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Chapter 4

From Atheists to Dissenters

An Overview of Issues

Allow me to give you brief overviews of certain aspects of apologetics with different types of people. These synopses are not intended to elaborate all the essential issues, nor show how to resolve them, but rather to give the aspiring apologist a general sense of the issues he or she will need to be familiar with in order to engage in apologetics with people in those groups. The trajectory follows the three levels of apologetics starting with the most fundamental: natural apologetics (God), Christian apologetics (Jesus), Catholic apologetics (the Church).

Apologetics with Atheists

Obviously, because atheists deny the existence of God and anything supernatural (e.g., heaven and hell, human souls, angels and demons), only the most basic level of apologetics — natural — is possible or appropriate when engaging them. This means that your efforts to find common ground must begin with God’s existence. It would be pointless to present to an atheist an apologetics defense of, say, the Holy Eucharist. This is not to say that at some point you couldn’t explain the Eucharist, the divinity of Christ, or the authenticity of the Bible, but you’ll first need to lay a solid foundation for believing in God’s existence. Just like building a house, you start with the foundation and work your way up.

Apologetics with the Culture

Defending the Faith sometimes requires that you engage the culture itself. It propagates those errors in the media that infect great numbers of people with attitudes and assumptions that can obscure their view of reality.

Moral relativism is a perfect example of what I mean. Doing apologetics in an environment where many people have been conditioned for many years to think that truth is relative (“That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me”) can be exceedingly challenging. The moral relativist mind-set sees issues like abortion, gay marriage, homosexual activity, adultery, fornication, pornography, and contraception as merely personal preference options, not activities that can be called “right” or “wrong.” Or more exactly, while one can say such activities are right, it’s absolutely unacceptable to say they are morally wrong. It’s a one-way street.

Your best tools in this area of apologetics will be logic and the ability to spot fallacies, because moral relativism is itself a fallacy and it both feeds on fallacious, uncritical thinking and continually spawns it in modern culture.

Before you can engage in apologetics on moral issues, you must first help someone see that “morals” as such exist at all. They are above us, transcendent, and not dependent upon our personal whims and preferences. Happily, it’s not terribly difficult to use basic logic to point out the internal incoherence of moral relativism by simply relativizing something the other guy is passionate about.

For example, a woman once angrily scolded me for being “antiabortion” and “selfish” because my wife and I have eleven children. A friend and I were standing in the checkout line at a store, and, while chatting, it happened to come up that we have a lot of kids. The lady ahead of me, hearing this, whirled around with an angry look on her face and informed me emphatically that I was selfish because our family was taking up resources, crowding the planet, and so on. “You’re antiabortion, I’ll bet!” she said with a sneer. And I responded, “Yes, I am. Abortion is immoral.” This, as you might guess, made her madder. She said, “Get over it! Abortion is legal!”

“What does it being legal have to do with it?” I countered. “Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s not immoral.”

“It wouldn’t be legal if it were immoral!” she snapped back.

That’s when I realized what I needed to do.

I decided to use a logic move known as the reductio ad absurdum in which you take the person’s claim at face value and, by asking questions, reduce it to its absurd and intolerable logical conclusion.

So, I asked her, “Well, what about slavery? That used to be legal in the United States. It used to be perfectly legal for white people to own black people; to buy and sell them, split up their families — separate husbands from their wives, parents from their children — and to work them literally to death. Are you saying that slavery was not immoral simply because it was legal?”

She glared at me but said nothing, so I continued.

“And what about the Third Reich’s laws mandating the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War II? Did that make those actions moral just because they happened to be legal?”

By now, a vein in this woman’s forehead was throbbing. But still she said nothing. So I fired off one more example for good measure. I asked her how she felt about the fact that until the passage of the nineteenth Amendment it was perfectly legal for men to prevent women from voting. “Did the fact that this was legal make it right?”

At that, she stormed off. All I could do was pray for her and hope that my line of argumentation got through her defensive shields about a “woman’s right to abortion.” I had to come at this issue from a vantage point she was completely unprepared to defend against. I hope that conversation made enough of a dent in her worldview for the grace of God to enter her heart and start transforming her. That’s just one example of how when you engage the culture in defense of truth, Bible verses and the facts of Christian history are probably not your best tools. More often than not, what you’ll need to use are the tools of logic and analogies. Those really do work in that kind of situation.

Apologetics with Non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Etc.)

Non-Christians who believe in God already have common ground with you. Build on this by seeking areas of agreement on issues such as morality, truth, religious obligation, and so on. Keep in mind that you will find a very different set of issues from one religion to another. Islam’s moral code is quite different in certain respects from that of Buddhism — the concept of radical jihad being an example. Non-Christian world religions can be monotheistic (e.g., Judaism, Islam, Sikhism), polytheistic (e.g., Hinduism, Shinto, Jainism), and, in the case of Buddhism, not focused on knowing, worshipping, or even believing in a personal God. Apologetics in this field focuses on the person and uniqueness of Jesus Christ, his existence, miracles, teachings, Resurrection, and divinity.

Apologetics with Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses