12 hard questions

Here's a list of questions from recent book. Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

I haven't read it, but it's supposed to reflect up-to-date sociological data regarding how many younger-generation unbelievers view Christianity. So I'll take my own stab at answering the questions:

Chapter 1: Aren’t we better off without religion?

i) Because many unbelievers regard religion as false in general, they dump all religions into the same basket. So Christianity gets blamed for the atrocities of Islam, evangelicalism gets blamed for Catholic scandals and massacres. Therefore, one corrective step that Christian apologists need to take is to distinguish between different religions and different sects. Humans are better off without certain religions, which doesn't mean they're better off with atheism. 

ii) To say we're better off without religion assumes that atheism (or naturalism, to be pedantic) offers a superior alternative. Yet many atheist thinkers admit that atheism logically leads to moral and existential nihilism. And it's not coincidental that as the pop culture becomes more secularized, it becomes more inhumane. Take movements like antinatalism and human extinction. 

Chapter 2: Doesn’t Christianity crush diversity?

Diversity can be good or bad. But when a people-group is evangelized and discipled, that fosters a creative stimulus to examine traditional culture in light of Christianity and Christianity in light to traditional culture. The results in an intellectual and artistic revolution by infusing fresh blood into the status quo. 

Chapter 3: How can you say there is only one true faith?

If God exists, how can there be more than one true faith? One God, one revelation. The one God acting in history. 

Chapter 4: Doesn’t religion hinder morality?

False religions (e.g. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, witchcraft) hinder morality. True religion fosters morality. Atheism subverts morality. 

Chapter 5: Doesn’t religion cause violence?

i) Violence, per se, isn't wrong. Sometimes violence is necessary to protect the innocent and uphold or restore justice.

ii) Atheism has a long track record of causing wanton violence on a massive scale. 

iii) False religions (e.g. Islam, medieval Catholicism) may foster gratuitous violence because they aim for outward conformity rather than personal conviction, so they resort to coercion to achieve mass conversion and nominal consensus. 

Chapter 6: How can you take the Bible literally?

"Literal" is a slippery term. The basic principle is to understand the Bible the way the original audience would construe it.

Chapter 7: Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?

i) Sometimes the conflict is not between science and the Bible, but between methodological atheism and the Bible. If you define a scientific worldview in terms of physicalism and causal closure, then that's incompatible with biblical dualism and supernaturalism. That, however, isn't based on scientific evidence but secular philosophical presuppositions.

ii) It can be a good and necessary thing when secular scientists are challenged by Christianity. There's a dominant scientific narrative according to which we exist in an accidental universe. There is no afterlife. Humans have no immortal soul. Necrosis is irreversible. We're just temporary, replaceable, interchangeable organisms.

Everything we value is a product of evolutionary brainwashing. Our brains were wired by a mindless, amoral process to value certain things. But that's arbitrary. Our brains could be rewired to value the opposite. Nothing is inherently right or good. 

Chapter 8: Doesn’t Christianity denigrate women?

i) According to Christianity, there are innate stereotypical physical and psychological differences between men and women. Distinctive male virtues and distinctive female virtues. 

ii) According to atheism, women simply exist to produce human replacements. Women have no inherent value. They're only a means to an end. Once they pass the childbearing years they outlive their usefulness. In atheism, women have no independent worth.

iii) In addition, feminine instincts are just programmed into them by evolutionary conditioning. There's nothing inherently good or true about feminine instincts. They're just slaves to their brain chemistry and hormones. 

Chapter 9: Isn’t Christianity homophobic?

If homosexuality is physically and psychologically harmful, then it ought to be discouraged–in the same way that socially and self-destructive addictive behavior ought to be discouraged. 

Chapter 10: Doesn’t the Bible condone slavery?

The Bible regulates what it cannot abolish. Where feasible, it mitigates evil. Rev 18 is an attack on the economic system of slavery. 

Chapter 11: How could a loving God allow so much suffering?

Paradoxically, suffering can be a source of second-order goods. Unique goods unobtainable apart from suffering. To eliminate all suffering eliminates all the embedded goods.

Chapter 12: How could a loving God send people to hell?

God isn't reducible to love. God is not a love machine that robotically treats the just and wicked alike. Love without justice isn't good.