God Walks Into a Bar by Grenville Kent

 

Chapter-by-Chapter Critique of "God Walks Into a Bar"

1. Introduction: Billiard Balls and Big Bangs

• Problem: The opening sets up a false dichotomy: Either blind chance, or a purposeful Mind. This ignores a spectrum of scientific, metaphysical, and philosophical positions including non-theistic interpretations of cosmological fine-tuning, and leaves the vast literature on contingency and necessity unexplored.
• Failure: Kent often frames atheism as a pessimistic and empty worldview, misrepresenting secular humanism and naturalism as nihilistic, which is both unfair and unsupported by evidence.

2. "Evidence For (and Against) Faith"

• Problem: Kent claims to offer evidence "for and against" but is overwhelmingly apologetic, rarely engaging with the strongest atheist or skeptical counter-arguments in their best form. Straw man versions of skepticism abound.
• Failure: Where he attempts to address doubts, Kent tends to present faith as emotionally attractive—offering hope, purpose, and love—rather than demonstrating rational or empirical necessity.

3. The Church’s Image Problem

• Problem: Kent acknowledges abuses and corruption in religious institutions but ultimately hand-waves this away by pointing to Christianity’s charitable works, without deep philosophical grappling with theodicy or religiously motivated harm.
• Failure: Systemic critique is dodged; historical harm and the abuse of power are contextualized as mere exceptions or image problems, not as substantive challenges to divine providence or goodness.

4. Miracles, Resurrection, and the Empty Tomb

• Problem: Kent recycles standard Christian apologetic talking points: eyewitnesses, the inability of guards to have stolen the body, transformed disciples, etc. These claims are extensively rebutted in scholarly literature, and Kent does not present or critically engage rival explanations (e.g., legendary development, cognitive dissonance, myth-making).
• Failure: The book presupposes the reliability of gospel narratives and ignores contradictions, late dating, lack of external corroboration, and the methodological limitations of miracle claims.

5. Faith and Reason

• Problem: Kent often conflates faith with reason, suggesting belief in God is rational because it feels good, offers hope, or answers existential questions. He does not properly distinguish emotional satisfaction from epistemic justification.
• Failure: Instead of engaging deep epistemology—what counts as knowledge, warranted belief, justified true belief—Kent slides into motivational apologetics: "It would be nice if it were true, so let’s hope it is."

6. Suffering and Theodicy

• Problem: The treatment of suffering is generic: Kent asserts that God works all things for good, without tackling the existential horror of natural evil, the suffering of innocents, or the non-intervention of God in history.
• Failure: Sophisticated atheistic arguments (e.g., evidential problem of evil, divine hiddenness) are mostly ignored or misunderstood.

7. Moral Guidance and Meaning

• Problem: Moral claims rest on the assumption that objective morality requires theism, which is heavily debated and flatly rejected by many philosophers. Kent cherry-picks moral "benefits" of belief but glosses over religiously motivated harm, exclusion, and tribalism.
• Failure: The book side-steps the Euthyphro dilemma and evolutionary origins of social cooperation, failing to critically weigh moral frameworks outside theistic narratives.

8. Conclusions and Calls to Faith

• Problem: Kent ends with a barstool invitation to faith as a leap, dressed in warmth and social belonging. These are pragmatic and affective appeals, not arguments addressed to truth-seeking skeptics.
• Failure: The book’s methodology is grounded in persuasion, not demonstration; conviction is prioritized over truth, and doubts are reassured, not actually resolved.

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Summary of Main Problems

• Kent’s apologetics rely heavily on rhetorical framing, emotional resonance, and selective engagement with skeptical arguments, rather than robust dialectic or evidence weighing.
• False dichotomies abound—chance vs. Mind, despair vs. hope, blind faith vs. enlightened belief—leaving critical alternatives unaddressed.
• Contentiously asserted “prophetic quotations” (e.g., "seek and you will find") are attributed without adequate historical or textual scrutiny, a problem you previously flagged and which remains unresolved.
• Where demonstrably false claims or misleading implications exist in Kent’s book (such as the reliability of resurrection accounts or the necessity of theism for morality), he either glosses over scholarly rebuttals or buries the nuance under motivational platitudes.

