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How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist, by John W. Loftus
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The first book on Christian apologetics written by a leading atheist figure that teaches Christians the best and worst arguments for defending their faith against attack. The Christian faith has been vigorously defended with a variety of philosophical, historical, and theological arguments, but many of the arguments used in an earlier age no longer resonate in today's educated West. Where has apologetics gone wrong? What is the best response to the growing challenge presented by scientific discovery and naturalistic thought? Unlike every work on Christian apologetics that has come before, How to Defend the Christian Faith is the first one written by an atheist for Christians. As a former Christian defender who is now a leading atheist thinker, John Loftus answers these questions and more. He tells would-be apologists how to train properly, where to study, what to study, what issues they should concern themselves with, and how poorly the professors who currently train them practice their craft. In the process, he shows listeners why Christian apologists have failed to reach the intelligent nonbeliever. For those Christian apologists who think this book will provide a secret formula to convert the nonbelieving masses, be warned: as an expos� of the present state of Christian apologetics, it can just as easily be used by atheists to refute apologetic arguments. Thus, this book presents both an opportunity and a challenge to Christians: they must either change how apologetics is done, or quit doing apologetics altogether.
- Sales Rank: #103287 in Audible
- Published on: 2016-02-15
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 534 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
Ingenious Idea Executed with Mastery
By Book Shark
How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist by John W. Loftus
“How to Defend the Christian Faith" is an excellent and clever guide on how to defend the Christian faith from an atheist’s point of view. Accomplished author and former preacher John W. Loftus, offers some positive and negative advice on what apologists should not do. This ingenious 280-page book includes sixteen chapters broken out by the following three parts: 1. You Must Prepare for the Task, 2. How to Defend the Christian Faith, and 3. How to Defend God in a World of Pain.
Positives:
1. An author with a proven track record of high-quality work. Well-written, well-researched.
2. What an ingenious idea for a book, apologetics advice from a person so well-suited to do so. Loftus was a preacher who studied under the best known Christian apologists and is an active atheist.
3. Excellent writing style that is engaging, provocative and accessible.
4. Makes perfectly clear early on what this book is all about. “The truth is that I really am going to offer some sincere honest advice to would-be Christian apologists, especially in Part 1. I’ll also be offering a lot of snarky tongue-in-cheek advice, especially in Parts 2 and 3. I’ll offer some positive advice for what budding apologists should do, as well as negative advice—lots of it—for what they should not do.”
5. Did I say provocative? It’s a Loftus trademark. “My argument is that God, if he exists, failed to effectively communicate his will. He failed to provide the sufficient evidence we need to believe.” This is what he calls, the Problem of Divine Miscommunication.
6. Discusses areas that apologists should not debate. “Evolution is a fact. Every scientist in every part of the globe knows it is a fact. It is not up for debate. The only thing left for would-be Christian apologists to do, based on the fact of evolution, is to deal with the implications of evolution honestly.”
7. Scientific implications. “In fact, neuroscience is destroying the notions of free will, sin, and the need for salvation. At the very least neuroscience is making it extremely difficult for believers to still claim that that we freely choose to sin, that we can freely choose to be saved, and that there is a wrathful God who will judge us on the last day.”
8. Sound advice backed by the best of our current scientific understanding. “My first and probably most important piece of advice is not to trust your brain. “
9. The Socratic Method and its value. “Over and over Socrates would ask them to clarify what they were talking about. The first question he would ask is, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He would also ask another question, ‘How do you know?’ You should be asking these two questions several times a day in various contexts by using differing words and sentences. These two questions can lead us to truth.”
10. The three indicators on how to detect indoctrination. “A key indicator that indoctrination is taking place rather than education is if you’re being taught something that goes against the consensus of scholars working in their respective fields.”
11. A look at the apologetic methodology. Loftus discusses the five most important headings. “I’ll argue that apologists who seek to defend the Christian faith must accept and defend nothing less than the need for sufficient objective evidence. This is the only honest choice.” “Sufficient objective evidence must be there for Christianity, or else reasonable people should not accept it.”
12. It wouldn’t be a Loftus book without the rational approach of the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF). “For believers who want to know which religion is true, if one is, I have proposed the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF).” “I argue that, by its very nature, faith cannot pass the OTF because faith is always unreasonable.”
13. The traits of an apologist. Provides great examples on how special pleading is used to defend the faith by punting to possibilities rather than sticking to probabilities. “From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one.” “Possibilities don’t count. Only probabilities do.”
14. A look at the Bible. “We’re first and foremost arguing that the New Testament is so riddled with discrepancies and evolved layers of religious tradition from a superstitious era that it leaves a great deal of room for doubt—that it’s much more likely no one can know what happened, if we take the New Testament at face value—which means Christians have little basis beyond blind, irrational faith for believing Jesus rose from the grave. That’s what we’re saying.”
15. The virtues of methodological naturalism. “Methodological naturalism (MN) is a proven method whereby scholars assume there is a natural explanation for any event rather than a supernatural one.”
