What are the strongest objections against it, and what are its best answers?

Every famous objection — Aisha's age, the sword verses (Qur'an 9:5–6), apostasy, women — has a documented answer once context, evidence, and history are actually consulted. Rule one: check the source. Rule two: judge the teaching, not the sinner.

Three objections are pressed hardest. Fine-tuning: the physical constants sit in the narrow range life requires, which theists argue points to design (Collins, Swinburne); atheists answer with the multiverse, observer selection, and the reply that a brute universe is still simpler than a brute God (Oppy). Moral grounding: objective moral duties are said to need a lawgiver (Craig); Wielenberg answers that basic moral truths can stand on their own like mathematics — while Mackie's camp denies the objectivity instead. Plantinga's evolutionary argument: if minds evolved for survival rather than truth, naturalists cannot trust their own reasoning; naturalists reply that reliably tracking truth is precisely what made reasoning useful for survival.

William James argued in 'The Will to Believe' that on live, forced, momentous questions suspension is itself a choice with costs — the agnostic forfeits truth to avoid error. Pascal pressed the same point as a wager: you must bet, and betting nothing risks everything. Theists and atheists alike add that no one actually lives suspended. The agnostic's best answers: Clifford — belief without evidence corrupts the believer and the society; the wager assumes the very God in dispute among countless candidates; and declining to vote is not a secret vote for either side.

Hume argued that no testimony can establish a miracle, since uniform experience stands against it; Christians answer that this assumes what it must prove, and that the resurrection evidence should be weighed like any historical question. The problem of evil — pressed from Epicurus to J.L. Mackie — asks how a good, almighty God permits suffering; Plantinga's free-will defense is widely credited, even by critics, with answering its logical form, while Lewis admitted pain remains the hardest fact pastorally. Ehrman argues the texts were corrupted in copying and that Jesus' divinity grew late; textual scholars reply that the variants are catalogued and largely recoverable, and Wright and Bauckham find worship of Jesus in the earliest layers.

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise argued the Torah is the later-compiled political law of one ancient state, not eternal divine teaching; modern criticism (Wellhausen) reads it as woven from several documents, and archaeology has not confirmed the exodus and conquest as narrated (Finkelstein and Silberman). The tradition's best replies: the national-revelation argument — a whole people's testimony is unlike one man's vision (Halevi); scholarly counter-cases such as Cassuto's against the documentary hypothesis; and thinkers like Heschel who ground the Torah's authority in Israel's covenant encounter with God rather than in criticism-proof manuscripts. The argument is real and remains open.

The oldest objection is internal: if there is no self, what is reborn, and who benefits from moral effort? The classical answer — continuity without identity, one flame lighting another — was worked out in the Milinda Panha and refined for centuries. The sharpest modern critique is Evan Thompson's Why I Am Not a Buddhist, which argues that «Buddhist exceptionalism» overstates the scientific standing of Buddhist claims. The tradition's best reply concedes that the science is young and returns to its own ground: the core claims are offered for testing in practice, not as settled findings.

Three bite hardest. Karma's account of suffering, critics argue, blames victims and rests on a beginningless ignorance it never explains (Whitley Kaufman presses this in "Karma, Rebirth, and the Problem of Evil"); the tradition answers that karma is diagnosis rather than blame, and that a beginningless ignorance is no stranger than any other ultimate starting point. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste charged that caste is not an add-on but built into the scriptures' authority itself; reformers respond by subordinating every text to the Upanishads' one self in all. Third, the schools flatly contradict one another about ultimate reality; the classical reply — teachings are staged to the student's capacity — persuades insiders more than critics.

The oldest objection calls Sikhism a syncretism — a blend of Hindu devotion and Islamic Sufism — a framing running from Ernst Trumpp's hostile 1877 translation into modern textbooks, with scholars like W.H. McLeod placing Nanak within North India's Sant tradition. Sikhs answer that Nanak's revelation was direct and his system original — his reported first words were that there is no Hindu and no Muslim — and that shared vocabulary does not mean a derived faith. A second objection, from McLeod's own historical criticism, is that the janam-sakhi stories of Nanak's life are late hagiography, not reliable biography. The Sikh answer: the faith rests on Nanak's own preserved hymns, not on the miracle stories told about him.

The deepest objection is that neutrality is impossible: Taylor argues in A Secular Age that the secular frame is itself a substantive way of experiencing the world, and Asad's Formations of the Secular contends that 'the secular' defines and disciplines what religion is allowed to be. Religious critics add that laïcité becomes coercion in practice, as in France's 2004 ban on headscarves in public schools. Secularism's best answers: Rawls conceded the state cannot be neutral in effect but can be neutral in aim, privileging no group's doctrine in law; Bhargava replies that flawed French practice does not define the principle, offering India's principled distance as a fairer model; and secularists themselves have opposed the coercive cases as violations.

The sharpest objection is grounding: if no God exists, why is human dignity binding on anyone? Mavrodes pressed it academically and Craig in public debate; MacIntyre argues Enlightenment ethics is a fragment cut from a theistic whole, and Gray calls humanism Christianity’s morality without its foundation. Humanism’s best answers are Wielenberg’s case that basic moral truths are real and need no further ground, and Kitcher’s account of ethics as a human project tested over millennia — adding that divine commands face their own grounding problem (the Euthyphro dilemma).

MacIntyre (After Virtue) charges that liberal ethics are fragments without a shared story of the good; Sandel that its 'unencumbered self' misreads how people actually carry identities; Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) that it consumes the family, faith, and community it silently lives off; Schmitt attacked its faith in endless discussion; and postcolonial critics document empire ruled under liberal flags. Liberals answer: the framework does not ban thick community — it protects it from the state; self-criticism this fierce is itself a liberal freedom; and every rival order yet tried has protected persons worse. The debate is live.

The strongest objections come from named critics: Sommers charged that a grievance-driven 'gender feminism' displaced fair-minded 'equity feminism' and traded in inflated statistics; Paglia argued feminism undervalues biology and treats women as perpetual victims; religious critics answer its family analysis with a vision of complementary rather than identical roles. Feminists are also divided among themselves over whether 'woman' includes transgender women (Butler's line) or names a sex-based class (Stock's line). The movement's best responses: its case never required denying all difference, only denying that difference justifies subordination (Okin); and the target is sexism, not men or the family (hooks).

The objections are famous and real: Tagore called the nation a machine that grinds moral man; Orwell described nationalism as the habit of placing your nation beyond good and evil; Einstein dismissed it as an infantile disease; Nussbaum argues birthplace is morally arbitrary; and fascism stands as the charge that the doctrine ends in catastrophe. Its best answers: patriotism is not chauvinism (Viroli); fascism was imperial conquest that destroyed nations — a betrayal of self-determination, not its fruit (Tamir, Hazony); and duties to humanity are best delivered through functioning national communities (Miller).