On April 24-25, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) helped run a big apologetics conference in upstate New York. Its organizers promised that attendees would get answers for the “hard questions” of Christianity. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But they did accidentally ask two legitimate questions that, had they adequately answered them, might have helped establish their religion as a valid pursuit for potential converts.
Today, I’ll show you how this conference went down, we’ll explore the “hard questions” they asked, and then we’ll look at the two most important questions that they couldn’t answer.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 5/25/2026. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! Also, I apologize for the lack of voicecasts. I’m dealing with some major drama lately with very loud new neighbors who are making recording almost impossible. I’m pursuing the situation as strenuously as the rules allow. Hopefully, I’ll see a resolution soon. As I write this, I literally feel their bass beat through the floor and my feet—and they aren’t even beneath my apartment. You can likely guess that I’ve been LIVID about this. Thank you for your patience.)
SITUATION REPORT: ‘First-ever New York apologetics conference addresses hard questions of faith’
On April 24-25, the Baptist Convention of New York (BCNY) held an apologetics conference. According to Baptist Press, this is the first such conference BCNY has ever held. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was heavily involved in the conference, with its North American Mission Board (NAMB) and the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) co-sponsoring it.
In an interview, the executive director of BCNY, Frank Williams, positioned the conference as something that would help attendees evangelize better:
Apologetics as a tool is helpful in that it prepares believers to share their faith with a population of diverse beliefs or persons who … have challenging questions for the Christian faith … questions such as ‘Is Christianity good?’ and ‘Is God good?
The “hard questions of faith” it addressed were the usual ones that evangelicals imagine heathens have. These included pushback against Creationism, Jesus’ historicity and Christians’ claims about him, the capital-P Problems of Evil and Suffering, and more. As far as I can tell, the conference only addressed two questions I’d consider valid ones that heathens actually have about any religion’s claims.
Today, we’ll address the conference’s “hard questions,” assess its answers to those questions, and check out the two they asked that might actually be valid (and what their answers are).
The apologetics conference’s schedule and list of topics
According to its official site, here’s the conference’s list of apologetics activities:
FRIDAY
3:00 PM – Conference Check In at Starpoint Church [an SBC church in Clifton Park, New York, which is just north of Albany, which in turn is midway up the state’s east border]
4:00 PM – Opening Session | Speaker: Frank Williams
6:45 PM – Plenary Session #1 | Speaker: Gary Habermas, Ph.D. – “Jesus’ Resurrection: The Answer to Our Worst Suffering”
8:00 PM – Panel Discussion #1 | Moderator: Tawa Anderson, Ph.D. – “The Problem of Evil: Reconciling God’s Goodness and Human Suffering”SATURDAY
8:30 AM – Panel Discussion #2 | Moderator: Robert Stewart, Ph.D. – “Belief Systems and Bible Credibility”
9:30 AM – Plenary Session #2 | Speaker: Tawa Anderson, Ph.D. – “When Science and Scripture Collide”
2:00 PM – General Q & A with Panel | Moderators: Frank Williams and Ramny Perez
2:00 PM – Breakouts #3 (Selected Encore Sessions – 2:00pm – 3:00pm)
3:00 PM – Plenary Session #3 | Speaker: Robert Stewart, Ph.D. – “Did Jesus Claim to be God?”
Of those breakout sessions, Baptist Press tells us:
Breakout sessions included:
Mahlon Smith, Deconstruction and Reconstructing Faith
Ramny Perez, Does Christianity ‘Work’?
Alycia Wood, God of the Old Testament: Is He for Real? and Is Christianity Good in 2026?
Ryan Rice, Missional Apologetics
Todd Brandt, Unpacking Unbelief
Jade Turner, Using Logic and Critical Thinking to Defend Our Faith and What Happens to People Who Never Hear the Gospel?
It’s astonishing that literally only two questions on their entire lineup of “hard questions” matter—and worse, neither is even an official headline topic.
Sidebar: Welcome to a (mostly) New Orleans Apologetics Roadshow!
The lineup for this conference is extremely interesting.
Gary Habermas is a beloved evangelical apologist who largely provides (bad) support to evangelicals’ historical claims. I don’t know if he’s specifically SBC himself, but Southern Baptists tend to like him a lot. He’s their conference star, similar to how blockbuster movies need a really big-name actor involved to get funding.
If you’re wondering why on earth a New Orleans seminary is involved with this conference, it’s because Frank Williams got his Th.M from there, and as of March 2025 he’s working on his Ph.D in apologetics there as well. The site doesn’t mention either credential.
In fact, going by the conference site, at least four other speakers (Tawa Anderson, Ryan Rice Sr., Robert Stewart, Jade Turner) hail from that very apologetics program. NOBTS focuses hard on apologetics in general, so this isn’t as weird a partnership as it might seem at first, but it is strange to see what amounts to a New Orleans roadshow in upstate New York. And it’s definitely odd that Williams’ NOBTS ties aren’t mentioned while the other four’s connections are.
