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Speaker 1: It's fascinating if you listen to the most watched atheists.

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Speaker 1: Most of them, like Alex O'Connor would be a good example,

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Speaker 1: would say fine-tuning to them is like A-tier, like top-notch,

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Speaker 1: this is a compelling argument. There's even footage of Richard

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Speaker 1: Dawkins saying that when push comes to shove, fine-tuning is

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Speaker 1: the argument that keeps them up at night.

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Speaker 2: But the bottom line is we are conscious thinking agents,

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Speaker 2: and atheists often talk about reason and rationality, You can

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Speaker 2: only have those things if consciousness exists. One of Craig's

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Speaker 2: top arguments, William and Craig, is the inexplicable applicability of math.

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Speaker 2: Why we can do science and it applies to the

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Speaker 2: natural world seems like a coincidence on atheism, but makes

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Speaker 2: sense if there's design. We often hear that belief in

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Speaker 2: God is rooted in blind faith, but is that really true?

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Speaker 2: Our guest today, Biola University theology professor Thaddeus Williams, argues

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Speaker 2: that atheism takes more blind leaps than theism. In fact,

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Speaker 2: he argues there are at least nine blind leaps of

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Speaker 2: atheism that we're going to explore today. Thad, thanks for

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Speaker 2: coming on, man.

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Speaker 1: Hey, brother. It's always a joy to be with you.

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Speaker 2: Well, one question before we get into each of these

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Speaker 2: nine is this. You wrote a book called Revering God.

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Speaker 2: And you said, some may say, believing in God made everything.

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Speaker 2: What a blind leap of faith. One way to test

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Speaker 2: the validity of a belief is to assume it's falsehood,

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Speaker 2: to see if the alternative makes more or less sense

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Speaker 2: to the world. So let's assume for the moment that

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Speaker 2: there's no creator. Will we find our worldview more factual

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Speaker 2: and defensible? Or will we face longer and longer leaps

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Speaker 2: of blind faith? What are we doing here? Frame this

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Speaker 2: conversation for us, if you will.

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Speaker 1: Sure. So oftentimes the way God debates play out is

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Speaker 1: the assumption is, well, the theists, they're making a positive

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Speaker 1: claim God exists. They shoulder 100% of the evidential burden.

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Speaker 1: And in a sense, sure, as Christian theists, there is

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Speaker 1: a burden of evidence to shoulder that I think Christianity

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Speaker 1: does an exceptionally well job of meeting those evidentiary and

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Speaker 1: transcending those evidentiary standards. I think it's the most credible, rational,

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Speaker 1: fact-based worldview going by far. But what rarely happens, Sean,

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Speaker 1: is when I've seen people who claim to deconvert or

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Speaker 1: deconstruct their faith or walk away or apostatize or whatever

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Speaker 1: we call it, they almost never apply the same level

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Speaker 1: of scrutiny or to their newfound non-theism, whatever shape that takes,

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Speaker 1: whether it's agnosticism or hardcore atheism. So there's just this

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Speaker 1: assumption that, oh, I've stepped out of this worldview that

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Speaker 1: had all these cracks into it, and now I'm in

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Speaker 1: this sort of invincible atheism that is falsely assumed to

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Speaker 1: be the rational default position. If I'm I'm going to

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Speaker 1: approach this with my mind and my reason and my

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Speaker 1: science intact. Of course, atheism. And so I'm framing it

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Speaker 1: this way to push back on that and say, it's not,

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Speaker 1: of course, atheism. There's actually huge leaps of faith required

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Speaker 1: to deny God's existence. The minute the atheist opens his

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Speaker 1: or her mouth to defend atheism, they're committing themselves to

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Speaker 1: beliefs and rationality and free will and all kinds of

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Speaker 1: stuff that I just don't think the atheist slash agnostic

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Speaker 1: can sustain the burden of evidence required to reject God's existence.

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Speaker 1: So that's the way I'm framing it and the way

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Speaker 1: I'm coming at it. Love it.

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Speaker 2: We're going to get into each one of these nine,

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Speaker 2: but the point is there's an assumption, and even a

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Speaker 2: lot of Christians believe this. Well, faith is blind. It's

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Speaker 2: believing something without evidence. And you're saying, okay, wait a

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Speaker 2: minute here. Even atheists assume certain things that their worldview

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Speaker 2: cannot account for. These are leaps, arguably of faith. And

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Speaker 2: I think as you're going to talk about blind faith.

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Speaker 2: But let's get into each one of these. And last

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Speaker 2: thing before we start, I want everybody to realize I've

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Speaker 2: done a deep dive on every single one of these.

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Speaker 2: We're not pretending to deal with all the objections here.

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Speaker 2: This is what you might call kind of a 30,000-foot

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Speaker 2: view approach to these issues. And there's fair objections for

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Speaker 2: each one of them that we haven't dealt with. We're

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Speaker 2: not pretending that we have. But let's take a look

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Speaker 2: at blind leap number one, the universe.

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Speaker 1: Go. So Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French existentialist, had a

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Speaker 1: brilliant insight when he said, all philosophy starts with the question,

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Speaker 1: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there

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Speaker 1: something rather than nothing? And you might think, well, in

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Speaker 1: a world of eight or nine billion people, there's got

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Speaker 1: to be a long list of answers to that question.

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Speaker 1: Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, it turns

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Speaker 1: out any answer we could possibly give why there's a

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Speaker 1: universe at all is going to be some variation of

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Speaker 1: four fundamental logical possibilities. Number one would be sort of

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Speaker 1: more the Eastern, the Hindu perspective. There is no something.

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Speaker 1: The universe is what Hinduism would call Maya. It's an illusion.

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Speaker 1: It's not really here. The quickest way to debunk that

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Speaker 1: is to just ask the non-believer in a real universe

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Speaker 1: to kindly hand you your wallet. You could kick him

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Speaker 1: really hard in the shins. And when they wince at

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Speaker 1: illusionary pain, why are you wincing at illusionary pain from

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Speaker 1: an illusionary kick and your illusionary shin? I don't recommend that, Sean,

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Speaker 1: as a way to embody the love of Christ and

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Speaker 1: the first Peter 3 command to defend the faith with

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Speaker 1: gentleness and respect. So maybe just, okay, well, give me

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Speaker 1: the illusory keys to your car. And you'll see that

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Speaker 1: that first option is unlivable. So a second logical possibility is,

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Speaker 1: The something, the universe has just always been. It has

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Speaker 1: no beginning, therefore requires no beginner. And we could have

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Speaker 1: a five-hour conversation about this. I'll keep it short and sweet.

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Speaker 1: There's a good philosophical reason that that view is impossible.

