Dumb Arguments Professors Make Against Christianity: Overview

I know what you’re thinking: This is too big a topic for a single blog post.  And you’d be right about that; this topic is like Pi.  There is literally no end to the stupid things professors will say against Christianity.  As Chesterton said, “any stick seems good enough to beat Christianity with.”

That’s why there is a whole category here devoted to this topic, and not just a single post.  This post is just an overview of the topic, and parallels the stuff on the Apologetic Professor web page (www.apologeticprofessor.com).  What I want to do here is a little less ambitious than countering every dumb and uninformed argument that my fellow professors make about what I believe.  I have a smaller goal: I want to generally talk about the dangerous larger conclusion that I think some students emerge from college with as a result of all these professorial epistemological shenanigans.

When professors play fast and loose with the truth, Christians can of course counter each specific error with a better argument.  If that only happened once or twice, the dangers would be minimal.  However, when it happens a hundred times, there is a different problem.  And I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of university students, at least here at the University of Montana.  (Go Griz!)

And that leads us to…the Ways of Knowing class.  The danger of this class doesn’t seem to me so much that the specific arguments are threatening to the Christian faith.  They aren’t.  At least, they aren’t to any thinking person.  The real danger is much more subtle.  It is that, after hearing multiple points of view all giving bad reasons to doubt Christianity, you may not really believe the bad arguments…but you also won’t believe Christianity, either.  In other words, the real danger is that you’ll just stop believing everyone entirely, in an unthinking manner. 

I’d like to point out that this is partially reasonable.  I do it myself on domains I don’t know anything about, and even sometimes on ones I know a lot about.  I’m very skeptical of essentially everyone.  So when Fox News tells me that Obama stinks for reason X, I am inclined not to believe reason X.  And when CNN tells me that Obama rocks for reason Y, I am inclined not to believe reason Y. 

So if you merely believed your professor’s argument in the Ways of Knowing class, life would be easier.  Because then I could show you the flaws in the argument.  But how does one fight a general sense that no one on earth, Christian or un-Christian, knows what the  %#$^& they are talking about?

Well, here I merely want to point out a great danger – not so much to your mind, but to your soul – in this way of thinking about religion.  And what I ultimately want to create in you is the courage to think.  It is your heathen, anti-Christian professors who often want you to swallow whole the strange distortions of the faith that they present.  What I want is the opposite: I want you to think, and think hard, about the truth.
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Now, imagine a parable.  Let’s assume that 2+2=4.  And imagine that in every single class you went to, you had a professor offer a different challenge to 2+2=4.  Some professors said 2+2=5, some 2+2=9, some 2+2=1.  But some professors took a totally different angle: They said things like “2+2=4 isn’t even a meaningful statement, because one cannot make such assumptions about knowledge” and “while 2+2=4 is a beautiful metaphor of the great unknowable, it would be foolish to assume that abstract principles of mathematics have any relationships to the real world.”

Now, to those of us who can clearly see the objective truth that 2+2=4 is based on real mathematical principles that correspond directly to rocks and Billy Ray Cyrus albums and Michael Bolton photos, this sort of thing is maddening.  Students come away from all of this not really believing that all their professors who argued against Basic Math knew what they were talking about.  The arguments are rarely convincing enough for that. But it is also natural to begin to question mathematics, as any human would in this parable.  I mean, if so many reasons can be generated against it, how can I trust it?

Well, it may shock you to know how accurate I think this parable is to the Ways of Knowing class.  Some of your professors will interpret the Book of Genesis as a communistic treatise.  Some of them will interpret it as a clear example of Freudianism.  Some of them will interpret it as illustrating the beauty and truth of Darwinism.  Meanwhile, I’m here believing that 2+2=4.  While they are simply putting whatever fancy that happens to please them…while they are simply dressing the book up in any garment they think looks nice…I am engaging in the radical and ridiculous idea that a religious book, written by religious people to religious people for a religious purpose, is…fundamentally religious.  I am not, you see, dressing it up in any garb at all.  I am only trying to understand it for what it obviously is: A religious work about God.

Now you may disbelieve it as a religious work about God.  I can respect that, even though I disagree with you about it.  But I can’t really respect your belief if it is influenced by the intellectual sloppiness of hearing a hundred meaningless criticisms of Christianity based on clear misinterpretations of it, just because some of your professors (who mostly don’t know what they are talking about in the slightest, as far as I can tell) said so.  That isn’t skepticism, which I respect; it is simply laziness.  Are you sure you want to risk your soul because you were too lazy to think for yourself?

Of course, coming to accept Christ isn’t as simple as accepting that 2+2=4.  God is invisible in a way that mathematics (for all its abstract glory) isn’t.  My point here isn’t to get you to accept Christianity, but to get you to stop rejecting it out of intellectual laziness masked under a veneer of “Ways of Knowing-like” skepticism.  I am a skeptic, too…that’s one of the reasons I am a Christian.

If you have professor arguments you would like to see Apologetic Professor address, please e-mail me at luke.conway@umontana.edu.

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3 Responses to Dumb Arguments Professors Make Against Christianity: Overview

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