Cold Case Christianity: Volitional Resistance to Christianity Often Masquerades as Rational Opposition

This is my response to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Volitional Resistance to Christianity Often Masquerades asRational Opposition

265In another blog post I offered three reasons why people typically reject a truth claim. Sometimes folks simply have rational doubts based on the evidence, some people have doubts that are purely emotional, and others deny the truth for volitional reasons.

But if Enns and other liberal Christians can have doubts about fundie claims such as Jesus' resurrection being provable, or bible inerrancy, then unless you say liberal Christians are spiritually dead, you cannot assert the spiritual deadness of atheists as the likely reason atheists deny what you consider to be "truth".  You must find another excuse, and the truth is that your fundy claims are easily criticized as irrational, unreasonable, and unlikely.  You automatically suspect falsity when a stranger on the bus tells you they can levitate their body with mental power alone, and I suspect falsity when a stranger on the bus tell me they have an invisible friend who died 2000 years ago.  But until critical thinking skills become common place, room will always be made for apologists to make money pretending that God never had a chance until somebody invented the phrase "forensic faith".

 Until the age of thirty-five, I rejected the claims of Christianity (and theism in general). As an atheist, I adamantly identified myself in the first category of skeptics: I was a rational objector. When asked about my resistance, I repeatedly told people it was based on the lack of convincing evidence for Christianity and an abundance of evidence supporting naturalistic processes (like evolution). After examining the evidence and changing my mind, I revisited my prior opposition and realized much of my resistance was simply a matter of volition.

Then that helps explain why you started thinking Christian evidences were convincing.  Your basis for unbelief was more volitional than rational.  Glad I don't have that problem.

At some point I had to ask myself, “Am I rejecting this because there isn’t enough evidence, or because I don’t want there to be enough evidence?”

Gee, how many apologists are guilty of not "wanting" there to be any evidence for atheism?

After writing the post related to rational, emotional and volitional objections, I received the following note from an atheist who comments occasionally:

“I would place myself firmly in your first category, Jim: I’m not convinced by Christianity because I don’t see evidence for it. But I would not say it’s because I lack information – it’s rather that I have too much information, especially information about how the real world works. Your placing yourself in the third category, that of volitionally rejecting God, is telling. Almost all the Christians I know who were once atheists place themselves either here or in the second category, rejecting God because they hate Him. And almost all the atheists I know fit into the first, rational category. I would almost be tempted to say that you were never a ‘true’ atheist. It seems also to be a widespread belief among Christians that most of us atheist are god-haters or self-lovers. I guess that fits in with numerous Scriptural verses, but it doesn’t reflect reality on the ground in my experience.”

I immediately recognized the words of this atheist reader. They are my words, spoken many years before I became a Christian. All the atheists I knew (virtually all my friends at the time) identified themselves in the first category as rational objectors. I’ll bet Antony Flew, the famous British philosopher and atheist, would also have identified himself in this camp prior to becoming a theist. I don’t know anyone who was once an atheist who would ever have identified themselves as anything other than a rational objector. This really shouldn’t surprise us.

Then I would surprise you:  Not only do I reject your god and bible inerrancy because the evidence against those things is as conclusive as possible in this world, I also reject your god on volitional grounds, because he not only causes evil, but "delights" to cause men to rape women, to grant success to kidnappers,  and cause parents to cannibalize their kids.  Deuteronomy 28:30, 41, 53, 63: 

15 "But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:

 30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.

 32 "Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and yearn for them continually; but there will be nothing you can do.

 41 "You shall have sons and daughters but they will not be yours, for they will go into captivity.

 53 "Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.

 63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it.

Unless you wish to argue that a woman is irrational to scream out against the local pedophile who just came to town, you cannot argue that I'm being irrational to use your god's above-cited moral failures to justify saying these traits are contradictory to the idea of "love" that god allegedly put in our hearts which was based on our being made in his "image".  Instead of worshipping Irenaeus and Tertullian as inerrant prophets, Mr. Wallace, you might consider that Marcion was correct, and the god of the OT was a demon.  Subjecting his people to punishment is one thing, "delighting" to watch rape after you have empowered the rapist through a curse to sexually violate Hebrew women, is quite another.  And yet in v. 63 is it specified that the type of "delight" God will take to inflict these atrocities, is the same "delight" he takes to grant prosperity to those who obey him.  So when you try to subtract happiness and cheer and glee from the delight God takes in causing these atrocities, you necessarily subtract it also from the delight he takes in granting prosperity.

Be sure your bible teaches the infinitude and perfection of god consistently, before you mouth off that we are in no position to judge God.  Moses successfully judged God's quick intent to kill people as irrational, and God apparenly saw the error of His way and changed His mind: 

 9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.
 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people. (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU) 

You can cite other parts of the bible that speak of God's foreknowledge and pretend that when you smoosh that and this together, you wind up with God not "really" changing his mind because he already knew what Moses' reaction would be, but that argument presupposes the truth of the certainly false doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and since so many spiritually alive Christians and their scholars deny inerrancy to various degrees, that doctrine has far less universal acclaim than other tools of interpretation such as "immediate context" and "grammar".  Therefore, I am not irrational to refuse to exalt bible inerrancy in my mind up to the status of governing hermeneutic.  If the way I interpret Exodus 32 causes it to conflict with something else in the bible, that is no reason whatsoever, to suspect that the interpretation is wrong.

Looking back at my own life as a young man who spent nine years in the university (prior to returning for seven more), I now recognize a simple truth: The more I thought I knew, the less teachable I became.

