The Questioning Christian

False Dilemmas Impede the Gospel

Written by

D. C. Toedt III

in

I’ve started a list of some of the false dilemmas, the black-or-white, either/or thinking, that I’ve encountered recently in the church.  Many well-meaning Christians try to defend their faith with such fallacies.  But it seems to me that when they do so, they actually impede the Gospel, because they likely drive away some of the unchurched who, rightly, find fault with their reasoning. 

Here are a few examples:

  • I don’t like the music [or the priests, or the preaching, or the Sunday school] at my parish.  Therefore I need to find another parish. 
    [Response:  You could always try accepting that no parish is perfect.]

  • Either the Bible is completely reliable, or it can’t be relied on at all.
    [Response:  Some parts of the Bible are more reliable than others — for example, we don’t still stone disobedient sons to death at the town gates.]

  • If you refuse to submit yourself completely to the authority of the Bible, you are setting yourself up as the supreme authority. 
    [Response:  The Bible can be an authority without having to be the supreme authority.]

  • Many early Christians died for their belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  No one would die for a lie.  Therefore, Jesus must have been raised from the dead. 
    [Response:  The same logic would apply to the Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., who died for their beliefs — to say nothing of the Catholics and Protestants who died during the religious wars of the Reformation era, the residents of Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, etc.]

  • If you can’t profess the entire Nicene Creed in good conscience, you must not recite any part of it during the Eucharist. 
    [Response:  That would seem to be entirely a matter of opinion.]

  • The theory of evolution cannot satisfactorily explain how the first living organisms came into existence.  Therefore, that theory must be false, and God must have directly created those organisms. 
    [Response:  It’s far too early for that conclusion.  We don’t have all the pieces of the evolutionary puzzle, but we can still keep looking in the hope of learning more.]

And of course, there’s C.S. Lewis’s classic formulation (paraphrased here):

  • Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord God Almighty. 
    [Response:  We don’t have enough reliable evidence to justify such a facile trichotomy.  See some of my postings on Scripture, listed at right under "Favorite Postings," for more thoughts.]

Comments

One response to “False Dilemmas Impede the Gospel”

  1. alfrednorth Avatar
    alfrednorth

    Regarding your “false dilemma” concerning the Resurrection, you misstate the trustworthiness of the evidence. The point is that those disciples who witnessed the empty tomb and (later) the risen Lord—namely Peter, James, and John, to name just three who went to a martyr’s death afterward—would not have been motivated to do so had they been in on a fraudulent plot to remove Jesus’ body from the tomb. If you _personally_ know that the Resurrection was a fraud, you don’t rationally go to your death to try in vain to keep the secret after it has been exposed for all to ridicule. If Jesus’ body had been snatched from the tomb by his disciples (who, if the Gospels are witness, did not even understand the necessity of why the tomb needed to be empty by the third day, and who were cowering inside their lodgings lest they go in public and be identified and associated with a crucified criminal), the Pharisees and Sadducees would have ridiculed the claim of the Resurrection, and said: “We know what you did with the body—Joseph of Arimathea (or someone else with no reason to hide what he saw) told us: it’s buried right over there.” Christianity would never have been able to attract any followers in the face of such ridicule had the disciples perpetrated a fraud.
    Then there is the independent witness of Paul, who not only attested to his own experience of the risen Lord, but who again went to a martyr’s death based on his conviction from what he personally had seen and heard on the road to Damascus. And as he attests in 1 Cor. 15, there were some 500 other eyewitnesses who saw the risen Lord following the Resurrection, most of whom were still alive and thus could be questioned at the time he wrote his Epistle.
    This kind of eyewitness testimony, backed up by a conviction that endured even crucifixion and other torturous deaths, is by no means equivalent to your facile listing of “Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., who died for their beliefs — to say nothing of the Catholics and Protestants who died during the religious wars of the Reformation era, the residents of Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, etc.” Which of any of those you cite went to a martyr’s death protesting that they were eyewitnesses to the Resurrection, and hence willing to die based on what they themselves had seen and personally experienced? By equating conviction based on faith (or delusion, as in Jonestown) with conviction based on eyewitness experience of a sublime miracle, you debase the latter and grossly inflate the former.

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