209 objections
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Every objection answered on this site, listed by what was actually said rather than by subject — because nobody in a conversation thinks “this is a question about the canon”. Find the sentence, follow it to the reply.
1 of 209 objections
A good person wouldn't demand praise. Why is it different for God?
Because when a person demands praise they are claiming something untrue — placing themselves at the centre when they are not. The claim is only arrogant if it is false. If God actually is the source of everything, saying so is accuracy.Why does God want to be worshipped?
A good person wouldn't demand praise. Why is it different for God?
Because when a person demands praise they are claiming something untrue — placing themselves at the centre when they are not. The claim is only arrogant if it is false. If God actually is the source of everything, saying so is accuracy.
Why does God want to be worshipped?A human parent who knew would not have the child.
The analogy assumes God is a parent making a risk assessment. He is also described as the judge of everything, which changes what the decision is. And a parent who declined to have a child because the child might one day do wrong would never have a child at all.
Why create people he knew would reject him?Animals suffered for millions of years before humans existed.
This is the sharpest form and Christians disagree about it. Some hold that the disorder in creation is not tied to human history at all; others read it differently. Anyone who gives you a confident answer here is going beyond what Scripture says.
Why does God allow natural disasters?Arab Christians say “Allah”, so it must be the same God.
The word settles nothing either way, and you should be glad of that. It also disposes of the claim that Allah is a repurposed moon god — which is bad history, and repeating it will cost you the room.
Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?Are there other places where God appears in person in the Old Testament?
Yes, and that is a fair reason the question comes up at all. The angel of the LORD speaks in the first person as God rather than delivering a message from him, and is called by God's own name.
Was Melchizedek Jesus?Aren't Christian archaeologists just finding what they want to find?
The Tel Dan stone was found by a secular excavation and read by scholars from both sides. The Pilate inscription came out of an Italian dig at a Roman theatre. Nobody was looking for either. And the discipline is small and quarrelsome enough that a forged or overstated claim gets taken apart quickly — as several famously have been.
Does archaeology back up the Bible?Aren't the prophecies vague enough to fit anyone?
Some are. Bethlehem, the timing before the Temple's destruction, and death by a method not yet invented are not. The honest response is to drop the vague ones rather than defend all three hundred — a shorter list that holds is worth more than a long one that leaks.
Did Jesus really fulfil Old Testament prophecy?Aren't these just dying brains producing hallucinations?
For most reports, that is a reasonable explanation. It works less well for the cases involving verified information the person could not have obtained — a hallucination is a very poor mechanism for delivering accurate facts about a drawer.
Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife?Aren't these sources too late to prove anything?
Tacitus wrote around 116 AD, Josephus in the 90s, Pliny in 112. That is roughly sixty to eighty years after the crucifixion — which by the standards of ancient history is quick. Most of what we know about Alexander the Great comes from biographies written more than three hundred years after he died, and no one suggests he is a myth.
Did Jesus actually exist?Believers can be sincere and still wrong.
Entirely, and that is the strongest form of this. Sincerity gets you honesty, not accuracy — which is why the hallucination and misidentification theories exist and deserve answering on their own terms. But that is a different objection from *they made it up*, and mixing the two is how this argument usually goes wrong.
Aren't the Gospels biased?Believing in miracles means throwing out the laws of nature.
It actually requires them. A miracle is only recognisable against a regular order. If people rose from the dead every week, the resurrection would be a statistic rather than a sign.
Does science leave any room for God?But every miracle we've investigated has had a natural explanation.
Many have, and that is a good reason for caution rather than for a rule. The honest position is case by case: most claims fail on examination, which is exactly what you would expect either way, and it tells you nothing about the ones that remain.
Don't miracles break the laws of nature?But religion clearly does comfort people. Doesn't that count for something?
It counts as an explanation of behaviour, and a partial one. Christianity has also sent people to be eaten by animals rather than say four words that would have saved them. Any account of religion as comfort has to explain the martyrs, and Freud's does not try.
Isn't God just a crutch people invented?But the doctrine did develop over time.
It did, and Christians say so. What developed was the vocabulary — words like substance and person, hammered out to say precisely what had been believed imprecisely. Development of language is not invention of content, and the earlier writers show the content was there.
Did the church invent Jesus' divinity at Nicaea?But the originals are lost, so how can you know?
We have no originals of anything from the ancient world. What historians do is work backwards from the copies, and the more copies from more places, the tighter the reconstruction. It is the same method used on every ancient text — the New Testament simply has far more to work with.
Hasn't the Bible been changed over the centuries?But the tone is completely different.
The genres are different, which accounts for a lot: national history and law read unlike letters to small churches. And the two halves cover different situations — one is a nation with an army and a legal system, the other a persecuted minority with neither. The God described is the same; the circumstances are not.
Is the God of the Old Testament the same God?But there are obvious similarities between religions.
There are, and Christians have an explanation rather than an embarrassment: if human beings are made by God, you would expect their myths to circle the same themes — sacrifice, rescue, a death that means something. C. S. Lewis, who taught this literature, argued that the myths were rumours of a true story. That is a claim about resemblance, not about copying.
Isn't Jesus copied from earlier pagan gods?Can't I just watch online?
It is better than nothing and it is not the same thing. You cannot be known by a screen, cannot be inconvenienced by it, and cannot serve it. Everything the letters describe requires being in a room with people who can see you.
Do I need to go to church?Christians changed the Bible to make Jesus divine.
The material claiming most for Jesus is in the earliest layer we have — Paul's letters from the 50s, and Mark, the first Gospel, which shows him forgiving sins and accepting worship. If the divinity was inserted later, the later manuscripts should show it appearing. They do not.
Was the Bible corrupted, as Muslims say?Christians used these verses to defend slavery for centuries.
They did, and that is a real stain rather than an unfair accusation. It is also why "the Bible says" is not the end of an argument — people quote it badly, and the corrective is reading it more carefully, which is exactly what the abolitionists did.
Does the Bible support slavery?Church is full of people I have nothing in common with.
That is close to the point. A group of people you would never otherwise have chosen, held together by something outside all of them, is a strange and difficult thing — and the New Testament treats it as evidence. Anyone can form a club of people like themselves.
Do I need to go to church?Couldn't God have created only the people he knew would say yes?
Some Christians hold that he did something like this, and there are serious versions of the argument. The difficulty is that the people who would say yes only exist in the circumstances in which they said it — including the people around them who did not. Extracting them means creating a different world with different people, not the same ones minus a few.
Why create people he knew would reject him?Couldn't God have made a world with different physics and no disasters?
Possibly. Nobody can model a coherent universe that supports complex life and contains no destructive processes, so the claim that it is achievable is a guess rather than a finding. It might be right. It is not something either side can demonstrate.
Why does God allow natural disasters?Couldn’t God have made a world with free will and no evil?
Possibly. Nobody can settle that either way, and Christians should not pretend otherwise.
If God is good, why is there so much suffering?Couldn't God have made people who freely always choose good?
That is exactly what Plantinga's argument addresses. If God arranges that you cannot choose otherwise, your choosing well is not free in the sense the objection needs. It is not a limit on God's power; it is a limit on what the words can describe.
Doesn't evil prove there is no God?Couldn't God have set up the rules differently?
