Ask An Atheist: What do you feel the best argument is for a Christian God?

Christian apologetics turns on two main arguments: that the historicity of the resurrection accounts is unlike all other religions and thus effectively verified and true, and that the personal experience of their own Christian conversion has so intensely changed their lives that this can only be because it is true.  Those two classes of defense are not unique to Christianity, and therefore can’t be regarded as specifically best case for them.  Most all religious believers profess to the personal transformation of their faith, but since Christianity is not now (nor ever has been as far as I can see) the majority belief of the planet, Christians must deny to all other believers the transformative argument they wish to exclusively apply to their own faith.

That leaves the historicity of the resurrection, and that brings us smack dab into the nature of historical verification. If success is a measure of truth, then Islam and Buddhism must also be true, grounded as they are in explicit historical personages. Indeed, some demographics suggests Islam may surpass Christianity in sheer numbers in this century, in which case they get to win the retroactive historicity debate. Without a time machine it is impossible to determine what went on that eventually ended up being described in the various gospels. That Christians firmly believed Jesus had been resurrected is plain enough, but did that actually occur, in the manner ultimately recounted in texts dating only after the event? The usual argument is that the gospel writers were such honest and good fellows that it would be outside their temperament to have lied about it. But that is presuming something that the history of humans certainly belies: that people can profess things that are not true but that they believe to be true, building on mistaken recollection or desires to eventually get very far from the original truth.

I explore these issues more fully in “Cuz the Bible Tells Me So” so won’t belabor the points here. The upshot is that history (and religions including Christianity) is littered with people firmly believing things that aren’t true, and nonetheless honestly repeating the claims.

The best argument for a Christian God consists of not paying attention to most of the data, of selecting out only reinforcing notions and ignoring the rest. Neither the resurrection story nor personal conversion enthusiasm makes the theodicy problems of the Bible go away (such as its historic acceptance of slavery) or makes the screwball cosmology of Genesis (nicked from the Babylonians) any less scientifically incredible. Nor does it account for the failure of the Parousia (a historical non-event that, unlike the unverifiable resurrection, can actually be recounted not occurring century after century, and can be seen to be rationalized all the way down to current apologetics).

People who can play picky-chosey and whittle down their data set until they find a “best argument” for the particular god(s) they are attracted to will (surprise) arrive at exactly the destination they set for themselves. Non-believers in their particular faith (which includes everybody else on the planet, not just atheists) will go on not finding their particular “best argument” best.

Here it is important to remember that, no matter which god(s) you believe in, most of the people on planet Earth do not believe in them, never have, and maybe never will. What sort of “best argument” is it then that appeals to only a narrow segment of people, an accident of history and demographics, and swings back and forth in popularity much as hem lengths or the fashion for beheading heretics.  That is a “best” that, sorry to say, doesn’t look so much better when compared to all the other confident “bests” we humans are so addicted to.

So sorry if you were expecting some miraculous non-believer concession here on your “best argument” hopes.