16. How apologists gerrymander for God. “The problem of suffering is one of the reasons why Process Theologians have conceded that God is not omnipotent. It didn’t take atheists to persuade them to abandon God’s omnipotence at all. The problem speaks for itself.”
17. Takes on Dr. David Marshall who interesting enough has made remarks to some of my own reviews admittedly in a respectful manner. The art of mischaracterization.
18. A fascinating look at the ubiquitous problem of suffering in the world. “Christian apologist William Lane Craig agreed with the force of the problem: The problem of evil is certainly the greatest obstacle to belief in the existence of God. When I ponder both the extent and depth of suffering in the world, whether due to man’s inhumanity to man or to natural disasters, then I must confess that I find it hard to believe that God exists.”
19. Some quotes just stay with you. “If Satan was the brightest creature in all of creation, and he knew of God’s immediate presence, absolute goodness, and omnipotent power like no one else, then to rebel against God makes him pure evil, suicidal, and dumber than a box of rocks!”
20. A look at illegitimate excuses for God. “The more suffering we find in the natural world, the less probable it is that a good, omnipotent God exists.”
21. Notes included.
Negatives:
1. Lack of supplementary material (tables, charts and/or diagrams) to complement the excellent narrative.
2. No formal bibliography.
In summary, I’m an admirer of Loftus’s work. He’s an eloquent author with provocative ideas that resonate with my kind of thinking. This clever book exemplifies what a five-star book is all about: an author with expertise on an interesting topic able to engage the public with provocative thoughts and ideas backed by sound science and logical thinking. Kudos! I highly recommend it!
Further recommendations: “Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity", "The End of Christianity”, and “The Christian Delusion” by John W. Loftus, “The End of Biblical Studies" by Hector Avalos, "Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History" and “Natural Atheism” by Dr. David Eller, "Man Made God: A Collection of Essays" by Barbara G. Walker, “Why I’m Not a Christian” by Richard Carrier, “The Dark Side of Christian History” by Helen Ellerbe, “Atheism for Dummies” by Dale McGowan, “The Atheist Universe” by David Mills, “Nailed” by David Fitzgerald, “The Portable Atheist” and “God is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, “The God Argument” by A.C. Grayling, “50 popular beliefs that people think are true” by Guy P. Harrison, “Godless” by Dan Barker, “Moral Combat” by Sikivu Hutchinson, and “Society Without God” by Phil Zuckerman.
37 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
Should Be the Last Word on Christian Apologetics, Period
By James A. Lindsay, Ph.D.
Four years ago I wrote in my first book about what I called The Problem of Apologetics, making the case that the very existence of apologetics–lawyerly defenses of religious faith–is a major strike against the believability of the contents of any faith tradition employing them. In considering and formulating that set of ideas, I rapidly concluded that religious apologetics don’t deserve serious consideration, and as a result I thought it wasn’t possible for me to take them any less seriously. I was wrong. In his new book, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist, John W. Loftus managed to convince me that the amount of respect I should give to religious apologetic arguments isn’t zero, as I had concluded; it is less than zero.
How to Defend the Christian Faith is truly a clever book. Its intended audience is young, would-be Christian apologists, and Loftus’s goal is to present them with a hard choice and convince them that they really must make it. On the one hand, the young minds for which Loftus is writing can choose to follow his advice as it is given and become the only kinds of apologists that could have a hope of defending the Christian faith, if it can be defended at all (and I don’t think it can or that many would-be apologists would persist after taking his advice). On the other hand, they could be reasonable and abandon all such hope, recognizing the dragons that lie in wait along that path.
Loftus expertly guides these minds, unless they’re simply too thick to realize it, to see that the awful choice they have can be summarized by the refrain of the whole book: “If you want to be a good apologist, you shouldn’t do these things at all. But then if you didn’t do them at all, you wouldn’t be an apologist at all.” By implication, then, however skilled or brilliant an apologist may be, Loftus neatly demonstrates that he is necessarily a bad apologist. Aspiring faith-defenders who read this book are thereby left with no good options, and Loftus makes it clear that clinging to a desire to rationalize the Christian faith is precisely what binds them.
His thesis is presented in three parts. In the first part, he indicates what any would-be good apologist must do to prepare for the task, and unsurprisingly, all of his forthright and accurate advice would leave the hopeful defender of the faith struggling to hold on to his own belief. He admonishes that good apologists must be open-minded, must think scientifically, must evaluate their religious beliefs from the outside, must get a proper secular education, must attempt the impossible by defending Christian belief solely on evidential grounds, and must learn the relevant sciences–like evolutionary biology–that overwhelmingly undercut the rational capacity to believe. The picture it paints is grim to anyone hoping to argue for Christianity.
