You can give a complete account of how a belief spread and never once touch the question of whether it is true
One of the sharper moves in the New Atheist toolkit never bothers to argue that Christianity is false. It explains it instead.
The argument runs like this. Ideas spread the way organisms do. Some replicate well because they are useful, some because they are sticky, and some because they exploit a vulnerability in the host. Religion, on this telling, is in the third category — a mental parasite, a virus of the mind, propagating through children who are built to trust their parents and through adults who are built to fear death. Notice what has happened. The claim has not been examined. It has been diagnosed. And a diagnosis does not invite a reply; it invites treatment.
It is a clever move, and it works on a lot of believers because it sounds like science and it feels like a verdict. It is neither. It is one of the oldest named errors in logic wearing a lab coat.
Grant everything that is actually true in it
Start by conceding what deserves conceding, because an apologetic that cannot concede anything is not worth hearing.
Beliefs do spread socially. Of course they do. Most people on earth hold roughly the religion of the place they were born, and that includes a great many Christians. Religious ideas have been transmitted by pressure, by habit, by inheritance, and sometimes by force. Churches have carried nonsense alongside the truth and have at times defended the nonsense more fiercely. Children do absorb what the adults around them assume. All of that is observably the case, and no Christian who has watched a congregation up close will pretend otherwise.
So the sociology is not the problem. The problem is what gets smuggled in behind it.
The oldest fallacy in a new coat
What has been described is a transmission mechanism. What is being concluded is a truth value. Those are two entirely different questions, and no quantity of the first ever settles the second. Logicians have a name for the slide between them: the genetic fallacy — judging a claim by its origin instead of by its content.
Make it concrete. A man runs out of a building shouting that it is on fire. You could give an excellent psychological account of why he is prone to panic: he is anxious by temperament, his father was a firefighter, he lost a house as a child, and he has been primed for years to see smoke. Every word of that could be true. And the building could still be burning. The account of why he believes it has not touched whether it is so. The only way to settle that is to go look at the building.
That is the whole answer, and it is worth stating bluntly: explaining a belief is not refuting it. Mathematics gets taught to children by trusted adults with a curriculum and a grade attached, and arithmetic is not thereby a virus. The pipe a thing came through tells you nothing about the water.
And the tool cuts both ways, which is the part that rarely gets said out loud. If every belief is reducible to the mechanism that installed it, then so is the belief that every belief is reducible to the mechanism that installed it. The man making the argument acquired his convictions from somewhere too — from a university, a book, a father, a peer group he wanted to be respected by. If origin settles truth, his position is on the same shelf as the one he is dismissing. Which tells you the principle was never meant to be applied evenly. It was meant to be aimed.
Then go look at the building
Clear the fallacy away and the real question is still standing, unanswered and unavoidable: is it true?
And this is where Christianity turns out to be a strange sort of virus, because it keeps handing out the diagnostic kit. It does not ask to be felt. It asks to be checked. Paul puts the entire structure at risk on purpose.
And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. (1 Corinthians 15:14, KJV)
Read that as an atheist would and you should be startled. The man building the movement names the single finding that would destroy it. A comforting fiction does not do that. A meme optimized for survival does not volunteer its own kill switch. And a few verses earlier he does something no mind-virus would dare: he lists the witnesses, by name and by number, while most of them were still alive to be interviewed — Cephas, the twelve, above five hundred at once, James, and then himself. He is not reporting a feeling. He is submitting evidence with a chain of custody.
That posture is not Paul’s invention. It runs through the whole New Testament. Luke opens his Gospel by telling his reader the point of the document is that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed (Luke 1:4, KJV). The Lord answers the one disciple who refused to take it on report by handing him His hands. And when Paul preached in Berea, Scripture records the response it clearly approves of.
And they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. (Acts 17:11, KJV)
Whether those things were so. They did not get rebuked for auditing an apostle. They got commended for it. Paul writes the instruction into a letter as a standing command — Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21, KJV). A faith engineered to exploit gullible hosts does not issue standing orders to test it.
Why evidence does not finish the job
Now the hard half, and Christians should say it rather than pretend the evidence does all the work by itself. People do not move on evidence alone. They never have. Scripture is more honest about this than most apologetics.
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19–20, KJV)
Paul’s diagnosis of unbelief is not an information shortage. It is a relationship to the information — the next verse says they knew and glorified him not. Which means the mind-virus theory and the biblical account agree on one surprising point: human beings do not hold their deepest beliefs on purely evidential grounds. They differ entirely on the diagnosis. One says the believer has been infected. Scripture says every one of us arrives with an interest in the verdict.
That cuts toward the church as much as away from it. If you were raised in this and have never once examined it, then the critic has located something real in you — not a false faith necessarily, but an untested one. And an untested faith will not hold the first hospital room you sit in.
The confrontation, both directions
To the skeptic: you have explained the pipe. Fine. Now test the water. Take the one claim the whole structure hangs on, the one Paul put a kill switch under, and examine it the way you would examine any disputed event in the ancient world — the execution, the burial, the empty tomb, the appearances, the sudden willingness of frightened men to die for a report they could have recanted at any time. If it collapses, you have refuted Christianity properly, and you will have done something the mind-virus argument never attempted.
To the believer: stop answering this charge with volume. Answer it with the discipline Scripture already commands of you.
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. (1 Peter 3:15, KJV)
A reason. Not a mood, not a testimony about how it makes you feel on good days. A reason — and given with meekness, which rules out winning the exchange and losing the man.
Because in the end the Christian claim is not a replicating idea at all. It is a report about something that happened in a particular province, under a named governor, outside a specific city wall, to a man whose grave had an address. Ideas spread. That is what ideas do. But an idea cannot be crucified on a Friday and eat fish with its friends on a Sunday.
Explain the pipe all you want. The tomb is still empty, and that is a fact about the world, not a feature of your mind.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist