Christianity arose from an ancient and ignorant people who didn’t have science.

Atheist Argument #5

Up to this point, I have demonstrated how the first four of Bob Seidensticker’s arguments have failed, despite his view that they logical valid. Each one has been weighed at this point and found wanting. I now come to what I would call an argument that has a serious problem with the plain historical facts of the origins of Christianity.

I must confess, I would love to drop some of these arrogant modern thinkers into the first century AD and force them to open share their prejudices concerning these “ancient and ignorant” people. I suppose a 1000 years from now, we will be the new ancient and ignorant people. How utterly and incredible arrogant!

The fact of the matter is that Christianity did not arise from “people.” It was not the invention of a small group of Jewish men and women who had decided they had had enough. The origin of Christianity, in reality, existed in the plan of God before there were ever any “ancient and ignorant” people. But I am not going to take it there. Instead, I am going to take it to Christ because that is where Christianity began. The birth of the Christian religion, if you prefer that term, coincides with the birth of Jesus Christ. As the events and life of Jesus Christ go, so goes Christianity.

Bob goes on to talk about superstition where the Bible talks about the supernatural. Apparently, had civilization been more with it, more scientifically advanced, more modern and less ancient, more scientifically informed and less superstitiously ignorant, they would have invented these myths to account for what they could not explain. And, they would not have bothered to waste their time with such embellishments knowing that the culture would have dismissed them as unenlightened buffoons.

So, let’s quickly pull up and see just how advanced our scientifically enlightened culture has become. We are so scientifically enlightened that, if the state of North Carolina wants to pass a law allowing business owners to decide within their own businesses whether or not they will permit a man to use a woman’s rest room simply on the basis that the man wants to identify as a woman, we respond to that state by accusing it of bigotry, punish it with economic boycots economically, and accuse those behind the legislation of hate. At last check, the sex of a human is biologically determined, not self-determined. But modern American God-haters have finally reached the place where they are now foolishly rejecting something as basic as the God-designed distinction in the sexes.

In Canada, you can be put in jail for using a male pronoun to describe a man who wants you to use a feminine pronoun to refer to him. Oops, if anyone in Canada reads this I guess I am going to jail. Hey Canada, your head is full of rocks. Modern culture calls it enlightened, advanced, and progressive. I call it poppycock. Here is a story demonstrating just how insane our enlightened culture has become: Drag Queen Stories for Kiddies

There should be no safer place for a baby than in its mother’s arms, except perhaps, than being in its mother’s womb. Yet, we are murdering our children in the womb at an alarming rate. The infant mortality rate in the US is 5.8/1,000. What does this mean. Well, there are just under 4,000,000 babies born in the US annually. On the other hand, we murder nearly 1,000,000 babies in the womb. And we are so enlightened, we have convinced ourselves (not really) that it’s a woman’s health or rights issue. It is nothing of the sort. Doesn’t sound too enlightened to me. Abortion and homosexuality are just two examples of the irrationalism that entails when God does not restrain sinful predication to the degree he once did. America is experiencing this as we speak and it seems that our enlightened culture isn’t really very enlightened after all.

A Lesson in Logic

The real problem with this objection, however, is not the arrogance of modern culture. The real problem with this argument is that it commits the informal fallacy known as the abusive ad hominem. This is closely related to the genetic fallacy. It is a fallacy of relevance. The validity or soundness of an argument has nothing to do with the source of the argument. The abusive ad hominem turns the attention away from the argument itself to focus on something that is not really relevant to the argument at all. We see this all the time in arguments. The abusive ad hominem is an attempt to lower our view of someone and then moving to cast doubt on their argument. Atheist objection # 5, Christianity should not be believed because it arose from and ancient and ignorant people is a really bad objection to Christianity who teeth is ripped from its mouth when placed under the critical light of proper logical argumentation. So, as a Christian engaging the culture with the gospel, you are going to encounter more bad arguments than you could imagine. Most of them are far more subtle and difficult to identify than this one. Work on your critical thinking skills: in other words, get good at discernment.