If you’re identifiably Christian on social media, you’ll eventually be confronted with atheists asking questions about your faith. This can be a good thing, if the questions are sincere. But often they’re not.
While many atheists truly are seeking answers and should be treated with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15), there’s a subset of atheists on the internet that just wants to stir the pot with their bogus “questions.” It’s not that these questions are inherently phony, it’s that the motive behind them is not sincere.
As tempting as their questions are, you have to keep in mind these people are not there to get information. They’re there to hassle you, to get you off-balance, to stick that theological pebble in your shoe that will bother you for weeks, months, even years.
But fake questions by pot-stirring atheists don’t have to get you off-balance. First of all, you’re allowed to just ignore them. Scripture does tell us to be prepared with answers for those who ask about our faith (1 Peter 3:15), but we’re also told not to waste our time with people who won’t listen (Matthew 10:14). I’ve tilted at those bogus windmills more times than I care to admit, so I’m here to tell you that you’re probably not missing an opportunity if you choose not to respond.
However, if you choose to engage these potential time-wasters, you need to be prepared. So, here’s a list of the top three bogus questions used to pester Christians, along with the answers I usually give. If I give any answer at all. Sometimes it’s worth it—you never know who else is listening or if what you say plants a seed—but don’t stress about it too much. Remember, it’s ultimately not your job to save people, it’s His.
Right, here we go.
Bogus Question #1: If God created the universe, who created God?
Answer: No one.
God is eternal, uncreated, perpetually existing. End of story.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of wisdom to be had when this question is asked sincerely. My kid asked who created God when she was five, and it led to a really good discussion about causes and what eternal means.
But most of the ding-dongs who ask this question already know that eternal things don’t need creators. How do I know they know? Because in the 1950s, before the Big Bang destroyed the eternal steady-state universe, not one of them was asking, “What created the eternal universe?”
Remember when the late astronomer Carl Sagan said, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be”? They took that literally.
Bogus Question #2: Which of the thousands of gods do you believe in and why?
Answer: The God.
Like the first question, there’s a way to ask this that’s not disingenuous and stupid. Not everyone agrees on what exactly is meant by “God,” so it’s important to get clarification. And talking about who and what God is can lead to a lot of wisdom.
But the tipoff that this question is meant to maneuver you into a “gotcha” is the lower-case g. If the doofus asking the question knows you’re Christian, he already knows you believe in the big-G God of the Bible. The question is therefore meant to tenderize you with the mallet of humiliation by implying that there are thousands of made-up gods out there, and you’re a rube who just happens to believe in one of them.
So, what distinguishes God from gods? Orthodox Christian philosopher, Eve Keneinan, expresses it this way:
God is not a being or thing or entity that exists in the total ensemble of things that exist; rather God is the ground and source of the total ensemble of things that exist.
Even pagans who believe in a panoply of gods acknowledge that there must be an absolute reality from which the gods, along with everything else in the universe, derive their existence. This absolute reality is commonly referred to as big-G God.
Having said that, I’m now going to say something that may shock and offend some of you: It’s possible that small-g gods exist.
The late Christian scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser, made a strong case that the “divine council” mentioned in the Old Testament (e.g. Psalm 82) consists of what we would call ‘gods’ who, under the authority of Yahweh (God), are assigned the management of the various nations. Personally, I’m compelled by Heiser’s argument, which is why I usually meet this bogus question with “Most of them” and a link to Heiser’s work. This has so far never failed to deactivate the “gotcha” before it can go off.
Alternate answer (if you’re up for it): Most of them, but I only worship the one true God.
Bogus Question #3: What’s your repeatable, scientific evidence for the existence of your god?
Answer: What’s your repeatable, scientific evidence for your existence?
That may sound like a flip answer, but it gets to the heart of the problem with this question.
