Answering Atheist Arguments: The Bible is Unreliable, it Was Written by Christians!

The Reason Rally has inspired me to write a new section on my blog.   Every Tuesday I plan on looking at a common atheist argument and responding to it in a quick paragraph to show why it doesn’t work in the argument against Christianity.  Atheists, especially the ones I met at the Reason Rally, use a lot of strong and angry rhetoric.  Quite often it is just to score a rhetorical point, but can be easily refuted.  Here is the inaugural edition of Answering Atheist Arguments.    (Nice alliteration there huh?)    These are not arguments for Christianity, these are just simple refutations of arguments against Jesus.

At the Rally on Saturday, I found myself talking to someone about the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.   As I begun to explain why I think the gospel books in the Bible are reliable he interrupted and asserted, “You can’t trust what it says in those books of the Bible because they were written by Christians!”

Really?

Why does that mean they are unreliable?   Can I get away with such poor reasoning? 

Imagine if I was talking to someone about why I don’t believe global warming was real and I said, “Well you can’t trust the scientists who report on global warming, they all believe global warming is real!”  Certainly you would tell me that this is a silly reason to not believe in global warming, and you would be right.  The fact that the people recording the historical events of the resurrection were Christians does nothing to show its reliability or unreliability.

Further, let’s just imagine that the resurrection did happen and YOU witnessed it.  You knew Jesus before, you saw him get murdered, and then you saw him again alive.   Wouldn’t you follow Jesus and be a Christian at that point?  Would the fact that you became a Christian mean that you were now unreliable in the question of whether or not he did resurrect?  The authors of the Bible didn’t start out as Christians.  They only became so after they saw the evidence for the resurrected Christ.

As you can see, this argument against Christianity fails right out of the gate.