We’re All Biased

Sometimes I am frustrated when sharing the Gospel with skeptical people, because I honestly believe that I have really solid reasons to believe in the truth of the Christian message.  I’ve got teleological, ontological, cosmological, historical, and aesthetic arguments, well-constructed and rational, that seem to be ineffective to militant agnosticism and atheism.  It seems that my skeptical audience simply will not hear the truth, regardless of how iron-clad my reasoning is.  A skeptic is constantly looking for a loophole, because they are convinced that the truth cannot possibly contain supernatural elements.

Most militant atheists and agnostics that I come across are in fact biased while wearing the cloak of skepticism. Their particular bias states that supernatural things simply cannot occur, and they will do all kinds of mental gymnastics to try to explain everything that defies naturalistic explanation.

Here’s the thing, though, I am biased, too.  We all have a “skeptical dial,” as William Lane Craig calls it, regarding what we think conforms to reality, and for things that we find irrational, we crank the dial way up, so that proof is almost impossible to find.  Most of us find denial of the Holocaust absurd, so when a Holocaust denier presents incompatibilities in the accounts and the realities of the events, we dismiss him out of hand, without really considering the weight of the evidence (I am not a Holocaust denier btw!).

We cannot escape our biases; it is impossible! A rational person, however, will recognize that they are biased, and will give opposing arguments a legitimate hearing, instead of dismissing the argument because we don’t want it to be true, we should examine the tenets of the argument for logical fallacy and truth.  So, as you share the truth of the Christian faith with skeptical people, perhaps you should be as willing to consider the validity of their arguments as you would like them to be about yours.