DAY 87

CHALLENGE

“The Catholic Church has too many rules.”

DEFENSE

This is a cliché and does not stand up to examination.

First, how many rules is “too many”? People never propose a number for how many would be appropriate. They just repeat a stock claim to criticize the Church.

Second, the rules the Church has are much fewer than those of any group of comparable size.

The Church has a billion members, the large majority of whom belong to its Latin rite. The main legislation governing the Latin Rite is the Code of Canon Law, which is one volume that runs a little over 500 pages in a…

DAY 86

CHALLENGE

“The burden of proof is on those who believe in God. Atheists don’t have to prove God doesn’t exist; believers have to prove he does.”

DEFENSE

This misunderstands the burden of proof.

The concept is borrowed from civil law, where it refers to the obligation a party has to provide sufficient evidence for a claim or lose his case. U.S. law establishes a presumption of innocence, according to which a prosecutor must prove the accused is guilty of an offense or the accused will be acquitted and be legally treated as innocent. The presumption of innocence is a choice our so…

DAY 85

CHALLENGE

“Jesus’ genealogies contradict each other. Matthew says that Jesus descended from David’s son Solomon (Matt. 1:6), but Luke says it was David’s son Nathan (Luke 3:31). Similarly, Matthew has him descended from Zerubbabel’s son Abiud (Matt. 1:13), whereas Luke says it was Zerubbabel’s son Rhesa (Luke 3:27).”

DEFENSE

Jesus was descended from David and Zerubbabel by more than one line.

Normally, a person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this doubling pattern does not go back indefinitely. Marriages usually occur within the sam…

DAY 84

CHALLENGE

“Peter didn’t have a special role among the apostles. Paul doesn’t show him special respect in his letter to the Galatians. He even opposed Peter ‘to his face’ (Gal. 2:11).”

DEFENSE

On the contrary, his letter to the Galatians shows that Paul acknowledged Peter’s unique role in the Church.

Paul’s critics had apparently accused him of trying to please men by preaching a watered-down gospel that did not require circumcision. Thus he stresses that he is not trying to please men and that his gospel is not of human origin (Gal. 1:10–12).

He then recounts a series of inciden…

DAY 83

CHALLENGE

“If Jesus existed, why don’t we have statements about him from non-Christian eyewitnesses of his ministry?”

DEFENSE

Because we would not expect to.

Based on events like the feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand (Matt. 14:13–21, 15:32–38), we may estimate that the number of people who were eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry was in the tens of thousands. However, the vast majority were not among his constant companions and only encountered him on one or a handful of occasions. They were thus unlikely to leave a written account.

Further, the vast majority of t…

DAY 82

CHALLENGE

“The Church is hypocritical in its opposition to divorce. Annulments are just the Catholic equivalent.”

DEFENSE

Annulments are not the same thing as divorce, and the Church’s teaching on annulments is rooted in the teaching of Jesus.

A divorce claims to sever a marriage bond that really existed, while an annulment is a finding that there never was an actual marriage in the first place.

This is why, when a civil court is asked to grant a divorce, the spouses don’t have to prove anything about the time they were married (other than that they were married). One spouse sim…

DAY 81

CHALLENGE

“The Catholic claim that it’s possible for non-Christians to be saved undercuts the basis of evangelization.“

DEFENSE

The duty to evangelize is not based on the idea that it’s impossible to be saved without explicitly embracing the Christian faith.

We have a duty to evangelize because Jesus told us to: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20), and, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole cre…

DAY 80

CHALLENGE

“The Catholic Church says Protestants are damned. The Council of Trent contains many canons saying that if someone endorses a particular Protestant belief, ‘Let him be anathema’ (damned by God).”

DEFENSE

This fundamentally misunderstands what an anathema was. It reads a non-Catholic understanding of the term into Catholic documents.

In Church documents, the term “anathema” does not mean “damned by God.” It refers to a form of excommunication that used to be practiced. When a person was excommunicated by anathema, a series of procedures had to be followed, including the…

DAY 79

CHALLENGE

“Acts isn’t reliable history. It was written long after the events.”

DEFENSE

The date that the book of Acts was written does not pose a problem for its historical reliability.

We observe elsewhere the general subject of Acts’ reliability (see Day 193). Raymond Brown proposed a late date for Luke and Acts of A.D. “85, give or take five to ten years” (An Introduction to the New Testament, 226, 280). If so, Acts would have been written approximately fifty- two years after the earliest events it describes and twenty-five years after the latest. All of that is within livi…

DAY 78

CHALLENGE

“The concept of revelation is irrational. Why should we believe something just because an alleged prophet says so?”

DEFENSE

The concept of revelation is not irrational. In fact, it’s something we use all the time.

Something is revealed if it is disclosed to us by another rather than be- ing personally verified. Sometimes this is also referred to as accepting a claim “on authority.”

C.S. Lewis writes:

Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe ar…