While cruising around the Christ-o-sphere today, I happened upon a post about ‘navigating doubt‘ (archive). Written by Ron Tewson, it’s an absolute mess of bad logic, unsupported claims, and mischaracterizations. That all said, though, it’s also a perfect example of how Christians learn to push away their legitimate doubts about their religion—and how their leaders use emotional manipulation to teach them to ignore the red flags that would show them the way to a life of freedom from lies.
This post is worth our time because it offers a smorgasbord of irrational thinking for us to examine. If we can learn the techniques of this thinking in something we already know is very bad for people, then we are well-prepared to spot it in claims that maybe we wish were true.
So today, let’s explore the first part of this guy’s OP (Original Post). And let’s see why his arguments will not satisfy any reader with serious doubts about their religion.
(This post first appeared on Patreon on 12/19/2023. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)
We start an OP about doubt with an attempt to sound very very Jesusy
I loved how Ron Tewson begins his OP with an attempt to make himself sound super-duper Jesusy:
I’m a follower of Jesus, so I guess that makes me a person of faith.
Oh yes. The very coolest kids in evangelicalism describe themselves like that. They know that evangelicalism is a hopelessly tainted brand with normies these days. So they keep coming up with new ways to describe themselves. “Follower of Jesus” isn’t new, of course. I’m pretty sure I heard younger Millennial evangelicals using the term back in the 2010s. But it’s come back into vogue with the exact kind of evangelical who helped taint the label in the first place. If you hear someone using this phrase to describe their religious opinion, you can absolutely bet it’s a culture-warrior evangelical. They talk like this to establish their authority and credibility as a source of instruction or advice.
Aaaaand yep, that is exactly what Tewson is. His bio blurb at Christian Post names him as the owner of something called “the Therefore Project.” It’s a basic apologetics site. Its schtick appears to be “bite-sized” apologetics zingers that theoretically “win people, not arguments.” It’s also a very new project. A domain registry lookup reveals that it was only created in 2021. I don’t think he’s done much work on it.
[Note bene to Tewson: You have a typo in the “bite-sized” page. At the top, it offers “Bit-Size” Answers.”]
In its “Bigger Portions” page, we find links to all the standard-issue culture-warrior evangelical pages like Frank Turek’s CrossExamined.com and Sean McDowell’s shitty apologetics site.
Of interest and (surprisingly) not really mentioned in the OP, Tewson published a standard-issue evangelical rah-rah book last year. Called Threads, it appears to offer evangelical culture-warrior readers the usual instructions for how to Jesus their way to lives of “peace and purpose” while also chiding them for expecting “too little” of their god.
Between the euphemism for “evangelical” and a list of his apologetics heroes, we can tell quite a bit about Ron Tewson. First, we know that he has never met a terrible, fallacy-riddled, emotionally-manipulative apologetics argument he didn’t immediately embrace as Capital-T “TRUTH.” Second, we know that he is incapable of examining his beliefs in any kind of rational way. Instead, something irrational captured his mind. It chains him to the increasingly-tribalistic world of culture-warrior evangelicals.
Also: Yes, he is absolutely a “person of faith.” He clearly doesn’t like it, but it fits him perfectly.
When in doubt, just deploy a logical fallacy!
After that oh-so-pious-sounding “follower of Jesus” opening, Tewson shares the reasons for his belief in evangelicalism. He also commits his first crime against rational thinking:
I attribute the presence and power of God to many things that go on in my life.
So many good things have happened to him! He doesn’t name them, of course. But only Yahweh/Jesus could have made them happen! (Source: trust me, bro.)
Even without knowing what the “many things that go on” are, we can identify this thinking as a riff on the argument from beauty:
- Gee, this thing/event is sure very beautiful/beneficial to me. [Premise]
- There’s no way it could have happened naturally. Only an omnimax god could have made it happen. [Unsupported claim about premise]
- Therefore, Jesus is totes for realsies. [Conclusion]
All logical fallacies share a general strategy. They begin with an observation, make an unsupported claim about that observation, and then conclude with a non sequitur that is wholly unrelated to the argument’s premises. Here, any number of factors could have caused the thing in the premise. Even if the claim in (2) above were true and fully supported, there’s no reason at all to assume that Yahweh/Jesus is the particular god responsible for the premise.
The argument from beauty falls flat on its face when we start asking how Tewson attributes terrible events in his life. Or natural disasters. Or the ongoing slew of horrendously evil crimes committed by evangelical pastors against defenseless children in their congregations. No, if his god were real, he’d bring both good and evil to humans. His very own Bible says so in Lamentations 3:37-38 and Isaiah 45:7!