On that note, the Baptist Press writeup also says that each attendee got a copy of the NOBTS president’s latest book, Moral Apologetics. On Friday night, the conference set aside time for people to get their copies signed by him.
Incidentally, the only sign this conference even happened is on the Baptist Press site and the BCNY conference site. NOBTS’ Twitter feed doesn’t say a word about it. If I didn’t keep an eye on Baptist Press, I’d never have known about it.
First, Gary Habermas avoids the Problem of Suffering
Christianity suffers from a couple of serious dealbreakers that are so major that they are often capitalized as Problems: The Problem of Hell, of Suffering, and of Evil. They’re all about the same, though. To summarize:
If Christian claims about their god’s qualities and powers were true, then Hell, suffering, and evil shouldn’t exist. But they still think Hell is real, and suffering and evil definitely exist. So is their god either less powerful than they claim, less good, or less aware of the situation?
Rather than downgrade their god’s status as “omnimax,” Christians instead try to explain away the existence of Hell, suffering, and evil as completely compatible with him.
That’s what Habermas tried to do in his talk, which Baptist Press summarized. He conceded that yes, our world contains a lot of suffering—and even Jesus suffered greatly. But it’s okay, because Jesus would “be holding your hand through it all.” Gosh, he asked, “Do we deserve to suffer less than Jesus?”
(In answer to that question, by the way: I’d say yes, since according to modern explanations of Jesus’ suffering, it was done as a substitute for humans.)
This 100% does not answer the Problem of Suffering. It’s not “how Jesus responds to suffering,” but why it’s there at all. Then, he offered subtle shame to anyone who dared pursue that question: He trusts and believes in Jesus so much that he just doesn’t care why suffering exists. Again, that’s not an answer to one of Christianity’s biggest dealbreakers.
Tawa Anderson followed this up with a panel about the Problem of Evil. Though we’re not told what he brought to the table, I’m guessing it isn’t much different from what Habermas said. There really isn’t a good way for anyone to deal with this topic.
I really hope some bright-eyed Christian trots out their non-answers to an evangelism target. And I hope even more that someone captures the response on video.
Second, Creationism still uses its same old bad-science, bad-faith arguments
Tawa Anderson offered a talk titled “When Science and Scripture Collide.” In it, he argued that the universe is “fine-tuned” and must have a beginning, which to him means someone created it, which of course means Yahweh did it, which then of course means the Bible is true.
It’s important to note that Anderson is a philosopher and apologist. He has zero science education or background. That may be why he calls modern biology “Darwinism,” which is not a term used by any reputable biologists. Creationists use it to make modern biology sound less reputable. So it’s like a perma-blinking turn signal on the science highway. When you see it, take it to mean someone who doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
Also, Anderson completely muddles biology with cosmology and astrophysics. Biology, including the Theory of Evolution, has nothing whatsoever to do with questions about the earliest moments of our current universe—I mean, if it had a beginning at all. Hell, the Theory of Evolution doesn’t even have anything to do with how life first arose on Earth. All it talks about is how life changes over time through natural selection.
When Anderson asserts that evolution can only happen in a fine-tuned universe and that his god totally had to have designed it and created it, he’s making a lot of assumptions there—because we don’t know that evolution has occurred anywhere but Earth yet. Of all the matter in our universe, only the tiniest, most miniscule fraction of it supports life that we know of. Every other part of the universe is catastrophically hostile to Earth life.
Though we know that the particles in our universe certainly have values (“tuning”) that seem to support the flowering of the exact kind of life that Earth has, what we don’t know is why. But it seems extremely unlikely that any gods are behind it, and Anderson certainly won’t be the Magic Christian to find support for any such idea. If anyone ever did, it sure wouldn’t be a guy with no science education, a garbled sense of major ideas in biology and astronomy, and nothing but arguments in lieu of evidence.
In other words, Anderson offers nothing new. All he’s got are the same Creationist talking points they’ve used for decades now. Sean Carroll, an actual reputable cosmologist, took these ideas apart ages ago. Also, see this 2014 debate where he wiped the court with then-A-list apologist William Lane Craig:
More questions about the Bible’s credibility and Jesus’ claims of godhood
Robert Stewart offered a couple of major panels about the Bible’s “credibility” and Jesus’ claims of godhood. Neither present non-believers with “hard questions.”
The Bible classifies bats as birds and teaches that slavery is A-OK. Its god ordered his followers to genocide entire enemy tribes, take girls as sex slaves after slaughtering the rest of their people, sent plagues to Egypt to torment and kill innocent people, even children, and—let’s not forget—Yahweh once genocided our entire planet in a fit of pique.
Really, Christians’ best hope is that the Bible completely lacks real-world credibility. It’s a good thing that nothing supernatural in it can be supported with any real-world observations or contemporary corroboration. (See: My last night as a Christian, when I had to reckon at last with the sheer monstrous evil that is Yahweh.)