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Speaker 1: If the universe had no beginning, there would be an

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Speaker 1: infinite amount of moments that would have to transpire before

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Speaker 1: right now. Looking at my watch here, 11.15 on Monday,

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Speaker 1: August 17th. if there was an infinite amount of moments

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Speaker 1: that would have to transpire before now, we could never

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Speaker 1: reach now. So that's a philosophical reason called the impossibility

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Speaker 1: of traversing an infinite. On top of that, we could

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Speaker 1: add scientific reasons like the universe heading towards heat death

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Speaker 1: or a state of equilibrium, that if the universe has

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Speaker 1: been here for eternity past, it would have had infinite

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Speaker 1: amount of time to hit equilibrium, and the universe would

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Speaker 1: be dead, lifeless, and cold. The fact that there's enough

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Speaker 1: energy left in the universe to power my microphone proves, therefore,

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Speaker 1: the universe didn't have an indefinite past and stretches on

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Speaker 1: eternally backwards. A third logical possibility, so we know it's

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Speaker 1: not an illusion, we know it hasn't always been here,

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Speaker 1: a third logical possibility is, well, maybe the it had

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Speaker 1: a beginning, but no beginner, right? This was sort of

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Speaker 1: the Lawrence Krauss option a few years ago that the

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Speaker 1: universe could come from nothing. But you read his work

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Speaker 1: on this and others, and it's very clear by nothing,

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Speaker 1: they don't mean no thing. They mean a quantum bathtub

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Speaker 1: of quantum particles or energy or something. So the idea

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Speaker 1: here that something could come from nothing is what David Hume,

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Speaker 1: the famous agnostic, the Scottish agnostic, said, ex nihilo nihil fit,

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Speaker 1: from nothing comes nothing. So we can cross that option

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Speaker 1: off the table. Fourth and final logical possibility, the universe,

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Speaker 1: the something came from someone. The universe had a beginning

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Speaker 1: and therefore a beginner. We might call this the Genesis

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Speaker 1: 1-1 option. In the beginning, God created. That's argument number one.

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Speaker 1: Leap number one, the atheist has to take. Which of

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Speaker 1: those Three options are you going to say, the universe

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Speaker 1: is an illusion, it's been here forever, or it came

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Speaker 1: from nothing, if you're going to deny the beginner.

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Speaker 2: One quick thing. I know people are going, wait a minute,

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Speaker 2: there's A, objections to God, like who made God, which

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Speaker 2: of course I've dealt with elsewhere. And that's a logical

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Speaker 2: fallacy because you can ask who made something of things

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Speaker 2: that can be made. But God, by definition, is not

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Speaker 2: a makeable thing. Like the laws of logic are not

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Speaker 2: the kind of things you can make. I did a

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Speaker 2: deep dive with Stephen Meyer because Roger Penrose, one of

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Speaker 2: the greatest scientists over the past half century, responded to

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Speaker 2: one of my videos. And we did a deep dive

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Speaker 2: walking through his model and essentially showing that there is

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Speaker 2: no model that is able to escape the beginning of

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Speaker 2: the universe that is physically possible or doesn't rely upon

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Speaker 2: some input of mind or intelligence to maintain it. And

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Speaker 2: if people don't believe me, go watch that video. But

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Speaker 2: our first leap is something from nothing. Second blind leap

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Speaker 2: is a fine-tuned universe.

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Speaker 1: Go. Yeah, so fine-tuning, it's fascinating if you listened to

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Speaker 1: the most watched atheists in the interwebs these days. Most

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Speaker 1: of them, like Alex O'Connor would be a good example,

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Speaker 1: would say fine-tuning to them is like A tier, like top-notch,

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Speaker 1: this is a compelling argument. Even before Alex O'Connor, one

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Speaker 1: of the quote-unquote new atheists, Chris Hitchens, and there's even

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Speaker 1: footage of Richard Dawkins saying that when push comes to shove,

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Speaker 1: fine-tuning is the argument that sort of keeps them up

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Speaker 1: at night. And it's a straightforward argument that the universe

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Speaker 1: is tuned just right for the emergence of biology and

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Speaker 1: the emergence of life. You can take a lot of

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Speaker 1: levels of the fine-tuning. You could look at after the

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Speaker 1: Big Bang, in which matter, energy, space, and time spring

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Speaker 1: into being, the beginning that Genesis 1.1 is saying, the

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Speaker 1: beginning had the beginner, the amount of variables that had

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Speaker 1: to be dialed in so precisely just for the Big

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Speaker 1: Bang to be a successfully expanding universe so that the

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Speaker 1: matter-energy ratios are just right so the universe doesn't instantly

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Speaker 1: implode on itself. That those ratios have to be dialed

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Speaker 1: in just so, so that it doesn't expand too quickly

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Speaker 1: and you get no formation of stars. There's a long list.

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Speaker 1: I remember learning this stuff when you and I were

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Speaker 1: at Biola years ago. And Hugh Ross.

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Speaker 1: The great astronomer apologist, he had a list in his

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Speaker 1: little book, Creator in the Cosmos, that I think was

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Speaker 1: 48 or 49 factors long, the hydrogen to nitrogen ratios

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Speaker 1: in the atmosphere, the Earth's axial tilted 23 degrees, our

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Speaker 1: distance from the sun, the elements on the periodic table

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Speaker 1: that emerged through nuclear fusion in the core of a

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Speaker 1: collapsing star, and it just went on and on and on.

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Speaker 1: That list is in triple digits now. This was in

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Speaker 1: the 2000s, early 2000s, that, you know, Hugh Ross listed 48, 49.

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Speaker 1: The anthropic principle, sometimes it's called the principle that on Earth,

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Speaker 1: life is just fit for Anthropos, for the emergence of humankind. So,

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Speaker 1: I'm not a scientist here. I don't pretend to be.

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Speaker 1: So I point listeners to the scientists on this, most

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Speaker 1: of whom, I think all of whom we've interviewed, guys

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Speaker 1: like Steve Meyer and Doug Axe, another colleague of ours

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Speaker 1: at Biola, have done brilliant, brilliant work on all this stuff.

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Speaker 2: I actually interviewed Jay Richards, who's one of the leading

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Speaker 2: defenders of fine-tuning in biopsy. May, and then we did

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Speaker 2: a live stream where we took all the toughest questions.

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Speaker 2: I tracked down the hardest questions I could find and

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Speaker 2: asked Dr.

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Speaker 1: Richards.

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Speaker 2: So if you're not convinced, go back and at least

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Speaker 2: look at that and have him articulate that. But the

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Speaker 2: thing to keep in mind is the first one is

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Speaker 2: why is there something rather than nothing? The second one

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Speaker 2: is why is this something arranged within an incredibly narrow window,

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Speaker 2: so to speak, that allows the emergence and sustenance of life?

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Speaker 2: And these are the constants and laws of physics. when

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Speaker 2: they could have been different, seems to point towards something

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Speaker 2: beyond matter itself. And to assume it is a blind

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Speaker 2: leap of atheism. All right, blind leap number three, a

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Speaker 2: planet fit for life.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, planet fit for life. This is some of the

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Speaker 1: stuff I was talking about with the anthropic principle. But

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Speaker 1: let me back up a bit. Before Earth emerges, there's

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Speaker 1: some fascinating signs here. That takes me right back to,

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Speaker 1: I don't know about you, Sean. I'm terrible at math.

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Speaker 1: And so when I was a Biola undergrad, I found

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Speaker 1: the one math class, because you had to take a

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Speaker 1: math class, that you didn't have to do any math in.

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Speaker 1: It was called The Nature of Math. Yep. I loved it.

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Speaker 1: You just got to think about math, not actually do it.

