When someone says belief in God is irrational, you do not have to answer the charge on the spot. You can ask two questions, in order. First: What do you mean by that? Second: How did you come to that conclusion? The first question finds out what the claim actually is. The second hands the job of supporting it back to the person who made it. You need no memorized arguments to ask either one, and neither starts a fight.
Greg Koukl, founder and president of Stand to Reason, has built a whole approach to faith conversations around those two questions. He names it after Lieutenant Columbo, the television detective who solved cases by asking simple questions until the story stopped holding together. The method looks almost too modest. Its strength is logical. It tracks two things every claim depends on: a definite meaning, and some reason for thinking that meaning is true.
What is hiding inside a dismissive claim?
Take the sentence Koukl uses as his test case: belief in God is irrational. It sounds like one claim. It is really a placeholder for several.
It might mean there is no evidence for God. It might mean belief in God conflicts with science. It might mean the idea of God contradicts itself. It might mean that believers hold the belief for emotional reasons and not rational ones. These are different claims. They need different evidence, and a Christian would answer each one differently. A defense launched before you know which one is on the table may answer a charge nobody made.
So the first move is a question, not a rebuttal. Faced with the irrationality charge, Koukl says, “I have a question. The question is, what’s irrational about it?” His reason is plain: “I don’t know what they think. I don’t think it’s irrational.” The question is honest because he actually lacks the information. He cannot respond well until he knows what is being asserted.
That honesty is what separates the method from manipulation. A clarifying question asked only as a trap is a setup, and people can usually feel it. A clarifying question asked because you need the answer is just good listening.
Why does the order of the questions matter?
The sequence follows a simple dependency. You cannot test the reasons for a claim until you know what the claim is. Reasons support propositions, and a vague proposition can be supported by almost anything or refuted by almost nothing.
Consider the charge that the Bible has been changed. That sentence could mean that copies differ in small ways, which no serious student of the Bible denies. It could mean the original message has been lost, which is a much bigger claim. Ask what the person means, and in Koukl’s example the claim sharpens: we do not now have what was written two thousand years ago. Now it is specific enough to examine.
Koukl describes the aim of this first step bluntly. A clarifying question should, “in a certain sense, make him a bigger target.” A precise claim is easier to evaluate, for both people. The question does not weaken the other person’s position. It makes the position visible.
Only then does the second question come in: why are you convinced the Bible has been changed? The first question asks what. The second asks why. Asking why too early means testing reasons for a claim neither of you has yet identified.
What does it mean to shift the burden of proof?
Koukl calls the second step reversing the burden of proof. The idea rests on an ordinary principle of reasoning. Whoever makes a claim takes on the responsibility of supporting it. Saying something with confidence does not make it true, and it does not oblige the listener to disprove it.
Many Christians feel the opposite. When a friend says Christianity is ridiculous, they feel they must immediately prove it is not. But the friend made the claim. Asking why he believes it is not a dodge. It puts the responsibility where the claim placed it.
This also changes the Christian’s position. While you are asking questions, you are not advancing a view of your own. As Koukl puts it, “until I start asserting my own view, I have nothing to defend.” He adds, “Notice that since I’m not putting anything on the line, I am safe.” For a timid person, that is the practical payoff. You can enter a hard conversation without first mastering every argument, because for now you are a student of someone else’s view.
Does silence mean the skeptic is wrong?
In Koukl’s experience, the second question often meets silence. People who are quick with a challenge frequently cannot say what supports it. “They don’t know what to say ’cause they haven’t thought about it.” That is a report from his own conversations, not a measured finding, and it raises a question about what such silence shows.
If someone cannot explain why they believe the Bible has been changed, you have learned something about that person’s reasoning. You have not learned whether the Bible has been changed. A claim can be true even when the person stating it cannot defend it. A student can believe the earth orbits the sun and be unable to give a single reason. The belief is still correct.
So the honest conclusion from an unanswered question is modest. This person has not given a reason to accept the claim. You are under no obligation to accept it from them, and the question may prompt them to think harder. It does not settle the underlying issue. Christians who treat a skeptic’s silence as a win are making the same error they would object to if it were turned on them.