(Frankly, I’d be betting on Apollo over Yahweh for any good and beautiful things happening. Sure, sure, Apollo had his terrible moments in mythology, but overall he’s supposedly pretty good to his followers. By contrast, Yahweh is pure genocidal cruelty with a few narcissistic moments of kindness.)
And how Ron Tewson deals with that lurking doubt
Obviously, Tewson has had some rightful pushback against that assertion. He continues:
Yet some would argue this has nothing to do with God but is merely the result of luck or coincidence. I guess that’s always possible. But when you think about it, luck and coincidence are nothing more than alternative forms of faith.
Here, he commits another logical error: redefinition. He’s trying to define “luck and coincidence” as “alternative forms of faith.” But they are absolutely nothing like a “form of faith.” Even addicted gamblers who spend every penny they earn on their vice don’t practice anything like a religious faith in their desire for Lady Luck to look their way. Even the weirdest gamers with multiple sets of “lucky dice” and rituals around throwing them aren’t practicing anything like a religion.
Some religions, like Greek reconstruction paganism, do rely heavily on portents and omens, just as Christians themselves do. But they don’t make portents and omens an entire religion unto themselves. I know of no religion that consists only of worship of “luck and coincidence.” No temples to “luck and coincidence” exist, not even in Las Vegas’ casinos.
Only someone wriggling desperately against the irrational and false nature of his religious claims could go here. I suddenly get the feeling that Tewson wrote this OP for an audience of three: he, himself, and him. To escape accusations that his good fortune can be easily attributed to natural factors like luck/coincidence, he builds a religious strawman out of them, sets fire to it, and declares that it’s okay for him to attribute luck and coincidence to his god, because ickie secular people have similar religious attributions to their alternate religion of luck and coincidence!
He hasn’t dealt with the accusations themselves, of course. He’s only shifted his problem onto other people’s shoulders with false redefinitions of what luck and coincidence are.
I laughed at “But when you think about it,” though. In apologetics, that’s the coward’s way out of a legitimate contradiction. I mean, when you think about it, we’re all really atheists at heart, aren’t we? Even evangelicals. Even Ron Tewson. So I can stop writing this post right now.
Oh wait. He’s not an atheist in any meaningful sense of the word. He’s just a typically-irrational evangelical who is caught between two very pressing needs: To maintain his beliefs, and to feel like he holds those beliefs for some kind of good reason.
Doubt creeps into Ron Tewson’s mind on little cat feet
Having mischaracterized the nature of luck and coincidence, now Tewson tells us that “There is absolutely no way to prove the existence of a force or an accident that seems to have a mystical connection. These are alternative faith paths to explain the unexplainable without God.”
And again, other explanations aren’t “alternative faith paths.” We don’t need to invoke any gods at all to explore other explanations for Ron Tewson’s lucky or coincidental life-events. In fact, I guarantee that nothing that’s ever happened to him is completely unexplainable. That’s likely why he hasn’t told us about any of those events. He knows already, probably because it’s happened, what happens when he does.
But alas! Ron Tewson still sometimes wonders.
So, do I ever wonder if my faith in God is misplaced? Sure, because while I’m a person of faith, I find I’m also a person of doubt. Sometimes, the realities of life are just so unsettling it makes me want to join the doubter crowd and cry, “Where is God? If He’s real and loving, why doesn’t He do something!”
I’ve never seen God with my eyes or heard Him with my ears, which is fertile soil for doubt.
I give him half credit for admitting in that last sentence what we’ve always known. His god has never once appeared in person to any followers, nor been heard by them. Not one Christian can honestly claim to have seen or heard him. Nobody’s even verified a single word from the lord as real.
(That’s Christianese for a divinely-given message. Back when I was Pentecostal, these were almost all just rah-rah “hold fast in your faith, for the day of judgment is coming” sorts of things.)
It’s not just “fertile soil for doubt.” It’s really the only thing anyone needs to know to reject Christian claims. Christians can’t have their god both ways: as meddling constantly in their lives, and yet completely impossible to detect in reality.
The Faith Pool and Ron Tewson’s doubt
As we’ve already seen, Ron Tewson’s faith pool fills constantly. Various alleged lucky-and-coincidental events pour from faucets to fill that pool. (We’ll see next time what other faucets fill the pool. He reveals quite a few in his OP.)
