When a critic of religion lands a blow, a familiar reply follows: you have attacked a caricature. The God you reject, a cosmic patriarch who intervenes on whim, is not the God of serious theology. Terry Eagleton pressed this charge against Richard Dawkins, and David Bentley Hart has built whole books around it. Read Aquinas, read Tillich, read the Cappadocian Fathers, the argument runs, and you will find a conception of the divine your objections never reach.

The objection deserves a serious hearing. Critics do sometimes target the crudest forms of belief, and the classical theistic tradition is a genuine intellectual achievement. God as ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, is not a hypothesis on a par with dark matter. Treating it as one misreads the claim, and a careful skeptic should say so.

But conceding this does less work than its proponents hope. Sophisticated theology does not dissolve the critic's problems. It relocates them. It buys immunity from some objections by taking on new ones. It describes a faith that few believers actually hold. And it leaves untouched the concrete commitments, historical, revelatory and moral, that give each tradition its content. Taken together, these three difficulties show why the strawman charge, though sometimes fair, rarely shields religion from scrutiny. They also show something about what honest engagement with the strongest version of an idea actually requires.

Consider the move from an anthropomorphic deity to classical theism. A God who is one powerful being among others invites an obvious question: what explains that being? Classical theism answers that God is not a being among beings but being itself. On this view God is simple, immutable and timeless, the ground of existence rather than an item within it. The explanatory regress seems to dissolve.

Yet divine simplicity creates puzzles of its own. If God is identical with his attributes and with his act of existence, how can God know contingent facts that might have been otherwise? God's knowledge that I exist would be identical with God. Since I might not have existed, either God is contingent or my existence is necessary. Alvin Plantinga, hardly a hostile critic, argued in Does God Have a Nature? that simplicity in its strong form may be incoherent.

The same pattern appears with divine action. If God is not an agent acting in time, what does it mean for God to answer prayer, respond to suffering, or love? The classical answer is analogical predication: terms like “good” apply to God neither univocally nor equivocally. But the further an analogy is stretched, the less it says. Antony Flew called this the death by a thousand qualifications. A claim compatible with every possible state of affairs asserts nothing about which state obtains.

Hume saw this coming. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Cleanthes charges the mystics with being atheists without knowing it, since a deity wholly incomprehensible differs little from no deity at all. Apophatic theology, from Pseudo-Dionysius to Maimonides' negative attributes, protects God from anthropomorphism by draining away positive content. The gap between rigorous apophaticism and reverent agnosticism narrows to almost nothing.

None of this shows that sophisticated theology fails outright. It shows that it faces a dilemma. Each refinement that shields God from evidential objection also distances God from the features that made God religiously relevant: personhood, responsiveness, intention. The problem is not solved. It changes shape, from implausibility into obscurity, and obscurity is not obviously the better position to defend.

Takeaway

When a concept is refined until it escapes every objection, ask what it now rules out. The content of a claim is measured by the possibilities it excludes.

Suppose classical theism is coherent. A further question remains: whose religion is it? The strawman charge assumes critics should engage a tradition at its most refined. But religions are not only bodies of doctrine. They are social practices sustained by millions of people, whose beliefs shape their moral judgements, political choices and private lives. A critique aimed at those beliefs is aimed at religion as it actually exists.

Cognitive science gives this gap empirical shape. In a 1996 study, Justin Barrett and Frank Keil found that participants readily affirmed God's omnipresence and capacity to attend to everything at once. Yet when asked to recall short narratives, they systematically distorted them. In their retellings, God finished one task before helping someone else, or occupied a single location. Barrett called this theological correctness: official doctrine is recited, while an intuitive, anthropomorphic concept does the real-time reasoning.

Practice confirms what the experiments suggest. Petitionary prayer presupposes a God who listens and might change course. Liturgies address God as father, king and shepherd. Hymns plead with a being who could be moved. Surveys in many countries consistently find large shares of believers affirming a literal heaven, miraculous healing and divine intervention in personal affairs. Even in churches whose official theology is classical, everyday devotion often runs on a personal, interventionist deity.

This produces an awkward asymmetry. Sophisticated theologians defend a God few people worship, while ordinary believers worship a God the theologians disavow. When a critic addresses popular belief, the reply is that it is naive. When the critic addresses the refined version, the reply is that philosophy misses lived faith. Dennett's notion of belief in belief is useful here: what is often defended is the value of believing, not the truth of what is believed.

The point is not that ordinary believers are foolish. It is that sophisticated theology cannot serve as a shield for religion as practiced. If the refined account is correct, much actual devotion is mistaken about its object. Some theologians accept this conclusion, but few preach it. A defense of the academy's God is not a defense of the congregation's, and the critic who notices this is not attacking a strawman.

Takeaway

Defending the best version of an idea does not vindicate the versions people actually hold. Always ask which version is carrying the social and moral weight.

The most decisive problem is the simplest. No living tradition is merely theism. A successful argument for classical theism would deliver a metaphysical ground of being, something close to the God of the philosophers. Christianity, Islam and Judaism require far more: particular historical claims, specific revelations, and moral demands grounded in divine authority. Sophistication at the foundation does nothing to secure what is built on top of it.

Take Christianity's central claim. Paul is unambiguous: if Christ has not been raised, faith is futile. No metaphysical refinement converts the resurrection into anything other than a claim about an event in first-century Judea, subject to the ordinary standards of historical evidence. Aquinas affirmed it literally, as does Hart. Here Hume's essay on miracles applies directly: testimony to the extraordinary must be weighed against the uniformity of experience, and that weighing is unaffected by doctrines of divine simplicity.

The same holds across traditions. Islam holds that the Qur'an is the verbatim word of God delivered to Muhammad. Rabbinic Judaism grounds its law in a covenant given at Sinai. These claims are specific, and their specificity is the point, since it is what separates one tradition from another. Classical theism is largely shared ground among them, which is precisely why it cannot settle which revelation, if any, is genuine.

This is where religious diversity becomes pressing. Sophisticated theists in each tradition use similar metaphysical tools yet reach incompatible conclusions about the Trinity, divine unity, salvation and the status of scripture. If the metaphysics does not decide between them, something else does: scripture, community and upbringing. That the distribution of religious belief tracks geography and birth so closely, a fact Hume noted and John Hick later wrestled with, calls for an explanation that refinement cannot supply.

Finally, there are moral commitments: teachings on sexuality, diet, gender, clerical authority and the boundaries of permissible inquiry. These are where religion most directly shapes lives and law, and they rest on claims to revelation rather than on the metaphysics of being. A critic who examines them is not attacking a caricature. The critic is examining exactly what a tradition asks its adherents to accept and to live by.

Takeaway

Even if an argument establishes a necessary ground of being, the hardest step remains: getting from 'something must exist necessarily' to 'this prophet spoke for it'. That step is the one sophistication rarely covers.

The strawman charge rests on a sound principle: criticism should engage the strongest version of a view. But engaging the strongest version reveals three things. Sophistication trades evidential vulnerability for semantic thinness. It describes a faith remote from practice. And it leaves particular commitments as exposed as they were before.

None of this calls for contempt. Classical theology is a monumental intellectual project, and its questions remain live: why there is something rather than nothing, and what grounds value and obligation. A secular philosopher can take these questions seriously without accepting the answers on offer.

Naturalism offers a different way to hold them. It treats contingency as a puzzle to investigate rather than a proof to cash out. It grounds ethics in human flourishing and in reasons that can be shared across traditions. It locates meaning in commitments we examine rather than merely inherit. Above all, it applies to theology the same rigor theologians rightly demand of their critics.