What has to be true before an argument for God can persuade the person in front of you? Two things. Its premises have to survive that person’s actual doubts, and you have to know which doubts those are. The first takes careful thinking. The second takes listening, and Joseph Torres, in a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, puts listening ahead of every argument.
This study works on both. First it maps the four classic arguments for God’s existence as Torres lays them out, asking which premise carries the weight and what each conclusion does and does not establish. Then it practices listening for what matters to a real person. Work through it alone in two or three sittings with a notebook, or with a group over two sessions of about an hour: the argument maps in the first session, the listening practice in the second, after members have tried it during the week.
What an argument can carry
Every argument has two parts you can test separately. One is its form: if the premises are true, does the conclusion have to follow? The other is its content: are the premises actually true? Most of the classic arguments have a tidy form. Nearly all real disagreement happens at the premises.
Torres makes this point himself. After giving each argument in three short lines, he notes that whole books develop them, because “different unbelievers will attack different points.” If two skeptics reject the same argument for different reasons, a memorized answer will fit at most one of them. Knowing which premise a particular person doubts is already a listening task.
A second test asks how much the conclusion delivers. An argument can succeed and still prove less than the person using it hopes. A cosmological argument that works gives you a cause of the universe. It does not, by itself, give you the Father of Jesus Christ. Naming that gap is a mark of honesty, and it also explains why apologists disagree about where to begin. Torres describes the classical method as working in two steps: first arguments that a God exists, then the question of which God, leading into historical arguments for the resurrection. The evidential method uses many of the same arguments but can go straight to the resurrection and ask whether it happened, letting that event show what kind of God exists.
Map the four classic arguments
For each argument below, write the premises on separate lines. Then mark three things beside them: the premise doing most of the work, the premise a thoughtful skeptic would most likely challenge, and what the conclusion actually establishes. Group members can take one argument each and report back.
The cosmological argument
Torres states it this way: “everything that is finite has a cause.” Then: “The universe is finite, therefore the universe has a cause,” a cause usually called God. The form is clean. The pressure falls on the second premise. Is the universe finite in the relevant sense, with a beginning, or does it only look that way? A skeptic might also ask whether a rule we observe for things inside the universe applies to the universe as a whole. If the argument succeeds, it establishes a cause. Whether that cause is personal, single or good needs further work.
The teleological argument
The name comes from the Greek telos, which Torres glosses as end, goal or purpose. His summary: “anything that’s designed requires a designer.” The universe shows evidence of design, so it has a designer. Look closely at the first premise. It is nearly true by definition, since calling something designed already implies a designer. The real burden sits on the second premise: that the universe shows design and more than complexity resembling design. That is where a skeptic who credits natural processes will push. Torres treats intelligent design arguments as a high-level form of this one, and those arguments are attempts to carry exactly that burden.
The ontological argument
This one starts from the idea of being itself. Torres puts it as God “is the maximally perfect being so he has all perfections,” and “existence is a perfection.” He also names the assumption underneath: “it’s better to exist than to not exist.” The conclusion follows: “if existence is a perfection and God has all perfection, then God exists.”
Many people find this argument either profound or suspicious, and it helps to locate why. One objection says existence is the condition of having qualities at all, so it cannot sit on the list beside wisdom or power. Another uses a counterexample. Imagine the most perfect island possible. Existence is a perfection, so the perfect island must exist. Since it plainly does not, something in the reasoning must be broken. A defender replies that the parody fails because islands have no built-in maximum: you can always add another palm tree or a better beach. A being with every perfection is different, because “maximally perfect” has a definite meaning for God that it lacks for anything else. Decide which reply you find stronger, and write down why.
The moral argument
Torres: “there is a universal moral law,” and “laws require a law giver, and so therefore there exists a moral law giver.” Both premises are open to challenge. A skeptic may deny that any moral law is universal, calling morality convention or instinct. Another may grant the moral law but ask whether the word law means the same thing in both premises. A law of physics describes; a law of a nation commands. The argument needs the moral law to be the commanding kind. Checking whether a key word shifts its meaning between premises is one of the most useful habits this guide can build.
Mapping prompt. Beside the argument you find most convincing, write one sentence that begins I would doubt this argument if I learned that… and finish it honestly. If you cannot name anything that would weaken it, you may be holding the conclusion more firmly than the premises.
Turn the map around
Now test a skeptic’s argument with the same tools. Take this common one: Our moral feelings evolved because they helped our ancestors survive. So morality is just instinct, and no moral law exists. Write its premises on separate lines. Which premise carries the weight? Then ask what the conclusion establishes. At most, the first premise explains where moral feelings came from. Does an explanation of origin show that nothing is truly wrong, or only that we came to sense right and wrong in a certain way? A fair map may show the skeptic’s argument is weaker than it sounds. It may also show that your own moral argument needs more support at the same premise. Groups should map this one together and see whether everyone locates the gap in the same place.