(Related: How the faith pool works.)
Once the water level in a faith pool hits a certain level, belief sparks to life.
However, the faith pool also has drains. These drains represent contradictions to whatever that faith pool represents. In the case of Christianity, reality itself becomes the most significant drainer of the pool’s water. And Tewson knows it. Once the water completely drains, the belief withers and dies.
That’s likely why Tewson never bothered finding real-world explanations for these lucky-and-coincidental events. If he ever learned their real reasons for happening, those corresponding faucets would immediately turn off. Because reality itself drains so much water so quickly from his faith pool, he needs a steady and strong source of incoming water.
As he says, one cause for doubt for him is simply never having seen his god nor heard him speak. If his claims were true, then we’d expect some Christian somewhere to have seen or heard him. As the classic xkcd goes, hundreds of millions of people on Earth—maybe even billions (archive)—now possess smartphones. And yet not one of those people has ever recorded any evidence of the supernatural at all.
Ron Tewson uses thought stoppers to deal with his doubt
Another drain on Tewson’s faith is the sheer number of things he admits he doesn’t understand about his god:
It’s pretty normal to question things we don’t understand, and there’s a long list of things I don’t understand about God. Yet this is to be expected since there is no way my little two-cylinder brain can comprehend all there is to know about the infinite God:
He then name-checks Isaiah 55:8, the classic “my ways are higher than your ways” verse that evangelicals use as a thought stopper. Thought stoppers are rituals that literally stop someone’s mind from going to risky places. He can never allow himself to realize that this verse exists to be a thought stopper.
Nor can Tewson ever allow himself to know that the entire reason he doesn’t understand so much is because it’s not true. People can twist and re-imagine Yahweh/Jesus’ nature all they want, and they have. With no objectively-real source material to draw from, only the ridiculously inconsistent and incoherent Bible, the sky’s the limit for these re-imaginings.
So his god’s nature and behavior confuses him for the same reason that Marvel and DC fans can’t ever be 100% certain of their favorite heroes’ natures due to their constant revamps and reboots. Is Batman a fun-loving playboy billionaire? Or a brooding Dark Knight? Or an attachment-avoidant recluse dreaming of having his own family in a Lego wonderland?
They are mutually contradictory descriptors, and yet none is invalid. Because Batman only exists in human imagination, Batman story creators can go anywhere they want. No actual Batman is ever going to step out of the shadows to set the record straight on his nature. Yahweh/Jesus is exactly like that. Whenever a Christian gets too close to realizing it, Isaiah 55:8 holds up a giant “STOP THINKING ABOUT IT” sign.
The magic question about doubt
Between his statements about his faith, we get this interesting little insertion:
So, is doubt a disqualifier of faith? I don’t think so. Doubt is about questioning, while unbelief is about rejection.
And this is very interesting to me. Yes, doubt is about questioning. It isn’t a disqualifier of faith. Rather, it’s part of the process of examining claims. It’s where we all are as a null position until the faith pool fills up enough to spark belief to life. Until we have (what we believe is) good reason to believe in a claim, we have doubt as to its veracity. Should we embrace a claim and later encounter contradictions to it, doubt may lead us to re-examine what we thought supported it.
Should we learn that the claim is, after all, false, then we no longer believe it. At that point, we reject it.
It’s very interesting that Tewson went here. And it’s even more interesting to see the placement of this text. Here’s the entire paragraph as he wrote it:
I’ve never seen God with my eyes or heard Him with my ears, which is fertile soil for doubt. So, is doubt a disqualifier of faith? I don’t think so. Doubt is about questioning, while unbelief is about rejection. It’s pretty normal to question things we don’t understand, and there’s a long list of things I don’t understand about God. Yet this is to be expected since there is no way my little two-cylinder brain can comprehend all there is to know about the infinite God:
After falsely claiming that his lucky-and-coincidental life events aren’t in the least natural, and after telling us that he understands that never having seen or heard his god is a serious dealbreaker, this explanation of the nature of doubt peeks in from a little side door. And then he slams that side door shut with Isaiah 55:8.
A psychologist would have an absolute field day with this guy. He doesn’t even know what he’s written here, or how powerful a contradiction he’s offered to his faith. It’s like he knows the truth, but doesn’t allow himself to know that he knows it.
Again, something powerful is holding him in his faith. Something powerful constantly disgorges enough water to fill his faith pool. It’s not reality. It’s something even stronger than reality, at least to him. We’ll see what it is soon.