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This book may spark “rich discussions,” but as a work for the truth-seeking skeptic, it is riddled with logical flaws, a lack of rigorous argument, and methodological weaknesses. If your goal is to examine faith claims critically, “God Walks Into a Bar” is better read as an example of contemporary pop-apologetics—useful only as a case study in persuasive but non-rigorous religious advocacy.

Let me know if you wish for a deeper dive into any chapter, or want sources on specific scholarly rebuttals to Kent’s arguments.

continue above with chapters 9 onwards

Continuing the savage critique of Grenville Kent’s "God Walks Into a Bar," here are problems with chapters 9 onwards, built from the available chapter list and Kent’s repeated apologetic themes.

9. Jesus and the NonChristian Historians

• Problem: Kent appeals to non-Christian historians (like Josephus and Tacitus) as evidence for the historical Jesus, but fails to address serious scholarly disputes about the authenticity and accuracy of these accounts. For instance, the Testimonium Flavianum from Josephus is widely regarded as interpolated or at least edited by Christian scribes, a fact Kent discounts or buries.
• Failure: Instead of dissecting sources for Christian bias and later emendation, Kent treats the thin historical record as strong supporting evidence, showing apologetic selective blindness while ignoring the complex and contested nature of ancient testimony.

10. Can You Find a Hole in This?

• Problem: This chapter poses “holes” in skepticism and seeks to rebut common objections. However, Kent typically offers simplistic versions of skeptical arguments—setting up straw men, not steel men (best form)—and his rebuttals are shallow, centered more on plausibility than on rigor.
• Failure: Kent does not seriously engage with leading criticisms from philosophy of religion or biblical scholarship. For example, he does not address Bayesian reasoning on miracle claims, or properly deal with alternative non-supernatural explanations for the appearance of resurrection belief.

11. Four Agreed Facts

• Problem: Kent likely draws on William Lane Craig’s “minimal facts” apologetic method: Jesus died by crucifixion, his tomb was empty, disciples experienced appearances, and belief spread rapidly. All these facts are hotly contested by critical scholars.
• Failure: Kent lumps together apologetic consensus as if it were scholarly consensus, glossing over major debates (e.g., cognitive dissonance theory, origins of legend, Paul’s vision as hallucination) and incorrectly asserts that these agreed facts “demand” a resurrection.

12. Conclusions

• Problem: Kent summarizes faith’s emotional and existential appeal, typically leveraging hope, belonging, and purpose—conflating desirability with truth. The conclusion is an extended motivational speech, not a weighing of evidence or a reckoning with deep doubt.
• Failure: Serious questions about religious epistemology—the limits of reason and faith, the coercive psychological power of apologetics, religious pluralism—are swept aside for narrative closure.

13. Ruby

• Problem: This final narrative is likely an anecdotal testimony meant to crystallize religious conversion or the "human face" of faith. Kent uses personal story, emotion, and individual transformation to imply argument.
• Failure: The rhetorical move is storytelling in place of logic or evidence. Testimony is not a substitute for truth-claims—but Kent deploys it as if it seals the defence.

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Overarching Problems (Chapters 9+)

• Kent’s apologetic style remains unchanged: He repeatedly cherry-picks evidence, ignores scholarly objections, and conflates plausibility with probability, desirability with truth.
• Historical and philosophical gaps: Major debates in New Testament criticism, ancient history, and philosophy of religion are barely acknowledged; complexity and context are replaced by Christian triumphalism.
• Rhetorical closure: Faith is the end-point—doubt is acknowledged emotionally, rarely intellectually.

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Bottom Line: For the truth-seeker, Kent’s book remains a work of persuasive apologetics, not critical engagement. It is more a barstool sermon than a scholarly inquiry. The chapters from 9 onward continue the pattern: shallow rebuttal, selective evidence, narrative persuasion.

14. Narrative Faith and Storytelling

• Problem: Kent relies increasingly on anecdote and narrative at this stage, using personal and communal stories as “evidence.” While stories can illustrate, they do not logically justify faith claims or authenticate miracle reports. The rhetorical sleight-of-hand is substituting impact for argument.
• Failure: Subjective transformation and emotional testimony are multiplied, but their epistemic value is never established. Kent does not address why atheists, people of other religions, or even secular narratives can inspire similar change—making the link to Christian truth claims spurious.

