Apologising for something, in a strict sense, does not mean ‘to be sorry for it’. If you’ve expressed the opinion that surgeons should not be dismembering children from their working organs, you may have been called a “Nazi apologist” before, implying that in doing so you are in essence saying, “Sure Hitler did some bad things, but at least he didn’t do that.” That is not apologetics. Coming from the Greek word ‘ἀπολογία/apologia’ it means to make a formal defense of a position, not a literal apology for it.
Where the term is most frequently used is in ‘Christian apologetics’, meaning a formal defense of the Christian faith on philosophical grounds. Or at least it should. Today I’m going to complain about how often it feels like it falls into the misnomer of its own name, and gives a limp-wristed effort, mounting to saying, “Guys come on please if you just possibly consider this one potential idea then maybe there’s something more than the universe”. That is not even the beginnings of a formal defense of Christianity.
I don’t want to appear ungrateful to Catholic apologist Trent Horn, his arguments in his book ‘Answering Atheism’ played a role in my conversion from atheism, but whilst listening to his July 26th show “#640 - DIALOGUE: Does evil disprove God? (with Alex O’Connor, Joe Schmid, and Cameron Bertuzzi)” I realised a frustration had bubbled up inside me for the way apologetics is typically done, now that I have “progressed” from listening to podcasts talking to atheist materialists to reading Scholastics first-hand and opening up a new world of philosophy. I know how pretentious that makes me sound, but there is a huge gap between the two mediums in terms of intellectual rigor that I wish was crossed by now as we would be much better off.
In this show Trent joins an atheist, an agnostic, and a protestant to talk about apologetics. Alex, the atheist, spends the whole time leaning on the problem of evil argument whilst the rest fumble around it. It’s possible that I’ve never truly got this argument, because I hear all the time how it’s “the best argument against God’s existence” (already a nonsensical phrase) and just never grasped how it was an objection at all beyond 1 minute of scrutiny. As Alex uses the term suffering so much, we could phrase his particular objection as:
If an all-good God existed there would be no suffering. Suffering exists, so God does not.
This already puts you onto a utilitarian and hedonistic footing whereby pleasure means good and pain means bad, but even on that shoddy premise I don’t see why it couldn’t be answered this quickly:
Christianity posits that Heaven exists, a world with no suffering. This universe has suffering, but if it has more good within it than it has bad, that is a valid reason for God to allow it to exist in this state alongside the all-good Heaven.
However, the objection given by Cameron, the protestant, can be paraphrased as:
But you could believe in ‘non-good theism’ and believe that God exists but just isn’t an all-good being.
If I wasn’t driving while I heard this, I would’ve had my head in my hands trying not to scream. How on earth could this ever be called a defense of the Christian faith, to cede to an atheist that 1) God is “a being”, 2) He could be something other than what Christians say He is - at least you could believe so if it made you feel better, or something?
If you read my previous article “A Current Synthesis of Thought” you’d have read me explain that the observable existence of moral good requires it’s own perfect form - the Good, aka God - which is the summit of being itself, not “a being”. The only podcasts you’ll hear that explained are Godsplaining and the lectures from The Thomistic Institute, run by the same Dominican monks (good luck understanding them if you’re not already a theologian), or Bishop Robert Barron’s appearance on the Lex Fridman Show. You will probably never hear God described as ‘pure act giving potency to all else’ & ‘being itself sustaining’ in any pop apologetics, instead God is sometimes relegated to the description of a being, defended by saying “Yeah I can see why you think he doesn’t exist but pretty please consider the chance that he possibly does and just maybe isn’t actually God but something else? Pleeeeeeease?”
The likely reason for this dumbing down of not just apologetics for God, but the description of God Himself, is that most people won’t understand Scholastic arguments - indeed I admitted that most will not understand Dominicans. But that cannot be a justified reason for not ‘shooting with both barrels’ in the name of the Lord. If a person is a full-time Christian apologist, they should consider it their job to argue “God does not exist, He is existence” in an understandable way. It can be done, I’ve done it, and I could make my explanation much simpler in terminology whilst still retaining the all the meat of it. Why can’t people who’ve done this professionally for years?
New Atheism is dying (thanks be to God) but it’s extremely polemic and aggressive approach surely must have shown us that a wishy-washy limp-wristed defense of religion is completely insufficient to those who don’t believe. The premier writers used bully tactics, not arguments, so diluting arguments to cater to them wasn’t only completely ineffective because you used the completely wrong strategy, but only actually introduced structural weakness into the arguments, growing the perception that religious people are just idiots who don’t understand science. Ed Feser hit back, calling them idiots who don’t understand what science even is because they don’t understand philosophy, which must come first.
I’m not saying everybody should be equally abrasive to those who attack their beliefs, but to rummage around in the front of their trousers until you find your testicles, pop them back out of your abdomen, puff out your chest, and stand your ground. Tell them how and why their premises are faulty, how they don’t even understand who God is yet try to argue against Him, how science cannot prove science so logical proof is more valid than scientific proof, that the existence of anything makes no sense unless God is existence itself.
Apologetics as it stands severely lacks masculinity, and that is what so many men who argue against Christianity are desperately looking for and should be met with. The archetypal atheist is looking for it without knowing, unconsciously yearning for father figures in a fatherless world. Seeing God as their ultimate fulfilment starts with you being a man, laying down the law, putting them in their place and humbling them.
I’ve written before on the rise of neo-pagans who idolise masculinity, and separately on the corruption of masculinity that this myopic idolisation often brings. These people are led by emotional aesthetics rather than arguments. That’s not my cup of tea, nor a particularly good ethos, but we can still beat them at their own game. Jesus Christ died in the ultimate act of virtuous self-sacrifice, descended into the bowels of Hell for 3 days to fight the forces of evil singlehandedly, rescue the innocent, bring them to Heaven, and brought Himself back to life to tell us of His victory over death and our ability to enter Heaven in order to fulfil our purpose for existing. That is better than any Icelandic saga or Homeric poem, and makes the Doom Slayer take notes.
As I have said, apologetics does not literally mean to apologise for something. Why, then, does Christian apologetics so often feel like that’s what it’s doing? Why are probabilistic arguments used in place of impregnable logical ones? Why is an inch of ground ever ceded to faulty modernist worldviews which contrive themselves into a corner?
Western society believed in the Scholastic arguments for centuries, their premises for thousands of years. These people were not stupid backwards savages, they were as much human as you or I, even if they didn’t have microwave ovens. They were either right or wrong - the evidence is overwhelming that they were right. The only way they can be perceived as wrong is to not understand it, or look at it through a broken modern lens which can’t even tell us if women exist.
Do not ever pander to this lens; destroy it.