The rules here are not regulations he chose and could revise. Justice is being described as part of what God is, not a policy he adopted — so "just change it" amounts to asking him to stop being himself. That is not a limit on his power any more than being unable to make a square circle is.
Why couldn't God just forgive us?Couldn't God just forgive everyone and skip the whole thing?
He could force everyone into his presence, yes. But a God who overrides your will about the deepest question you will ever face is not the loving God the objection started with. You cannot ask for both — a God who never coerces you and a God who coerces you at the end.
How can a loving God send anyone to hell?Couldn't he have been sincerely mistaken rather than mad?
About the weather, yes. About being the one who forgives sins and will judge the world, that is not an ordinary mistake — it is the kind of belief that, in anyone else, we would treat as a symptom. And the rest of his behaviour shows none of the signs: the teaching is lucid, the answers under hostile questioning are sharp, and no one at the time, including his enemies, suggested he was unwell.
Wasn't Jesus just a great moral teacher?Couldn't Jesus have deliberately fulfilled them?
Some, yes — riding a donkey into Jerusalem is a choice, and a deliberate one. But you cannot choose your birthplace, your ancestry, the century you are born in, or what a Roman execution squad decides to do with your clothes. The case rests on those, not on the ones he could stage.
Did Jesus really fulfil Old Testament prophecy?Couldn't the whole death scene be a later addition?
The crucifixion is the single best-attested fact about Jesus, accepted by practically every historian of the period including atheists. It is also the most embarrassing thing that could be reported about a claimed Messiah, which is why nobody thinks it was invented.
Did Jesus actually die on the cross?Couldn't the whole thing be a legend that grew fast?
Legends do grow. What they do not usually do is grow while the eyewitnesses are still alive and in the same city, and grow into something that gets you killed. The first Christians were making claims in Jerusalem, weeks away, to people who could have walked to the tomb.
Did Jesus actually exist?Couldn't they have gone to the wrong tomb?
Then the authorities go to the right one. This explanation requires everybody — the women, the disciples, the Romans, the Sanhedrin — to be unable to locate a tomb belonging to a named member of the council, in their own city, within walking distance.
Couldn't the disciples have hallucinated Jesus?Critical scholars reject traditional authorship.
Many do, and some of their arguments are serious and worth reading properly.
Who wrote the Gospels, and can we trust them?Didn't Constantine decide the canon?
No, and this one is worth naming because it is everywhere. Constantine asked Eusebius to have fifty copies of the Scriptures produced for the churches of Constantinople. He commissioned copies of books already in use. He did not select them, and nothing in the record suggests he tried.
Who decided which books went in the Bible?Didn't Constantine make Christianity the state religion to control it?
He legalised it in 313 and favoured it heavily. It became the official religion of the empire later, under Theodosius. Whatever you think of the consequences — and Christians have argued about them ever since — none of it bears on what was believed about Jesus in the second century.
Did the church invent Jesus' divinity at Nicaea?Didn't early Christians believe in reincarnation until it was removed?
The claim usually attaches to Origen in the third century and to a council in 553. Origen speculated about the pre-existence of souls, which is not the same as reincarnation, and the council condemned a set of ideas attributed to him. There is no evidence of texts being removed, and the manuscript record covers the period.
What about reincarnation?Didn't the church change texts to support its doctrines?
If it had, the evidence would be missing. Instead the awkward readings are all still there, printed with footnotes, in Bibles published by the church. A body that was editing its own records to win arguments made a strange job of hiding the edits.
Hasn't the Bible been changed over the centuries?Didn't the first Christians all reject him too?
The first Christians were Jewish, every one of them — the disciples, Paul, the Jerusalem church. The question was argued inside Judaism for decades before it became a division between two religions. Framing it as Jews versus Christians imports a later situation into an earlier one.
Why don't Jewish people accept Jesus as Messiah?Different cultures have completely different morals, so it's obviously relative.
They differ far less than the claim suggests. No society has honoured cowardice in battle or made betraying your friends a virtue. What varies is who counts as a friend, and the scope of duties rather than the duties themselves — which is a disagreement about facts, not about values.
If there is no God, can anything be really wrong?Do you have to believe it to be a Christian?
It is in every historic creed, which is as strong a signal as Christianity gives. Some modern theologians have treated it as symbolic; the church as a whole has not, and it is difficult to explain why two independent writers would invent something so costly.
Why do Christians believe in the virgin birth?Doesn't 'without father or mother' have to mean he was divine?
It would if the Bible used that phrase about his nature. It uses it about the record.
Was Melchizedek Jesus?Doesn't every group think it's the right one?
Most think they are right about the disputed points, which is what having a view means. What is unusual is how much they concede to each other: Catholics recognise Protestant baptisms, most traditions recognise each other's members as Christians, and they say the same creed. That is not how rival religions behave.
Why are there so many denominations?Doesn't every religion think it's the right one? That's the problem.
Most make truth claims, yes — including the claim that none of them is finally right. The question is not who is claiming, it is who has grounds. You cannot escape it by noticing that everyone is doing it.
Aren't all religions basically the same?Doesn't evolution make God unnecessary?
It offers a mechanism for the diversity of life. That is not the same as explaining why there is a universe with life-permitting laws, or why anything exists at all. Knowing how a bridge is built does not tell you whether anyone built it — and this argument, if it worked, would work against every scientific explanation of anything.
Can a Christian accept evolution?Doesn't God give David his wives in 2 Samuel 12?
The verse says God gave him his master's house and wives — a standard way of describing the transfer of a kingdom, in a passage whose entire point is God condemning David for taking another man's wife. Reading it as an endorsement inverts the chapter.
Why does the Bible allow polygamy?Doesn't it still carry Western culture with it?
Often it has, and that has been a live argument within the church for a century. But the growth is now largely led by non-Western churches with their own music, theology and leadership, and increasingly they are sending missionaries to Europe.
Isn't Christianity a Western religion?Doesn't James say a doubter shouldn't expect anything from God?
He is describing someone in two minds about whether to trust God at all while asking him for things — a person who wants the benefits without the relationship. That is a different condition from an honest question about whether something is true.
Can a Christian have doubts?Doesn't Jesus contradict all this?
He fulfils it rather than contradicting it. The New Testament keeps the idea that God judges — Jesus says more about judgement than anyone else in the Bible — but it moves the sword out of human hands entirely. Judgement belongs to God, at the end, not to us, now.
Why is the God of the Old Testament so violent?Doesn't Jesus revise the law — 'you have heard it said, but I say'?
He intensifies it rather than replacing it: not only do not murder, do not hate; not only do not commit adultery, do not look at someone that way. That is tightening a standard, and in each case he is arguing against a lax interpretation rather than against the text.
Is the God of the Old Testament the same God?Doesn't Jesus say ask anything in my name and you'll receive it?
He does, and it is not a blank cheque — praying "in his name" means praying as his representative, for what he wants, not attaching a formula to what we want. The same Jesus asked for something in Gethsemane and did not get it, which rules out the vending-machine reading.
Why doesn't God answer my prayers?Doesn't Leviticus allow foreign slaves for life?
Yes, and this is the hardest text in the discussion. What can be said is that it sits in the same law that forbids kidnapping, commands that the foreigner be loved as yourself, and grounds all of it in Israel's own memory of being slaves in Egypt. Christians read the trajectory of the whole Bible as running towards Philemon, not away from it.
Does the Bible support slavery?Doesn't neuroscience show belief is just brain activity?
Everything you think is brain activity, including that sentence. Showing which regions light up when someone prays tells you the mechanism, not whether the belief is true — exactly as with mathematics, which also happens in neurons and is not false because of it.
Isn't God just a crutch people invented?Doesn't prophecy prove the future is fixed?
Prophecy in the Bible is frequently conditional — Jonah announces Nineveh's destruction and it does not happen, because they change. That is not a failed prediction; it is how much of the genre works. It complicates the picture rather than settling it either way.
If God knows the future, are we free?Doesn't reincarnation explain suffering better?
It explains it as deserved, which is its strength and its cost. Applied consistently, a person born into famine is working something off. Christianity refuses that: Jesus was asked directly whether a disaster's victims were worse sinners and said no. Which explanation is better depends on whether you want suffering accounted for or want it to be undeserved.
What about reincarnation?Doesn't science assume nature is a closed system?
Methodologically, yes — science looks for natural causes, which is why it works. That is a working rule about what science investigates, not a discovery that nothing else exists. Treating the rule as a finding is the step where the philosophy gets smuggled in.
Don't miracles break the laws of nature?Doesn't that make it too easy?
It makes getting in free, which is not the same as easy. What follows is described in the New Testament as taking up a cross, dying to yourself, and loving people you would rather avoid. The entry costs nothing because someone else paid; the life is not advertised as comfortable.
If faith saves, do good works matter?Doesn't the Bible praise people for believing without proof?
It praises people for continuing to trust when circumstances turn against them — Abraham, Job, the psalmists. That is perseverance in trust already given for reasons, which is a different thing from credulity. Nowhere is anyone commended for believing something with nothing behind it.
Isn't faith just believing without evidence?Doesn't the Bible promise that the righteous will be blessed?
Parts of Proverbs describe how life generally goes, in the way a proverb does — diligence tends to pay. Job exists in the same Bible to stop anyone reading that as a guarantee, and Jesus said plainly that his followers should expect trouble.
Why do the wicked prosper?Doesn't the blood and water detail sound made up?
It sounds like something a first-century writer would not think to invent, because its medical significance was not understood until much later. John reports it as a strange thing he saw. That is the shape of testimony, not of embellishment.
Did Jesus actually die on the cross?Doesn't the Gospel of Thomas contain some genuine sayings of Jesus?
Possibly, and honest scholars say so. Some of the 114 overlap closely with Matthew and Luke, and a few of the others may preserve authentic memory. That is a real point, and it does not get you what the objection needs: a document with a handful of familiar sayings, a great deal of unfamiliar material, and a theology the earliest churches did not hold.
What about the gospels that were left out?Doesn't the lack of Egyptian evidence settle it?
Egypt also leaves no record of the Hyksos being expelled in the terms we know it happened, and routinely erased pharaohs it disliked from its own monuments. A culture that edited its records this thoroughly is not a reliable witness to its own defeats.
Did the Exodus actually happen?Doesn't the New Testament blame Jewish people for the crucifixion?
It records a Roman execution ordered by a Roman governor, and its writers are Jewish. Passages that were later used to justify persecution are being read against their own authors, who spend chapters agonising over their love for their own people. The history of that misuse is the church's shame, not the text's teaching.
Why don't Jewish people accept Jesus as Messiah?Doesn't the Old Testament command war?
It records commands given to one nation, at one moment, about one land, and never presents them as a pattern — and the New Testament closes that door explicitly. That deserves its own answer rather than a line here, and it has one.
Hasn't religion caused most of the wars?Doesn't the Old Testament show God commanding terrible things?
That is a fair challenge and it deserves its own answer rather than a sentence here. What can be said is that if it were a real contradiction it would count against the claim that God's character is the standard — so Christians cannot shrug it off, and should not.
If there is no God, can anything be really wrong?Even if it points to a designer, why the Christian God?
It does not get you there, and saying so is important. This argument reaches a mind that chose, which is a long way short of Christianity. What it does is remove the reason many people have for not looking further.
Why is the universe so finely tuned for life?Even if there is a first cause, why call it God?
You should not, straight away — that is a separate step and pretending otherwise is dishonest. This argument gets you to something immaterial, outside time, immensely powerful, and capable of choosing. That is not yet Christianity. It is the removal of the reason people give for not bothering to look.
If God made everything, who made God?Even so, children died. How is that acceptable?
That is the part no answer makes comfortable, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What can be said is that this is the same problem as any death of a child anywhere — the objection is not really about Canaan, it is about a world where children die at all. And Christians hold that a child who dies is not outside the mercy of God. It is not a tidy answer. There is not a tidy one.
Why is the God of the Old Testament so violent?Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A fair principle, and it needs a second half: extraordinary compared to what? On the assumption that there is no God it is astronomically unlikely; on the assumption that there is, considerably less so. The slogan hides the fact that the prior assumption is doing the work.
Don't miracles break the laws of nature?Ezekiel and John contradict each other.
Only if you read Ezekiel as offering righteousness as a way to be saved — and he is not doing that.
What do Christians mean by being saved?Faith means believing without evidence — the opposite of science.
That is not what the word means in the Bible. Hebrews 11:3 speaks of understanding through faith, and the New Testament constantly appeals to witnesses, to events, to things people saw.
Does science leave any room for God?Free will doesn't explain earthquakes and cancer.
Correct, and it is the strongest form of the objection. The free-will defence was only ever aimed at the logical argument, and it does not pretend to account for natural evil. Christians have offered other lines here — the value of a law-governed world you can act in, a creation itself out of joint — and none is as clean. Better to say so than to stretch free will to cover it.
Doesn't evil prove there is no God?Galileo still shows the church silencing a scientist.
It does, and Christians should not spin it. The church punished a man for a position that turned out to be right, and John Paul II said as much in 1992. The point is not that nothing happened. It is that what happened was an argument about authority and evidence, not proof that faith and science cannot occupy the same room.
Have science and Christianity always been at war?God knows everything, so if Jesus doesn’t know something he isn’t God.
The first half is right. The conclusion does not follow, because the objection quietly assumes Jesus is only one thing.
If Jesus is God, why doesn’t he know the day or the hour?Hasn't archaeology also contradicted the Bible?
There are genuine tensions — the dating of Jericho's walls and the scale of the Exodus are argued about hard, including among believing archaeologists. It is better to name those than to pretend the record is unbroken. What has not happened is the collapse people once expected.
Does archaeology back up the Bible?He says the Father is greater than he is.
He does, and Christians have never claimed Jesus is the Father. The question the objection skips is: greater in what respect?
In Gethsemane he prays “not my will but yours” — doesn’t that mean he isn’t God?I don't need God to know that cruelty is wrong.
Agreed, and the argument does not say otherwise. It is not about how you know it. It is about what makes it true. Those are different questions, and this one gets confused more than any other.
If there is no God, can anything be really wrong?I get more from a walk in the countryside than from a service.
