Atheism vs. Christianity

Christianity is not a single, monolithic belief system. It spans Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, evangelical Protestantism, liberal mainline denominations, and hundreds of smaller traditions, each with their own theology, hermeneutics, and moral positions. But beneath this diversity, a set of core claims is shared across virtually all Christian traditions — and it is those claims that atheist thinkers have engaged most directly.

The central claims of Christianity

At its core, Christianity holds that a personal God created the universe and sustains it; that human beings are made in God’s image but fallen through sin; that God became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; that Jesus was crucified and rose bodily from the dead; and that through this resurrection, eternal life is made available to those who believe. Most traditions also hold that this God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.

These are not small claims. They are specific, historical, and — in principle — falsifiable. That specificity is both Christianity’s strength and its vulnerability.

The resurrection: historical warrant or miraculous assertion?

The resurrection is the load-bearing pillar of Christian theology. Paul writes explicitly in his first letter to the Corinthians: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.” Apologists like William Lane Craigargue that the resurrection is not merely a matter of faith but of history — that the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the rapid emergence of resurrection belief among the disciples are best explained by an actual bodily resurrection.

The atheist response operates on two levels. First, the historical: the earliest accounts of the resurrection (Paul’s letters, written within two decades of the crucifixion; the Gospels, written forty to seventy years later) are not independent sources, and the details differ substantially between them. The empty tomb is not mentioned by Paul at all. The “post-mortem appearances” Craig cites include a vision Paul reports of himself — which he lists alongside visions by others as if they are the same category of evidence. Second, the methodological: historical reasoning generally assigns the lowest probability to miraculous explanations, because a miracle requires not only that a remarkable event occurred but that the laws of nature were suspended. To invoke resurrection as the “best” historical explanation is to assume the very thing that requires demonstrating.

The problem of evil: a Christianity-specific challenge

The problem of evilis a challenge for any form of theism, but it lands with particular force on Christianity, which insists that God is not merely powerful but perfectly good and loving — indeed, that God is love. This is not the distant clockmaker of deism. It is a God who is said to know every sparrow that falls and to number every hair on every head.

The existence of gratuitous suffering — childhood cancer, natural disasters, the evolutionary history of predation and extinction that preceded any human sin — creates a genuine tension with this picture. Stephen Fry put it memorably: bone cancer in children is not a consequence of human free will. It is built into the structure of a world this God is said to have designed.

Christian responses — that suffering builds character, that God permits evil to preserve free will, that divine purposes are beyond human comprehension — are familiar and have a long theological history. The atheist position is simply that these responses are not adequate to the scale of what they are being asked to explain, and that the same reasoning could be used to excuse any atrocity whatsoever.

Did Jesus give us better ethics?

Many people who have abandoned Christianity’s metaphysical claims retain a high regard for its moral teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. Loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, caring for the poor — these are not uniquely Christian insights, but they are real moral insights, and worth taking seriously.

The complication is that the same New Testament contains endorsements of slavery (servants, obey your masters), instructions for women to keep silent in church, and — in the teachings attributed to Jesus himself — extended warnings about hellfire and eternal punishment for unbelief. Bertrand Russellnoted that a person who genuinely believed in hell — as Jesus apparently did — was not exhibiting the best moral character, whatever their other qualities. The moral case for Christianity has to be made selectively, which raises the question of who is doing the selecting and by what standard.

The global picture: growth, decline, and demographics

Christianity is the world’s largest religion by number of adherents, with roughly 2.4 billion people identifying as Christian. But the picture is not static. In Western Europe and North America — the historic heartlands of Christian culture — affiliation is declining rapidly, particularly among younger generations. In the United States, the share of adults identifying as Christian fell from 75% in 2015 to around 63% by the mid-2020s. The “nones” — those with no religious affiliation — are now the fastest-growing demographic in Western societies.

Christianity is simultaneously growing in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia — which means global numbers remain large, but the geographic and cultural centre of gravity is shifting. Whether this growth represents genuine theological conviction or is driven by social factors — community, identity, the association of Christianity with Western development — is a question sociologists of religion continue to debate.

The atheist observation is straightforward: the truth of a proposition is not determined by the number of people who believe it. If Christianity’s core claims are true, they are true regardless of demographics. If they are false, the growth of Christianity in any particular region is irrelevant to that question.

Where they genuinely agree

It would be dishonest to present this as pure opposition. Secular humanism shares much with the ethical core of the Christian tradition: the dignity of each person, the obligation to care for the vulnerable, the importance of forgiveness and community. Many of the moral intuitions that secular people hold — and defend — have deep roots in Christian culture. The disagreement is not primarily about values. It is about whether those values require a supernatural foundation — and whether the specific metaphysical claims of Christianity are true.