This limit keeps the method from becoming a game of scoring points. The goal is clearer thinking on both sides, and clearer thinking sometimes shows that a question is harder than either person assumed.
Isn’t this just a way to avoid defending your own faith?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. Scripture does not let Christians hide behind questions forever. Peter tells believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). If shifting the burden of proof became a permanent strategy, it would run against that command.
Two things answer the objection. First, the burden of proof is not a weight you push onto someone else so you never carry one. It belongs to whoever makes a claim. When a Christian says Jesus rose from the dead, the Christian owes reasons. The method does not deny that. It handles one claim at a time, starting with the one already on the table.
Second, the approach has a third step, and it is where the Christian speaks. Koukl summarizes it this way: “you make your own point, advance the gospel, exploit a weakness or a flaw by using questions.” The first two steps do not replace making a case. They prepare for it, so that when you do speak, you are answering what the person actually believes and not a guess.
Peter’s verse also says something about manner. The answer is to be given with meekness and fear. Questions asked with real interest honor that, because they treat the other person’s reasons as worth hearing. Lisa Fields, founder and president of Jude 3 Project, tied this to the way Jesus engaged people, often answering a question with another question: “I think of the humility it took for Jesus to be with people who constantly misinterpreted his words and not pick a fight every time.” Asking is not a lesser form of faithfulness than answering. It can be the more humble one.
How can a question carry an objection?
The third step shows what the first two make possible. Once a claim is clear, its flaws become visible, and a question can point to a flaw without turning into an accusation.
A young man named Gil told Koukl that Christians were nice people but judgmental. Koukl asked what was wrong with that. Gil said it is wrong to judge. The clarifying question had exposed something: Gil’s statement was itself a judgment, made against Koukl’s view. The claim refutes itself, because to assert it you have to do the thing it forbids.
Stating the problem directly would have been fair. Koukl’s verdict on that option: “It’s accurate, but it’s not elegant. It’s not tactically shrewd.” So he asked, “Gil, if it’s wrong to judge, then why are you judging me right now?” Gil revised his view. Judging might be acceptable, he granted, but you cannot push your morality on other people. Koukl asked, “Is that your morality?” Gil said it was. The same problem returned, because Gil was pressing his own moral view on Koukl in the act of forbidding it.
A statement that defeats itself cannot be true as stated. Gil saw that only because the question let him look at his own words. Nobody told him he was wrong. He got there by answering. Without the first question, “what’s wrong with that?”, his real claim would never have surfaced, and there would have been nothing for the third step to work on.
This is also why the method suits two very different kinds of Christians. Some treat every exchange as a contest. Koukl describes the picture many carry: “we see these encounters as almost gladiator events.” For them, the questions force a slower pace and more listening. Others are timid and stay out of conversations entirely. For them, the first two questions are a low-risk way in, with no expectation that one conversation must end in a decision.
What remains unsettled?
The method does not tell you how to read the person in front of you. Koukl admits that telling a seeker from someone who only wants to fight is hard, because you cannot see into another mind. He has met people who were most hostile just before they became Christians.
It also does not guarantee you can answer what comes back. Koukl sees no problem with saying you do not have the information and will return to it later. Online, where objections often arrive as a long list, he suggests choosing one charge and asking the person what they mean by it, or how they reached it. The same two questions shrink the conversation to something manageable.
He does mark one firm limit. Some people interrupt constantly and roll over every attempt at conversation. If that cannot be managed, it is fine to stop. He points to Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:6, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” Koukl reads the verse carefully: “his point there is not that people are pigs or dogs, but that some circumstances are such that you just let it go.” That fits the verse’s setting in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus has just warned against hypocritical judgment and now adds a word of discernment. It is wisdom about circumstances, not a label for people.
Where exactly a conversation crosses that line is a judgment call. No pair of questions removes the need for wisdom.
What the two questions do provide is a fair way to begin. They ask the same thing of every claim: say what you mean, and say why you think it is true. A Christian who uses them honestly will eventually have to answer them too. That is not a weakness in the method. It is the reason it can be trusted.