Very possibly, and God is not absent from the countryside. What a field cannot do is know you, contradict you, expect you next week, or need anything from you. The gathering is not primarily a delivery mechanism for inspiration — it is a set of people you are answerable to and responsible for.
Do I need to go to church?If babies who die go to heaven, isn't that an argument for infant mortality?
It is the ugliest form of the question and it has been asked seriously. The answer is that death is described throughout the New Testament as an enemy, not a shortcut — the last enemy to be destroyed. Nothing in Christianity treats a child dying as a good outcome, and God's mercy in a catastrophe is not an endorsement of the catastrophe.
What happens to babies who die?If Genesis isn't literal, why trust any of it?
Because reading a text according to its genre is how reading works, not a concession. Nobody thinks Jesus was denying the existence of a real prodigal son. The question is always what the writer intended, and that is a normal literary question rather than a slide into treating everything as symbolic.
Can a Christian accept evolution?If God appeared to Paul on the road, why not to me?
Paul was not a seeker — he was on his way to arrest Christians. And Christians should admit the discomfort here rather than smoothing it: God does not appear to everyone the same way, and the New Testament does not explain why. What it says instead is that Thomas, who demanded proof, got it — and was told that those who believe without it are not second-class.
Why doesn't God just make himself obvious?If God disapproved, why didn't he forbid it outright at the time?
The law does the same thing with several ancient practices — it regulates a society rather than abolishing it overnight, while embedding rules that undermine it. The pattern is a trajectory rather than a single decree, and Jesus makes the trajectory explicit when he says it was not this way from the beginning.
Why does the Bible allow polygamy?If God inspired it, why isn't it uniform?
Because inspiration was not dictation. God did not use four secretaries; he used four people, with their own memories, purposes and readers. If the accounts were word-for-word identical we would be told, correctly, that they had been copied from one another.
Is the Bible full of contradictions?If God knew I'd sin, isn't he responsible for it?
Only if knowing were causing, which is the thing under discussion. A parent can know with near certainty how a child will behave and not be the cause of it. And the alternative — God creating only beings whose choices he could not anticipate — is a smaller God, not a fairer one.
If God knows the future, are we free?If God wanted unity, why didn't he make the Bible clearer?
It is clear on what it emphasises — Christians of every tradition agree on the central claims. The disputes cluster where it says less, which may be deliberate: the questions left open are largely the ones about how to organise, and those have to travel across very different cultures and centuries.
Why are there so many denominations?If God wanted us to believe, why not leave better evidence?
There is a lot of it, and it did not settle the question for the people who saw the events first-hand either. The Gospels themselves describe eyewitnesses who doubted. Evidence establishes plausibility; it has never been able to compel trust, in this or anything else that matters.
Does archaeology back up the Bible?If he is only a symbol, why does the Bible make such a fuss about him?
Because of what the fuss is for. Hebrews is arguing with readers who believed the only real priesthood was the one descended from Aaron, passed from father to son. Melchizedek is the counter-example sitting in their own scriptures: a priest God accepted, centuries before Aaron was born, with no descent at all.
Was Melchizedek Jesus?If I have doubts, was my faith ever real?
By that standard John the Baptist's was not, and Jesus said otherwise. Faith is not a feeling of certainty; it is trust, and trust can be exercised while uncertain. Most people who trust anyone have done it while unsure.
Can a Christian have doubts?If ignorance might save people, isn't preaching to them making things worse?
It is the oldest version of this objection and it assumes the message is a risk rather than a rescue. Christians hold that knowing God is the point of being alive — not a legal hazard to be avoided. On that view withholding it is not mercy, it is deciding on someone's behalf that they would rather not know.
What about people who never heard of Jesus?If it doesn’t depend on what I do, why be good at all?
This is the oldest objection there is, and Paul answers it himself. His answer is not "you still have to". It is that someone who has genuinely been rescued does not walk back into the wreck.
What do Christians mean by being saved?If it's free, why does anyone need to do anything at all?
A gift still has to be taken. That is not a payment, and taking something out of someone's hands is not earning it.
What do Christians mean by grace?If it's so pro-women, why has the church treated them badly?
It often has, and that is a fair charge that Christians should not dodge. Institutions with power tend to reproduce their surroundings. The measure is whether the failure is the teaching being followed or being ignored, and here the founder is the one who put women at the centre of the story.
Is the Bible sexist?If Jesus is God, who was he praying to?
The Father — and this is a question about the Trinity rather than about this verse. Christians do not claim Jesus is the Father; they claim one God in three persons, so a conversation between the Son and the Father is expected rather than awkward.
Why did Jesus say "the Father is greater than I"?If the church chose the books, isn't the Bible's authority really the church's?
This is the serious version of the question, and Christians answer it differently. Catholics and Orthodox say the church, guided by the Spirit, is the recogniser and so its judgement carries authority. Protestants say the books were authoritative in themselves and the church was the witness, not the source. Note what both are saying: the church acted as a recogniser. Neither claims it manufactured anything.
Who decided which books went in the Bible?If the mind isn't the brain, why does brain damage change people?
It does, dramatically, and no honest account ignores it. But dependence is not identity — a broadcast depends on the radio and is not produced by it. That analogy has limits and should not be pushed. The point is only that "changes with the brain" and "is nothing but the brain" are different claims.
Isn't the mind just the brain?If there were real evidence, wouldn't everyone agree?
People disagree about evidence in every field where the stakes are personal. Two historians read the same sources and reach different conclusions; two people read the same evidence about their own marriage and see different things. Evidence constrains belief; it has never compelled it.
Isn't faith just believing without evidence?Isn't 'creation is groaning' just a way of avoiding the question?
It would be if it were offered as a mechanism. It is not — it is a claim that the world is not currently as it is meant to be, which is the same intuition behind the objection. Both sides agree something is wrong. The disagreement is about whether that judgement means anything.
Why does God allow natural disasters?Isn't 'equal in worth, different in role' just a way of dressing it up?
Many people find it so, and it is one of the sharpest disagreements inside Christianity rather than between Christians and everyone else. There are churches that ordain women and churches that do not, both arguing from the same texts. It is not a settled question with a public relations answer.
Is the Bible sexist?Isn't 'God exists necessarily' just an assertion?
It is a proposal, and the argument earns it rather than assuming it: the regress has to stop somewhere, and it can only stop at something non-contingent. What Christians then add — that this necessary being is personal — comes from elsewhere, and it is honest to say so.
Why is there something rather than nothing?Isn't 'God is eternal' just special pleading?
It would be, if it were asserted only to protect God. But the need for something uncaused comes from the regress, not from theology — everyone has to stop somewhere. Atheists usually stop at the universe itself, or at a wider multiverse. Both are proposing an uncaused something. The question is only which candidate fits what we observe.
If God made everything, who made God?Isn't 'group hallucination' too strict a term? People do share experiences.
Crowds can misinterpret an ambiguous stimulus — a light in the sky, a shape in mist. That is a different thing from a detailed shared conversation with a person who is not there. And it needs an ambiguous stimulus to start with. There is none here.
Couldn't the disciples have hallucinated Jesus?Isn't 'religious war' being defined narrowly to get that number?
It is a fair worry — the classification is a judgement call, and motives are usually mixed. Which is why the figure matters less than the range: three compilers, working independently with different definitions, all landed between six and seven per cent. To get to "most", you would need to be wrong by a factor of seven.
