The strongest criticisms of Christianity,
steelmanned and answered.

Three layers of response. (1) Historical: the Encyclopedia of Wars (Phillips & Axelrod, 2005) catalogues ~1,763 wars and classifies about 7 percent as primarily religious; subtract Islamic conflicts and the number for Christian-driven wars drops further. Most wars are fought over land, resources, dynastic succession, and ethnic identity. (2) Comparative: William Cavanaugh (The Myth of Religious Violence, 2009) shows that the category "religion" as a discrete cause of violence is itself a modern construction that conveniently exempts nationalism, market ideology, and secular revolutions. The 20th century alone, under avowedly atheistic regimes (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim), produced roughly 100 million non-combat deaths - a death toll that dwarfs the entire religious-war ledger of recorded history. (3) Philosophical: if Christianity is judged by its central teacher, then "love your enemies," "turn the other cheek," and the refusal of Jesus to lead an armed messianic revolt are the benchmark. Religiously-motivated violence is a betrayal of that ethic, not its consistent application. Finally, the same impulse that critiques religious violence - the conviction that every human bears irreducible worth - is itself a historically Christian inheritance (see Tom Holland, Dominion).

The very evidence that generates the worry is also what makes the text recoverable. (1) Manuscript density: we have ~5,800 Greek NT manuscripts, plus ~10,000 Latin, plus ~9,300 in other ancient languages - far more than any other ancient work. Homer's Iliad, the next best-attested, has roughly 1,900. (2) Early attestation: P52 (John 18) is dated ~AD 125-175, within a generation of composition; P46 contains most of Paul by ~AD 175-225. Nothing in Greco-Roman literature is this close to its autographs. (3) Nature of variants: of ~400,000 variants across all manuscripts, textual critics (Wallace, Metzger, the Nestle-Aland committee) classify roughly 99 percent as trivial - spelling, word order, definite articles. Fewer than 1 percent are both meaningful and viable, and Ehrman himself concedes "essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants." (4) Canon and translation: the canon was not invented by Constantine; the four Gospels, Acts, and Paul's major letters were functioning as Scripture by the early 2nd century (see Muratorian fragment, Irenaeus). Modern translations work directly from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, not from a chain of translations. The Dead Sea Scrolls (copied a thousand years earlier than the Masoretic manuscripts previously available for the OT) confirmed that the text had been transmitted with remarkable fidelity.

When you check the primary sources, the parallels evaporate. (1) Horus was not born of a virgin (Isis conceived via a reconstructed Osiris), not born on December 25, had no twelve disciples, was not crucified, and was not resurrected in anything like the Christian sense - these claims come from 19th-century occultist Gerald Massey and the 2007 film Zeitgeist, not Egyptology. (2) Mithras was born from a rock, not a virgin; the bull-slaying iconography appears in Roman Mithraism, which postdates Christianity by decades. (3) Dionysus myths of dismemberment-and-return are quite different from a historical public execution followed by bodily resurrection witnessed by named contemporaries. (4) More fundamentally, 1st-century Palestinian Judaism - the matrix of earliest Christianity - was ferociously allergic to pagan syncretism; the earliest Christians were Jews who risked martyrdom rather than offer a pinch of incense to Caesar. (5) The resurrection of Jesus is not a seasonal nature myth but a specific, datable, named claim about a Galilean rabbi executed under Pontius Pilate, proclaimed by eyewitnesses in the same city where the tomb was. N.T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003, ~800 pages) shows there is no Jewish or pagan analogue to what the first Christians claimed.

Hume's argument is famously circular. (1) It defines "uniform experience against miracles" as the evidence - but whether experience is uniform is exactly what is in dispute. If any miracle has happened, experience is not uniform; ruling them out a priori is assuming the conclusion. (2) The argument proves too much: by the same logic, we should reject reports of extremely rare but real events (a new particle, a one-in-a-billion medical recovery, an unprecedented discovery) whenever they conflict with prior experience. Science would grind to a halt. (3) Bayes' theorem, the modern formalization of probabilistic reasoning, shows Hume's framing is incomplete: we need both the prior probability and the likelihood ratio (how much better the miracle hypothesis explains the evidence than the alternatives). Timothy and Lydia McGrew (Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, 2009) and Richard Swinburne (The Resurrection of God Incarnate, 2003) show that for the resurrection specifically, even with a very low prior, the cumulative likelihood ratio is so strong that the posterior is high. (4) Philosophically: if God exists and created nature, miracles are not "violations" but higher-order acts within a broader system, the way an author can enter her own novel. The real question is not whether miracles are possible but whether there is good historical evidence for specific ones.