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Speaker 1: And the professor, who I'm sure you know, Walt Stangle,

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Speaker 1: he is this world-class math whiz. And he showed up

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Speaker 1: to class one day and turned his back to the

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Speaker 1: students and started writing out this massive equation. It was

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Speaker 1: like E equals MC squared over seven times Q. And

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Speaker 1: he was filling up these dry erase boards as the

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Speaker 1: class just sat there in silence. And after about 10 minutes, Dr.

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Speaker 1: Stengel turns around and he had these thick Coke bottle glasses.

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Speaker 1: And you can see pouring out from under his glasses

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Speaker 1: are tears. And I'm thinking, this dude's crying at math.

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Speaker 1: He's crying at math. And I'm thinking, I've cried at

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Speaker 1: math too, but for very different reasons than Walt Stengel.

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Speaker 1: And he went on to explain to us that what

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Speaker 1: he had just drawn up on the boards were the

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Speaker 1: chemical equations for nuclear fusion as it occurs in in

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Speaker 1: the core of a collapsing star. And he explained that

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Speaker 1: in order to move down the periodic table from the

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Speaker 1: light stuff like hydrogen and helium to move down into

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Speaker 1: things like nickel and iron, where biology becomes a reality,

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Speaker 1: you have to have this, these kinds of equations dialed

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Speaker 1: in with utter precision. And then even if that happens, if,

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Speaker 1: in the absence of a great capital C chemist or

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Speaker 1: a great capital M mathematician, that doesn't do us any

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Speaker 1: good if they're trapped in the core of a dying star.

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Speaker 1: And so there's this, God has this ingenious idea of

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Speaker 1: a supernova that blasts all those heavy elements back into

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Speaker 1: space so that they can form through gravity, a new star,

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Speaker 1: or in our case, a heavy planet. And so we

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Speaker 1: are on a elementally rich planet, meaning we have the

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Speaker 1: stuff of life, the stuff of biology that moves us

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Speaker 1: down the periodic table so that you and I can

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Speaker 1: have physical bodies to even have this conversation right now.

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Speaker 1: And you look at the evidence from that and we

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Speaker 1: could easily fill 10 hours going through it. And the

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Speaker 1: earth fit for life points to a supreme intelligence. I

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Speaker 1: love this.

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Speaker 2: The first one is why is there something rather than nothing?

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Speaker 2: The second one is why is this something arranged in

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Speaker 2: a way that allows the possibility of life? And the

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Speaker 2: third is like, wait a minute, we find ourselves in

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Speaker 2: a very narrow environment, habitat, which enables life to thrive

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Speaker 2: and survive. And there's certain incredibly precise factors that have

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Speaker 2: to take place for this. So you have to have

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Speaker 2: a sun of a certain distance, of a certain size,

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Speaker 2: of a certain age. You actually have to have a

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Speaker 2: certain galaxy, and then we have to be in a

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Speaker 2: certain place in that galaxy at a certain time. You

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Speaker 2: have to have carbon-based life. No other kind of life

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Speaker 2: could exist with any complexity like human beings. We've got

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Speaker 2: to have surrounding giants like Jupiter to protect us.

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Speaker 1: We need a moon.

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Speaker 2: We need an iron core. All of these things are

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Speaker 2: necessary but also happens to be the very place where

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Speaker 2: there's human beings that we have a clear atmosphere and

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Speaker 2: other factors that we can make discoveries about the universe.

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Speaker 2: If I went to the top of a mountain in

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Speaker 2: Hawaii and found a telescope up there, I'd never ask

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Speaker 2: why did they place it there? Because you place observers

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Speaker 2: in the place to make observations. Not only do we

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Speaker 2: have a planet capable of of sustaining life like you

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Speaker 2: described it's the place in which we can make discoveries

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Speaker 2: about the universe those those are three blind leaps of

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Speaker 2: atheism we're going to circle back how arguably you and

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Speaker 2: i think they point towards theism but let's move to

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Speaker 2: number four blind leap of the origin of intricate life.

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Speaker 1: Yeah so this is a big one even if you

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Speaker 1: know we're telling the origin story of humanity on atheist

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Speaker 1: or agnostic presuppositions? Where do we get something from nothing?

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Speaker 1: Where do we get a universe that's fine-tuned? Where do

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Speaker 1: we get an earth fit for life? Even if in

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Speaker 1: the conversation we just grant all that and say, let's

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Speaker 1: just say there's a credible explanation. We just haven't found

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Speaker 1: it yet. There's still the next leap, which is a

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Speaker 1: massive one. The problem of a biogenesis is the fancy

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Speaker 1: 50 cent scientific term for it. A, that prefix means

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Speaker 1: no bio life genesis beginning, no life beginning. How do

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Speaker 1: you get life beginning from non-life? And if anybody tells you, oh, well,

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Speaker 1: we've got that figured out. They're just lying to you.

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Speaker 1: They're just lying to you. The sheer amount of complexity

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Speaker 1: that goes into Even what we would mistakenly dub a

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Speaker 1: simple single cell organism, there's nothing simple about a single

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Speaker 1: cell organism. And so as, let me say it this way,

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Speaker 1: in Darwin's day, they knew about cells, but in a

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Speaker 1: very rudimentary way. So they sort of assumed a cell

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Speaker 1: is like a, a little bag of jello or something.

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Speaker 1: It's just these little units of organic goo. And on

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Speaker 1: that naive understanding, it's like, okay, well, this goo can

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Speaker 1: arrange in such a way. And so then you have

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Speaker 1: the famous experiments of scientists trying to zap some replica

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Speaker 1: of primordial goo to see if they could generate life

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Speaker 1: from non-life. And those experiments, do you remember it was

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Speaker 1: Stanley and Urey or something like that?

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Speaker 2: I think it was around 1953. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And all they could do is generate a couple amino acids,

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Speaker 1: the building blocks of proteins, over 200 of which you

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Speaker 1: need a line just so to have anything resembling a

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Speaker 1: simple cell. And the researchers overlooked the basic fact that

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Speaker 1: they had to be intelligent enough to create the experiment

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Speaker 1: to zap the primordial goo in the first place. So

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Speaker 1: they ended up sort of sawing off the branch they

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Speaker 1: were sitting on and inadvertently proving intelligence in the process.

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Speaker 1: But even since the 50s, we have had the advent

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Speaker 1: of biochemistry and microbiology. And so now, as science has advanced,

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Speaker 1: this is not an example of We have a gap

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Speaker 1: in our explanatory origin story of how we got here.

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Speaker 1: Let's just jam God into that gap. And then science

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Speaker 1: comes along and slowly closes the gap until God is unemployed.

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Speaker 1: This is precisely the opposite. The more science advances, the

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Speaker 1: more we move from Darwin's cells are unsophisticated hunks of

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Speaker 1: organic goo to to microbiology and biochemistry, we're peering into

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Speaker 1: the cellular world, we see a whole microcosm of engineering brilliance,

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Speaker 1: of elegance, of incredible designs and little machines and micro

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Speaker 1: machines all working in tandem to create life. And so

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Speaker 1: this is an example where the more science, the more

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Speaker 1: microbiology and the more biochemistry we do, The God gap

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Speaker 1: isn't closing, leaving God unemployed. That gap gets bigger and

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Speaker 1: bigger and bigger, showing that intelligence is indeed involved. Now,

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Speaker 1: real quick, I want to say it again. I'm not

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Speaker 1: a scientist. I'm a trained theologian and philosopher. So I

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Speaker 1: would point listeners to friends like Doug Axe and many

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Speaker 1: of your interviews where you're talking to people that this

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Speaker 1: is their lane and.

