DAY 366 CHALLENGE “This book doesn’t include my objection to the Faith!” DEFENSE A single book can only do so much. Therefore, let me recommend some more resources that may help. The Handbook of Catholic Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli: This is an excellent survey of the general evidences for the Christian faith, written by a pair of scholars who communicate in a manner easily accessible to all. Scaling the Secular City by J.P. Moreland: This was one of the first apologetic books I read when I began studying the field. Dr. Moreland is an outstanding scholar who carries …

DAY 365 CHALLENGE “Why should I pay attention to the Bible at all? It’s an ancient book written by people of limited understanding. Besides, other religions have their own scriptures, too. Why are they any less important?” DEFENSE The Christian scriptures are unique and valuable. The mere fact that the books of the Bible were written a long time ago is no reason to look down on or dismiss them. To do so would be chrono-logical snobbery. Just because a person wrote before you doesn’t mean that person was wrong. If it did, we would have to dismiss all works written in the past, obliter…

DAY 364 CHALLENGE “As an atheist, I may not be able to prove God doesn’t exist, but I also can’t prove there isn’t, orbiting between Earth and Mars, a teapot too small to be detected by telescopes. If I don’t have to believe in the latter, I don’t have to believe in the former.” DEFENSE This argument is subject to a number of objections. First, it was originally proposed by the philosopher Bertrand Russell as an answer to believers who felt atheists have the burden of proof regarding the existence of God (see “Is There a God?” The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 11). From th…

DAY 363 CHALLENGE “There can’t be an ‘unbroken line’ of popes going back to Peter. Look at the vacancies between popes, and at the antipopes.” DEFENSE The “unbroken line” claim may be found in the writings of individual Catholics, but it is difficult to find it in any official Church documents. Nevertheless, it expresses a truth: There is a line of popes (bishops of Rome) that we can trace in historical succession, going back to Peter. The statement that it is unbroken must be understood in the sense that those who make the claim intend, otherwise a straw man will result. This means …

DAY 362 CHALLENGE “Why can’t there be a multiplicity of gods?” DEFENSE The answer depends on what you mean by “gods.” In classical paganism, the gods people typically worshipped were not infinite, eternal beings. Instead, they were understood to be superhuman but finite beings who came into existence at some point. (Thus Osiris’s father was Geb, Zeus’s father was Chronos, Thor’s father was Odin.) It is possible for there to be multiple superhuman beings. That could be the case even in the natural world. There might be creatures in the physical universe who are more intelligent, more po…

DAY 361 CHALLENGE “Why shouldn’t people of the same sex be allowed to marry one another?” DEFENSE It’s not so much a question of what should be allowed as of what is possible. Marriage involves a reality that can only exist between a man and a woman. Marriage is a union of a man and a woman that is oriented toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring (CCC 1601). No other kind of union is a marriage. Since before recorded history, men and women have united to care for each other and to bring up children. That happens in every culture, no m…

DAY 360 CHALLENGE “If religion has benefits for individuals and groups, why can’t we say that evolution has favored the development of religion, even though it has no bearing on reality.” DEFENSE Religion does have benefits (see Day 283), but this doesn’t lead to the conclusion that religious beliefs are false. If it were possible to dismiss a belief as having no bearing on reality simply because adopting it has benefits from an evolutionary point of view (i.e., promoting the survival and reproduction of those who hold it), then we would have to dismiss a vast number of beliefs. …

DAY 359 CHALLENGE “Why do Catholics worship on Sunday instead of keeping the Sabbath? The (Saturday) Sabbath is part of the Ten Commandments, which Catholics recognize as expressing the moral law (CCC 1962).” DEFENSE The Sabbath command is unique among the Ten Commandments in that it incorporates both moral and ceremonial aspects. The Catechism of Trent states: The other commandments of the Decalogue are precepts of the natural law, obligatory at all times and unalterable. Hence, after the abrogation of the Law of Moses, all the commandments contained in the [Ten Commandments] are ob…

DAY 358 CHALLENGE “There is no one argument that demonstrates the Christian God exists. At most, each points to only a single aspect of the Christian God.” DEFENSE The arguments are not meant to be used individually. They’re meant to be combined in a cumulative case. It would be possible to combine all the arguments into a single, highly complex argument, with many subarguments (similar to the way a computer program contains many subroutines). However, such an argument would be excessively difficult to follow. Consequently, apologists through the ages have broken the overall argument …

DAY 357 CHALLENGE “For Christians, violence is never permitted. Jesus teaches strict pacifism when he says, ‘Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’ (Matt. 5:39).” DEFENSE What Jesus teaches in one passage must be read in light of what he teaches elsewhere. Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek occurs in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), but in the same discourse he draws a distinction between the natural, human response and a supernatural response that goes beyond it. The first is morally acceptable, but i…