Two confusions run through this objection. (1) Category mistake: science investigates secondary causes within a law-governed universe. It does not and cannot address why there is a universe at all, why it is governed by mathematical laws, or why those laws are intelligible to rational minds. Those are metaphysical questions, not empirical ones. Asking science to disprove God is like asking a microscope to locate an author. (2) The gaps have not all closed; in several cases they have widened. Before 1929 most scientists assumed an eternal universe; Big Bang cosmology and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003) show any universe with average expansion greater than zero must have a finite past. Fine-tuning: roughly 30 physical constants (cosmological constant, ratio of electromagnetic to gravitational force, proton-neutron mass difference, etc.) are calibrated within life-permitting windows so narrow that Martin Rees, Roger Penrose, and Leonard Susskind - none Christians - call the precision staggering. Origin of information in DNA (Meyer, Signature in the Cell): we know by repeated experience that specified information traces to mind. Hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, Nagel): no amount of neurochemistry explains why any physical process should be accompanied by subjective experience. Historically, the founders of modern science - Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell - were theists who believed nature was ordered precisely because it had an Orderer. Today ~50 percent of working scientists are religious believers (Pew 2009). The conflict thesis (Draper 1874, White 1896) is rejected by contemporary historians of science (Lindberg, Numbers, Harrison).

The evidence runs the opposite direction, and every major critical scholar - including the non-Christians - grants it. (1) The creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 ("that Christ died for our sins...that he was buried...that he was raised on the third day...and appeared") is in formulaic, pre-Pauline Aramaic/Greek and is dated by critical consensus (Hengel, Bauckham, Ludemann, even Ehrman) to within 2-5 years of the crucifixion. Paul quotes it, not invents it, around AD 53-55. That is not legendary accumulation time - that is eyewitness time. (2) Acts 2 records the resurrection being preached publicly in Jerusalem within weeks, in the same city with the tomb, by people with faces and names and hostile audiences who could have produced a body. (3) A.N. Sherwin-White (Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, 1963), the Oxford classicist, worked on exactly this question for Greco-Roman history and concluded that even two full generations is too short for legend to displace hard historical memory; a fortiori for the 2-5 year window of 1 Corinthians 15. (4) The Alexander, Apollonius, and emperor-cult parallels are instructive - in the opposite direction. The gap between Jesus and the earliest resurrection preaching is weeks, not centuries. (5) Ludemann (atheist), Crossan, and Ehrman (agnostic) all accept as historical: Jesus' death by crucifixion, the disciples' sincere experiences of seeing him alive, and the early dating of the creed. They disagree about the cause, not the data.

Two moves, one logical and one pastoral. (1) The logical move: the truth of a claim is independent of the behavior of its adherents. Physicists can be cruel; it does not disprove physics. The move from "X's adherents fail" to "X is false" is the genetic fallacy. Christianity itself predicts and diagnoses exactly this pattern: "all have sinned" (Rom 3:23), including and especially those inside the church. A faith whose central symbol is a crucified man does not promise followers' moral perfection; it promises forgiveness and a lifelong process of renewal. Hypocrisy confirms the diagnosis, not refutes it. (2) The pastoral move: take the wound seriously. If a representative of Christ did harm, that harm is real, and minimizing it is itself un-Christlike. Jesus reserved his hardest words ("brood of vipers," "whitewashed tombs") for religious hypocrites. The Bible's internal critique of religious corruption is fiercer than any outsider's critique. The question is not whether Christians fail - they do - but whether the standard they are failing is true. (3) Historically, on net: Tom Holland (Dominion, 2019, and he is not a Christian) traces how hospitals, universities, universal human rights, the abolition of slavery, and the care of widows and orphans emerged from a specifically Christian moral imagination, even against Christians' own worst behavior.