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Speaker 2: They are way more. And you know what? I'll jump

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Speaker 2: in here. I interviewed Doug in May. and we walked

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Speaker 2: through the origin of life, and he talked about how

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Speaker 2: there's no explanations now. The problem is more deep than

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Speaker 2: it was a decade, 20, 30 years ago. He also argued,

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Speaker 2: we're not talking about this here, the amount of information necessary,

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Speaker 2: not for the origin of life, but from the origin

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Speaker 2: of life to all the complex organisms is a greater

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Speaker 2: leap than the origin of life. We're not even talking

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Speaker 2: about this here. Friends, you can go back and watch

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Speaker 2: that with Doug Axe, Cambridge Trained, Berkeley, one of the

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Speaker 2: leading educational institutions in the world. And then we took

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Speaker 2: tough questions live, the toughest ones people could come up with.

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Speaker 2: Let's keep the train moving here. Blind leap number five

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Speaker 2: would be consciousness.

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Speaker 1: Oh, this one's so fun. This one, we could easily

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Speaker 1: do a year course on this and still be scratching

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Speaker 1: the surface. So let's just grant again, to be kind,

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Speaker 1: Let's say atheism explains how you get something from nothing,

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Speaker 1: how you get a tailored universe by chance, how you're

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Speaker 1: able to get a heavy universe from a light universe,

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Speaker 1: move down the periodic table, how you get an earth

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Speaker 1: fit for life, how you get life from non-life to

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Speaker 1: begin with. If we just grant those four or five leaps,

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Speaker 1: this next one I'm fascinated by, and I think it's

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Speaker 1: not just a singular leap. How do you get consciousness

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Speaker 1: from non-conscious stuff from organic, even if we grant, you

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Speaker 1: can get sophisticated cells and organisms in the absence of God.

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Speaker 1: It's a series of leaps to get from this hunk of,

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Speaker 1: let's call it maybe sophisticated steak, right? Sophisticated organic meat

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Speaker 1: to the qualities of consciousness. This would be things like

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Speaker 1: choice-making power that we'll talk about a little more deeply

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Speaker 1: here in a minute. This would be things like what

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Speaker 1: philosophers of mind call intentionality. Intentionality is a fancy word

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Speaker 1: for what I like to refer to as aboutness. Aboutness

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Speaker 1: means my mind, my consciousness can be about things in

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Speaker 1: a way that physical stuff can't. So if I'm holding

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Speaker 1: a physical book, this book can be here or not

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Speaker 1: be here. It's not thinking about anything. It's a concrete

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Speaker 1: physical object with weight and mass and spatio-temporal properties. But

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Speaker 1: our minds have this incredible capacity to be about things.

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Speaker 1: So I can think about, our listeners can think about, say,

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Speaker 1: the red planet, right? We can think about Mars without

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Speaker 1: the red planet existing. or materializing in our brain matter,

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Speaker 1: giving us a splitting headache, right? You can think about

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Speaker 1: a nuclear weapon without your head blowing up, right? So

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Speaker 1: that capacity of consciousness to be about things is a

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Speaker 1: non-physical property. Another just quick one here is philosophers of

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Speaker 1: mind draw a distinction between syntax, which is the physical medium,

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Speaker 1: of communication. So right now in this moment, there's a

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Speaker 1: lot of physical syntax happening, meaning my voice box is

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Speaker 1: vibrating and a certain level of, of Hertz, a certain

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Speaker 1: frequency it's feeding into a microphone going through. It's a

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Speaker 1: very complex process that eventually is making its way to

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Speaker 1: your ears, which is now then uploaded. And all of

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Speaker 1: our listeners can hear right now as they're listening to

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Speaker 1: my voice, the sound that those sound waves take, the

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Speaker 1: shape that those sound waves take, that's all the physical

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Speaker 1: stuff that goes into the message. That's what philosophers call syntax.

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Speaker 1: But philosophers draw a distinction between syntax and semantics. Semantic

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Speaker 1: is the non-physical meaning that's being carried in and through

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Speaker 1: the physical syntax. In other words, you can hear, our

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Speaker 1: listeners can hear more than just, you know, sound waves

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Speaker 1: coming at them. Hopefully I don't sound like Charlie Brown's

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Speaker 1: teacher just going, hopefully they can discern something remotely intelligible

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Speaker 1: that I'm saying. And so the point is that syntax,

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Speaker 1: the physical medium, the non-physical semantic cannot be reduced to

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Speaker 1: the physical syntax, meaning somebody listening on YouTube or something

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Speaker 1: could translate this into Spanish. In real time, there's AI

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Speaker 1: that can have me instantly start speaking German or whatever.

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Speaker 1: So all the physical syntax changes. What doesn't change is

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Speaker 1: the non-physical semantic. Therefore, meaning can't be reduced to the medium.

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Speaker 1: Semantic can't be reduced to syntax. So there's a feature

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Speaker 1: of consciousness that is irreducible. And that's on a theistic foundation.

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Speaker 1: in the beginning was the word. In the beginning you

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Speaker 1: have meaning. You have a God of meaning who speaks

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Speaker 1: meaning into his cosmos. On the atheist origin story of

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Speaker 1: who we are and how we got here, you don't

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Speaker 1: start with any speaking being. You start with a collision

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Speaker 1: of unthinking atoms. And so the leap here is how

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Speaker 1: do you get aboutness or intentionality from physical arrangements of particles?

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Speaker 1: How do you get semantics from different arrangements of physical syntax,

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Speaker 1: and that's two of about 11 features of consciousness. Each

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Speaker 1: one is a leap unto itself that the atheist must take.

426
00:29:04,810 --> 00:29:06,420
Speaker 2: And by the way, it's back to the first point

427
00:29:06,440 --> 00:29:08,600
Speaker 2: you raised from Sartre, is how do we get something

428
00:29:08,640 --> 00:29:13,680
Speaker 2: from nothing? If you have matter, there's something novel emerging,

429
00:29:14,180 --> 00:29:18,980
Speaker 2: consciousness and thinking and reflecting in and acting, which cannot

430
00:29:19,060 --> 00:29:23,160
Speaker 2: be reduced down to the physical matter of the body.

