Life & Wisdom Quote by Josh McDowell

McDowell opens by granting his opponents the microphone, then quietly rigs the sound system. “For centuries” gives the criticism the gravitas of tradition, but it also turns it into something stale: an old refrain, endlessly repeated. “Distinguished philosophers” sounds like respect; subtextually it’s a way to frame unbelief as an elite pastime, a club of credentialed assailants. The verb choice does the real work. They haven’t “questioned” or “critiqued” Christianity; they’ve “assaulted” it. That one word recasts an intellectual argument as aggression, inviting readers to feel besieged rather than persuaded.

The triad “irrational, superstitious and absurd” is both a summary and a caricature. It’s the kind of list that feels comprehensive while staying conveniently nonspecific: no names, no arguments, no distinctions between, say, Enlightenment deism, Marxist materialism, or analytic critiques of miracles. That vagueness is tactical. It sets up a narrative in which Christianity is the perennial target of contempt, implying that the critique is not merely wrong but predisposed to mockery.

Context matters: McDowell is best known for popular Christian apologetics aimed at students and lay audiences, often in the shadow of modernity’s prestige institutions. This line functions as a throat-clearing move before a rebuttal, but it also doubles as identity formation. If “distinguished philosophers” have been attacking for centuries, then holding the faith becomes an act of resilience against fashionable scorn - and the reader is primed to see subsequent arguments not just as reasoning, but as defense.