It remains a source of great amusement to me that some people style themselves “religious apologists.” Religion certainly has much to apologize for – inquisitions, crusades, genital mutilations, the ongoing sabotage of science and education – but that is not what they mean. They mean that their job is to defend religion. This is already an admission of failure. Reality doesn’t require apologists. There is no “heliocentric apologetics,” no “gravity apologetics,” no “oxygen apologetics.” Facts do not hire spin-doctors. Only falsehood requires such hired help.
Defending the Indefensible
Observe for instance the unctuous William Lane Craig, endlessly described as the “greatest living apologist,” a title as oxymoronic as “world’s most respected snake-oil salesman.” Here is a man with a PhD, and therefore no excuse, peddling arguments so transparently circular they would shame a freshman. He rolls them out with the smarm of a used-car dealer who has just wound back the odometer and insists the rusted wreck was driven by one careful nun.
His profession is not philosophy but damage control. He is there to varnish medieval superstition with just enough pseudo-logic to keep the faithful from noticing they’ve been sold the intellectual equivalent of a lemon.
And let’s be clear: this is what apologetics has always been. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated the earth moved, the clergy scrambled to invent tortured “harmonies” between Scripture and science. When Darwin revealed our kinship with apes, the pulpits roared in outrage, before sheepishly “reinterpreting” Genesis. Every advance of reason has been met with the same dreary pattern: denial, obstruction, retreat, then belated appropriation. Apologetics is the PR department of defeat.
The Stock Replies
To my own modest writing, I receive the same threadbare replies. Some announce that they will pray for me – the intellectual equivalent of telling me they will consult their horoscope on my behalf. Others warn of hellfire, apparently believing that a grown adult will be frightened into faith by threats of a torture chamber they themselves cannot describe without embarrassment.
Then come the slogans: “If there is no God, how did life begin?” “If there is no God, where do morals come from?” As if shouting “mystery!” and then declaring it solved by Yahweh counts as argument.
The most irritating, however, are those who never engage at all. They simply contradict, dodge, or scatter the discussion with irrelevant queries. Their strategy is transparent: if the atheist falters, if he says “I don’t know” even once, they cry victory. They confuse ignorance with evidence, silence with surrender. This is playground reasoning elevated into a profession. Ignorance on my part does not translate into knowledge on theirs. “I don’t know” is an honest answer. “Therefore, God” is not. That is the entire dishonesty of apologetics in miniature: pretending to know what no one can know, and using gaps in our understanding as a dumping ground for divinity.
Conclusion: The Parasite Class
Apologists are parasites on science. They wait for discovery and then scramble to appropriate it. “DNA is a code, therefore a coder!” they exclaim – but only after the molecule was discovered by Watson and Crick. Where was their revelation before 1953? Where, in all those inspired scriptures, is the faintest hint of a double helix?
They have no predictions, no discoveries, no insights. They come only after the fact, like vultures, attempting to baptize whatever science uncovers. Their trade is the laundering of ignorance, the sanctification of gaps, the pretence of knowledge where none exists. This has been their role since the Enlightenment first exposed religion as a fraud. Every step forward in human understanding has forced apologists to retreat, red-faced and muttering, scribbling new evasions to disguise old defeats.
Reality has never needed apologists. Religion has required them in battalions. That alone ought to tell you which side is telling the truth.
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