431
00:29:23,880 --> 00:29:28,510
Speaker 2: Thoughts are not physical. Sensations and pain might be experienced

432
00:29:28,610 --> 00:29:32,270
Speaker 2: through the body, but cannot be reduced to the body. Now,

433
00:29:32,290 --> 00:29:34,190
Speaker 2: in case people are watching this and they're saying, you

434
00:29:34,210 --> 00:29:36,550
Speaker 2: guys are giving five leaks of atheism. These are Christians

435
00:29:36,590 --> 00:29:38,950
Speaker 2: talking here. Let me just pause for a second. You

436
00:29:38,990 --> 00:29:41,630
Speaker 2: were with me, Thaddeus, in Vegas. I had a debate

437
00:29:41,670 --> 00:29:43,720
Speaker 2: with Michael Shermer, one of the leading skeptics in the

438
00:29:43,760 --> 00:29:48,000
Speaker 2: world today about consciousness. We'll link to it below. He

439
00:29:48,040 --> 00:29:51,460
Speaker 2: gives his explanation for the origin of consciousness, and I

440
00:29:51,480 --> 00:29:54,200
Speaker 2: won't go into it here, but needless to say, I'm

441
00:29:54,300 --> 00:29:59,420
Speaker 2: completely unconvinced by it, and thus the vast majority of

442
00:30:00,040 --> 00:30:03,740
Speaker 2: of skeptics that are out there on any side, philosophers

443
00:30:03,760 --> 00:30:07,240
Speaker 2: of mind will concede, there's no explanation for the origin

444
00:30:07,260 --> 00:30:10,140
Speaker 2: of consciousness. And Shermer kind of concedes that. He just says,

445
00:30:10,200 --> 00:30:12,740
Speaker 2: here's a way we should start thinking about it. But

446
00:30:12,780 --> 00:30:16,960
Speaker 2: the bottom line is we are conscious thinking agents, and

447
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:22,380
Speaker 2: atheists often talk about reason and rationality. Well, you can

448
00:30:22,620 --> 00:30:26,900
Speaker 2: only have those things if consciousness exists, But you said,

449
00:30:26,980 --> 00:30:30,560
Speaker 2: last point, we'll move on. If God is a conscious agent,

450
00:30:31,060 --> 00:30:34,590
Speaker 2: we have a natural explanation that we would be thinking

451
00:30:34,990 --> 00:30:38,690
Speaker 2: conscious beings. Now, the second argument I made with Shermer

452
00:30:38,730 --> 00:30:42,090
Speaker 2: that people can watch and go, you know, analyze somebody

453
00:30:42,130 --> 00:30:45,490
Speaker 2: pushing back leads us to our blind leap number six,

454
00:30:45,910 --> 00:30:46,790
Speaker 2: which is free will.

455
00:30:48,310 --> 00:30:53,710
Speaker 1: Yeah, so think of it this way, that let's go

456
00:30:53,790 --> 00:30:58,370
Speaker 1: with the mainstream version of atheism, which tends to embrace

457
00:30:58,410 --> 00:31:01,630
Speaker 1: some form of nature is all that exists, some version

458
00:31:01,650 --> 00:31:05,560
Speaker 1: of metaphysical naturalism, sometimes it's called physicalism, and I'm sure

459
00:31:05,580 --> 00:31:09,280
Speaker 1: a few commenters out there might say, oh, well, you're strawmanning,

460
00:31:09,360 --> 00:31:13,860
Speaker 1: because Buddhists can be atheists, sure. What I'm describing here

461
00:31:13,900 --> 00:31:17,760
Speaker 1: is mainstream Western atheism, which tends to be committed to

462
00:31:18,300 --> 00:31:21,400
Speaker 1: nature and its processes tell the whole story, or Carl

463
00:31:21,420 --> 00:31:24,690
Speaker 1: Sagan's The Cosmos, the physical world It's all there is,

464
00:31:24,870 --> 00:31:27,540
Speaker 1: ever was, or ever will be. Now let's grant that.

465
00:31:28,340 --> 00:31:31,940
Speaker 1: Physical universe is all there is. Well, how does physical stuff,

466
00:31:31,980 --> 00:31:36,360
Speaker 1: how does matter, energy, space, time behave? It tends to

467
00:31:36,400 --> 00:31:41,780
Speaker 1: behave what they thought 250 years ago during the French

468
00:31:41,840 --> 00:31:46,960
Speaker 1: Revolution and the Enlightenment breaking out through Europe. You have

469
00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:52,610
Speaker 1: guys like Denise Diderot, Pierre Laplace, Lemaitre a little later

470
00:31:52,630 --> 00:31:56,340
Speaker 1: in the history of atheism. This is one of the

471
00:31:56,380 --> 00:31:59,500
Speaker 1: classes I taught at a secular college for nine years

472
00:31:59,560 --> 00:32:02,880
Speaker 1: before I came to Biola was history of atheism. And

473
00:32:02,900 --> 00:32:05,840
Speaker 1: there's fascinating things happening in the 18th into the 19th

474
00:32:05,860 --> 00:32:13,980
Speaker 1: century where Newton has just explains gravity and the cosmos

475
00:32:14,080 --> 00:32:18,300
Speaker 1: in a way that is essentially a gigantic clock with

476
00:32:18,420 --> 00:32:22,510
Speaker 1: cogs in it. And every cog is spinning in time.

477
00:32:23,130 --> 00:32:28,500
Speaker 1: so that you get this great cosmic machine that's determined.

478
00:32:28,900 --> 00:32:34,459
Speaker 1: It's a well-oiled machine. But Newton refused to include man

479
00:32:34,540 --> 00:32:37,920
Speaker 1: as just a cog in that machine, because he believed

480
00:32:37,940 --> 00:32:40,620
Speaker 1: that we have choice-making power, and we can't be reduced

481
00:32:40,640 --> 00:32:44,370
Speaker 1: to physical processes. Well, Denise Diderot comes along in Le Maître,

482
00:32:44,440 --> 00:32:48,870
Speaker 1: and the way Jacques Menard put it, in the 20th century,

483
00:32:48,890 --> 00:32:51,970
Speaker 1: he said, the cell is a machine, the animal is

484
00:32:52,010 --> 00:32:56,240
Speaker 1: a machine, man is a machine. So they just took

485
00:32:56,360 --> 00:32:59,920
Speaker 1: Newton to that next level and swallowed up man in

486
00:32:59,980 --> 00:33:05,320
Speaker 1: that deterministic view. And so if everything is physically determined,

487
00:33:05,620 --> 00:33:09,960
Speaker 1: if human beings are merely physical beings, it follows that

488
00:33:10,080 --> 00:33:13,600
Speaker 1: freedom itself as an illusion. And you'll hear that from

489
00:33:13,620 --> 00:33:17,750
Speaker 1: atheists until before he passed away, Daniel Dennett, one of

490
00:33:17,790 --> 00:33:23,270
Speaker 1: the new atheists, now the not-so-new atheist movement, You hear

491
00:33:23,350 --> 00:33:26,690
Speaker 1: Sam Harris take the view that free will is an illusion.

492
00:33:28,170 --> 00:33:33,470
Speaker 1: Even Alex O'Connor has recently gone on record as a determinist.

493
00:33:34,350 --> 00:33:38,390
Speaker 1: And on that view, let's bring it down to earth.

494
00:33:38,730 --> 00:33:41,410
Speaker 1: Maybe this conversation is a bit in the clouds for folks.

495
00:33:42,590 --> 00:33:44,790
Speaker 1: Think of the last person you said I love you

496
00:33:44,910 --> 00:33:50,460
Speaker 1: to and meant it. On this view, on option one

497
00:33:50,560 --> 00:33:52,760
Speaker 1: for the atheist origin story of who we are and

498
00:33:52,780 --> 00:33:56,200
Speaker 1: how we got here. All that's going on there is

499
00:33:56,260 --> 00:34:01,360
Speaker 1: a predetermined sequence of rain chemistry, plus your natural environment

500
00:34:01,920 --> 00:34:06,950
Speaker 1: that sets off this, uh, required response where you open

501
00:34:06,970 --> 00:34:09,870
Speaker 1: your mouth, almost like a chatty Kathy doll back in

502
00:34:09,890 --> 00:34:12,350
Speaker 1: the fifties. You know, they have those creepy little dolls.