Hasn't religion caused most of the wars?Isn't 'they'll get theirs later' just a way of putting up with injustice?
It would be if it produced passivity, and sometimes it has. But the same Scriptures command action now — defend the orphan, pay fair wages, do not favour the rich in court. The promise of final justice is meant to keep you going when your own efforts fail, not to replace them.
Why do the wicked prosper?Isn't 'we can't see the reasons' just an excuse?
It would be if it were the whole answer, and if it were used to close down conversation with someone in pain. As a piece of logic it is doing something narrow: blocking an inference from our ignorance to a universal claim. That is a legitimate move, and it is not the same as an explanation.
Doesn't evil prove there is no God?Isn't 'we're all sinners' a convenient way to avoid responsibility?
It is if it is used to stop a conversation. Used properly it does the opposite: it removes the option of pretending, and it means a Christian has no ground from which to look down on anybody. If it is functioning as an excuse, it is being used backwards.
Aren't Christians hypocrites?Isn't 'you're suppressing it' just unfalsifiable?
As a diagnosis of an individual, yes, and it should not be used that way. As a description of a general human tendency it is ordinary: we are all skilled at not noticing what would cost us something. That is observable in every other area of life.
Why doesn't God just make himself obvious?Isn’t “everything happens for a reason” the Christian line?
No, and it does a great deal of damage.
If God is good, why is there so much suffering?Isn’t “two natures” just a convenient escape hatch?
It would be, if Christians had invented it to get out of this one verse. They did not.
If Jesus is God, why doesn’t he know the day or the hour?Isn't a stolen body still more likely than a resurrection?
If you have already decided that resurrection is impossible, then yes, by definition — any natural explanation wins however badly it fits. That is a conclusion about what the universe allows, reached before the evidence, and it is worth saying out loud so both sides know what is actually being argued.
Wasn't the body just stolen?Isn't consciousness just an illusion?
Some philosophers do say this, and it is the one move that seems to eat itself: an illusion is something that seems a certain way to someone, so you need consciousness to have one. Denying experience requires the experience of denying it.
Isn't the mind just the brain?Isn't it just an accident of where you were born?
Often it is, and Christians should feel the force of that. It is also true of your politics, your language and most of your opinions, and we do not usually conclude from this that none of them can be examined. Where a belief came from and whether it is true are different questions.
Aren't all religions basically the same?Isn't it suspicious that everyone's God looks like their culture?
Somewhat, and it is a fair observation about religion in general. It does not work as well on a first-century Jewish carpenter executed as a criminal, which fits neither Jewish expectations of a Messiah nor Roman ideas of a god. The story was an embarrassment in both directions.
Isn't God just a crutch people invented?Isn't it unfair to punish someone forever for one lifetime of choices?
It would be, if hell were a fixed sentence for a finished crime. The Christian claim is that the rejection does not stop at death — that the person who spent a life refusing God goes on refusing him. The punishment is not disproportionate to the sin; it is the sin, arriving at what it always was.
How can a loving God send anyone to hell?Isn't it unjust to be born in the wrong place?
The premise is that being born within reach of a church is the advantage that decides everything. But plenty of people surrounded by churches never engage, and the Bible's picture is of a God who meets people rather than waiting at fixed addresses. What Scripture rules out is anyone standing before God able to say the process was rigged.
What about people who never heard of Jesus?Isn't it unjust to punish an innocent person for someone else's crime?
It would be, if he were a third party dragged in. The Christian claim is that the judge and the substitute are the same — God is not transferring his anger onto a bystander, he is absorbing it himself. And the New Testament is careful that Jesus gives himself; nobody takes his life from him.
Why couldn't God just forgive us?Isn’t the Angel of the Lord just God’s representative?
This is the strongest objection to everything above, and it deserves a real answer.
Is Jesus really God?Isn't the Bible a Western book?
It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, in the Middle East, by people none of whom were European. Its earliest translations were into Syriac, Coptic and Latin — two of those three being African and Asian languages of the time.
Isn't Christianity a Western religion?Isn't the church only friendly to science when it can't win?
That would predict resistance whenever a finding was inconvenient. The actual record is patchier and more human: the Big Bang was resisted by atheist physicists who preferred an eternal universe, and welcomed by a priest. Neither side behaves the way the warfare story requires.
Have science and Christianity always been at war?Isn't the hyperbole answer just a convenient way out?
It would be, if it were invented for this. But the same idiom appears across the ancient Near East in texts nobody is defending, and the Bible undercuts its own literal reading two chapters later. The evidence for it is external and internal, and it was noticed by scholars working on Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, not by apologists looking for an escape.
Why is the God of the Old Testament so violent?Isn't the resurrection just another myth about a god who returns?
The shape is different in the way that matters. These are stories set in a mythic past, about deities, with no witnesses named. The resurrection is reported as an event in a named year, under a named governor, with a list of people who said they saw it and who could be asked while they were alive.
Isn't Jesus copied from earlier pagan gods?Isn't the second coming just an excuse for a failed prophecy?
It is the obvious suspicion and it should be stated rather than dodged. What is worth weighing against it is that the suffering-first pattern is in the text beforehand, not added afterwards — Isaiah 53 exists in a manuscript from before his birth. Whether that is sufficient is exactly what the two sides disagree about.
Why don't Jewish people accept Jesus as Messiah?Isn't this a false trilemma? There are obviously more options.
There are, and the honest version says so — legend is the main one, and there are others: misquoted, misunderstood, speaking in a way his hearers took too literally. The argument only works against one specific position, the one it was aimed at. It was never meant as a complete map of the possibilities.
Wasn't Jesus just a great moral teacher?Isn’t this borrowed from pagan myths?
Pagan myths give you many gods, born from one another, arguing and competing. The Trinity gives you one God who was never born and has no rival. These are not the same kind of claim, and one is not a version of the other.
What do Christians mean by the Trinity?Isn't this just a god-of-the-gaps argument?
A gaps argument says we don't know, therefore God. This says the opposite: here is something we know precisely, measured to many decimal places, and here are the three candidate explanations. If physics later derives the constants from a deeper law, the argument weakens honestly — which is what a real argument does.
Why is the universe so finely tuned for life?Isn't this just a licence to do whatever you want?
If it were a transaction, yes — pay once, do as you like. But the claim is about a relationship, and relationships do not work that way.
What do Christians mean by grace?Isn't this just a mystery Christians hide behind?
Sometimes it is used that way. But the philosophical work is real, ancient and ongoing, and the honest position is that there are several serious answers and no consensus. That is different from having none.
If God knows the future, are we free?Isn't this just a nicer way of saying the same thing?
It changes what the word means, which is the whole issue. If worship is grovelling before a superior, the objection stands. If it is what happens when you finally see something for what it is, the objection is describing a different activity under the same name.
Why does God want to be worshipped?Isn't this just a word game to reconcile two verses?
It would be, if the two meanings of justified were invented for the occasion. They are not — both are standard usage, and each writer's meaning is clear from what he is arguing against. The test is whether the reading makes sense of the whole letter, and it does in both cases.
If faith saves, do good works matter?Isn't this just borrowed from pagan stories of gods fathering children?
