Every so often the same three visitors show up at my page in the same week, and this was one of those weeks. Three of atheism’s favorite arguments arrived in the comments, each confident, each familiar. I answered them one at a time, and I want to lay out the whole exchange here, because the pattern that emerges matters for your faith more than any single argument does.
The Crowd of Gods
The first objection is a favorite because it sounds devastating. “There are thousands of gods. Yours is just one of the pile.”
Think about what that argument would have to prove. The existence of many wrong answers to an equation has never shown that there is no right answer. It shows that people were working on a real problem. Humanity’s long search for God is evidence that the question is real, not that every answer is equally false.
Then notice the category difference the objection hides. Brahma, Ganesha, Gaia, Ulgen: these are finite beings inside the universe, born or formed from something that came before them. The evidence I examine on this page points somewhere else entirely. A universe that began. A cosmos tuned on a knife edge. A moral law standing above every culture. All of it points to an eternal, uncaused Cause beyond space, time, and matter, and that is a job description almost none of the candidates in the pile even claims to meet.
Very few survive the first cut. And of those, only One staked His entire claim on a checkable public event: a resurrection, in a specific city, in front of hostile witnesses, with an open invitation to investigate. This was never a coin toss among ten thousand equals. It is a process of elimination, and it narrows quickly, all the way to Jerusalem.
The Canaanite Yahweh
The second objection arrives wearing academic robes. “Yahweh was just a minor Canaanite god. The priests edited the others out.”
So I opened the actual evidence: the Ugaritic tablets that describe the Canaanite pantheon. Here is the detail the retellings leave out. Yahweh is essentially absent from those god lists. His supposed rise through a pagan pantheon is not written in any text we possess. It is a reconstruction, assembled from shared vocabulary. And the vocabulary proves less than advertised, because “El” is simply the common Semitic word for God. That is why Genesis has no difficulty fusing the titles: “Yahweh… El Elyon… possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:22).
Did Israelites worship Baal and Asherah? Constantly. The Bible does not hide this; condemning that corruption is practically the plot of the Old Testament. So when archaeologists dig up evidence of syncretism, they are confirming exactly what the prophets said was happening. The difference between the theory and the text is a difference of direction. The theory treats the corruption as the original. The Bible treats it as the departure.
What would settle the matter is a manuscript of the supposed earlier polytheistic Bible. A century and a half of digging, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, has produced none.
The Rule That Fails Its Own Test
The third objection is the most philosophical. “Believing without empirical evidence is a failure of intellect.”
I simply ran the sentence through its own rule. What empirical evidence establishes that claim? Name the experiment that produced it. There is none. It is philosophy posing as science, and it fails its own test the moment it is spoken. Enforce the rule strictly and you lose far more than God. You lose the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, and the reliability of reason itself. None of those fits in a test tube. All of them must be assumed before science can begin.
And “zero evidence”? Consider the list. A universe that began, demanding a cause beyond space, time, and matter. Fine-tuning that atheist physicists themselves call the deepest problem in their field. A coded database in every cell of your body, when every code whose origin we know comes from a mind. The moral “ought” the objector smuggled into his own comment. An empty tomb that converted the very enemies of the movement. Dispute the weight of any line you like; that is a conversation I welcome. But “zero” is not skepticism. It is a confession that one has not looked.
The Pattern Behind All Three
Step back and the lesson of the week comes into focus. The case against God keeps taking three forms. A crowd of rivals that dissolves under one question. A history that exists only in reconstruction. A rule of evidence that cannot survive being applied to itself.
Meanwhile the case for God stands on the same ground every courtroom and every laboratory stands on: evidence, converging from independent directions, toward one conclusion. I did not raise my voice once this week. I did not need to. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18). Reason came, and reason was welcomed. Followed all the way home, it arrived where it always arrives.
Bring me the next objection. The door is open, and so is the invitation. And if you would like to keep working through questions like these with me, the free courses in my Faith on Trial community are open to anyone who wants to keep asking.
Where to Check My Work
- Genesis 14:22; Psalm 96:5; 1 Corinthians 8:5-6; Isaiah 1:18 (King James Version)
- The Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra, discussed in Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God, second edition (Eerdmans, 2002), a critical scholar’s own account
- Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin, Physical Review Letters 90 (2003)
- Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape (2005), on fine-tuning
- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (1995), on DNA as code
- Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (2004)
Get new articles by email
Subscribe and I will send you a short note whenever a new article is published on this site. No spam, and you can unsubscribe at any time.