The second part of How to Defend the Christian Faith is, in my opinion, cleverer and more interesting. It tells any hopeful apologist exactly the kinds of things she must do in order to be a successful defender of Christian belief, and each and every one of them is something that should cause her to recoil in intellectual horror. Loftus expertly explains in this delightful middle of the text that the only way to apologize for the Christian faith is to abandon one’s intellectual honesty. To read these fifty or so pages as a would-be defender of Christian belief must be to be left aghast at the undeniable need to forswear academic scruples to do the job. And so bites the refrain: if you want to be a good apologist, don’t do it, but if you don’t, you won’t be an apologist at all.
The last of the three parts of the book focuses particularly on the problems presented to belief in any Christian faith by the fact that ours is, indeed and for whatever else, a “world of pain.” This section brings up the famous Problem of Evil–sometimes rightly called the “rock of atheism”–and gives aspiring apologists the best possible advice for dealing with it, and all of that advice is bad. Avoid, lie, blame, punt, or ignore: these form the backbone of what any Christian apologist must do to handle the full weight that this problem presents to the rationality of Christian belief. Yet again, sincere hopeful apologists will be left dumbfounded at the sheer impossibility of doing their task well.
That all of this artillery against the capacity to defend the Christian faith is headed by a witty and insightful foreword by Peter Boghossian, of A Manual for Creating Atheists fame, only increases its potency. Boghossian, like Loftus, rightly insists that any would-be apologists must engage this kind of material or be prepared to be marginalized out of serious consideration. The foreword sets a tone of cruciality for any aspiring apologists, and then Loftus delivers the bad news for them in chapter after hard-to-dispute chapter.
To that, I add my own insistence. Those who wish to defend the Christian faith should read How to Defend the Christian Faith with utmost seriousness, ponder its contents, and ultimately find something better to do with their time as a result. Others should read it to get a full sense of just how bad the case for Christianity really is. As I argue extensively in my newest book, Everybody Is Wrong About God, the time has come to give no serious consideration to the entire theistic enterprise, and How to Defend the Christian Faith shows us exactly why. The case is hopeless; it’s time to move on.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
The Christian Apologetics Industry Has Met Its Match
By David Madison
According to one estimate, by 2030 there will be a billion Pentecostals on the planet, so I am not optimistic that Christianity is going disappear anytime soon. It has two thousand years of momentum, and the faithful are disinclined to perform proper due diligence on their own religion. But I do have hope that Christianity will lose its appeal because it has been critiqued so thoroughly by serious thinkers, especially Richard Carrier and John Loftus. Carrier’s monumental scholarship has demonstrated that Jesus probably never even existed, and Loftus—well, Loftus is almost a force of nature, judging from the energy he has put into showing that Christianity has been falsified.
Like myself, Loftus is a former minister, and his book, “Why I Became an Atheist” is tour-de-force explanation of his departure from the faith. And he followed this volume with three massive anthologies, “The End of Christianity,” “The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails,” and “Christianity Is Not Great: How Faith Fails.” For any Christians who ARE up to the task of due diligence, this ‘Loftus library’ is mandatory homework.
In this new book, Loftus turns his focus to the peculiar industry that was spawned by the church, i.e., the apologetics industry, whose sole purpose is to make excuses for God—and for all of the egregious flaws in Christian theology. The apologists are custodians of denominational doctrine; they have to find ways to make it look plausible and respectable. Ancient alchemists strove to turn lead into gold; apologists have their own lumps of lead, and they too haven’t managed to work it out.
There’s a lot at stake, of course: Christianity is a multi-billion dollar business, with thousands upon thousands of buildings to maintain, bureaucracies and clergy to sustain, troubling doubts to sweep under the rug. Hence churches and seminaries pay for scholars (well, pseudo-scholars, too much of the time) to come up with reasons to cling to faith despite all of the evidence that Christianity is an amalgam of pagan borrowings, errors and follies—and that it will eventually take its place with thousands of other religions that have faded from human memory.
The apologists make so many mistakes, they resort to so many shallow arguments, and Loftus rises to the task of warning them to come up with something better to do for a living. The title is ironic, of course: “How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist.” Because none of the defenses work—and Loftus shows exactly why that is the case. He was once an apologist himself, so he knows the cast of characters and the works they have churned out—and skewers them with precision. He offers plenty of examples of their favorite sleight-of-hand maneuvers, e.g., special pleading, ‘punting to possibilities,’ gerrymandering, mischaracterizing—and just plain old lying [see his chapter titles in Part 2 of the book].
He comes down especially hard in Part 3, which deals with the massive gratuitous suffering that is part of life on Earth. How can that be squared with the claim that there is a good god who loves the world? …and has the power to do the right thing? He highlights some of the mind-numbing arguments that theologians have come up with to get God off the hook. They try…oh, how they try. I was especially delighted that Loftus refers bluntly to one of C. S. Lewis’ arguments as “asinine.”
Loftus maintains a delightful conversational style in this book. It’s as if he is sitting across the kitchen table from us, saying, “Come on, let’s get real, enough with the silly excuses: the Christian god isn’t all he’s cracked up to be—and we’re too smart now to be fooled.” If we could just get all those Pentecostals to read his books….
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