Topic
Doubts about God and the Gospels
If you don't believe in God, or think Christianity rests on weak history, these pages start from your reasons and look at the evidence with you. None of them asks you to accept the Bible first.
Claims
- “Evil and suffering disprove God”Suffering is serious evidence against God, not a proof. Christianity does not explain every horror; it claims God entered suffering and will end it.Read the answer
- “God is hidden”The hiddenness argument assumes love must guarantee belief now. Christianity questions that premise and points to Jesus as God's public answer.Read the answer
- “Hell is unjust”The Christian doctrine of hell claims proportion, degrees, and a chosen separation from God, which is a different claim from the endless cruelty you may have heard.Read the answer
- “Jesus never existed”Historians across belief, including the agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, agree that Jesus lived and was crucified under Pilate. The open question is who he was.Read the answer
- “Miracles are impossible”Natural laws describe what nature does when left to itself. They cannot rule out a God who acts, so the real question about miracles is the evidence.Read the answer
- “Science has disproved Christianity”Science has changed how Christians read some texts, but its methods cannot show that nature is all there is. Christianity's central claim is historical.Read the answer
- “The Bible condones slavery”The Bible regulates ancient slavery rather than banning it, but it outlaws kidnapping people to sell them and grounds human worth in a way abolitionists drew on.Read the answer
- “The Canaanite conquest was genocide”The conquest texts give wrongdoing, not ethnicity, as their reason, and use the exaggerated idiom of ancient war reports. That narrows the charge but leaves hard questions.Read the answer
- “Who created God?”The cosmological arguments do not claim that everything needs a cause. They claim that dependent things do, and ask what could end the chain.Read the answer
Reasons
- Contingency and creationScience explains one state of the world by an earlier one. It cannot say why there is anything to study, and a self-existent ground answers that better than a brute fact.
- Fine-tuning and ordered creationThe weak popular examples fall away. What remains is the constants and starting conditions of physics, and design is one explanation worth weighing.
- Liar, lunatic, or LordJesus taught about himself as well as how to live. If he made those claims, 'only a good teacher' does not fit, and the question is whether they are false, invented, or true.
- Objective morality and GodThis argument does not claim you need God to be good. It asks what makes moral obligation binding and human worth real, and argues that God is the best explanation.
- The bodily resurrection of JesusLuke, John, Paul, and Acts all tie the risen Jesus to the body that died. Paul's "spiritual body" describes a body made new, not a body left behind.
- The crucifixion of JesusPaul's early sources, the movement's beginnings in Jerusalem, hostile Roman and Jewish writers, and the embarrassment of a crucified Messiah all point to a real execution under Pilate.
- The reliability of the BibleVariants in the manuscripts are real and openly catalogued. They show a text copied many times in many places, which is why its earliest wording can be recovered.
- The reliability of the New TestamentPaul's letters preserve a summary of belief from within a few years of Jesus' death, the Gospels were written within living memory, and the text can be recovered with confidence.
- The resurrection witnessesThe earliest Christian claim was public testimony from named witnesses, and any explanation of it has to cover the whole set of facts historians accept.