"If God is real why doesn't he give us signs anymore" OH MY GOSH SERIOUSLY?!
Thousands of people are miraculously healed at the spring in Lourdes, France. People discover the incorrupt bodies of saints. People are healed from relics. You can still see the tilma of Juan Diego, where the image of Our Lady miraculously appeared with an IMPOSSIBLE amount of detail, which also survived a crazy attempt to destroy it. St. Padre Pio (recent enough that we have photos of him) bilocated. Did you know that saints can't be canonized unless the Church investigates and confirms two miracles attributed to their intercession? The Eucharist at Mass has turned into real human flesh, which non-Christian scientists and doctors have examined and said IS STILL ALIVE.
Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. There's a lot to be heard.
“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you;” - 1 Peter 3:15
You can’t answer every question of someone who opposes God. Often their objections are moral even if they claim it’s scientific or social. We don’t have the ability to speak to people face to face and get to the heart of the questioner so sometimes it’s best to get to the broader root of the problem. Always ask them to define what they mean. Don’t let them define Christianity, morality or reality by their relative standard because then you’ll be talking at cross purposes. Don’t let them back you into a corner defending yourself. If they claim to have evidence, they’re the ones who have to provide it for their claims, not the other way around. Make them. Nearly 100% of the time they cannot and will just evade your question or submit evidence of a baseless, personal nature.
Lastly, be honest enough to admit we cannot “prove God” by their standards of touching him and measuring with scientific means but also forceful enough to say that by those same standards, they cannot disprove God either. We can know God is real by observable means beyond our own conversion. The known universe testifies to his reality in creation, history confirms his incarnation, archeological and historical evidence confirms the Bible narrative which means God’s Word is true.
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” - Romans 1:19-20
An atheist cannot prove gravity by giving you a cup of it, yet any intellectually honest one will say they know it is real by the effects, by the observable evidence on the universe and humanity. They can’t show you the body of Christ, they can’t say he did not resurrect or disprove he was God in the flesh. Don’t let them get you so worked up you forget that they’re the ones with no evidence yet all the bluster. In the end it’s not about winning the argument but trying to throw a stone in someone’s shoe. What we cannot do, God always can. God’s Word does not return void.
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” - Hebrews 4:12-13
Apologetics is so important in a time when people claim to want discussion and evidence but really are about wanting control over others and to destroy faith. Put on the whole armor of God every day and know that while we can point people to God’s truth, in love, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be any less firm in standing for said truth. Know when to walk away though and not keep engaging if their logic is simply divorced from reality because you can’t converse with someone who isn’t in their right mind. Don’t get worked up with people who aren’t thinking logically. We don’t need to beg people to come into the kingdom, Jesus didn’t. If they want to walk themselves to the gates of Hell, God allows them the free will choice and I think more Christians need to start accepting that uncomfortable reality. Point them to God often and always because regardless of the places you fall short, he will not and he knows what they need to hear.
“No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.” - Luke 8:16-17
Resources on Apologetics:
Cold Case Christianity
Stand To Reason
Answers In Genesis
David Rives Ministries
Cross Examined
gotquestions.org (It’s not apologetics specifically but there isn’t a biblical question I haven’t seen this site not have an answer for and be sound doctrinally on.)
Julius Cesar, his existence is only confirmed by 10 official and reliable manuscripts. Not even from his time. In fact 900 years after
Yet Christ, the gospels alone, are 24,000. 5,800 of Greek alone. Why’s that important. Cross referencing! Ie accuracy. And only 30+ years after he ascended.
If one were to make the argument of “he didn’t write anything himself!”
then look no further than Socrates who didn’t write anything, his existence solely predicated by 50 manuscripts from his students.
So people choose to believe is Julius and Socrates just fine, yet not Christ?
Christian apologetics is an inherently funny field of pseudo-philosophy. Someone will come along with some stupid non-answer to the Problem of Suffering like "God is always in control" or "Everything happens for a reason" or "God uses evil for good" and then some other person will come along with a refutation to this non-answer that's just another non-answer like "God may not explain everything, but he is always besides you and will never abandon you" which just replaces one version of "People who ask questions go to Hell" with another version of "People who ask questions go to Hell" and no one who's doing this has any awareness of what they're doing. You can teach a pig to play a video game, but you can't get your average Christian to do actual philosophy.
I have a hypothesis. When you read modern apologetics, theodicy is the front-and-center issue that has to be addressed. It's vital and an apologetic work that doesn't address it at all is either going to be highly specialized or having a gaping lacuna.
But if you read older apologetics, theodicy is just... not really present as an issue? It obviously gets brought up (the Book of Job exists, after all), but it's a minor issue. To the extent that God's justice in mortal life gets questioned, the question is "Why do the wicked prosper?" not "Why do the righteous suffer?" And interestingly, I rarely see the former question addressed in modern apologetics.
My hypothesis is that this is a direct result of the discovery that the world is largely mechanistic. Earthquakes happen and we know exactly why they happen, and it's very hard to attribute an earthquake to a miracle if it happens in an area with fault lines. And a lot of other things that were mysterious and unexplained also have causes that can only be considered miraculous in the loosest sense of the word.
But if you don't know? Then it's very easy to attribute earthquakes to sin. Why do the righteous suffer? Well, we can't know for sure that they really are righteous. And in any case, even if they are righteous, God could be testing them. They aren't suffering simply because of low pressure fronts and plate tectonics; they're suffering by the will of God!
And even if you don't know why something is the will of God, it's a lot more comfortable to know that your suffering is his will and has some higher purpose; in a mechanistic universe God just set things up so that suffering happens sometimes and it probably has nothing to do with your sins or testing you or really anything but luck. That's a lot harder to take.