Four lines of response, not one. (1) Hiddenness is not absence: billions across history report experiences of God, and not only the credulous - C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, Francis Collins, and thousands in rigorously documented studies (Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back) report veridical-seeming encounters. The question is not "why is God hidden?" but "why is he hidden from me?" - a different question admitting different answers. (2) Freedom and love: if God appeared as a coercive presence, the kind of free, trusting love he wants would be impossible; Pascal, Kierkegaard, Eleonore Stump, and Paul Moser develop this in detail. Overwhelming evidence would produce not love but capitulation. (3) Moral/spiritual prerequisites: Paul Moser (The Elusive God, 2008) argues that the God of Christianity is "cognitively elusive" to protect seekers from treating him as a mere object of curiosity; he reveals himself in the context of moral transformation, not neutral examination. (4) Christianity's specific claim: God has made himself obvious - in a person, in a time, in a place, with named witnesses. The shape of the self-revelation is not spectacle; it is incarnation. The question then becomes historical, not abstract: did Jesus rise? If yes, hiddenness is answered. If no, hiddenness is moot.

The framing is statistically misleading. (1) The 45,000 figure in the World Christian Encyclopedia counts every national affiliation separately: the Anglican Church of Kenya and the Anglican Church of Nigeria are counted as distinct denominations, though they share polity, liturgy, and confession. When you collapse those to actual doctrinal families, you get a much smaller number - broadly Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and a handful of others. (2) On essentials, historic Christianity has been extraordinarily united for 2,000 years: the Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed (the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, the forgiveness of sins, the life to come) are confessed by nearly every Christian tradition on earth. Disagreements cluster in the secondary and tertiary layers. (3) Comparison is fair: political philosophy, moral philosophy, and science itself contain deep internal disagreements without anyone concluding "nobody knows anything." Diversity within agreement on fundamentals is not chaos; it is the normal shape of a living tradition. (4) Jesus prayed for unity (John 17:21); the scandal of Christian division is real and biblically diagnosed. But the existence of division does not entail that no truth lies beneath it.

Moral and religious overlap is exactly what Christianity predicts, not what it has to explain away. (1) C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, Appendix; Mere Christianity) argues that the shared moral intuitions of humanity (the Tao) are evidence of a common moral reality, not evidence that Christianity is cobbled together. Romans 1-2 explicitly teaches that God has written moral law on the human heart and that pagans without the Jewish scriptures are still accountable to conscience. Of course Confucius recognized the Golden Rule - he was a human being with a conscience. (2) The Christian distinctive is not a novel ethical maxim; it is a person: a crucified Jewish carpenter who claimed authority to forgive sins, was vindicated by resurrection, and reconstitutes Israel around himself. That claim has no real parallel. Akhenaten's monotheism died with him; Hillel never claimed to be the Son of Man; Socrates did not rise from the dead. (3) Where Christianity did innovate - care for infants exposed on Roman hillsides, hospitals for the sick of any class, universal human dignity grounded in imago Dei, the equality of slave and free before God, the radical forgiveness of enemies - the innovations reshaped Western moral imagination so thoroughly that even post-Christian critics argue from values Christianity put into circulation (Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual; Tom Holland, Dominion; Nietzsche saw this with bitter clarity).