15. Religious Experience and Conversion

• Problem: The book pivots to cases of religious experience—visions, mystical moments, conversions. Kent treats personal experience not just as evidence, but as a kind of proof, dodging the empirical and psychological explanations for such phenomena.
• Failure: There is no engagement with well-established critiques from neuroscience, psychology, or comparative religion. He avoids the question: If religious experience proves a religion true, why are such experiences common across contradictory religions and ideologies?

16. Faith’s Fruits: Hope, Purpose, and Love

• Problem: The apologetic tone peaks, focusing on the positive “fruits” of faith while sidestepping destructive outcomes—from psychological manipulation to toxic tribalism and violence. Poignant stories of hope are marshalled selectively, glossing over real-world harm.
• Failure: Kent never provides a metric or framework to compare the "fruits" of faith versus secular humanism, or other belief systems with equivalent moral outcomes. Philosophical arguments concerning the grounding of value are replaced by motivational examples.

17. The Leap

• Problem: The narrative invites you to “take the leap"—to choose faith, not through reason but through desire, hope, and community. The leap is portrayed as a rational act, but this is an equivocation at best and a category error at worst.
• Failure: Genuine risk, doubt, and the existential cost of religious belief are obscured by a façade of certainty. Kent glosses over the leap’s epistemological peril: committing without sufficient evidence.

18. Epilogue: A Final Toast

• Problem: Kent closes not with answers, but with camaraderie, warmth, and exhortation—faith is a “journey,” truth a barstool conversation. Emotional closure replaces rigorous reckoning.
• Failure: The book leaves critical doubts unaddressed, faith’s leap unexamined, and religious epistemology underdeveloped. Motivational closure is not the same as philosophical closure, and the latter is necessary for any genuine search for truth.

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Final Problems (Chapters 14+)

• Kent’s final chapters double down on rhetorical, emotional, and anecdotal appeals, not intellectual engagement.
• Critical questions about religious pluralism, subjective experience, and the epistemic status of faith are ignored.
• The book ends with kinship and persuasion, not with demonstration, justification, or answer to skepticism.

In summary: The latter chapters of "God Walks Into a Bar" exemplify lay apologetics at their weakest—stories in place of evidence, feelings in place of facts, and camaraderie in place of rigorous argument. For the truth-seeker and critical reader, Kent’s method does not hold up: it persuades the hopeful, but fails to meet the doubter’s challenge.

 

Adventist to atheist

 I did not begin my religious life by weighing arguments. I entered it by inheritance.

When I was seven or eight years old, my parents began taking us to a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church. Around the same time, some genuinely kind colporteurs sold my parents a collection of Bible-themed books—Uncle Arthur stories and similar material that framed faith as warm, moral, and trustworthy. Soon after, we attended a George Vandeman evangelistic series, ostensibly billed as an exploration of the wonders of the universe. It opened with striking images of stars and galaxies—cosmic awe carefully cultivated—before moving almost seamlessly to the conclusion: therefore, God.

I grew up entirely inside a young‑earth creationist framework. This was not a belief I later adopted; it was the intellectual atmosphere I breathed. Genesis was literal, the flood explained geology, and doubt was framed not as curiosity but as danger. I was baptised at sixteen. Adventism felt coherent, purposeful, and morally serious. In time, I trained as a nurse at Sydney Adventist Hospital. Far from moderating my beliefs, I became more fundamentalist in outlook. I leaned in.

After graduating, I worked at a small SDA hospital in Warburton. During this period I became particularly enthusiastic about the church’s health message and about Ellen G. White. I read widely and earnestly through her writings, taking seriously the claim that she functioned as a modern prophet. The Spirit of Prophecy was not an optional accessory in Adventism; it was structural.

Then came the Desmond Ford and Walter Rea material. What unsettled me was not simply that Ellen White had drawn from earlier authors—honest influence could have been acknowledged and discussed—but that material presented by the church as the result of divine visions (“I was shown…”) turned out to be nearly identical to existing sources. The problem was not inspiration; it was misrepresentation. Prophetic authority had been asserted where dependence and editing better explained the facts.

My confidence in the Spirit of Prophecy collapsed. More importantly, my trust in the church’s honesty collapsed with it. I could not continue attending a church that I believed was lying about its own foundations. Around 1983 I stepped away from institutional Adventism. Yet belief itself did not vanish. For the next twenty‑six years, until roughly 2009, I remained a young‑earth creationist Christian—minus Ellen White. In practical terms, I accepted about 26 of the church’s 28 fundamental beliefs.