DAY 356 CHALLENGE “The Catholic Church is wrong to express appreciation for scientific studies on the origins of the universe, life, and man (see CCC 283). Contrary to modern scientific ideas, the universe is only a few thousand years old. God created it with the appearance of age, just like he created Adam as an adult.” DEFENSE This view creates problems for God’s truthfulness. The challenge is based on an overly literal interpretation of Genesis (see Days 90, 290, and 339). However, if we assume for the moment God did create Adam as an adult, there would be a very good reason: Human …

DAY 355 CHALLENGE “People shouldn’t legislate their religious views. We live in a democracy, and not everybody has the same religion.” DEFENSE This challenge is problematic on several grounds. First, it assumes people in a democracy shouldn’t vote according to their beliefs. This is false. Democracies exist precisely to allow people to express their will regarding how society should be governed. Saying that they should not vote their will simply because it is informed by their religious views and others disagree with those views, is contrary to the fundamental enterprise of democracy…

DAY 354 CHALLENGE “Catholic theology of merit is false. We can’t earn our place before God.” DEFENSE The Church does not teach that we can earn our place before God. Everything we receive from him is due to his grace. When we first come to God and are justified, it is entirely by his grace, for “none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification” (Trent, Decree on Justification 8). After our initial justification, God’s grace leads us to do good works (Eph. 2:10) and he rewards these (Rom. 2:6–7), but still, “with regard to God, th…

DAY 353 CHALLENGE “Okay, religion is a human universal—something that’s found in all cultures. That doesn’t mean that it’s true, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Christianity is true.” DEFENSE Nobody would argue that because religion is a human universal, Christianity must be true. That would be excessively simplistic. Instead, the argument is that the fact that religion is a human universal points to there being a religious dimension to the world. The starting point for this argument is recognizing the universality of religion in human cultures. There have been no cultures without…

DAY 352 CHALLENGE “We don’t need the Church to infallibly settle the canon of Scripture; we have a fallible collection of infallible books. Further, the Catholic Church didn’t even attempt to define the canon for centuries.” DEFENSE There are several responses to this challenge. First, if you want to claim we have certain knowledge that all the books included in the canon belong there, then you do need an infallible authority. Although some Protestants have been willing to say our knowledge of the canon is fallible (“a fallible collection of infallible books”), many find this prospect …

DAY 351 CHALLENGE “If something is good just because God says it is, then morality is arbitrary. But if there’s an independent standard of morality that even God is bound to, that means there exists something besides God that is eternal and that is able to bind God.” DEFENSE God is the ultimate standard of goodness. A version of this argument was proposed in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro around 400 B.C. In it, Socrates debates whether piety is whatever the gods love or whether the gods love something because it is pious. In philosophy, this has become known as the “Euthyphro dilemma.” T…

DAY 350 CHALLENGE “Catholic teaching on justification is confused. Catholics hold that, when God justifies us, he gives us more than legal righteousness, yet we obviously aren’t fully righteous in our behavior.” DEFENSE This concern is caused by the categories used to look at the question. In the Protestant community, justification (here meaning the initial justification at the beginning of the Christian life) is usually thought to involve the bestowal of only legal righteousness (sometimes called “forensic” righteousness). On this model, God acts like a courtroom judge and declares th…

DAY 349 CHALLENGE “Peter didn’t have any special authority, because Jesus gave the power of binding and loosing to others. This simply refers to the ability to preach the gospel and admit people to the kingdom, as Peter did with Jews on Pentecost (Acts 2) and Gentiles with the household of Cornelius (Acts 10–11).” DEFENSE This interpretation does not fit the text or the context. First, while Jesus gave the power of binding and loosing both to Peter (Matt. 16:19b) and to others (Matt. 18:18), this wasn’t the thing that made Peter unique (cf. CCC 881). In addition to giving him this au…

DAY 348 CHALLENGE “Belief in God is unscientific.” DEFENSE This challenge can mean different things, but none show that God does not exist or that it is unreasonable to believe in him. The statement that something is “unscientific” can mean different things. Taken in the most charitable sense, it would mean that the methodology used by science (i.e., scientific method) cannot establish the existence of God. Although this view is widely held among both scientists and theologians, it is not clear that this is the case. The scientific method involves proposing an explanation b…

DAY 347 CHALLENGE “Matthew’s Gospel isn’t reliable. It was written long after the events by a non-eyewitness.” DEFENSE Matthew was written by an eyewitness within living memory of the events it records. We elsewhere cover that the names of the evangelists were not made up at a later date and that they indicate actual authors of the Gospels (see Days 109 and 146). Matthew’s Gospel was already called by that name in the first century, as shown by the testimony of the first-cen- tury figure John the Presbyter (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:16). The evidence thus points to Matthew the ap…