How would you respond to Victor Stenger's assertion that religious argument leads universally to dismal failure and untold suffering?

Stenger's charge deserves to be taken at full strength: religion has been used to bless wars, burn heretics, and defend slavery. An answer that begins by minimizing that is not an answer. But the claim is empirical, and empirical claims can be checked.

1. Grant the indictment where it is true. Christians blessed the Crusades, staffed the Inquisition, and preached sermons defending chattel slavery. That is not a smear. It is documented history, and it was disobedience to the man they claimed to follow. A defense that skips this is not credible, and the New Testament itself says the world will judge the message by the love of its messengers (John 13:34-35).

2. Bad fruit is not an argument about truth. Suppose a doctor is rude and a patient dies of neglect. That is a terrible doctor. It is not evidence that medicine is false. This is the genetic fallacy: showing that a belief has been badly used says nothing about whether it is true. The same logic would discredit chemistry because of chemical weapons.

3. The twentieth century cuts the other way. The century's largest mass killings were carried out by regimes that were officially atheist and persecuted believers: Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia. The deaths are commonly estimated in the tens of millions. That does not prove atheism causes atrocity, since most atheists are decent people. It does destroy the thesis that religion is uniquely and characteristically violent.

4. The verdict borrows its own standard. To call religious cruelty evil rather than merely unfashionable, Stenger needs a moral standard that transcends human preference. If morality is only what our species happens to feel, then untold suffering is a description, not an indictment. His outrage is doing work his worldview has trouble funding.

5. Christian violence contradicts the founder. When Peter drew a sword in the garden, Jesus told him to put it away (Matthew 26:52). When Pilate asked about his kingdom, Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting (John 18:36). The pattern the New Testament commands is endurance, not conquest: do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:17-21).

6. The argument from reason boomerangs. If our minds were shaped only for survival, why trust them on questions with no survival payoff, like metaphysics, or the reliability of metaphysics itself? A faculty selected for escaping predators is not obviously a faculty for grasping truth. The naturalist who says religious belief is a delusion must explain why his own beliefs escape the same suspicion.

7. Suffering gets an answer, not a slogan. Stenger's untold suffering is the problem of evil in one phrase, and it should be answered with the cross rather than a syllogism. The Christian claim is not that God watches suffering from a distance. It is that he entered it: he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5). Whatever else that is, it is not indifference.

8. The ledger has two columns. Hospitals, universities, literacy, and the abolition of the slave trade were disproportionately carried by Christian conviction, with Wilberforce's campaign as the standing example. A full accounting weighs both columns. Stenger weighed one and called it the total.

9. What would failure even mean. If the measure is whether an argument makes everyone good, no argument passes, including Stenger's. The job of an argument is to establish what is true, and truth claims are not refuted by the misconduct of people who accept them. Otherwise we would have to abandon every position a bad person has ever held.

Stenger was right that religion has done terrible damage, and wrong that this settles the question. Conduct is not a truth test, the twentieth century is not the alibi his thesis needs, and his moral outrage depends on a standard his own view struggles to supply. Weigh the argument, not only the body count.

Sources: Victor Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis; William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith; Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason; Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity; Paul Copan.

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