503
00:34:12,370 --> 00:34:15,450
Speaker 1: You pull the string and out comes the pre-programmed. I

504
00:34:15,510 --> 00:34:20,480
Speaker 1: love you. I love you. Right. Um, So that version

505
00:34:20,900 --> 00:34:25,960
Speaker 1: of atheism, the materialist sort that says we're just material

506
00:34:26,020 --> 00:34:28,420
Speaker 1: and it's all determined, doesn't seem like there's a ray

507
00:34:28,440 --> 00:34:32,150
Speaker 1: of hope there for meaningful choice-making power, much less love

508
00:34:32,590 --> 00:34:35,029
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Well, there seemed to be, in

509
00:34:35,710 --> 00:34:38,350
Speaker 1: the early 20th century, a little glimmer of hope for

510
00:34:38,390 --> 00:34:43,720
Speaker 1: the atheists with Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty and the advent

511
00:34:43,820 --> 00:34:49,440
Speaker 1: of quantum discoveries and seeing that, wow, at the subatomic

512
00:34:49,700 --> 00:34:54,560
Speaker 1: level of the physical world, things don't seem machine-like. There's

513
00:34:54,600 --> 00:34:59,150
Speaker 1: none of this rigid determinism. There's not even predictability. Things

514
00:34:59,390 --> 00:35:05,689
Speaker 1: seem to behave willy-nilly. Epicurus, back in the BCs, said

515
00:35:05,750 --> 00:35:09,089
Speaker 1: the atoms falling in the void swerve. And everybody thought,

516
00:35:09,110 --> 00:35:12,400
Speaker 1: what does that even mean? That's ridiculous. Well, in the

517
00:35:12,580 --> 00:35:15,320
Speaker 1: 20th and 21st century, we found out, oh, maybe Epicurus

518
00:35:15,340 --> 00:35:21,490
Speaker 1: was onto something. The atoms swerve. There's a swerviness, a willy-nilliness,

519
00:35:21,850 --> 00:35:29,240
Speaker 1: a randomness, an arbitrariness to subatomic particles. Now, some atheists said, yes,

520
00:35:30,080 --> 00:35:34,460
Speaker 1: we finally have room in an atheist cosmos to squeeze

521
00:35:35,400 --> 00:35:40,500
Speaker 1: meaningful choice-making power. Well, it didn't take too long for

522
00:35:40,680 --> 00:35:43,450
Speaker 1: philosophers to realize that this doesn't do us any better.

523
00:35:44,420 --> 00:35:47,080
Speaker 1: Like if now picture that person you said I love

524
00:35:47,100 --> 00:35:53,330
Speaker 1: you to. Sure, maybe there wasn't a deterministic chain reaction

525
00:35:53,390 --> 00:35:56,450
Speaker 1: in your brain that forced you like a chatty Kathy

526
00:35:56,469 --> 00:35:58,910
Speaker 1: doll with its string pulled to say I love you.

527
00:35:59,790 --> 00:36:07,170
Speaker 1: Maybe instead on the quantum indeterminacy model, somewhere invisible to

528
00:36:07,190 --> 00:36:12,010
Speaker 1: the naked eye, a subatomic particle, a quark or something,

529
00:36:12,390 --> 00:36:15,230
Speaker 1: in your amygdala, swerve to the left rather than to

530
00:36:15,250 --> 00:36:18,370
Speaker 1: the right, which set off a chain reaction at the

531
00:36:18,430 --> 00:36:20,830
Speaker 1: macro level so you open your mouth and blurt out,

532
00:36:20,930 --> 00:36:26,000
Speaker 1: I love you. Quantum indeterminacy doesn't salvage freedom or love

533
00:36:26,020 --> 00:36:29,299
Speaker 1: or creativity or any of the rest. And so the

534
00:36:29,420 --> 00:36:32,379
Speaker 1: atheist now has a burden of proof. If they're going

535
00:36:32,420 --> 00:36:37,420
Speaker 1: to freely reject God's existence and not be determined or

536
00:36:37,560 --> 00:36:39,970
Speaker 1: random in doing so, they need to be able to

537
00:36:40,030 --> 00:36:43,640
Speaker 1: account for some version of choice-making power.

538
00:36:44,340 --> 00:36:46,480
Speaker 2: And by the way, when it comes to quantum mechanics

539
00:36:46,520 --> 00:36:50,700
Speaker 2: like you're talking about, there are indetermined and deterministic models

540
00:36:50,760 --> 00:36:53,840
Speaker 2: that seem to both account for the phenomena, and it

541
00:36:53,900 --> 00:36:58,779
Speaker 2: hasn't even been landed yet which theory about this is true.

542
00:36:59,030 --> 00:37:01,210
Speaker 2: So it's not going to get them out of the

543
00:37:01,310 --> 00:37:03,109
Speaker 2: problem you're talking about, but I want to make sure

544
00:37:03,170 --> 00:37:06,230
Speaker 2: people don't miss this. We're talking about certain things that

545
00:37:06,270 --> 00:37:10,300
Speaker 2: we all take for granted. A, that there's a universe. B,

546
00:37:10,460 --> 00:37:14,840
Speaker 2: that it's fine-tuned for life. C, we live in a

547
00:37:15,340 --> 00:37:19,810
Speaker 2: habitable planet where all these factors have come together. There's

548
00:37:19,890 --> 00:37:22,710
Speaker 2: the origin of life. We couldn't be talking if we

549
00:37:22,750 --> 00:37:27,430
Speaker 2: hadn't first come to live. But then there's also consciousness.

550
00:37:28,570 --> 00:37:30,630
Speaker 2: All these things are part of the world that we

551
00:37:30,730 --> 00:37:35,759
Speaker 2: see and we experience, and yet atheism cannot adequately explain

552
00:37:36,120 --> 00:37:38,420
Speaker 2: any of them in our opinion, in our research, in

553
00:37:38,480 --> 00:37:42,040
Speaker 2: our argumentation. add free will on top of that.

554
00:37:42,960 --> 00:37:43,300
Speaker 1: Why?

555
00:37:43,660 --> 00:37:46,020
Speaker 2: Because you and I believe there's mind first, and it's

556
00:37:46,080 --> 00:37:49,940
Speaker 2: mind God brought matter into existence. But in an atheist worldview,

557
00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:53,939
Speaker 2: either there's nothing or there's matter, and then everything came

558
00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:57,900
Speaker 2: from that. So how does matter, acting and reacting together,

559
00:37:58,340 --> 00:38:04,040
Speaker 2: create consciousness and the capacity to choose and act rather

560
00:38:04,100 --> 00:38:08,530
Speaker 2: than be acted upon and This is, again, something from nothing.

561
00:38:08,570 --> 00:38:12,210
Speaker 2: So the atheist can say, A, there's free will, but

562
00:38:12,270 --> 00:38:15,210
Speaker 2: we don't have an explanation how that's the case. And

563
00:38:15,250 --> 00:38:19,290
Speaker 2: that's really where Michael Shermer goes. Or B, there's no

564
00:38:19,370 --> 00:38:23,500
Speaker 2: free will, but you lose love and you lose everything

565
00:38:23,580 --> 00:38:28,800
Speaker 2: we believe that makes us qualitatively different from the physical universe.

