Daily Defense Podcast

Latest Episodes:

#356 Appearance of Age? - Jimmy Akin Dec 22, 2023

Show notes

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 interpretation of Genesis (see Days 90, 290, and 339). However, if we assume for the moment God did create Adam as an adult, there would be a very good reason: Human ...

#355 Legislating Religious Views - Jimmy Akin Dec 21, 2023

Show notes

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 not vote their will simply because it is informed by their religious views and others disagree with those views, is contrary to the fundamental enterprise of democracy...

#354 Catholic Teaching on Merit - Jimmy Akin Dec 20, 2023

Show notes

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 Justification 8). After our initial justification, God’s grace leads us to do good works (Eph. 2:10) and he rewards these (Rom. 2:6–7), but still, “with regard to God, th...

#353 Religion as a Human Universal - Jimmy Akin Dec 19, 2023

Show notes

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 religious dimension to the world. The starting point for this argument is recognizing the universality of religion in human cultures. There have been no cultures without...

#352 A Fallible Canon? - Jimmy Akin Dec 18, 2023

Show notes

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 authority. Although some Protestants have been willing to say our knowledge of the canon is fallible (“a fallible collection of infallible books”), many find this prospect ...

#351 The Standard of Goodness - Jimmy Akin Dec 17, 2023

Show notes

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 debates whether piety is whatever the gods love or whether the gods love something because it is pious. In philosophy, this has become known as the “Euthyphro dilemma.” T...

#350 Objective Righteousness - Jimmy Akin Dec 16, 2023

Show notes

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 thought to involve the bestowal of only legal righteousness (sometimes called “forensic” righteousness). On this model, God acts like a courtroom judge and declares th...

#349 Binding and Loosing - Jimmy Akin Dec 15, 2023

Show notes

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 binding and loosing both to Peter (Matt. 16:19b) and to others (Matt. 18:18), this wasn’t the thing that made Peter unique (cf. CCC 881). In addition to giving him this au...

#348 God Is Unscientific? - Jimmy Akin Dec 14, 2023

Show notes

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. Although this view is widely held among both scientists and theologians, it is not clear that this is the case. The scientific method involves proposing an explanation b...

#347 The Dating of Matthew - Jimmy Akin Dec 13, 2023

Show notes

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 first century, as shown by the testimony of the first-cen- tury figure John the Presbyter (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:16). The evidence thus points to Matthew the ap...

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