The argument that will not sit still on paper
Torres adds a fifth, the transcendental argument, and it changes the exercise. The four classic arguments can be written down in advance. An apologetically oriented transcendental argument, he says, “requires that you listen to the person you’re talking to,” and find out what concept matters most to them. It might be causation, design or morality. Call it X. The argument then claims X makes no sense unless the God of Christianity exists.
Compare it with the moral argument above. The traditional version reasons from a moral law to a lawgiver. The transcendental version claims more: “the concept of morality, the concept of right and wrong, apart from the existence of God doesn’t make sense.” Torres admits this is harder to compress into three lines. He calls it “a whole system, so to speak, rather than just an argument,” drawing on the image of God and the moral law written on the heart. Its strength, he says, is that “the unbeliever already believes in those things.” The person already lives as though right and wrong are real.
Notice the size of the logical burden. Showing that God explains morality well is one claim. Showing that morality is unintelligible without God is a much stronger one, because it must rule out every rival account, including the strong ones. Torres leans toward the presuppositional method this argument belongs to. A classical apologist would still build from shared premises toward God first, and an evidentialist would start from the resurrection, so the choice among methods remains a real debate among Christians who take apologetics seriously.
Here is the assumption this guide has been testing. Many Christians think apologetics is mostly about having arguments ready. With the transcendental argument, listening is part of the argument itself. You cannot know which X to argue from until you have heard the person.
What Scripture says about the posture
Read these passages before the listening practice, and ask what each one asks of the person doing the answering.
Proverbs 18:13 is wisdom literature, a principle more than a procedure: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” The proverb targets the order: the fool answers before hearing.
James 1:19 gives the order directly: “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” Torres’s own rule of thumb echoes it: “you need two or three times more listening than speaking.”
1 Peter 3:15 holds both halves of this guide together: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and 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.” Peter writes to believers under pressure. The readiness is for someone who asks, and the manner is part of the command.
Acts 17 is narrative, describing what Paul did rather than prescribing a script. Still, in Athens Paul starts from what he observed, an altar inscribed “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” (Acts 17:23), and he cites the Athenians’ own poets: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). He had paid attention before he spoke.
Romans 1:20 often stands behind the cosmological and design arguments: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” In context, Paul is explaining human accountability before God, and he is not laying out a syllogism. Some interpreters see support for natural theology here; others read it mainly as a statement about what people already know and resist. Either reading fits Torres’s claim that people rely on truths they have not traced back to God.
Practice: a week of listening first
1. Map one argument fully. Take the argument you marked as most convincing. Write the premises, the likely objection, and your what would change my mind sentence. Keep the page with you.
2. Have one conversation where you ask before you argue. Torres is realistic here: “you don’t just go to breakfast and suddenly have a discussion on the existence of God.” So wait for a natural opening. His example is watching the news with someone outraged at bloodshed and injustice. You can agree the injustice is real. If you have become a safe, non-judgmental person to them, you might gently mention other things you have heard them say that seem to pull against that outrage, and ask, in his words, “I’m just trying to work through how those two things connect for you.” Your goal is to find their X, the concept they care about most.
3. Ask the reciprocal question. Christians often feel permanently on the defensive. Torres pushes back: “it’s not just one side that has to account for what they believe.” When the moment fits, ask how the other person arrived at their view and on what authority they hold it. Then listen to the whole answer. He also gives a fairness reason: if we want unbelievers to hear our perspective, we should respectfully understand theirs.
4. Debrief with yourself. Afterward, write down what concept mattered most to them, whether any of the five arguments touched it, and whether you held back when you felt the urge to answer, or did, as Torres puts it, “do a data dump on them.”
Turn the practice on yourself as well. Torres admits that “a lot of us have a lot of contradictory beliefs just banging around our heads,” and he includes himself. Before the week ends, find two beliefs of your own that seem fine alone and uneasy side by side.
For groups. In the second session, pair members off. One person states a view on morality or meaning they understand well, even if they reject it, as its holder would state it. The partner may only ask questions for five minutes, then must restate the view to the speaker’s satisfaction before offering any argument. Nobody should describe a real friend or family member in identifying detail. The drill quickly exposes the temptation to treat people as arguments.
Questions for discussion
- Which premise in your chosen argument did you find hardest to defend, and did locating it make you less confident or more prepared?
- When you mapped the skeptic’s evolutionary argument, where did your group place the gap? Did anyone place it differently?
- The transcendental argument claims X makes no sense without God, a stronger claim than saying God explains X well. Could you defend the stronger claim, or would you rather make the weaker one?
- In your conversation this week, what was the other person’s X? Was it what you expected?
- Torres says the burden of explanation runs both ways. When you have been questioned about your faith, did the conversation feel rigged, and what changed if you asked a question in return?
- Torres rejects the choice between abandoning the faith and holding “an empty headed faith.” Which of those two pressures do you feel more often?
Before you finish, look again at your what would change my mind sentence. After a week of listening, would you write it the same way?