How boastful was the apostle Paul that he had the truth?  He cursed even angels from heaven should they preach a gospel different than his own (Galatians 1:8-9).   Will you say the more Paul thinks he knows, the less teachable he becomes?  What makes you think that his sometimes allegedly being "inspired by God" exempts him from your general rule?  Peter was sometimes inspired by God to the point of having trances: 

 9 On the next day, as they were on their way and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray.
 10 But he became hungry and was desiring to eat; but while they were making preparations, he fell into a trance;
 11 and he saw the sky opened up, and an object like a great sheet coming down, lowered by four corners to the ground,
 12 and there were in it all kinds of four-footed animals and crawling creatures of the earth and birds of the air.
 13 A voice came to him, "Get up, Peter, kill and eat!"
 14 But Peter said, "By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything unholy and unclean."
 15 Again a voice came to him a second time, "What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy."
 16 This happened three times, and immediately the object was taken up into the sky.
 17 Now while Peter was greatly perplexed in mind as to what the vision which he had seen might be,  (Acts 10:9-17 NAU)

and yet we know from Galatians that Peter around that time was a Judaizer:

 14 But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in the presence of all, "If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? (Gal. 2:14 NAU)

So no, Mr. Wallace, you cannot use the occasional divine inspiration of the apostles to justify your exempting them from that rule you wish to apply to everybody else, that the more they think they know, the less teachable they become.  So if that rule does indeed apply to the apostles too, then by your own rule, because they thought they knew great mysteries, they must have become correspondingly less teachable.


Thanks for your personal testimony, but only a fool would assume his personal problems as an atheist count as evidence that other atheists are plagued with the same problems.   I have above-average knowledge of the bible, and I'm willing to discuss whatever apologetics arguments you think are the most unassailable.  You will find that what you think shows unteachableness, is really just genuine scholarly knowledge that overcomes your popular-level efforts.  Maybe knowing this is why you banned me from your facebook page despite the fact that I never violated any of your rules or Facebook's rules.  Hard to make the commercial persuasive if your competitor is always right there to explain why you are wrong.

My educational self-confidence led to a form of self-reliance in many aspects of my life, including the foundational worldview I constructed along the way.

Will you admit this was true of the apostles after they became born again, yes or no? 

My “rational” resistance to theism was deeply tainted by my desire to be the author of my own worldview (rather than the acceptor of someone else’s). I don’t think this is all that uncommon for people who think they know something.

Was it uncommon for the apostles, who clearly thought they knew something? 

That’s why virtually every skeptic identifies himself as a rational resistor, and I think this is also why those who consider themselves educated often reject any theistic worldview that requires them to submit their authority.

But since you cannot rationally claim to know what's going on in the mind of any other atheist, you need to candidly acknowledge that at this point you are pushing speculation to its limits.n  The truth is that there are plenty of skeptics who are ready and willing to take you on in a formal debate, live or over the internet, and you not only refuse to acknowledge these challenged, but you relentlessly promote your books as if they are explosive rebuttals to skeptical critiques, highly inconsistent with your track record of never having a full scale debate with an informed skeptic.  You are a fool if you think allowing comments at your Facebook page constitutes proof that you are willing to have such debates.  I was there for several months before you banned me, and you never responded to anything I had to say.

Theistic claims are unlike virtually any other claim we might consider. Every day we weigh the evidence related to all kinds of important decisions. Which car would be the best for my family? What school should I attend? Which career path is best suited to my skill set? We evaluate the evidence and options without thinking much about the role volition and emotion are playing. But make no mistake about it, our wills and emotions are always at work, even when we would deny this is the case.

Thanks for saying "we", because you condemn all Christians here when you condemn skeptics.  What fool would deny that most Christians do Christianity because it offers emotional fulfillment? 

Our decisions related to theistic claims are far more critical than other decisions we might make. As C.S. Lewis wrote in God in the Dock, “Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance.

Incorrect: plenty of liberal Christians say Christianity is true and everybody is going to be saved, in which case, dying as an atheist involves no more risk than dying as a Christian.  You are just passing off Lewis' fundamentalistic view as if it were gospel, sorry, it ain't.

The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” Even before we begin to examine the evidence related to Christianity, we understand the implications of any future decision. If we reject Christianity (or theism broadly), we get to continue living as the ruling authority of our own lives. If we accept, we must submit to a much greater authority.

Moses didn't submit to that authority in Exodus 32:9-14, so the door is open to the possibility that your God is just plain stupid at times, and needs human advice in order to see the error of his ways.  When God disagrees with me, that's where the problem starts, not where it ends.

Our decision related to God’s existence has a deep impact on every other decision we make going forward. This decision related to theism is foundational in a way unlike any other. It’s foolish to think this plays no part in how we might consider the question in the first place.

Our wills and desires are often deeply connected to the rational resistance we offer prior to submitting to the truth of theism. I would never have admitted to any volitional resistance as an atheist,

Indicating you were less honest than me.  I have no problems admitting I volitionally resist your magic genie for the same reason I resist the god of Mormonism:  they don't exist, but belief that they exist causes terrible emotional distress for some even if it creates joy in others. 

and it shouldn’t surprise us when other atheists also deny this to be the case. Volitional resistance to Christianity often masquerades as rational opposition.

 and it shouldn’t surprise us when Christians also deny this to be the case. Volitional resistance to atheism often masquerades as rational opposition.