Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Can Christians prove their claims?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Faith Alone!
Bishop Barnes, the author of The Rise of Christianity, an unpopular man among Christians because he was too honest for them, was once asked whether Christian claims could be proved. The bishop smiled in resignation, admitting that it was a frequently asked question, but that he could prove nothing. Christianity was accepted on faith alone or rejected.
Lesser and evangelically minded Christians will not give such an honest answer. They will first turn on the questioner and demand to know what they thought proof meant, suggesting that it was used in different ways, bullet proof, proof of the pudding, and so on, as well as a demonstration of validity. These tactics are meant to throw the unsuspecting listener off guard and cast certain doubts into their mind, namely that proof is not necessarily proof. Yet “to prove” has the central meaning of “to test”. If something has been proved, it has been tested and found to be sound.
The claims of science might be too extensive and complicated for me to prove myself, but besides the authority of a large number of important and clever men, there are everyday practical appliances that depend upon the truth of science to work. I can therefore have confidence in science from my own experience.
The Christian will claim the same confidence in authority and their own practical experience, but their experience is not something like a mobile telephone or an antibiotic drug that all of us experience. Christian experience is personal and the Christians claim to have a personal God. In short, these experiences are not real material experiences but psychological ones, and might be experienced equally or more by Buddhists, witches or ecstatic dancers, or even by just contemplating the wonder of Nature.
If pressed, the Christian evangelists might admit that faith helped them to be persuaded by the proof they were offered, but the proof is nothing more than expressions of faith by others. It is a great house of cards held together by the huge amount of money the various churches have extracted from people over the centuries. This money pays for professional Christians to have a full time job trying to persuade others that their scam is true, and publishing endless empty books to the same effect, successfully swamping the market with dross, so that few people ever get to read the counter arguments.
Christians are taught to use lying language without once thinking that it might be wrong. They use expressions like, the “facts of my faith”, the “certainties about God”, “Christian knowledge” and “Christian truth”. All of these beg the question asked. If Christianity is without foundation none of these truths, facts and certainties are anything of the sort. Christians use all of these affirmative words without a blush because they give the impression of certainty. That is why Christianity is a deception from beginning to end.
The truth is that no Christian can do what is asked, just as Bishop Barnes admitted. No Christian can prove that believers will get the reward of an eternal life after death. And that is the sole reason for being a Christian.