Another logical fallacy to dispel doubt
After this shocking admission, Tewson moves on smoothly to make a false equivalence. This logical fallacy involves equating one thing to another in a way that simply isn’t valid. Here’s what he writes:
I often find myself doubting — questioning — before and after making a decision. The other day I had to purchase a computer monitor because mine was done. I searched the web for endorsements, only to find a plethora of differing opinions. I talked with a few friends, prayed, and then made a choice. Today, it’s connected and working just fine. My doubt didn’t disqualify me from making a choice but instead drove me to investigate, process, question, and then move forward with my doubts to a conclusion.
This was hilarious to me. Yes, it involves an evangelical praying before making a decision about which computer monitor he should buy. The god of the entire universe stood by for that call, let me tell you!
And now, OMG!!! You won’t believe this!!! You won’t! That computer monitor is “connected and working just fine”!!!! OMG! I reckon that tears it—we have just heard about a genuine miracle of divine intervention! Let’s get our asses to church!
Oh wait.
See, we’re meant to infer that prayer formed a major part of his purchasing decision. But if an evangelical doesn’t flat-out tell us something, assume the worst. Tewson doesn’t tell us that the god of quarks and quasars offered any input about monitors. In fact, he left out any mention of how he felt after praying. I’m guessing those prayers bounced right off the ceiling, to use the Christianese. Dude also talked to “a few friends” before making his choice. That’s probably what guided him most.
But we’re in this section to examine a logical fallacy about false equivalence.
Here, Tewson implicitly compares doubt about which monitor to buy to doubt that his god exists in the form he thinks he does. His god and computer monitors are nothing alike. Computer monitors are real, and so there are a number of objective ways to test their quality. His god does not exist, and so nothing objective can be measured or observed about him.
Nor can a nonexistent god offer any opinions about monitors.
A brief segue into a popular mischaracterization of ex-Christians
Immediately after the monitor thing, Tewson writes:
I know some question the existence of God because He hasn’t performed the way they were led to believe He would.
This is the well-known argument from Not Getting A Pony. Many, many evangelicals firmly believe that ex-Christians are just mad at Jesus for not giving them everything they ever wanted or working extreme miracles upon their command. Tewson clearly agrees with this nasty smear.
It’s funny to me that evangelicals in particular swing from two extremes in their marketing and retention strategies. On one hand, they tell potential recruits that Jesus will be there for them through thick and thin. They talk up all the OMG MEERKULS they swear they’ve witnessed in person, implying that converts will gain access to the same miracles. They make sure to offer peace, joy, boundless love and mercy, and the whole nine yards of customer satisfaction. And all of it comes right from the Bible, of course!
It dazzles the recruits. I’ve been there, and I remember it well.
But should that convert ever notice that none of that is happening and complain about it, then evangelicals will attack them for just wanting an ATM. For making Yahweh into a lollipop-giving grandpa. If they should leave the faith after discovering none of its claims are true, then the remaining tribemates will smear them for having left because Jesus never gave them a pony.
They do their best to make Yahweh/Jesus sound completely different depending on their audience. But if someone compares the sales offers to the retention ones, they are just so different that it becomes downright comical.
This complete dichotomy in states reminds me of the new customer specials that satellite TV companies offered in the mid-2000s. Oh, they’d give new customers the moon: Four free receivers, free HD-DVRs, free satellite installation, you name it. But if a longtime, high-quality customer called in to ask for one single DVR, they got to pay full price for the equipment and installation. For a regular receiver, that worked out to about USD$200.
I worked for one of these companies at the time, and it was a real problem for all of the agents on the phones. We simply had no way to offer these existing customers anything close to the same deals that new ones got just for signing up. If one of those customers threatened to disconnect, even if we were positive they were just doing it to get something, they’d get some sort of deal. But it was never as good, and those customers made sure we knew how they felt.
Of course, at the time the logic was that it was much more expensive to bag a new customer than to keep an old one. In evangelicals’ case, they just want to retaliate against those leaving, and to make sure the rest of the flocks don’t get any funny ideas about following those apostates out of the fold. They’ve never had to deal with sales or retention on a serious level. It shows in how they treat others.
Of note, I didn’t deconvert because I was mad at Yahweh/Jesus for not performing at my command. My faith pool finally went dry when I found out that what the Bible taught about prayer didn’t line up at all with prayer in the real world. My faith in the Bible was the last faucet that turned off. No faucets remained on. And so my faith withered away and died that very night.