566
00:38:29,480 --> 00:38:32,160
Speaker 2: That comes at a cost that is arguably too high.

567
00:38:32,660 --> 00:38:38,839
Speaker 2: Three more, my friend. Blind leap number seven, oughts. Oughts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

568
00:38:38,860 --> 00:38:44,640
Speaker 1: So ought is just a term for moral value, how

569
00:38:44,680 --> 00:38:48,899
Speaker 1: to get moral values in a universe that's just reducible

570
00:38:49,020 --> 00:38:56,040
Speaker 1: to material facts. And so I love that C.S. Lewis

571
00:38:56,080 --> 00:38:59,890
Speaker 1: starts his famous Mere Christianity with a version of the

572
00:38:59,969 --> 00:39:04,910
Speaker 1: moral argument. But when I was teaching atheists at a

573
00:39:04,969 --> 00:39:07,670
Speaker 1: secular college in here in Orange County. I taught at

574
00:39:07,710 --> 00:39:11,510
Speaker 1: Saddleback College and their Emeritus Institute for almost a decade.

575
00:39:11,750 --> 00:39:15,580
Speaker 1: Most of my students were atheists. I had to be

576
00:39:15,640 --> 00:39:20,800
Speaker 1: very careful to not get fired by being too blatant

577
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:25,009
Speaker 1: about my faith. And so I had to sort of

578
00:39:25,290 --> 00:39:29,250
Speaker 1: come up with teaching strategies that protected my paycheck for

579
00:39:29,290 --> 00:39:31,719
Speaker 1: my family. And so one of those, what I would,

580
00:39:32,160 --> 00:39:36,940
Speaker 1: I would use atheists to debunk atheism. And so on

581
00:39:36,980 --> 00:39:40,870
Speaker 1: this question of odds or moral values, I had a

582
00:39:40,930 --> 00:39:45,129
Speaker 1: few go-to atheists, you know, uh, Fred Nietzsche, you know,

583
00:39:45,250 --> 00:39:52,259
Speaker 1: famously argues in, um, the gay science in, uh, let's see,

584
00:39:52,300 --> 00:39:54,160
Speaker 1: I have a bunch of his books on my shelf

585
00:39:54,500 --> 00:40:00,190
Speaker 1: right there. Um, he, in thus spake there, Thustra, he

586
00:40:00,230 --> 00:40:03,810
Speaker 1: makes the argument that in the absence of God, if

587
00:40:03,890 --> 00:40:10,190
Speaker 1: God is dead, then all of the moral, um, attributes

588
00:40:10,250 --> 00:40:13,350
Speaker 1: that we rested on his existence, those die with him.

589
00:40:15,010 --> 00:40:19,780
Speaker 1: And so Nietzsche here is writing, um, to the modern

590
00:40:19,840 --> 00:40:22,319
Speaker 1: man and saying, you can't have your cake and eat

591
00:40:22,360 --> 00:40:26,680
Speaker 1: it too. If we're going to slay God or bury

592
00:40:26,739 --> 00:40:30,339
Speaker 1: the notion of God six feet under, you can't go

593
00:40:30,460 --> 00:40:36,989
Speaker 1: along living by Christian theistic morality as if altruism is

594
00:40:37,050 --> 00:40:40,990
Speaker 1: still a good thing and as if justice and human

595
00:40:41,050 --> 00:40:44,050
Speaker 1: rights still exist. And so he's got pretty harsh words.

596
00:40:45,670 --> 00:40:48,910
Speaker 1: for fellow atheists to say, in the absence of God,

597
00:40:48,930 --> 00:40:53,250
Speaker 1: you lose all moral categories, which is why he calls

598
00:40:53,310 --> 00:40:57,730
Speaker 1: us to be the ubermunch, the overman, who you might

599
00:40:57,850 --> 00:41:02,810
Speaker 1: picture as like Superman flying over, transcending what he called

600
00:41:02,850 --> 00:41:07,970
Speaker 1: the heron moral, the herd morality, the slave morality of

601
00:41:09,030 --> 00:41:12,959
Speaker 1: do good unto others and tell the truth and don't

602
00:41:13,020 --> 00:41:16,730
Speaker 1: take stuff that isn't yours. He He spat on that

603
00:41:16,890 --> 00:41:20,540
Speaker 1: traditional morality. And so I would use an atheist like Nietzsche.

604
00:41:20,920 --> 00:41:24,280
Speaker 1: I could use an atheist like Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre

605
00:41:24,300 --> 00:41:28,299
Speaker 1: has a book on my shelf here called Existentialism and

606
00:41:28,360 --> 00:41:33,130
Speaker 1: Human Emotion. And in Existentialism and Human Emotion, he builds

607
00:41:33,190 --> 00:41:35,529
Speaker 1: a brilliant case. So it's not that the atheist has

608
00:41:35,570 --> 00:41:39,390
Speaker 1: to answer me or you or C.S. Lewis. He has

609
00:41:39,430 --> 00:41:43,330
Speaker 1: to answer his fellow atheists. Why is Nietzsche wrong that

610
00:41:43,370 --> 00:41:45,850
Speaker 1: if God's dead, so is the moral system that rests

611
00:41:45,930 --> 00:41:52,000
Speaker 1: on his existence? If God is non-existent, then the atheist

612
00:41:52,020 --> 00:41:56,640
Speaker 1: has to answer Jean-Paul Sartre, who says there can be

613
00:41:57,180 --> 00:42:02,910
Speaker 1: no objective meaning or morality because he says, quote, we're

614
00:42:02,989 --> 00:42:05,930
Speaker 1: on a plane of existence where there are only men.

615
00:42:07,300 --> 00:42:10,379
Speaker 1: And he goes through and he even calls out his

616
00:42:10,480 --> 00:42:14,340
Speaker 1: fellow French atheists and says, there's this silly school of

617
00:42:14,420 --> 00:42:17,439
Speaker 1: thought and paraphrasing this silly school of thought that thought

618
00:42:17,460 --> 00:42:20,940
Speaker 1: you could ditch God with the least possible consequence that

619
00:42:20,960 --> 00:42:23,820
Speaker 1: you could just go along championing human rights and kindness.

