The four great philosophical objections to Christianity — the impossibility of miracles, the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and religious pluralism — have occupied some of the sharpest minds of the last three centuries. None of them are decisive. All of them have been answered, many times, by philosophers whose work is accessible to the general reader. This chapter summarizes the best responses.
1. The Problem of Miracles (Hume)
David Hume argued in 1748 that no testimony for a miracle is ever believable, because a miracle violates the uniform laws of nature, and the uniform laws of nature constitute the strongest possible evidence against the miracle. Hume's argument is more rhetorically effective than logically sound, and in modern philosophy has largely been set aside.
The argument is circular: it assumes what it is trying to prove. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of "firm and unalterable experience" — but whether our experience is firm and unalterable is precisely the question miracle testimony raises. To exclude miracle testimony on the basis of a rule that says miracle testimony cannot count as evidence is to rule out the conclusion in advance.
The argument also fails on Bayesian probability. John Earman, a leading philosopher of science, titled his book on this topic Hume's Abject Failure. Earman showed that even granting that miracles are a priori improbable, sufficient testimony — multiple independent eyewitnesses, self-sacrificial commitment, consistent detail — can overwhelm the prior improbability.
Finally, Hume's argument assumes a closed universe. But if there is a God who created the natural order, he is not violating nature when he acts within it; he is acting as its author. "Miracle" does not mean "contradiction" but "extraordinary action of the one who set up the order in the first place." You cannot rule out divine action by defining it out of existence.
2. The Problem of Evil
If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why is there evil? This is the most emotionally and philosophically serious objection to theism. It comes in two forms.
The logical problem of evil argued that theism is logically incoherent — that the existence of any evil is logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God. Alvin Plantinga's 1974 The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom, and Evil are generally regarded, even among atheist philosophers, as having decisively refuted the logical problem. If God's creation of free creatures is itself a great good, and if free creatures can choose evil, then the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of a perfectly good God. Even J. L. Mackie, the most influential proponent of the logical problem, conceded Plantinga had answered it.
The evidential problem of evil is harder: even if evil is logically possible under theism, doesn't the sheer amount of suffering count as evidence against God? The Christian response is multi-part. God does not merely permit suffering; he enters it. The cross is not a decorative religious symbol; it is the place where God himself experienced the worst injustice the world has ever committed and answered it with forgiveness and resurrection. A God who suffered with us is not the same as a distant deity permitting our suffering from far away. Second, while we cannot always see the good purposes evil serves, we are in no position epistemically to rule them out. Third, the Christian story ends — not in the universal heat-death of materialism, but in the renewal of all things where "he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more" (Rev 21:4). The question is not whether suffering exists; it does. The question is which story gives it a coherent resolution.
The Alternative Costs
Atheism does not escape the problem of evil. It merely relocates it. On atheism, suffering exists without reason, without redemption, and without any moral standard by which to call it "evil" at all. The very existence of a moral outrage against suffering is, on materialism, a brute fact with no grounding. The Christian at least has a story in which suffering is both real and eventually answered. The atheist has only the real.
3. Divine Hiddenness
If God exists and loves people, why does he not make himself more obvious? Why do sincere seekers sometimes fail to find him? This is the argument developed by J. L. Schellenberg.
The Christian response has several angles. First, what would "more obvious" require? Some atheists say they would believe if stars rearranged into letters spelling "I exist." But consider what kind of relationship such a revelation would produce. A being so overpowering that belief became inevitable would also produce a relationship of coerced terror rather than freely offered trust. God values the latter.
Second, God is not as hidden as the argument implies. The universe has a beginning (cosmological evidence), is fine-tuned (teleological evidence), contains life-forms with vast information content (biological evidence), and has been entered by a specific person who rose from the dead (historical evidence). A generation without access to these facts is hard to imagine.
Third, hiddenness cuts both ways. People often do not find what they are not looking for. Jesus said "Seek, and you will find" (Matt 7:7) — the implicit condition is actual seeking. Pascal put it with his usual bite: "There is enough light for those who desire to see, and enough darkness for those who have a contrary disposition."
Fourth, for the specific case of sincere people who have sought and not found — the Christian tradition knows this experience. The Psalms are full of it ("How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?"). Mother Teresa's journals revealed decades of felt absence in a life of remarkable faithful service. The dark night of the soul is part of the spiritual journey, not a proof against it.
4. Religious Pluralism
There are many world religions. They cannot all be true. Isn't it arrogant to claim one is uniquely correct?
This objection often conflates three questions that should be separated. Is exclusivity arrogant by nature? No — exclusivity is arrogant only if the exclusive claim is held without reason or humility. A doctor who says "you have cancer and here is the only treatment that works" is not being arrogant; she is being truthful. If Christianity is true, then saying so is not arrogance; saying otherwise would be dishonesty.
Can all religions be "equally valid paths"? Not coherently. The major religions make mutually contradictory claims about the nature of God, of humanity, of salvation, and of the afterlife. Buddhism denies a personal God; Islam affirms one but denies the Trinity; Hinduism affirms many; Judaism rejects the Messiahship of Jesus. These claims cannot all be true simultaneously. Pluralism as it is usually formulated is itself a distinctive metaphysical claim — not neutrality, but a rival worldview that happens to include "all religions are culturally conditioned human constructions."
Why Christianity specifically? Because Christianity alone, among the major world religions, rests on a public historical event — the resurrection of a specific man at a specific time, witnessed by hundreds, for which the best historical evidence is decisive (see Part 5). The other religions largely depend on the personal authority of their founder. Christianity depends on something that either happened or did not. That is not arrogance; it is vulnerability. It is one of the few religious claims that could, in principle, be falsified — and hasn't been.
Finally, Christianity is also, practically, the most globally represented religion in human history — spread across every continent, race, language, and culture. It is not a Western religion. It was born in Asia, grew first in Africa and Europe, and today has its fastest growth in the Global South. If any religion transcends its cultural conditions, Christianity has the most demonstrated claim.
We have solved the philosophical objections to Christianity many times. We have not solved them so thoroughly that every atheist will be persuaded, any more than we have solved the objections to democracy so thoroughly that every authoritarian will yield. But the answers are in, and they are good. — Paraphrase of Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief
The burden of proof is on whoever makes a claim — and both theism and atheism make claims. To say "God exists" is a claim. To say "God does not exist" is also a claim. To shrug and say "I don't know" is agnosticism, which is a legitimate position but is not identical with atheism.
The Christian accepts the burden of making a case and has spent two millennia doing so. What is unreasonable is the modern rhetorical move of placing the full burden on the believer while treating the denial of God as a default stance requiring no argument. On the evidence for the universe's beginning, its fine-tuning, the information content of life, the moral structure of consciousness, and the historical evidence for the resurrection, the balance of probabilities favors theism — and not just bare theism, but the Christian God specifically.
This is correct, and Christians do not usually claim otherwise. Atheists can and do behave ethically; some shame professing Christians with their decency. But the question is not whether atheists are moral. The question is whether atheism can ground morality. On a naturalistic worldview, moral facts are either (a) brute facts that somehow arise from the non-moral, (b) subjective preferences, or (c) cultural conventions. None of these adequately account for the weight of our actual moral judgments — that torturing innocents for fun is really wrong, not just disapproved by most.
C. S. Lewis' observation still stands: our very outrage at evil is evidence of a moral order beyond ourselves. The atheist who calls God evil for permitting suffering is borrowing the moral framework that theism provides to mount the charge.