Those stories are structurally different — a god takes physical form and has intercourse with a woman, often violently. There is nothing like that here: no consort, no divine seduction, and a Jewish setting in which the idea would be blasphemous. The Gospels describe a creative act, not a coupling.
Why do Christians believe in the virgin birth?Isn't this just choosing which parts to follow?
It is following the parts the book itself marks as teaching. The narratives report; the law commands; the prophets and Jesus interpret. That is not selective reading, it is reading according to genre — and by that method the answer here is not ambiguous.
Why does the Bible allow polygamy?Isn't this just damage control for an obvious problem?
The problem is real and Christians should feel it. What the numbers do is change its size — from thirty thousand contradictory religions to a handful of families disagreeing about second-order questions while reciting the same confession.
Why are there so many denominations?Isn't this just explaining away anything inconvenient?
It would be if the explanations were invented for the occasion. The test is whether you would accept the same reasoning elsewhere — and you already do. Two friends describing a car crash differently does not make you conclude the crash never happened. Apply the standard you use everywhere else, in both directions.
Is the Bible full of contradictions?Isn't this just religion making people feel guilty?
Guilt as a permanent condition is not what is on offer — that is the caricature, and sometimes churches have delivered it. The claim is a diagnosis followed immediately by a cure, and a diagnosis with no treatment attached would be cruel. The order matters: you are worse than you thought, and more loved than you hoped.
What do Christians actually mean by sin?Isn't this just theological gymnastics to save the doctrine?
It would be, if the distinction were invented for this verse. It is not — it is how the New Testament describes the incarnation from the start, and it is what lets the same writers say he was hungry and that he made the world. Any reading has to account for both sets of statements, and only this one does.
Why did Jesus say "the Father is greater than I"?It's not fair that a lifelong criminal gets the same as a lifelong believer.
That is true, and it is the point. Grace is not fair. Fair was the first definition — justice, getting what you have earned. If you want fairness, you are asking for the option Christianity says nobody survives.
What do Christians mean by grace?Jehovah's Witnesses say this proves Jesus was created.
That is the Arian position, argued out in the fourth century and rejected — not because the verse is inconvenient, but because it cannot be held alongside the rest of the New Testament. The church did not overlook this text; the debate was largely about it.
Why did Jesus say "the Father is greater than I"?Jesus only claims divinity in John, the latest Gospel.
The explicit statements cluster there, which is a fair observation. But the actions in Mark, the earliest, carry the same weight: forgiving sins, claiming authority over the Sabbath, accepting worship. And Mark opens by applying to Jesus a line the Old Testament wrote about the Lord himself. He shows what John says.
Wasn't Jesus just a great moral teacher?Jews reject the Trinity too. Are they worshipping a different God?
This is the strongest objection to everything above, and the answer is that the two cases are different in kind, not just in degree.
Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?Legends grow. Maybe the empty tomb was added later.
The trouble is the counter-accusation. If the empty tomb were a late invention, the earliest opponents would have said so rather than explaining how it got that way. Their answer concedes the tomb.
Wasn't the body just stolen?Mark and John don't mention it. Doesn't that suggest it came later?
Neither of them covers Jesus's birth at all — Mark begins with the adult ministry and John with a theological prologue. An argument from silence needs the silence to be surprising, and here nothing about their scope makes it so.
Why do Christians believe in the virgin birth?Maybe life would just have been different in a different universe.
For most of the range there is no "different life" available, because there is no chemistry — no stable atoms heavier than hydrogen, or no stars, or no time in which anything could happen. The claim is not that our kind of life is special. It is that complexity of any sort has very few doors open to it.
Why is the universe so finely tuned for life?Maybe the accounts grew in the telling and the group appearances came later.
Paul's list is the problem for that. It is written around AD 55 and he introduces it as something he received and handed on — the language of formal transmission — which puts the material within a few years of the crucifixion. The group appearances are in the earliest layer we have, not a later embellishment.
Couldn't the disciples have hallucinated Jesus?Neuroscience is young. Won't it explain this eventually?
It might, and that is a reasonable hope rather than an argument. What is worth noticing is that the hard problem is not a gap in data — it is a question about whether the kind of explanation on offer can reach the thing being explained. More detail about mechanism does not obviously get you closer to why there is experience.
Isn't the mind just the brain?Only Paul mentions the five hundred, so nothing confirms it.
It is a fair instinct, but it is being applied far more strictly than historians apply it to anything else. If every detail of an ancient account had to appear in two independent sources before any of it could be trusted, most of what we know about the ancient world would have to go.
Did the resurrection actually happen?Paul isn’t a reliable witness.
The charge is usually built out of verses read away from their context — Paul saying he is glad Christ is preached even by people with bad motives, or raising an imaginary objection in Romans in order to knock it down.
Did the resurrection actually happen?People from different religions report different things.
They do, and it is a real limit on what can be concluded. It also does not eliminate the veridical cases, which turn on checkable detail rather than on interpretation. The variety tells you the imagery is shaped by the person; it does not explain the drawer.
Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife?Physicists say the universe came from nothing.
Read what they mean by nothing. It is generally a quantum vacuum — a state with laws, fields and energy, which is a very unusual sort of nothing. That is a claim about how something became something else. Leibniz's question is about why there was ever anything for the laws to describe.
Why is there something rather than nothing?Plenty of Christians today do reject science.
Some do, on some questions, and that is worth taking seriously rather than denying. What it does not support is the historical claim that the two have always been at war. A present-day dispute over one subject is not a two-thousand-year pattern.
Have science and Christianity always been at war?Plenty of people die for religions that are false.
They do, and that is a fair correction. The claim here is not about dying for a belief but about dying for a fabrication of your own making — a different thing. Sincere martyrs prove sincerity, which is exactly what is at issue.
Wasn't the body just stolen?Praying to God means you are not God.
That only follows if God is a single person — which is precisely the thing being argued about.
In Gethsemane he prays “not my will but yours” — doesn’t that mean he isn’t God?Religion doesn't need wars to do harm.
True, and it is the stronger objection. Abuse, coercion and the covering-up of both are real, recent and documented. That has nothing to do with battlefield statistics, and the right Christian response is not a counter-argument.
Hasn't religion caused most of the wars?Science explains all this without God.
Science explains how things behave, and it does that superbly. It does not address why there is anything to behave in the first place — and it cannot, because its whole method starts by assuming a physical universe is there to be studied.
Is there good reason to believe God exists?Science has replaced God as an explanation.
In explaining mechanisms, often yes — and Christians should welcome that rather than mourn it. A god invoked to explain lightning was never the God of the creeds in the first place.
Does science leave any room for God?Shouldn't Christians be better than everyone else, though?
They should be better than they were, and many are — that is the claim being made. Christianity does not predict that Christians will outperform their neighbours on a scoreboard; it says they were in trouble and are being repaired, which will look different depending on where each one started.
Aren't Christians hypocrites?Sincere people believe all of these. Doesn't that count?
Sincerity is real and worth honouring, and it has never made anything true. People have been sincerely wrong about the shape of the earth. Christianity does not say other believers are stupid or wicked; it says they are mistaken about something, which is what any of them says about the others.
Aren't all religions basically the same?So Catholics and Protestants still disagree about this?
