What are the reasons that ex-Christians, doubting Christians, agnostics, atheists, and other skeptics give for not accepting the truth-claims of Christianity?  In nearly every case, the answers that they give fall into one of the following categories:

• Suffering and evil make it impossible to believe in a good God.
• There is no sign of God’s intervention in the world or any solid evidence that prayers are answered. Life makes sense without God.
• The Christians that they know seem to be hypocrites, judgmental, annoying, stupidly naïve, or a combination of all of the above.
• Christianity doesn’t seem to have anything worthwhile to offer, and it therefore seems irrelevant. People can be moral without believing in God, and they don’t need the church or a religious structure to find personal happiness, social connections, or spirituality.
• The church seems to be on the wrong side of ethics and human rights – whether in the 12^th century during the Crusades or in the 21^st century on the issue of gender and gay rights.
• In a pluralistic world, it is hard to believe Christianity’s claim to be the only true religion. A study of comparative religion makes Christianity’s exclusive truth claims seem implausible.
• Science and archaeological evidence have disproved many of the Bible’s stories. In our modern scientific age, rational people shouldn’t give much credence to a 2,000-year-old book of legends and myths.  In fact, science may make it impossible to believe in any sort of God at all.
• The Bible shows no sign of being a book from God. It is filled with contradictions, unfulfilled prophecies, fantastic accounts, and borrowings from paganism.
• The God of the Bible is a petty, vindictive character.
• The idea of hell seems unfair.

These objections fall into three major categories: 1) Objections to God’s fairness; 2) Objections to the church; and 3) Scientific and historical objections to the Bible.  And for most skeptics (including I myself at one time, when I was a skeptic) these objections function in tandem and reinforce each other.  Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, for example, ostensibly focuses on scientific objections to theism, but devotes a large amount of space to attacking the character of the biblical God as deeply unfair.  The New Testament scholar (and self-professed agnostic) Bart Ehrman has long said that the historical and biblical manuscript evidence shook his faith in Christianity, but he has also recently written that the main reason why he found it impossible to believe the Christian message was because of the problem of suffering.  When I was a skeptic, I argued that the archaeological evidence made it impossible to believe in the Bible’s historicity, but I was also deeply bothered by the idea of hell, the behavior of God in the Old Testament, and the poor ethical track record of the church.

My own journey from professing Christian to open skeptic followed a fairly typical pattern: I began by asking questions about the historicity of the Bible and God’s justice, and as I continued my investigation, I found increasingly more reasons to believe that the historical and scientific evidence that I once had thought supported the Bible really rested on a house of cards.  I was bothered by the American evangelical church’s poor track record on issues of race and gender.  And I found that the biblical theology of hell – along with discussions of God’s judgment in general – were impossible to reconcile with my sense of ethics.

Most accounts written by thoughtful ex-Christians follow a similar trajectory.  John Loftus, a former Christian Church minister and trained apologist, devoted extensive space in his book Why I Am an Atheist not only to scientific and historical evidence against Christianity, but also to an ethical discussion of hell and God’s judgment.

In fact, the idea of combining historical, scientific, and ethical arguments against Christianity goes all the way back to the seventeenth-century deists.  Most of the modern skeptical objections to Christianity – that is, that parts of the Bible are forgeries and legends, that the God of the Bible is unjust, and that the idea of everlasting punishment for those who reject Christ is especially unfair – date back to the deists of the Enlightenment era.

But those deistic attacks on Christianity did not remain unanswered, nor was it even necessarily the case that most educated people found these attacks compelling.  Many highly educated Christians of the seventeenth and eighteenth century wrote voluminous responses to all of the skeptical arguments of their day, and in my view, some of their responses were surprisingly insightful.  In the interest of fairness, I think that if we are going to revive the eighteenth-century deistic objections to Christianity, we might want to also take another look at the responses that Christians of their day gave to their attacks to get their side of the argument.  That’s one of the things that I have tried to do in this website.

I have designed this website to cover the skeptical objections that I found especially compelling when I was wandering away from Christianity.  If you think that I have correctly identified one or more of the reasons why you find it difficult (or impossible) to accept Christianity, I hope that you’ll consider the possibility that thoughtful answers exist to your objections, and that you’ll be willing to take the time to explore those answers.

I would encourage you to browse through the various articles on the topics of greatest interest to you, but no matter what else you look at on this site, please be sure to take a look at the arguments that I have given in favor of Christianity under the heading “Why should I believe?”  You’ll notice that one thing I suggest there is that although persuasive answers to the most common skeptical objections exist, accepting these answers may require a paradigm shift.  What paradigm are you using to investigate Christianity?  That’s the question that I want to explore next.