Common Objections

Objection: If God is all-good and all-powerful, evil would not exist. Evil exists. Therefore God does not exist.

This is the most serious philosophical objection to Christianity and deserves a serious answer.

First, distinguish the logical problem from the evidential problem. The logical problem (evil and God cannot coexist) has been largely abandoned by professional philosophers since Alvin Plantinga's free will defense: it is possible that God had morally sufficient reasons for creating beings with genuine freedom, and that genuine freedom makes evil possible. A world with free creatures capable of love is better than a world of deterministic puppets, even if those creatures choose evil. This is not a proof; it is a defeater for the claim that God and evil are logically incompatible.

The evidential problem is harder: not that God cannot exist with this much evil, but that this much evil makes God unlikely. Here the Christian response is: we cannot evaluate God's reasons from our limited vantage point (Job 38-42). More importantly, the cross is God's answer to evil, not an explanation that tidies it up, but an act of entering into it and bearing it. God did not remain distant from suffering; He experienced the worst of it.

Second, the atheist's use of the problem of evil borrows moral capital from the Christian worldview. To say evil is real, genuinely wrong, not just unpleasant, requires a standard of goodness. Where does that standard come from if there is no God? The problem of evil is simultaneously an argument against God and an argument that requires God to work.

Third, suffering and formation. Romans 8:28 does not say everything is good, it says God works all things together for good for those who love Him. That is not the same claim and should not be confused. The Christian witness is not "God makes everything okay" but "God does not waste pain."

Objection: Science explains the universe. We no longer need God as an explanation.

Science explains processes within the universe. It does not explain why there is a universe to explain. The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is not a scientific question, science operates on existing material. It is a philosophical and metaphysical question that science, by its own methods, cannot reach.

Science has not explained: why the universe began, why the physical constants are calibrated for life, why mathematical abstractions describe physical reality (Eugene Wigner called this "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics"), why there is consciousness rather than pure mechanism, and why there are objective moral facts rather than just chemical reactions we call "preferences."

Beyond that: the founders of modern science, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Faraday, Mendel, Maxwell, Pasteur, were largely believers who understood science as exploring the rational order built into creation by a rational God. The conflict narrative (science versus religion) is a 19th-century invention, not the history.

The issue is not science versus faith. It is scientism, the claim that science is the only path to knowledge, which is itself not a scientific claim and cannot be verified by the scientific method. It defeats itself.

Objection: All religions are different paths to the same truth. Who are you to say Christianity is the only way?

The major world religions make mutually exclusive, specific truth claims that cannot all be true simultaneously. Islam says Jesus did not die on the cross (Surah 4:157). Christianity says the crucifixion and resurrection are historically central. Both cannot be true. Buddhism in its classical form denies a creator God and the self as a persistent entity. Hinduism accepts millions of gods and a cyclical universe with no ultimate personal Creator. These are not different descriptions of the same reality, they are competing descriptions that contradict each other at foundational points.

The claim "all religions are the same" is itself a truth claim that all religions deny. It is also condescending, it treats every faith tradition as an approximation of a truth the speaker has privately grasped.

The Christian claim is specific: the resurrection of Jesus is a historical event that, if it happened, changes everything. Christianity does not ask for blind faith in a general religious sentiment. It asks whether the tomb was empty. That is an evidential question, not a preference question.

John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Jesus was not offering a spiritual suggestion. He was making an exclusive historical claim about who he was. The question is whether that claim is true.

Objection: The Bible contradicts itself constantly, it cannot be trusted.

First: most cited "contradictions" dissolve on examination. Parallel Gospel accounts describe the same events from different perspectives, with different emphases, to different audiences. Ancient historiography did not require verbatim quotes or uniform chronological order, these were understood conventions of the genre. Differences in detail between Matthew and Luke's resurrection accounts are what historians expect from independent eyewitness testimony, not fabricated collusion.

Second: the existence of variants or difficulties does not automatically mean error. Many alleged contradictions are cases where the text is poorly translated, taken out of context, or compared across different genres (poetry versus history versus law versus prophecy).

Third: when there are genuine tensions in the text, the honest response is to sit with them, not manufacture a forced harmony, but not abandon confidence in the text either. The Bible records human experience with YHWH across centuries and multiple literary genres. Complexity is expected. Contradiction is different from complexity.

Practical move: ask which specific contradiction concerns them. Almost always, it turns out to be something they heard secondhand. Go to the text. Use the interlinear at /bible to read the Greek or Hebrew. Most alleged contradictions do not survive contact with the actual passage.

Objection: Hell is incompatible with a loving God. A truly loving God would save everyone.

First, precision: the biblical language for judgment is diverse. Gehenna (the word Jesus uses most), Sheol, Hades, the lake of fire, these are not identical concepts and the tradition has handled them differently. Annihilationism (the unrighteous cease to exist rather than suffer eternally) and conditional immortality are minority positions some Christians hold; universalism I regard as outside historic orthodoxy, not a live option. This is not a settled easy question and no one should pretend it is.

Second, the main answer: love that cannot say no is not love, it is coercion. A God who forces everyone into his presence regardless of their choices is not loving the creature; he is overriding it. Hell is both God's just judgment on unrepentant sin (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9; Revelation 14:10) and the settled condition of a will that has definitively chosen against God. I hold both together: it is deserved punishment, and it is what the sinner chose. C.S. Lewis put the second half memorably, "The doors of hell are locked on the inside", but it is only half. The damned get what they ultimately wanted, existence apart from God, and they receive what that refusal justly earns.

Third: the objector's sense that hell is unjust assumes a moral standard. Where does that standard come from? The moral argument operates here too.

Fourth: the cross. If God was willing to take the judgment himself in human flesh to make a way for the guilty, this is not the act of a capricious tyrant. The question is not whether God is loving enough. It is whether people will receive what he provided.

The goal is not to have a crushing counterargument for every objection. The goal is to be able to say clearly: I have considered this, here is what I think, and here is what the evidence points to. You do not need to win, you need to be honest and unshakeable.

Ask Dave to raise any of these objections against you. He will not let you off with vague answers. That pressure in a low-stakes environment is exactly what prepares you for real conversations.