Whereas in a mechanistic universe, it's very easy to understand why the wicked prosper. We can analyze the exact things that bring about their prosperity. They prosper not because of God's will, but because of the basic rules that govern how the world works.
Again, this isn't universal. The question of the suffering of the righteous is something theologians have cared about, but it didn't need to be the main Big Argument they had to overcome to be convincing.
(As a side note, there were also just... a lot more sins historically that people thought of as significant and worthy of bringing suffering upon the sinner for. Once you don't think masturbation is a sin, you've gotten rid of easily 15% of all sinning.)
I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America is Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen's 2023 book on the history of corporate apologetics; it's great:
https://thenewpress.com/books/corporate-bullsht
I found out about this book last fall when David Dayen reviewed it for the The American Prospect; Dayen did a great job of breaking down its thesis, and I picked it up for my newsletter, which prompted Hanauer to send me a copy, which I finally got around to reading yesterday (I have gigantic backlog of reading):
The authors' thesis is that the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed. What's more, we keep falling for it. Every time we try to have nice things, our bosses – and their well-paid Renfields – dust off their talking points from the last go-round, do a little madlibs-style search and replace, and bust it out again.
It's a four-stage plan:
I. First, insist that there is no problem.
Enslaved people are actually happy. Smoking doesn't cause cancer. Higher CO2 levels are imaginary and they're caused by sunspots and they're good for crop yields. The hole in the ozone layer is only a problem if you foolishly decide to hang around outside (this is real!).
II. OK, there's a problem, but it's your fault.
An epidemic of on-the-job maimings is actually an epidemic of sloppy workers. A gigantic housing crash is really a gigantic cohort of greedy, feckless borrowers. Rampant price gouging is actually a problem of too much "spending power" (that is, "money") in the hands of working people.
III. Any attempt to fix this will make it worse.
Equal wages for equal work will cause bosses to fire women and people of color. Protecting people with disabilities will cause bosses to fire disable people. Minimum wages will cause bosses to buy machines and fire "unskilled" workers. Gun control will only increase underground gun sales. Banning carcinogenic pesticides will end agriculture as we know and we'll all starve to death.
IV. This is socialism.
Income tax is socialism. Estate tax is socialism. Medicare and Medicaid are socialism. Food stamps are socialism. Child labor laws are socialism. Public education is socialism. The National Labor Relations Act is socialism. Unions are socialism. Social security is socialism. The Fair Labor Standards Act is socialism. Obamacare is socialism. The Civil Rights Act is socialism. The Occupational Health and Safety Act is socialism. The Family Medical Leave Act is socialism. FDR is a socialist. JFK is a socialist. Lyndon Johnson is a socialist. Carter is a socialist. Clinton is a socialist. Obama is a socialist. Biden is a socialist (Biden: "I beat the socialist. That's how I got the nomination").
Though this playbook has been in existence since the nation's founding, the authors point out that from the New Deal until the Reagan era, it didn't get much traction. But starting in the Reagan years, the well-funded network of billionaire-backed think-tanks, endowed economics chairs, and latter-day propaganda vehicles like Prageru breathed new life into these tactics.
We can see this playing out right now as the corporate world scrambles for a response to the Harris campaign's proposal to address price-gouging. Reading Matt Stoller's dissection of this response, we can see the whole playbook on display:
First, corporate apologists insisted that greedflation didn't exist, despite the fact that CEOs kept getting on earnings calls and boasting to their investors about how they were using the excuse of inflation to jack up prices:
There are all these out-in-the-open commercial entities whose sole purpose is to "advise" large corporations about their prices, which is just a barely disguised euphemism for price-fixing, from meat-packing:
That's stage one: "there's no problem." Stage two is "it's your fault." That's Larry Summers and co insisting that a couple of stimulus checks a couple years ago are responsible for inflation, because it gave you too much "buying power," and so the only possible fix is to jack up interest rates and trigger mass layoffs and sharp wage decreases across the economy:
Stage three is "any attempt to fix this will make it worse." When Isabella Weber pointed out that there was a long history of price-controls being used to fight price-gouging, corporate apologists lost their minds and brigaded her, calling her all kinds of nasty names and insisting that her prescription didn't even warrant serious discussion, because any attempt to control prices would destroy the economy:
You may recognize this as cousin to the response to rent control proposals, which inevitably trigger a barrage of economists screaming that this will not work and will actually reduce the housing supply and drive up prices, which is true, provided that you ignore all evidence and history:
And stage four is "this is socialism." Look, I am a literal card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America and I can assure you, Kamala Harris is not a socialist (and more's the pity). But that didn't stop the most eminently guillotineable members of the investor class from hair-on-fire, ALL-CAPS denunciations of the Harris proposal as SOCIALISM and Harris herself as a COMMUNIST:
The author's thesis is that by naming the playbook and giving examples of it – for example, showing how the "proof" that minimum wage increases will destroy jobs was also offered as "proof" not to abolish slavery, ban child labor, add fireproofing to textile factories, and pay women and Black people the same as white guys – we can vaccinate ourselves against it.
Certainly, we've reached a moment where the public is increasingly skeptical of claims that we can't fix anything because the economists say that this is the best of all possible worlds, and if that means that we're all going to boil to death in our own skin, so be it:
In other words, after 40 years of subordinating politics to economics, there's a resurgence of belief in politics – that is, doing stuff – rather than hunkering down and waiting for the technocrats to fix everything:
Corporate Bullshit is a brisk and bracing read – I got through it in about an hour in my hammock yesterday – and, in laying out the bullshit playbook's long history of nonsensical predictions and pronouncements, it does make a very good case that we should stop listening to people who quote from it.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