Less than the caricature suggests. Catholics have never taught that you earn salvation by works apart from grace, and Protestants have never taught that works are optional. The genuine difference is about how justification and the change in a person relate — whether the verdict is declared once and the change follows, or the two are one process. Real, but not the two positions usually described.
If faith saves, do good works matter?So people in the Old Testament were saved a different way?
No. They were saved the same way, on credit — trusting the God who had promised, looking forward to a sacrifice that had not happened yet.
What do Christians mean by being saved?So was he lying when he said he didn’t know?
No, and neither reading needs him to be.
If Jesus is God, why doesn’t he know the day or the hour?So you are saying no Muslim can be saved?
Christians hold that salvation comes through Christ. That is what every historic tradition teaches, and being polite about it does not change it.
Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?Some of the things called sins seem harmless.
Some things Christians have called sins were cultural additions, and Jesus spent a lot of his time attacking exactly that — people adding rules and calling them God's. If a prohibition cannot be traced to something that damages a person or a relationship, it is worth asking where it came from.
What do Christians actually mean by sin?Some of them never face any consequences at all.
In this life, plainly true, and the Bible does not pretend otherwise — that is what Asaph is complaining about. Christianity's claim is that death is not the end of the story, which is either true or false. If false, then there is no justice for most of the wronged, and the objection collapses into a complaint about the universe rather than about God.
Why do the wicked prosper?Some of them really don't harmonise, though.
A few are genuinely hard, and it is better to say so than to force a neat answer. Numbers in Kings and Chronicles disagree in places; some sequences may never be reconstructed. Christians have lived with those for centuries without the foundation moving, because the difficulty is in the details and the claim is about the events.
Is the Bible full of contradictions?Studies show intercessory prayer doesn't work.
Those studies test whether prayer functions as a reliable mechanism producing measurable effects on demand. Christianity does not claim that — and if God answered systematically under experimental conditions, prayer would be a technology rather than a relationship. The studies test a claim nobody is making.
Why doesn't God answer my prayers?The Gospels were written decades later, by which point memory drifts.
Twenty to sixty years, in a culture that trained memory formally and transmitted teaching orally with care — and while people who had been present were alive to object. Paul's earliest summary is inside five years. That is not a long gap by the standards of ancient history.
Aren't the Gospels biased?The Josephus passage was tampered with, so isn't it worthless?
The long passage was probably edited. That is a real finding, and honest scholars say so. But two things follow, and only one of them helps the objection. The edited passage cannot be leaned on hard — true. And the separate, shorter mention of "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ" is not part of that dispute. Also worth noticing: a later Christian editing a passage about Jesus assumes there was already a passage about Jesus.
Did Jesus actually exist?The Old Testament treats women as property.
Parts of it describe a society that did, and the law regulates that society rather than inventing it — while including provisions that were unusually protective for their time. It also opens with both sexes made in God's image, in the same sentence, before any of the rest. That is where any Christian argument about equality starts.
Is the Bible sexist?The Qur'an says he was not killed, but it was made to appear so.
It does, and it is a serious position held by many people. What can be said is that it is written six centuries after the event, and that every source we have from the period — Christian, Jewish and Roman, including hostile ones like Tacitus and the Talmud — records the execution as a fact. The disagreement is not about evidence available at the time.
Did Jesus actually die on the cross?The titles were only added in the second century.
That appears to be true of the physical titles. But look at how they appear: fully standardised, in places far apart, with no variations at all.
Who wrote the Gospels, and can we trust them?The winners write history — isn't this just the version that won?
If the church had been rewriting history it made a poor job of it. It kept four accounts that differ in details, that report its own leaders behaving badly, and that rest the whole resurrection claim on witnesses whose testimony was legally worthless. Those are not the choices of people editing for advantage.
What about the gospels that were left out?The word “Trinity” never appears in the Bible.
True. And neither do the words monotheism, incarnation or Bible. All of those are shorthand that Christians adopted for something the text describes at length.
What do Christians mean by the Trinity?Then what is the point of asking at all?
If the point were only outcomes, this would be fatal. Jesus tells his followers to ask anyway, persistently, while knowing the Father already knows what they need — which suggests the asking is doing something other than informing him. Most people who pray for years describe being changed by it rather than getting a better success rate.
Why doesn't God answer my prayers?Then why doesn't the Bible mention Muhammad?
That is the actual engine of the argument, and it is worth naming rather than circling. The corruption claim is usually reached backwards: the prophecy should be there, it is not, so something must have been removed. But the manuscript evidence covers the period, and there is no textual space for a removal that left no trace anywhere.
Was the Bible corrupted, as Muslims say?Then why is 'just have faith' the answer I always get?
Often because the person answering does not know the reasons, which is a failure of teaching rather than of the position. It is also why this site exists. If the only answer someone can give is "just believe", they have been let down by whoever taught them.
Isn't faith just believing without evidence?Then why is Jesus always painted as a European?
Because cultures depict him as one of their own, and European art dominated the export market. He is painted as Ethiopian in Ethiopia and Korean in Korea. The blond Jesus is a European habit, not a Christian doctrine, and it should be said plainly that historically he looked nothing like that.
Isn't Christianity a Western religion?Then why isn't there a hostile account of the same events?
There is a little — the Talmud's reference to the execution, Tacitus, Pliny — and in general very little survives from any first-century provincial dispute. What we do have is the earliest hostile explanation of the empty tomb, which conceded the tomb and argued about how it got that way.
Aren't the Gospels biased?Then why the threats attached? Worship or be punished.
That is a caricature of most of what the Bible says, though not of every sermon ever preached. The consequences described are largely the consequences of turning away from the source of life — like the consequences of not eating. There is a difference between a punishment imposed and a result arrived at.
Why does God want to be worshipped?They hallucinated. Grief does that.
Grief hallucinations are real and well documented, and if this were one grieving person the explanation would be strong.
Did the resurrection actually happen?They’re anonymous, so the names are just guesses.
The books are anonymous. The tradition about them is not. Those are two different claims, and the objection needs the second one to do its work.
Who wrote the Gospels, and can we trust them?This makes God sound like he needs an audience.
He is not described as gaining anything — he needs nothing, and lacked nothing before creating. If you take that seriously, creation is not something he did for his own benefit. It is the least self-interested act available to a being who already has everything.
Why create people he knew would reject him?Two million people would leave traces in Sinai. Where are they?
They would, if the number is read as a modern census figure. The Hebrew word translated "thousand" also means a clan or a military unit, and some scholars read the totals that way, giving a far smaller group. Others hold to the large number and point out that nomadic camps of tents, leather and wood leave almost nothing after three thousand years in any case. Both answers are live; neither is proof.
Did the Exodus actually happen?Two wills in one person is incoherent.
It would be if the two were competing on the same level, like a man in two minds about lunch. They are not.
In Gethsemane he prays “not my will but yours” — doesn’t that mean he isn’t God?Wasn’t his divinity decided at the Council of Nicaea?
No. The council met in the year 325. It did not invent the belief. It defended a belief the church already held, against a teacher named Arius who had recently started denying it.
Is Jesus really God?Wasn't it translated from language to language, losing something each time?