I described this position as “Bible‑only.” In practice, however, it was Bible‑only as interpreted through a residual Adventist framework. Ellen White was gone, but many of the conclusions she had helped cement remained. The Sabbath, literal Genesis, and a tightly bounded view of doctrine still felt not merely plausible, but self‑evident. I had removed a prophet, not the interpretive lens.

From 1995 to 2002, I worked in Saudi Arabia. I am not sure this directly caused later changes in belief, but it undeniably altered my vantage point. I lived in a deeply pious religious society—Muslim rather than Christian. Most people I encountered were decent, kind, and ordinary. Yet I never regarded the Qur’an as divinely inspired, and I was not impressed by the small but real presence of religious fanatics. Religion, experienced from the outside, became comparative rather than assumed.

In September 2001, while travelling to a medical conference, I was in New York. I saw the first tower already smoking and then directly witnessed the impact of the second plane. I was too shocked to process it. After checking in at Newark Airport, we were told to evacuate and I was stranded in New Jersey for several days. As information emerged, it became clear this was terrorism. Over dinner in Niagara Falls, I said to others that I suspected Saudi‑linked extremists—bin Laden, the Taliban. This was not guesswork: while working in Saudi Arabia, a local had previously told me that the Taliban had large plans to strike America, though they did not know how or when. We had even treated Taliban members as patients.

I did not conclude from this that religion was false. I stored the data. Absolute certainty, I noted, could become lethal.

I was aware of the so‑called “New Atheists,” but I knew they were wrong. In 2008, I decided I should understand their arguments properly in order to refute them. I began with Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I felt guilty reading it. On the train, I hid it inside a false book cover so as not to advertise what I was doing.

The book did not change my beliefs. It did something more dangerous: it opened the door to questions. I tried to critique it, to find clear errors that would allow me to dismiss it entirely. I could not do so with confidence. What followed was an intense year‑long reading frenzy—around one hundred books, cover to cover—both for and against belief: apologetics, science, theology, and philosophy.

Curiously, the scientific material on evolution did not move me. A sufficiently powerful God could do anything. Within a young‑earth framework, scientists could simply be wrong: dinosaurs could have existed and drowned in Noah’s flood. Omnipotence functioned as an all‑purpose patch.

It was philosophy that began to generate real doubt. Questions about divine honesty and moral coherence pressed in. Why would an honest God mislead us about the nature of reality? How could an all‑good God drown innocent people? These were not emotional objections but moral ones. The problem was not explanatory power; it was ethical credibility.

The movement away from belief was mostly a slow burn, punctuated by a few key moments. The God Delusion cracked the door. Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great produced a moment I still remember vividly: I physically put the book down, for the first time seriously entertaining the possibility that God might not exist at all.

Roughly a year later, and many books later, I was on a plane about to leave Melbourne for Sydney for a medical conference. As I had done on perhaps a hundred previous flights, I was about to pray silently. I could not. Speaking to someone—or something—that probably was not there felt wrong. Somewhere between take‑off and being airborne, I realised that I was now an atheist. The recognition was frightening. Significant inner turmoil followed.

After that, I remained open—agnostic atheist, for the pedants—and continued reading both for and against belief at roughly the same pace for the next decade. I briefly considered attending the Melbourne‑based Global Atheist Convention, but it did not feel right. They were not my people. The Christians were. Belief had changed before belonging did.

Eventually, I processed the fact that although I was no longer a Christian myself, my social and cultural gravity had not yet caught up. By 2012, I attended the Global Atheist Convention, and at that point wild horses could not have kept me away. I became openly—and at times loudly—atheist.

With time, that intensity softened. I now see progressive theists less as opponents and more as allies on shared, issue‑driven concerns. I did not lose faith because I wanted fewer constraints, but because honesty eventually mattered more than belonging. The journey from Adventism to atheism was not a rejection of meaning, morality, or community, but a refusal to continue asserting certainty where none was warranted.

I no longer believe in God. But I remain interested in how belief functions—for good and for harm—and in working alongside anyone, theist or not, who is willing to ground their convictions in evidence, compassion, and intellectual humility.