentricism on biblical grounds.

I also believe that creationism and deluge theology have been refuted by modern science. I believe that the case for evolution and an old-earth are overwhelming. I believe that the case for evolution has been well-documented by scientists. I believe that deluge theology has been refuted and that it was originally Christian geologists such as William Buckland and Adam Sedgewick who constructed the geological column and applied the principles of stratiography to geology, in effect refuting the contextually-demanding interpretation of the flood as a universal deluge. Like Galileo, it was their attempts at compromise that have helped Christianity to surivive.

Lastly, there is the starlight problem. How can light from stars travel in such a great distance if the cosmos is, indeed, young? I have seen almost every solution proposed to date from Barry Setterfield's hypothesis to D. Russel Humphrey's "relativistic cosmology". What is wrong with all of these hypotheses, is that they are all "after-the-fact". Who would conclude purely on secular grounds that the speed of light was decreasing all these years and therefore the earth is young and radioactive decay rates were much higher in the past or that billions of years of stellar evolution took place while the flow of time on earth was much slower, making the cosmos young? Who would ever propose such schemes unless they were looking for a way out of a tight-spot? The solutions are way too late! Why would God wait until almost a century after the problem arose, for the solution to be discovered? What that means is that no one was justified believing that the Bible and science were complementary and in harmony over the starlight problem until creationists like Setterfield and Humphreys were on the scene. If Humphrey's solution, involving relativistic time dilation is right, then what that means is that no one was justified in believing that the Bible and science were harmonizable on this point until after Einstein proposed his theories of relativity and the implications of it were worked out over the next few decades with Humphreys realizing the implications of it for the starlight problem! The "starlight paradox" as I have come to call it, personally (although I am willing to give credit where it is due if someone else has called it this)

Argument Three: The nonexistence of God

Finally, a reason I believe that the Christian God does not exist is because I believe that such a Being cannot exist. I believe that some of the biblically-based and theologically-defined attributes of God contradict each other. I believe, for instance, that the attributes of volition and omniscience contradict each other. It's the same with the attributes of volition and moral perfection. I believe that other attributes contradict each other, showing that the Christian God cannot exist because of a contradiction of the attributes, making the Christian God logically incoherent. Now don't get me wrong here: I believe that some contrary-attribute arguments might indeed be flawed but there are some that I am quite convinced, do work.

My Conclusion

The errancy of the Bible, both internally and externally, as well as the theological incoherency of the Christian God, are the chief reasons I believe that the Christian faith is indeed flawed and are the reasons I disbelieve that the Christian God exists. In my next article series, I plan to examine the doctrine of inerrancy in detail and show why it is flawed with examples of contradictions, errors, and failed prophecies as well as attempts by Christian apologists to resolve them.

Matthew