The logical problem is widely considered answered; the evidential problem is live and serious, but answerable. (1) Logical: Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974) is accepted across the philosophical spectrum - even by atheists like J.L. Mackie - as demonstrating that "God exists" and "evil exists" are logically compatible. It is possible that any world containing the goods of free moral agents unavoidably permits the possibility of evil. Since possibility is all the logical argument requires to rebut, the logical problem is defeated. (2) Evidential: no human, theist or atheist, is in a position to judge that a given instance of suffering is gratuitous - that it serves no purpose any omniscient being could reach. Stephen Wykstra's CORNEA principle and William Alston's "noseeum" critique formalize this. (3) Theological: Christianity does not offer God as a removed observer; it offers a God who enters the suffering - Gethsemane, the cross, the cry of dereliction. Whatever else the resurrection means, it means that suffering is not the last word. (4) Soul-making: John Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966) and Eleonore Stump (Wandering in Darkness, 2010) develop the view that certain goods - courage, compassion, self-giving love, intimate relationship with God after having been broken - are only accessible through a world in which suffering is possible. (5) Practical: the very objection presupposes a standard of the way things "ought to be" - but atheistic naturalism has trouble grounding any such "ought." Evil is a problem for theism; but the reality of objective moral outrage is itself a problem for naturalism.

Several complementary moves, in increasing depth. (1) Hyperbolic ANE war rhetoric: Paul Copan, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Matthew Flannagan (Did God Really Command Genocide? 2014) show that "utterly destroy, leave nothing alive" is stereotyped Ancient Near Eastern military language, used by Moab, Egypt, and Assyria in inscriptions describing campaigns where survivors demonstrably remained (the same book of Joshua that says all were killed also has the Canaanites still there a generation later - Judges 1). The genre is boast, not body-count. (2) The ḥerem was targeted not at ethnicity but at specific fortified military-religious sites (Jericho, Ai, Hazor) that were strongholds of a child-sacrificing, ritually predatory culture documented in both biblical and extrabiblical sources. Civilians in open towns had the option to flee, be absorbed (Rahab, the Gibeonites), or remain. (3) The Canaanite expulsion is explicitly framed as delayed justice: Genesis 15:16 says Abraham's descendants will not receive the land for 400 years "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" - God waits centuries. This is not ethnic cleansing; it is judicial response to documented, large-scale atrocity. (4) The principle is never generalized: these commands are explicitly limited to a unique historical moment in the inauguration of Israel's covenant land and are never reauthorized. No Christian has ever read Deuteronomy 7 as a general template for war. (5) Euthyphro: Christian theism answers the dilemma by locating the good neither in arbitrary divine fiat nor in a standard above God, but in God's own necessary character - so "good" is not empty, nor is God constrained by something higher.

Four clarifications, each with substantial literature behind it. (1) The traditional Christian view is not "torture by an angry God"; it is the continuation of a person's chosen rejection of God. C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain): "the gates of hell are locked on the inside." Hell, on this reading, is what a freely chosen life without God looks like when extended into the eternal state. If God wills to preserve the personhood of those who refuse him, the outcome is not divine cruelty but the shape of their own freely chosen trajectory. (2) The "finite sin, infinite punishment" framing assumes sin's gravity is proportional to duration of act, not to the dignity of the one sinned against (Anselm: sin against an infinite good is of infinite gravity). It also assumes persons in hell stop sinning; Lewis and others argue the self-enclosure continues. (3) Annihilationism and conditional immortality (John Stott, Edward Fudge) hold that the lost are not eternally tortured but cease to exist - a view with respectable biblical and historical support (it is a minority but not a fringe position). Universalism (David Bentley Hart, Robin Parry) is another respected minority. Christians disagree on the nature of final judgment; the caricature is not the only game in town. (4) The New Testament's dominant image is not sadistic torture but exclusion from a wedding feast, outer darkness, a door shut. The judgment is held to be tragic, not gleeful. Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

This is a 19th-century caricature with no roots in historic Christian theology. (1) The New Testament word pistis and its Hebrew counterpart ʾemunah mean "trust, faithfulness, loyalty" - the word used of a reliable witness, a trustworthy servant, or a covenant partner. It is a trust grounded in reasons, not a leap into the dark. When Jesus performed miracles it was "that you may believe"; when Paul preached at the Areopagus (Acts 17) he reasoned from shared premises and quoted pagan poets; when the resurrection was preached it was supported by eyewitness appeal (1 Cor 15, Acts 2). (2) 1 Peter 3:15 commands Christians "always be prepared to give an answer (apologia - reasoned defense) to anyone who asks for the reason for the hope that is in you." The biblical posture is evidentialism with trust, not fideism. (3) Hebrews 11:1 - "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" - describes not gullibility but confidence grounded in God's track record (the chapter then lists historical examples). (4) Every human being exercises trust beyond proof: you trust the airline pilot, the surgeon, your spouse, your memory, the reliability of perception. Strict demonstrative proof is impossible for almost anything outside mathematics. Reasonable trust based on sufficient evidence is how rational agents actually live. (5) The "faith versus reason" dichotomy was invented by Enlightenment rationalists and weaponized by New Atheists; it finds no foothold in Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Edwards, Lewis, Plantinga, or Swinburne. The great Christian tradition has always held faith and reason as allies.

