Good answers often fail because they answer the wrong question. Someone asks how old the earth is, or how a loving God could let a mother die of cancer, and the words sound intellectual. Underneath, the real question may be simpler and harder: why should I trust a God who let this happen? When an objection is carrying a wound, a sharper argument rarely moves it. What helps is finding the wound, naming it with care, and letting the gospel speak there instead of only at the level of the debate.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Sarita Lyons, who practices what she calls Christ-centered psychotherapy, put it this way in conversation with Lisa Fields: “a lot of times these intellectual debates that people are having about God are rooted in some more fundamental hurt and heart wounding that causes a resistance to come near to God and trust God.”
Her claim is careful. The intellectual questions are real, and they are rooted in something that produces resistance. A person can have a genuine question about evolution or the problem of evil and also have a reason they keep that question at arm’s length. That explains a frustration many Christians know well. You answer one objection, and another arrives with the same energy. If the objections keep changing while the resistance stays the same, the resistance is probably not coming from the objections.
What trauma does to a picture of God
Lyons starts with a basic observation about people: “I think it’s important to first realize that trauma changes us.” It can affect the body and the mind, and then, she says, “It can change the way we see ourselves, the way we see others, and ultimately, it can change the way we see and relate to God.”
The distortions she describes form something like a descending staircase. At the top, “God often is perceived as being punitive”, as though the suffering were punishment the person must have earned. A step down, God looks partial, choosing one person for devastation while shielding someone else. Then indifferent, too occupied elsewhere to be moved by this pain. Then powerless to intervene. At the bottom, God is judged not to exist at all, a comfort story for the naive.
That sequence is useful in a real conversation. “God isn’t real” may be the last step of a long descent rather than the first. Someone who now denies God may have started by believing God was punishing them. Argue only against the conclusion and you never meet them on the step where they first lost their footing.
Lyons offers an illustration she found in a book on counseling abuse survivors: the scene in Forrest Gump where young Jenny, trying to escape her abusive father, kneels and prays for God to turn her into a bird so she can fly away. Nothing changes. The film is only a picture, but it captures what Lyons sees in her work: when someone reaches toward God in the middle of harm and no rescue comes, belief can erode, or never form.
Why reassurance can reopen the wound
Most Christians assume that telling a hurting person God is real and loves them will console them. For someone who has been abused, Lyons argues, “the truth that God is alive and that God is real and that God loves you is in fact the conflict, the tension that the one who is abused is wrestling with.”
Unbelief can be the easier position, because it removes the hardest question. If God is real, the person has to face this: “what do I do with the reality that I went through trauma, God is real. He could have stopped it, but he didn’t.”
Put plainly, atheism can work as a kind of pain management. A world with no one watching is bleak, but it contains no Father who chose not to step in. Pressing harder on God’s existence and love may press on the exact place that hurts most. Lisa Fields summarized it well: for someone who has been traumatized, the familiar reassurance “becomes conflict, not comfort.”
Lyons does not conclude that Christians should stop saying God loves people. She treats the conflict as the place the journey begins: “conflict is not inherently bad, but we probably are gonna start with conflict.” The biblical story itself opens with a rupture in Genesis 3. Her path runs from conflict to the cross, and only through the cross to comfort, because “you’re not gonna go from conflict to comfort without the intersection, the intervention of the truth of the gospel.”
The cross is where the question of why God allowed it meets God’s own suffering. God allowed suffering to fall on his innocent Son so that the way back to him could be opened. Lyons also appeals to the God who is acquainted with grief, language drawn from Isaiah 53:3, which describes the servant as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Christians have long read that passage as fulfilled in Jesus, and the New Testament applies Isaiah 53 to him. For a wounded doubter, this does not explain the suffering away. It shows a God who did not stay at a safe distance from it.
When the word Father is the problem
Lisa raised a related concern about fatherlessness and recounted a story she had heard. A counselor kept telling a girl that God was her Father, not knowing her own father had molested her. The girl screamed. For her, the word meant danger.
Lyons widens the category beyond physical and sexual abuse. Abandonment belongs there too, since “to be abandoned, to be rejected, to be left is another way in which people are abused every day.” Consciously or not, “people are often projecting the very worst of their earthly father onto their Heavenly Father”.
Her examples are concrete. Trust is “difficult to believe when daddy has not been a man of his word”, when a child waited on the step for a father who never came. Provision is hard to credit when a father sent money but never showed up. God’s presence is hard to imagine for someone whose father missed every game and every recital.
She connects this to 1 John 4:20: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” John’s direct point is a test: love for God that never shows up as love for a brother is false. Lyons draws on the logic inside that test, the movement from the seen to the unseen. If we struggle to love the invisible God when we fail with people we can see, it is no surprise that we read the invisible Father through the fathers we could see. That is her application rather than John’s main claim, but it rests on the same assumption the verse makes about how people learn.
Her remedy is to let the name be redeemed. Knowing God, she says, gives people “a corrective experience of what it even means to be a father”, much as someone hurt by one person slowly learns that not everyone is that person. And God can bear the process: “God is not moved and God is not afraid of our emotions and our anger.” For the person in the conversation, the implication is simple. Before leaning on Father language, find out what that word has meant to the one in front of you.
Isn’t this a way to dodge hard questions?
The strongest objection deserves a real hearing. Telling a skeptic that their argument is really about pain can be condescending. Many people who reject Christianity have thought carefully and would rightly resent having their reasons explained away as unresolved hurt. Used as a trump card, this insight dismisses the doubter, just more politely.
The source sets its own limits. Lyons says “a lot of times,” not always. She also warns that a common mistake is assuming people are somewhere in their thinking about God that they are not, and she insists “we need to give people a chance” to say where they are. The insight is a reason to ask more, not to diagnose sooner.
Truth stays on the table. Lyons points to Priscilla and Aquila with Apollos. Acts 18:26 says they “took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly.” They corrected real errors with real teaching, and they did it by taking him aside, in relationship rather than as a public takedown. Lyons names the opposite failure bluntly: “If you have all truth and no grace, it’s abusive.” Arguments and care belong together, in the right order and the right setting.
So the honest limit is this. You cannot tell from the outside whether a given objection is carrying a wound. You find out by asking, listening, and taking the stated question seriously while staying alert for the one underneath.
Better questions, and your own limits
Asked what apologists should ask to reach the root, Lyons begins with what the person actually believes about God. Then she goes straight to the weak places: “where are you weak in your faith? What are some things about God that you struggle with?” She adds a question about which passages of Scripture bother people or which they avoid, because “we are often avoiding things in the Bible because they’re difficult for us.”
These questions treat struggle as normal and invite specifics instead of a vague confession of doubt. They also give permission, which Lyons treats as essential. She names “the secret guilt of the church is that I go to church all the time, and I’m really struggling in my faith.” Many doubters are not outside the church. They are sitting in it, afraid that asking will disqualify them.
Some of those wounds came from the church itself. “many of us have been spiritually abused,” Lyons says, and “people are wrestling in faith because man has done a poor job of representing Jesus Christ.” Jude 3 teaches that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Holding both keeps you from defending the indefensible while still pointing a wounded person to the One who never abused his power.
If someone tells you about abuse that is still happening, or that they are in danger, the conversation is no longer about apologetics. Their safety comes first. Help them reach a trusted person and appropriate help, and do not push them to reconcile with someone who harmed them. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Lyons ends by turning the questions back on the one asking. The helper has to ask, “what are my limitations” in this particular life, because “everyone that comes across your path may not be for you.” She grounds this in 1 Corinthians 3:6: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.” Some people need a pastor, a mature friend, or a trained counselor, and wisdom knows when to refer. Lisa added 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Knowledge puffeth up,” as a warning that good answers can tempt us to think we can help everyone. Lyons pressed further: people sometimes pour themselves into helping others to avoid their own healing. A Christian whose own wounds are unexamined may push hard on someone else’s doubt because it touches something unresolved in them.
The person across from you may never have wanted a winner in a debate. They may be asking whether God can be trusted with what happened to them. That question is not answered by proving God exists, since his existence is what makes it hurt. It is answered, slowly, at a cross where God let suffering fall on his own Son rather than watch from a distance.