Daily Defense Podcast
In this podcast, Catholic Answers senior apologist Jimmy Akin will take up a different challenge to Catholicism every day of the year and show how you can defend the Faith and give answers to skeptics. It’s the perfect podcast for the thinking Catholic on the go—less than five minutes a day to learn a new apologetic argument.
Episodes
January 1, 2024
DAY 366
CHALLENGE
“This book doesn’t include my objection to the Faith!”
DEFENSE
A single book can only do so much. Therefore, let me recommend some more resources that may help.
The Handbook of Catholic Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli: This is an excellent survey of the general evidences for the Christian faith, written by a pair of scholars who communicate in a manner easily accessible to all.
Scaling the ...
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December 31, 2023
DAY 365
CHALLENGE
“Why should I pay attention to the Bible at all? It’s an ancient book written by people of limited understanding. Besides, other religions have their own scriptures, too. Why are they any less important?”
DEFENSE
The Christian scriptures are unique and valuable.
The mere fact that the books of the Bible were written a long time ago is no reason to look down on or dismiss them. To do so would be chrono-lo...
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December 30, 2023
DAY 364
CHALLENGE
“As an atheist, I may not be able to prove God doesn’t exist, but I also can’t prove there isn’t, orbiting between Earth and Mars, a teapot too small to be detected by telescopes. If I don’t have to believe in the latter, I don’t have to believe in the former.”
DEFENSE
This argument is subject to a number of objections.
First, it was originally proposed by the philosopher Bertrand Russell as an answer to b...
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December 29, 2023
DAY 363
CHALLENGE
“There can’t be an ‘unbroken line’ of popes going back to Peter. Look at the vacancies between popes, and at the antipopes.”
DEFENSE
The “unbroken line” claim may be found in the writings of individual Catholics, but it is difficult to find it in any official Church documents. Nevertheless, it expresses a truth: There is a line of popes (bishops of Rome) that we can trace in historical succession, going ...
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December 28, 2023
DAY 362
CHALLENGE
“Why can’t there be a multiplicity of gods?”
DEFENSE
The answer depends on what you mean by “gods.”
In classical paganism, the gods people typically worshipped were not infinite, eternal beings. Instead, they were understood to be superhuman but finite beings who came into existence at some point. (Thus Osiris’s father was Geb, Zeus’s father was Chronos, Thor’s father was Odin.)
It is possible for there to...
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December 27, 2023
DAY 361
CHALLENGE
“Why shouldn’t people of the same sex be allowed to marry one another?”
DEFENSE
It’s not so much a question of what should be allowed as of what is possible. Marriage involves a reality that can only exist between a man and a woman.
Marriage is a union of a man and a woman that is oriented toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring (CCC 1601). No other kind ...
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December 26, 2023
DAY 360
CHALLENGE
“If religion has benefits for individuals and groups, why can’t we say that evolution has favored the development of religion, even though it has no bearing on reality.”
DEFENSE
Religion does have benefits (see Day 283), but this doesn’t lead to the conclusion that religious beliefs are false.
If it were possible to dismiss a belief as having no bearing on reality simply because adopting it has benef...
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December 25, 2023
DAY 359
CHALLENGE
“Why do Catholics worship on Sunday instead of keeping the Sabbath? The (Saturday) Sabbath is part of the Ten Commandments, which Catholics recognize as expressing the moral law (CCC 1962).”
DEFENSE
The Sabbath command is unique among the Ten Commandments in that it incorporates both moral and ceremonial aspects.
The Catechism of Trent states:
The other commandments of the Decalogue are precepts of the n...
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December 24, 2023
DAY 358
CHALLENGE
“There is no one argument that demonstrates the Christian God exists. At most, each points to only a single aspect of the Christian God.”
DEFENSE
The arguments are not meant to be used individually. They’re meant to be combined in a cumulative case.
It would be possible to combine all the arguments into a single, highly complex argument, with many subarguments (similar to the way a computer program contai...
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December 23, 2023
DAY 357
CHALLENGE
“For Christians, violence is never permitted. Jesus teaches strict pacifism when he says, ‘Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’ (Matt. 5:39).”