No — and this is a common mix-up. Modern Bibles are not translations of translations. They are made directly from the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. The chain people imagine, Greek to Latin to English, is not how any serious translation is produced.
Hasn't the Bible been changed over the centuries?Weren't the Gospel writers just writing the story to match the prophecies?
It is the obvious suspicion, and two things push against it. The prophecies were public property — these texts were read aloud in every synagogue, and hostile readers knew them at least as well as the Christians did. And the writers keep including details that fit nothing and help nobody: the disciples running away, Peter denying him, the women finding the tomb. Invented stories are tidier.
Did Jesus really fulfil Old Testament prophecy?Weren't the rejected gospels suppressed for political reasons?
Read them. That is the honest answer. They are available free online, and most people who have heard this claim have never opened one. The reason they were not accepted is visible on the page: they are late, and they teach things the earliest churches did not.
Who decided which books went in the Bible?What about 25 December?
The date is not in the Bible and Christians do not claim it as the historical birthday. It was fixed centuries later, and whether it was chosen to coincide with an existing festival is genuinely debated. Either way, no doctrine turns on the calendar.
Isn't Jesus copied from earlier pagan gods?What about Adam and Eve?
This is the hardest question in the discussion and the one where Christians differ most sharply — historical first pair, representative pair, or figures standing for early humanity. Anyone who tells you the answer is obvious is not representing the range. It deserves its own careful treatment rather than a paragraph.
Can a Christian accept evolution?What about original sin? Aren't they born guilty?
Traditions differ sharply. Some hold that inherited sin is a condition needing healing rather than a personal crime requiring punishment. Others hold that Christ's death covers those who could never have believed. Nobody holds that God is stuck, unable to save someone he wishes to.
What happens to babies who die?What about someone who never got a fair chance to hear about it?
The Bible says less about this than people assume, and Christians should be careful not to invent an answer. What it does say is that the judge of all the earth will do right, and that God is not willing that any should perish. Nobody will stand there and be able to say the process was rigged.
How can a loving God send anyone to hell?What about suffering nobody caused — disease, earthquakes?
This is the sharper version, and the free-will answer does not reach it. It should not be used as though it did.
If God is good, why is there so much suffering?What about the abuse scandals?
Those are not hypocrisy. They are crimes, and they were compounded by institutions protecting themselves instead of children. No theological point applies here. What is owed is truth-telling, cooperation with the police, compensation, and the surrender of any authority that was used to conceal it.
Aren't Christians hypocrites?What about the books Nicaea supposedly banned?
Nicaea did not discuss the canon at all. The list of New Testament books was already settled in practice long before, and the councils that recorded it came later and did not decide it. Two separate stories have been welded together.
Did the church invent Jesus' divinity at Nicaea?What about the disciples asking whether a man was born blind because of his sin?
They ask whether the man or his parents sinned — and Jesus answers neither, which sets aside the assumption the question was built on. It shows the idea was in the air in some form. It does not show he endorsed it, and his answer points away.
What about reincarnation?What about the Gospel of Barnabas?
It is a real document and it is late — the earliest manuscripts are from around the sixteenth century, and it contains anachronisms including references to medieval European life. It is not the lost original of anything.
Was the Bible corrupted, as Muslims say?What if I look into it and end up losing my faith?
Then either you were believing something false, in which case you would want to know, or you were not looking hard enough. Christianity claims to be true rather than useful. If it is, investigation is on its side. If it is not, no amount of avoidance helps.
Can a Christian have doubts?Where does Jesus ever say “I am God, worship me”?
Almost nowhere in those exact words, and there is a good reason.
Is Jesus really God?Who decides what counts as sin?
Not a committee, on this account, and not majority opinion either. If sin is falling short of what you were made for, then the standard is what you were made for — which comes from the maker, not from a vote. That is why Christians say God's character rather than God's preferences.
What do Christians actually mean by sin?Who made God, then?
The argument was never "everything has a cause". It was that everything which begins to exist needs a cause, or that things which did not have to exist need something that did.
Is there good reason to believe God exists?Why can't the universe itself be the necessary thing?
It might be, and Hume asked exactly that. The difficulty is that the universe does not behave like something that had to exist: it is made of parts that could have been arranged otherwise, running on constants that could have had other values, and on current evidence it began. Necessary things are not usually found to have started.
Why is there something rather than nothing?Why does God need blood at all? Isn't that primitive?
The word for it in the Bible is life rather than gore — blood stands for a life given up. Behind the objection is a modern instinct that guilt is a feeling to be managed rather than a debt to be settled. Anyone who has been seriously wronged tends to disagree: they do not want the offender to feel better, they want the thing put right.
Why couldn't God just forgive us?Why does God seem to change his mind in the Old Testament?
The passages are usually about a stated intention conditional on behaviour, which changes when the behaviour does — Nineveh being the clearest case. And a God who never responded to repentance would be less good, not more consistent.
Is the God of the Old Testament the same God?Why does it matter what Gnostics believed?
Because the objection assumes there was an early, diverse Christianity that got narrowed by force. What the texts show is that the narrowing happened by content: these documents were excluded for what they taught, and anyone can now check the teaching for themselves. The evidence is free online in English.
What about the gospels that were left out?Why does it matter whether belief is compelled or chosen?
Because of what is being offered. If the offer were a fact to accept, compulsion would be efficient. If it is a person to trust, compulsion is self-defeating — nobody has ever been argued into loving anyone.
Why doesn't God just make himself obvious?Why does it matter whether it happened?
Because the whole Old Testament is built on it. Every command about how to treat a foreigner comes with the reason attached: because you were slaves in Egypt. It is the event Israel keeps returning to, and Passover is its annual re-enactment. If it did not happen, a great deal is built on nothing.
Did the Exodus actually happen?Why doesn't the Bible describe near-death experiences?
Barely at all — Paul mentions being caught up and says he cannot describe it and was not permitted to repeat what he heard. Scripture is remarkably uninterested in this genre, which is itself a reason not to build doctrine on it.
Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife?Why doesn't the Bible just say?
That is a fair complaint. It answers the questions the first Christians were actually asking, and this was not one of them — they were a minority in a hostile empire, not administrators of a global system. The silence is real, and filling it with confidence we do not have is how this doctrine goes wrong.
What about people who never heard of Jesus?Why doesn't the Bible just say?
A fair complaint, and the same one that applies to those who never heard. It answers the questions its first readers were asking. The right response to the gap is to say there is a gap, not to fill it and call it revelation.
What happens to babies who die?Why not just say the universe is the eternal thing and skip God?
Because the evidence points the other way. The universe appears to have a beginning, and it is made of exactly the things — matter, space, time — that need explaining. Calling it eternal is not simpler; it is contradicted.
If God made everything, who made God?Why regulate it at all instead of banning it outright?
The law regulated a great many things it did not invent, in a world with no economic safety net. But notice what regulating it did: release dates, freedom for injury, protection for runaways and a death penalty for the trade. Those rules do not stabilise slavery, they corrode it.
Does the Bible support slavery?You’re just using God to fill gaps in our knowledge.
That is a fair complaint whenever it is true, and it has been true. If the argument is "we cannot explain this yet, so God did it", it deserves to lose — and it has lost, repeatedly, as gaps have closed.
Is there good reason to believe God exists?