More drains to the faith pool
Like most evangelicals, Tewson is well aware of how reality contradicts his religious claims. Each of the following factors he names represents a drain to his faith pool:
Disappointment, loss, the hypocrisy of so-called Christians, and the seeming absence of divine intervention in times of need led them to conclude God didn’t exist.
Like many others, I, too, have experienced frustration, disappointment, and even anger at the seeming silence of God. Life’s not going as I think it should, and the darkness keeps getting darker.
These are the real-world factors that completely contradict Christian claims. If Christian claims were true, none of that would be happening. The world would work in an entirely different way.
That’s why I don’t go with miracles as PROOF YES PROOF that Christian claims are true. It’s so easy to generate something that looks miraculous, or to attribute miracles to anything unlikely or unusual. Instead, I look to how the world works.
Christians do not escape tragedy at any greater rate than non-Christians do. They do not escape victimization by criminals, nor damage from natural disasters more often. Their health problems are about the same as those of anybody else practicing whatever lifestyle a given Christian does.
Nor are they favored more than others. For every mysterious $20 bill on the sidewalk an evangelical claims is a real live miracle, another hundred Christians suffer from poverty with no magic money appearing for them. For every seemingly-miraculous escape from harm a Christian relays with wide, earnest eyes and a voice like thunder, another hundred people don’t get divinely rescued from similar harm and instead suffer and die.
In fact, the situation with Christians is exactly what I’d expect to see if their god didn’t exist at all.
This universe, likewise, looks exactly as I’d expect if no gods really existed at all.
In both cases, nobody needs to invoke gods, or magic, or pixies, or any other imaginary thing or being to explain anything.
As Tewson demonstrates, he’s well aware of these dealbreakers’ validity. He knows that they lead to the total draining of many Christians’ faith pools.
Sidebar: Hypocrisy as the biggest tell about Christianity’s lack of veracity
Christian hypocrisy is simply the logical result of those claims’ lack of real-world support. Evangelical hypocrisy is about the worst there is in Christendom, and it’s no surprise at all. They’re also the most authoritarian of Protestants. Hardline Catholics share that authoritarian outlook. And for both groups, that authoritarianism is dysfunctional in nature. That means that these two groups’ various leaders focus on the gaining and guarding of personal power over and above the welfare of the group’s members or the fulfillment of their groups’ stated goals.
Nothing could be worse for a dysfunctional authoritarian leader than for their punishments to be unreliable and inconsistent, or for their power to be cast into serious doubt. That leader won’t last long at all if the flocks notice either situation happening!
Well, Yahweh/Jesus is exactly like that. And evangelicals know it. There’ll be no bolts from the blue to punish them for acting out. If they can keep their behavior secret, nobody will even know. No, I doubt evangelicals in particular would dare to be so flagrantly hypocritical if they had objective reasons to know that their god would be judging and punishing their behavior eventually.
Patton Oswalt puts it perfectly in his “Invisible Anus” bit:
People would be foolish to accept evangelicals’ hand-waving about why they’re so incredibly hypocritical. And they are right to judge evangelicals’ claims by their behavior. Evangelicals hate that truth. They often try to set themselves up as judges who can forbid heathens from recognizing that truth—and yet it remains, and it drains, and drains, and drains faith pools everywhere no matter what they do to falsely invalidate it.
He’s set the ball on the tee of doubt
We’ll pause here before we head into the shocking conclusion of Ron Tewson’s OP about doubt. I’ll summarize what we’ve learned:
Ron Tewson has no idea what logical fallacies are, or else he refuses to recognize them in his own religious claims.
Logical fallacies don’t necessarily mean that a claim is false. But they are not valid supports for that claim. Tewson has none, or else he’d have offered them. In this, he is exactly like every other Christian who ever lived.
Ron Tewson has some very skewed ideas of why Christians leave his religion.
By mischaracterizing and attacking apostates’ integrity and rationality, he clearly hopes to make his own religious claims sound slightly more true. But I doubt many Christians leave for the weak and shallow reasons he suggests. Rather, deconverting Christians are usually the only ones who take religious new-customer marketing completely seriously and fully expect reality to correspond to that marketing. That Tewson has not deconverted for similar reasons tells us that he’s in the religion for some other reason. Nobody who really cares about reality remains evangelical. There’s not a way to square the circle of evangelical claims about reality vs reality as it really is.
Ron Tewson’s faith pool is not filled by factual observations or measurements of his own religious claims. Its faucets bear different labels and provide water from other sources.
And we will find out what they are on Thursday!
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