The argument is self-undermining and proves too much. (1) The genetic fallacy: the origin of a belief has no necessary bearing on its truth. If I believe 2+2=4 because my parents taught me, the belief is still true. If beliefs are false merely because they are culturally transmitted, then the objector's own secular convictions - which are also predictably distributed by geography (Western Europe, elite universities, urban centers) - are equally disqualified. Secularism is far more statistically predictable from upbringing than, say, Christianity in China or Iran, where belief runs against the culture. (2) The argument proves too much: you would also have had different political, scientific, linguistic, and moral beliefs had you been born elsewhere and elsewhen. Do we therefore abandon all of these? No - we evaluate them on evidence and argument. Religious claims deserve the same treatment. (3) The relevant question is not where you happened to start but whether, on reflection, you have good reasons. Millions of converts in every direction - Christians in historically Muslim countries, Muslims in historically Christian countries, atheists in historically religious families, believers in historically atheist ones - show that the geographic correlation is not destiny. (4) Christianity is historically a religion that spread by persuasion and martyrdom, not inherited ethnicity; its center of gravity has shifted from Jerusalem to Rome to Northern Europe to the Global South, where it is now growing fastest. The idea that it is a "Western" religion is a parochial 20th-century view.

Pluralism is itself an exclusive truth claim, and a particularly bold one. (1) When Hick says "no religion has the whole truth" he is claiming a higher truth - the view from above - that Christianity, Islam, and orthodox Judaism all deny. He is not avoiding the claim to uniqueness; he is just relocating it to his own position. This is sometimes called "the arrogance of pluralism." The parable of the blind men and the elephant assumes the narrator can see the elephant - a point G.K. Chesterton, Lesslie Newbigin, and Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One) have made. (2) Religions make contradictory claims about the nature of ultimate reality (personal vs. impersonal, one vs. many, creator vs. illusion), the human problem (sin, ignorance, desire, disharmony), and the solution (grace, enlightenment, works, liberation). The law of non-contradiction says they cannot all be fully true. Respecting persons does not require pretending their claims agree. (3) Christianity has a distinctive answer: God has entered history in Jesus and made himself reachable. That is either true or false. If true, it is good news to share, not secret knowledge to hoard. Missionary zeal to tell people good news is not arrogance; arrogance is claiming to know better than the billion Christians, billion Muslims, billion Hindus that they are all equally mistaken. (4) Christian exclusivism is also inclusivist at a second level: the New Testament speaks of God making himself knowable to those who never heard the name of Jesus (Rom 2, Acts 17), judging people according to what they had access to. Exclusivism about Jesus-as-savior does not require exclusivism about who is finally saved.

The critique lands on real historical damage, but the biblical material is more subversive than the pop-atheist reading allows. (1) Genesis 1:27: "male and female he created them, in the image of God" - in a Near East where female humans were frequently treated as property or image-bearers of their fathers, this was radical parity. (2) Jesus' treatment of women - the Samaritan woman as the first evangelist, Mary of Bethany commended for taking the rabbinic posture of a disciple, Mary Magdalene as the first witness of the resurrection (legally inadmissible testimony in the period, which argues strongly for historicity), women funding and traveling with the Jesus movement - was astonishing for his culture. (3) Paul names women as co-workers, deacons (Phoebe, Rom 16:1), apostles (Junia, Rom 16:7), and house-church leaders (Priscilla, Nympha, Lydia). Galatians 3:28: "neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ." (4) The "household codes" (Eph 5, Col 3, 1 Peter 3) lift the pagan pater familias structure and reshape it: the famous line "wives, submit" is preceded by "submit to one another" (v. 21) and followed by an astonishing charge to husbands to love as Christ loved the church - to die for her. In the ambient Greco-Roman culture, no one told husbands they owed their wives anything. (5) Historical effect: infant exposure (overwhelmingly of female infants) was illegalized under Christian emperors; the status of wives and widows improved measurably wherever the gospel spread; universities and hospitals run by Christian women; Wilberforce-era abolition included female emancipation. Places where women's status is highest today correlate with historically Christian influence, not its absence. (6) Concubinage, polygamy, and brutal ANE practices are described, not endorsed, in the OT - and the trajectory of the canon bends against them. Jesus rolls back divorce to the Genesis ideal ("from the beginning it was not so," Matt 19).