DEFENSE
What Jesus teaches in one passage must be read in light of what he teaches elsewhere.
Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek occurs in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), but in ...
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December 22, 2023
DAY 356
CHALLENGE
“The Catholic Church is wrong to express appreciation for scientific studies on the origins of the universe, life, and man (see CCC 283). Contrary to modern scientific ideas, the universe is only a few thousand years old. God created it with the appearance of age, just like he created Adam as an adult.”
DEFENSE
This view creates problems for God’s truthfulness.
The challenge is based on an overly literal i...
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December 21, 2023
DAY 355
CHALLENGE
“People shouldn’t legislate their religious views. We live in a democracy, and not everybody has the same religion.”
DEFENSE
This challenge is problematic on several grounds.
First, it assumes people in a democracy shouldn’t vote according to their beliefs. This is false. Democracies exist precisely to allow people to express their will regarding how society should be governed. Saying that they should no...
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December 20, 2023
DAY 354
CHALLENGE
“Catholic theology of merit is false. We can’t earn our place before God.”
DEFENSE
The Church does not teach that we can earn our place before God. Everything we receive from him is due to his grace.
When we first come to God and are justified, it is entirely by his grace, for “none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification” (Trent, Decree on Justi...
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December 19, 2023
DAY 353
CHALLENGE
“Okay, religion is a human universal—something that’s found in all cultures. That doesn’t mean that it’s true, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Christianity is true.”
DEFENSE
Nobody would argue that because religion is a human universal, Christianity must be true. That would be excessively simplistic.
Instead, the argument is that the fact that religion is a human universal points to there being a reli...
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December 18, 2023
DAY 352
CHALLENGE
“We don’t need the Church to infallibly settle the canon of Scripture; we have a fallible collection of infallible books. Further, the Catholic Church didn’t even attempt to define the canon for centuries.”
DEFENSE
There are several responses to this challenge.
First, if you want to claim we have certain knowledge that all the books included in the canon belong there, then you do need an infallible authori...
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December 17, 2023
DAY 351
CHALLENGE
“If something is good just because God says it is, then morality is arbitrary. But if there’s an independent standard of morality that even God is bound to, that means there exists something besides God that is eternal and that is able to bind God.”
DEFENSE
God is the ultimate standard of goodness.
A version of this argument was proposed in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro around 400 B.C. In it, Socrates debat...
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December 16, 2023
DAY 350
CHALLENGE
“Catholic teaching on justification is confused. Catholics hold that, when God justifies us, he gives us more than legal righteousness, yet we obviously aren’t fully righteous in our behavior.”
DEFENSE
This concern is caused by the categories used to look at the question.
In the Protestant community, justification (here meaning the initial justification at the beginning of the Christian life) is usually th...
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December 15, 2023
DAY 349
CHALLENGE
“Peter didn’t have any special authority, because Jesus gave the power of binding and loosing to others. This simply refers to the ability to preach the gospel and admit people to the kingdom, as Peter did with Jews on Pentecost (Acts 2) and Gentiles with the household of Cornelius (Acts 10–11).”
DEFENSE
This interpretation does not fit the text or the context.
First, while Jesus gave the power of bindin...
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December 14, 2023
DAY 348
CHALLENGE
“Belief in God is unscientific.”
DEFENSE
This challenge can mean different things, but none show that God does not exist or that it is unreasonable to believe in him.
The statement that something is “unscientific” can mean different things. Taken in the most charitable sense, it would mean that the methodology used by science (i.e., scientific method) cannot establish the existence of God.
Alth...
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December 13, 2023
DAY 347
CHALLENGE
“Matthew’s Gospel isn’t reliable. It was written long after the events by a non-eyewitness.”
DEFENSE
Matthew was written by an eyewitness within living memory of the events it records.
We elsewhere cover that the names of the evangelists were not made up at a later date and that they indicate actual authors of the Gospels (see Days 109 and 146). Matthew’s Gospel was already called by that name in the fir...
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