When someone asks what evidence you have for God, that can be a great conversation starter—if it’s asked with sincerity. But it can be hard to tell sometimes. The tipoff that this question hails from Bogusville is “your god,” again with the small g. The presumption is that no acceptable evidence exists for God, so you, the Christian, will either be forced to acknowledge this or you’ll be pinned down for whatever lame evidence you do present.
Generally speaking, the type of person who asks this question is a science fetishizer who claims to only believe something if it’s got 20 peer-reviewed articles from credentialed scientists attesting to its veracity. Such people of course have little to no awareness of just how many things they accept as true without the holy stamp of peer-review. For instance, if you ask them what their peer-reviewed scientific evidence is for their own existence, they’ll sputter that you’re talking to them, aren’t you? Isn’t that evidence enough? (Note: not peer-reviewed!) If you counter that it’s possible that you’re hallucinating the conversation or that for all you know you’re talking to a bot, that’s usually where the conversation ends.
As a scientist, I can tell you that peer-reviewed papers are not the be all and end all of knowledge for a number of reasons. The chief reason is one atheists often boast about in relation to religion: the “self-correcting” nature of science. Which is a great feature of science, but it also means science is sometimes wrong. How do you know if those 20 peer-reviewed papers aren’t going to be proven wrong someday?
Another reason is that the peer-review process is fraught with issues. This is unsurprising, given that the peers who do the reviewing are only human. And even though the most egregious issues seem confined to the social and medical sciences, that doesn’t mean the hard sciences aren’t wrestling with their own serious publication problems.
But I agree that we do need evidence for whatever claims we make. The answer to the more appropriate question of what evidence there is for God is the Romans 1:20 answer: the evidence for God is all around you. God has convincingly revealed himself through his creation, which is why 90% of the world believes in God in some form.
The fact that the universe exists at all is evidence for God. The only thing that comes from nothing is nothing, therefore the fact that the universe exists cries out for explanation. If the universe hasn’t existed forever, something had to create it. And that something also had to create you.
As weird as it sounds, your own existence, all by itself, is evidence for God. Even if you were a total solipsist, the fact that thought is (hopefully) occurring as you read this article means that something exists that gives rise to that thought—what we would colloquially refer to as “you.” You haven’t existed forever, you don’t exist necessarily, and since you’re not the cause of your own existence, something had to cause you to exist. Many a philosopher has explained why a timeless, immaterial, transcendent, conscious creative force is the most likely and the most satisfying explanation for why anything at all—whether just you or the entire universe—exists. By any reasonable definition, that force is God.
There are several compelling arguments for God, including but not limited to:
The teleological argument
The cosmological argument
The fine-tuning of the universe for conscious life
The ontological argument
The argument from morality
Credible near-death and out-of-body experiences
The legal-historical evidence for the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ
All of the arguments are based on the application of reason to copious evidence.
Individually, these items are quite compelling; but as a whole, in my opinion, they represent a devastating case against atheism. Which is why, when presented with the bulk of evidence and arguments for God, some atheists will grudgingly admit that a Deistic sort of God is possible and maybe even likely. But they resist the idea that this is the God of the Bible. And that’s fine. If you can get someone to open up just to the possibility of God, that can kick off a really great discussion about the particulars of Christianity.
So, that’s it for the top three bogus “questions” atheists like to ask Christians. There are other bogus questions I’ll get to in the future. And let’s all keep in mind that even though these questions are sometimes asked in a dishonest and combative spirit, they may still be opportunities to plant some seeds.
Peace, y’all.
Most excellent.
On #3, Argument from free will: God endowed Creation with free will, including our freedom to believe in Him or not. Corollary: it is a contradiction in terms for God to ever reveal Himself in a repeatable measurable manner. Doing so would limit our free will to believe.
Wrestling with the question of free will led some earnest scientists, eg Sabine Hossenfelder, to consider superdeterminism as an alternative. Paradoxically, or not, the choice between an Universe governed by free will and superdeterminism is itself subject to free will.