The Two Types of Religious Apologetics

There are two things that religious apologists need to deal with

1. How to prove their religions

Most religions struggle with the fact that they have very little evidence of the divine in general and their specific revealed religion in particular. I think this has become a more acute problem in the modern era when atheism has become a rather legitimate intellectual position. In the Middle Ages you basically just had to show how stupid the other religions were and then your religion won by default. (Think Kuzari) Everyone basically assumed that A. There was a God and B. He had something to say. It was merely a question of figuring out which of the books was REALLY from God. Nowadays even if you believe in a God which is already a rather difficult thing to prove, what's stopping you from believing in Deism or a sort of God of the scientists? In short why is it more logically sensible to believe in MY religion rather than NOTHING.

It's basically impossible to prove revealed religions. And in our science saturated age the religious person is faced with the difficult problem of how to justify holding onto his or her religion when he or she has already accepted a more skeptical approach when it comes to other fields of inquiry.

2. How to deflect direct challenges to the religion

Atheism challenges religion in general. Evolution challenges Genesis and the primacy of man. Textual criticism, modern morality and history challenge the divinity of the Bible. Much of apologetics is dedicated to deflecting these challenges to religion. Some apologetics are more successful than others. But the fact is that every religion -no matter how ridiculous-manages to cope. No religion AFAIK has ever died out from modernity.

I find it really irksome when religious Jews scoff that skeptics are just ignorant of their apologetics and that everyone must realize that all the questions to Judaism have been answered. Yes they all have been "answered" but one must realize that the second form of apologetics is only really meaningful if one accepts the religion in question as true in the first place. If all religions are able to answer questions posed to them then "your answers" are only better if your religion is somehow more true than theirs which brings us back to square one and the question of how do you "prove" or even tip the scales in favor of your religion?

My impression from my limited knowledge of the subject is that most apologetics in the Jewish world and probably in other religions are of the second variety. Maybe its because the "proving" a religion is too hard. Maybe its because most writers of apologetics don't have any real doubts. I don't know. The problem is that the second type of apologetics is predicated on the first.

If anyone were to prove Judaism or any other religion or even demonstrate the likelihood of it being true then the second form of "deflectory" apologetics would be justified. But since the best Judaism has is the Kuzari proof which is merely an opiate for the Jewish masses, we haven't even been able to get off the ground.

Anybody involved in deflective apologetics is already assuming their religion is true. And since no one has very satisfactorily succeeded in the modern era with the first type of apologetics assuming your religion is true is rather unjustified logically speaking.

So perhaps the difference between the deflective apologist and the skeptic is not so much the quality of the apologetics themselves as much as the fact that the one assumes the religion to be true from the onset and the other doesn't.

The main skeptic argument is not any explicit attack on religion but rather the rather damning lack of evidence in support of religion in general not to mention MY religion.