As for Jesus’ claims of godhood, if he isn’t actually doing anything in the real world, then it really doesn’t matter what he said or didn’t say about himself. We don’t even need to get into the way the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke, written only decades after the 30s) contain no direct, unambiguous claims about Jesus being Yahweh. Whether he was literally a real person or just based on some long-forgotten real archetype of early-1st-century Judean prophets, Jesus is just functionally meaningless in the real world. He’s just a character in a story like millions of others. One might as well have huge debates about Obi-Wan Kenobi being a true “gray Jedi.” (I think he is.)
Like most of the “hard questions” this conference asked, they only matter if someone already believes Christian claims about the Bible and the concept of Jesus as a god.
The first of the only two questions that matter in this apologetics conference
It’s so ironic to me that the only two questions that actually matter in this “hard questions” apologetics conference got shunted to the breakout sessions and weren’t led by anyone super-important. Did you guess what those questions are?
Ramny Perez, Does Christianity ‘Work’?
Alycia Wood, God of the Old Testament: Is He for Real?
We’ll tackle Wood’s question first: Is Yahweh “for real”?
In other words, is he an actual god who can do things in the real world?
And the answer to that question is a resounding “no.” Nobody at this apologetics conference provides any reason to think otherwise, and no Christians ever have. Without extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim, we can and must dismiss it. This world, this universe, requires no divine explanations for its workings.
Then again, though, literally no religion’s believers have ever managed to demonstrate the existence of their gods. Christians like to imagine their religion is somehow super-special among all the religions humans have devised in the past 30-50k years, but it isn’t. It had a beginning, like they did, and like them it will also have an end one day.
Once you realize that simple fact, it stops mattering if this or that invisible wizard is really for realsies, or which heaven or hell might be the valid one out of all the options. The very question becomes absurd. We might as well latch onto the the Löwenmensch figurine as the one true god of humanity.
Instead, we ask a far more dangerous and difficult question. And here, Christianity’s validity disintegrates.
The biggest question of all, and one apologists cannot successfully hand-wave away
We have to ask if, despite its lack of supernatural basis, Christianity works. And I don’t mean this in the way that evangelicals typically do. I mean it like this: Do Christian systems fulfill their promises? Do Christian groups and relationships work better than those of other religions or philosophies?
If the answer to those questions is “yes,” then it wouldn’t matter what the supernatural claims were. In fact, it’d be more amazing if the systems worked so well despite none of the supernatural stuff panning out. I’d be incredibly impressed if, say, evangelical marriage rules resulted in happier, longer-lasting marriages. Or if evangelical churches run according to the Moses Model had significantly fewer abuse scandals, or if they were even more functional and welcoming communities.
That’s why I still feel so much affection for Hellenism, my flavor of paganism for years after deconversion. Whether the gods truly exist or not, I could see that Hellenic pagans were good, decent, disciplined people with a focus on self-improvement, the arts, education, and community involvement. They were people I liked being around, and they didn’t truck with drama and attention-seeking. The values and roadmap they used led reliably to destinations I wanted to reach. No gods were required, which was good because none seemed to be doing anything!
However, I can’t say the same about Christianity. As a group, Christians are not better people than non-Christians. They cannot be trusted more. They’re not more generous or kind. Their relationships certainly don’t seem better. And the more fervent they are and the more seriously they take their faith, the less reliable and less trustworthy Christians tend to be.
Christians as a group are so god-awful that major branches of apologetics exist solely to hand-wave away that discrepancy between Christians’ claims about themselves and the sad, disappointing reality of who they actually are.
We’re not obligated to humor these attempts to square reality with fantasy. They are the salespeople. We are the potential customers. They desperately need us, but we do not need them at all. Without us, their entire religion dissolves at the seams. Without them, we’re free to find systems that really do work for us.
Apologetics in the age of Christian decline
When it comes to apologetics, though, this conference highlights an even more drastic problem within Christianity during this age of decline:
Apologists and Christians who’ve spent money learning apologetics tend to be very impressed with apologetics. But in reality, apologetics does not convert people. Maybe it did once (and I’m being extremely generous there), but it isn’t a major factor anymore. Nowadays, apologetics exists to give Christian keyboard warriors some talking points—and believers the safe, happy feeling that someone somewhere has done the math about why they should be Christian. Those talking points do not long survive collisions with non-believers, not anymore.
Apologists hope this conference will make apologetics look more important to evangelism than it really is. After all, apologetics isn’t for non-Christians. It’s for believers. None of us are paying apologists’ bills and attending these conferences. Only Christians are. So apologists don’t need to come up with answers to their “hard questions” that we’d accept. We’re not the targets. They only need to convince the people paying them.
And that, at least, hasn’t been a problem for years.
NEXT UP: AHHHH! The SBC metrics for last year just dropped, and they are amazingly telling. SBC Summer kicks off with our traditional first-look analysis of the news! See you soon! <3
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