Three layers: (1) The text itself, carefully read; (2) the trajectory it sets; (3) the history of actual abolition. (1) OT "slavery" (ʿebed) was predominantly indentured servitude as debt-relief, time-bounded (Ex 21: release in seven years), with legal protections unheard of in the ancient world: fugitive slave laws running in favor of the slave (Deut 23:15-16 - uniquely in the ANE), the death penalty for kidnapping (Ex 21:16 - which outlaws the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade at the source), sabbath rest for servants (Ex 20:10), and freedom for any maimed in beatings (Ex 21:26-27). This is not a permissive slave code; it is a severely constrained one compared to Babylonian, Roman, or Greek systems. (2) The NT trajectory: Paul tells slaveowners "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven" (Col 4:1), calls Onesimus a "beloved brother...both in the flesh and in the Lord" (Philemon 16), and insists on "no slave nor free" before God (Gal 3:28). The seeds of abolition are planted here, explicitly. (3) Historical effect: the first large-scale abolition movements in human history - in the late Roman empire under Christian emperors, in medieval Europe, and decisively in Britain (Wilberforce, Clapham sect) and the U.S. (Quakers, Wesleyans, evangelical Second Great Awakening) - were driven by Christians appealing to the Bible, against the resistance of nominal Christians who defended slavery. Historian David Brion Davis (Inhuman Bondage) and Rodney Stark (For the Glory of God) document this. Abolition did not come from Enlightenment rationalists in general (many of whom, like Jefferson, owned slaves); it came from Bible-quoting evangelicals. (4) The Bible could have included a sentence saying "own no humans" - but it would have been read as authorizing rebellion in a society where slavery was economically structural. Instead it plants principles - the imago Dei, redemption-from-slavery as the constitutive Israelite memory, the master-servant reversal of the cross - that detonated the institution wherever they were actually applied.

The argument is self-defeating and explanatorily incomplete. (1) Self-defeat (Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, 1993, refined in Where the Conflict Really Lies): if naturalistic evolution gave us all our belief-forming faculties, and evolution selects for survival, not truth, then all our beliefs are the products of truth-indifferent processes - including the belief that naturalistic evolution is true. The argument saws through its own branch. (2) Genetic fallacy: even if religion has evolutionary roots, that says nothing about the truth of its claims. If God wanted humans to be able to recognize him, giving them cognitive machinery for doing so would be exactly what we would expect. "Human beings have brains built to detect God" is as compatible with theism as with atheism. (3) The HADD story predicts vague animism, not specific, historical, propositional religion with creeds, canons, philosophical arguments, and martyrs. Christianity's specific claims (a crucified man raised bodily at a dateable moment in a specific city) are exactly not what agency-detection misfires would produce. (4) Empirically: religious belief correlates not with superstition and credulity but with measurable mental health, pro-sociality, and (in multiple large-scale studies) well-being; Barrett himself (a committed Christian) argues the data are best explained by humans being "born believers" in the sense that we are built to perceive transcendence. That is what you would expect if God made us. (5) Many leading philosophers and scientists have argued naturalism cannot account for consciousness, rationality, objective morality, or the intelligibility of the universe - each a prerequisite for even making the argument. If naturalism is true, we have no warrant to trust our belief that naturalism is true.