This comes up a lot and I’m pretty open about the fact that I don’t really trust the religious very much, at least when it comes to their religious beliefs. I take on apologists constantly over on my YouTube channel and it becomes painfully clear that what they’re saying, it comes from their faith, not from their examination of the objective facts.
But is it worse than that? Let’s look at a single case.So today, we’re going to talk about Christian apologist Mike Licona.
Now I don’t have anything against him in particular, I don’t think he’s a bad person, I don’t think he’s an evil man and maybe, if we ever ran into each other in the real world, aside from our positions on God, we might be friends. I don’t know, I’ve had lots of religious friends over the years.
No, my problem here is that Mike, for all of his studies and all of his vocal claims about Christianity, Mike doesn’t have a choice but to side with a specific view of Christianity. Why? Because Mike signed a contract forcing him to.
Mike is an associate professor at Houston Baptist University and, as with most religious universities, he was forced to sign a statement of faith before he could be employed. It forces him to accept an inerrantist, evangelical view of Christianity whether the evidence leads that way or not.
In fact, Mike found this out at a previous employer where he violated that signed statement of faith and he lost his job. He was thrown out of the Southern Evangelical Seminary in 2011 because he dared to question, in his book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, whether the literal interpretation of parts of Matthew might lead one to consider that some parts of the Bible were apocalyptic imagery. This led to other apologists, including Norman Geisler and Albert Mohler to question whether Licona took the inerrancy of the Bible seriously. He’s never strayed far from his employment requirements since.
This is why, as much as I think Mike might b e a nice guy, it taints every word that comes out of his mouth immediately because his job rides on saying the right things. It has nothing to do with the evidence, it has to do with his overlords watching him to make sure he doesn’t say anything that they disagree with.
It isn’t just Mike Licona who has this problem though, a huge number of university-employed apologists have also signed similar declarations of faith. William Lane Craig is employed by Houston Baptist and Gary Habermas, who works out of Liberty University, is likewise intellectually hobbled.
This is very, very common among Christian (and other religious) schools. Some are very extreme, such as the one at Houston Baptist and some are much more lenient, like the one at Northwest University, but the fact remains, if you want to attend and certainly if you want to teach, you’ve got to force yourself into their mold, no matter what the evidence says.
You will notice that no scientific institution requires that their employees sign a non-negotiable “statement of science”. You are not only permitted, you are encouraged to explore the boundaries, using the evidence at hand, to come to your own conclusions. Proving others wrong is the highest complement within scientific circles. That simply doesn’t exist in religion.
This is one of the major reasons that I’m not at all impressed with the religious apologist. They have to accept a position statement based on faith regardless of what the evidence says. In fact, I think it would be hysterical if someone took on Mike Licona some day with some very choice arguments that would either require him to violate his signed statement or reveal himself to be a hypocrite. I’m really not sure which way he’d go.
I don’t care about your faith. I care about the evidence that you can offer in favor of your arguments and the religious are completely incapable. When your entire belief system starts and ends with faith, and worse, when you have someone constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure you don’t stray, just how valuable can anything that you say be?
Not very, I think. Not very at all.