Is There a Good Reason to be Christian?
A debate between a Christian and an atheistic philosopher
The following is a debate I had by email with a Christian reader named Kent Gordon. The question we considered was whether the Christian God exists or, more broadly, whether there’s a good reason to be a Christian.
We each wrote an opening statement, and I’ve divided our replies according to the opening statement to which they were directed. I’ve also lightly edited the exchange for Medium, fixing up some typos and the like.
Ben Cain’s Opening Statement
The Christian God very probably doesn’t exist.
For one thing, God as pictured in Christianity is incoherent. There’s the kindly, loving Jesus character from the gospels and then there’s the tribal deity that Jews understood to be revealed to them, the God of the Old Testament which is enfolded into the Christian’s conception. That older, more bloodthirsty, legalistic God seeps into Jesus’s apocalyptic pronouncements about eternal hellfire for sinners and nonbelievers.
What this means is that even if atheism turned out to be false and some personal entity created the natural universe, that deity wouldn’t likely conform specifically to Christian expectations. Just as Christians would like…
