Recently my wife and I were enjoying lunch together at a nice sandwich shop when I saw a young man wearing a provocative T-shirt. It bore the words “Bad Religion” and had a red circle and hash over a cross. At first I was indignant at his overt slam on my Savior. After a little bit, though, I began to wonder about what he believed and why he believed it. It’s perfectly natural for people to rebel and hate Jesus Christ – I did up until He saved me and opened my eyes.
He left shortly afterwards with his friends, so I was unable to talk with him about his beliefs. If I had the opportunity, though, I would have liked to ask him a couple questions. If you would be so kind as to indulge me, I would like to share my questions with you now.
My first question would have been, “What standard of morality are you using to call Christianity ‘bad’?” For him to say that anything is “good” or “bad” implies that there are moral truths. There are things that we can all agree are evil – incest, murder, extortion, rape, etc. Christianity can call these things evil because God declares them to be. In other words, morality is grounded in the objective character of God. The atheist, however, has no such grounding. Atheists rely on subjective morals, i.e. “it’s OK for me but not for you” morality. For example, I would suspect that this young man would claim that sex outside of marriage is a subjective moral decision – it depends on what the person wants to believe. Would not his declaration of Christianity’s immorality be just as subjective? If his moral standard is true, he has no reason to be so vehement against Christianity because it is just a matter of personal taste.
So to conclude my first point, the young man explicitly believes in morality based on the wording on his shirt. If pressed, he would have to admit his moral standards are subjective and have no weight in a real world application.
Secondly, I would like to ask him, “Why is Christianity so bad?” He would probably cite such evils as the crusades, Salem witch trials, the Inquisitions, etc. (As a side note, these charges have to do with murder, which is declared as evil in Christianity. Notice how the atheist has to borrow from Christian morality to argue against it, since his moral standard would allow murder as a matter of personal taste.) This is a common charge against the validity of Christianity. If Christianity is false because of the evils that so-called Christians have committed, then atheism must also be false. Atheists such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot, and Mao Tse Tung have killed far more people than any so-called Christians have. Using this line of reasoning, then, atheism must also be false.
There is a second flaw to this argument, however, and it is a logical one. It is called the ad hominem fallacy, or an argument “against the man.” It is when someone attacks the person rather than rebutting the person’s argument. To say Christianity is false because Christians do bad things is an ad hominem fallacy. It does nothing to nullify the truth claims of Jesus Christ or the New Testament. On the contrary, Christians doing bad things is consistent with the New Testament, since much of the epistles are devoted to teaching and correcting Christians who have made choices that were inconsistent with their faith.
I wish I would have had (or made) the opportunity to visit with the young man who was so opposed to Christianity. I would have liked to question him on what he believes and why he believes it. Maybe he would not have responded the way I’ve postulated here. But, then again, maybe he would. If so, the truth claims of Christianity would stand firm against his weak arguments against it.