620
00:42:24,140 --> 00:42:27,359
Speaker 1: And he says, that is quote an idle dream. He says,

621
00:42:27,420 --> 00:42:31,540
Speaker 1: we existentialists acknowledge that if there's no God, all things

622
00:42:31,600 --> 00:42:35,890
Speaker 1: are permissible. And so there's another atheist. And finally, just quickly, there's, uh,

623
00:42:36,430 --> 00:42:39,640
Speaker 1: an underrated atheist philosopher who I think is brilliant on

624
00:42:39,680 --> 00:42:43,040
Speaker 1: these questions. Uh, we can link his article in the

625
00:42:43,100 --> 00:42:46,420
Speaker 1: show notes, but his name is Arthur Leff, L E

626
00:42:46,700 --> 00:42:50,500
Speaker 1: F F. And Arthur Leff, um, wrote an article for

627
00:42:50,640 --> 00:42:54,680
Speaker 1: Duke law review years ago. Uh, and you can find

628
00:42:54,739 --> 00:43:00,300
Speaker 1: it online. Typically the article is titled something like says who, um,

629
00:43:00,680 --> 00:43:04,299
Speaker 1: S E Z says who in his taunt all through

630
00:43:04,320 --> 00:43:07,430
Speaker 1: the article, uh, is if you're going to say there's

631
00:43:07,489 --> 00:43:10,850
Speaker 1: no God, and then you're going to make any moral

632
00:43:10,930 --> 00:43:17,220
Speaker 1: position whatsoever, whether it's a pro-life or pro-choice position, whether

633
00:43:17,280 --> 00:43:21,000
Speaker 1: it's a socialist or capitalist position, whether it's a viewpoint

634
00:43:21,120 --> 00:43:28,319
Speaker 1: on slavery, any moral claim can be met with the retort,

635
00:43:28,760 --> 00:43:33,160
Speaker 1: says who, and in the absence of God, left brilliantly

636
00:43:33,340 --> 00:43:36,200
Speaker 1: as an atheist argues there's just no good answer to

637
00:43:36,239 --> 00:43:37,680
Speaker 1: that question in the absence of God.

638
00:43:38,500 --> 00:43:43,350
Speaker 2: The atheist has two responses. One, just concede that morality

639
00:43:43,530 --> 00:43:48,170
Speaker 2: is subjective, and that leads you to a relativistic ethic.

640
00:43:48,430 --> 00:43:51,790
Speaker 2: I recently interviewed Bart Ehrman on his new book, and

641
00:43:51,830 --> 00:43:53,529
Speaker 2: we kind of went back and forth, and he takes

642
00:43:53,550 --> 00:43:56,390
Speaker 2: that route. So you can see us debate and discuss

643
00:43:56,840 --> 00:43:59,500
Speaker 2: that route. The other is to say there's subjective right

644
00:43:59,520 --> 00:44:02,150
Speaker 2: and wrong without God. and ground it somewhere else. I

645
00:44:02,610 --> 00:44:04,390
Speaker 2: had Michael Sherron, it was a year or two ago,

646
00:44:04,430 --> 00:44:07,270
Speaker 2: and we spent about two hours going back and forth

647
00:44:07,530 --> 00:44:10,170
Speaker 2: on that. So we have had conversations and debates and

648
00:44:10,210 --> 00:44:13,759
Speaker 2: dialogues on all these issues. But I'm with Dostoevsky, if

649
00:44:13,820 --> 00:44:18,500
Speaker 2: there is no God, all is permissible. It is a

650
00:44:18,880 --> 00:44:20,820
Speaker 2: leap to right and wrong, and we can add on

651
00:44:20,880 --> 00:44:23,239
Speaker 2: top of this, I only have an obligation to you,

652
00:44:23,280 --> 00:44:27,180
Speaker 2: by the way, if you have intrinsic value and worth,

653
00:44:27,860 --> 00:44:30,990
Speaker 2: and we all seem to believe that, That's another leap

654
00:44:31,170 --> 00:44:33,390
Speaker 2: that we're not even talking about here that we could

655
00:44:33,430 --> 00:44:34,170
Speaker 2: circle back to.

656
00:44:34,630 --> 00:44:34,890
Speaker 1: All right.

657
00:44:35,010 --> 00:44:38,430
Speaker 2: Two more blind leaps of atheism, Thaddeus.

658
00:44:38,630 --> 00:44:39,410
Speaker 1: All right.

659
00:44:39,450 --> 00:44:42,030
Speaker 2: Blind leap number eight, rationality.

660
00:44:42,140 --> 00:44:50,160
Speaker 1: Go. Rationality. So think of the laws of logic. There's

661
00:44:50,800 --> 00:44:55,180
Speaker 1: traditionally the law of identity, A equals A. There's the

662
00:44:55,239 --> 00:44:58,830
Speaker 1: law of non-contradiction, A is not not A. There's the

663
00:44:58,870 --> 00:45:02,469
Speaker 1: law of transivity, that if A equals B and B

664
00:45:02,530 --> 00:45:06,069
Speaker 1: equals C, that A equals C. Now, the fascinating thing

665
00:45:06,110 --> 00:45:09,560
Speaker 1: about the laws of logic is they are true in

666
00:45:09,820 --> 00:45:14,660
Speaker 1: every possible universe. There's a school of analytic philosophy that

667
00:45:14,680 --> 00:45:18,359
Speaker 1: deals with possible universes, modal logic, things like that. There

668
00:45:18,420 --> 00:45:21,400
Speaker 1: is no possible universe in which the law of identity

669
00:45:21,460 --> 00:45:25,590
Speaker 1: or the law of non-contradiction do not hold. They're universals.

670
00:45:27,270 --> 00:45:32,590
Speaker 1: And so the question is, on atheism, do you believe

671
00:45:32,670 --> 00:45:36,810
Speaker 1: in the laws of logic? That they're real? Are you

672
00:45:36,830 --> 00:45:40,170
Speaker 1: a realist about these laws? And it seems like if

673
00:45:40,210 --> 00:45:45,180
Speaker 1: they say yes, then there's this leap of, help me understand,

674
00:45:45,620 --> 00:45:51,360
Speaker 1: atheist friend, which configuration of elements on the periodic table

675
00:45:52,140 --> 00:45:57,290
Speaker 1: Which evolutionary moment in history spawned the law of non-contradiction

676
00:45:57,350 --> 00:46:02,470
Speaker 1: into being? Is it like two parts helium, four parts boron,

677
00:46:03,130 --> 00:46:10,170
Speaker 1: eight parts carbon? Where is the law of non-contradiction? If

678
00:46:10,250 --> 00:46:14,660
Speaker 1: it's physical, is it in Paris? Is it by the

679
00:46:14,739 --> 00:46:17,279
Speaker 1: Eiffel Tower? Is it on the Biola campus? Is it

680
00:46:17,380 --> 00:46:20,920
Speaker 1: in my office in Talbot East? 318, where is the

681
00:46:20,960 --> 00:46:24,360
Speaker 1: law of non-contradiction? And you see they're just nonsense questions

682
00:46:24,450 --> 00:46:31,029
Speaker 1: because the laws of logic, although they're real, lack physical properties.

683
00:46:31,190 --> 00:46:34,290
Speaker 1: They have what we could, in a deep sense, call

684
00:46:34,590 --> 00:46:39,630
Speaker 1: there's something supernatural about them. There's something transcendent about the

685
00:46:39,690 --> 00:46:42,570
Speaker 1: laws of logic themselves. And so there's a whole school

686
00:46:42,610 --> 00:46:47,029
Speaker 1: of apologetics that you find coming out of guys like

687
00:46:47,070 --> 00:46:55,090
Speaker 1: Greg Bonson and Cornelius Van Til, Rush Dooney, and contemporary

688
00:46:57,210 --> 00:47:02,750
Speaker 1: presuppositionalists like, what's his name, Jeff Durbin. And a lot

689
00:47:02,790 --> 00:47:05,649
Speaker 1: of this argument focuses on the laws of logic and says,

690
00:47:05,710 --> 00:47:09,070
Speaker 1: in the absence of God, you have no reason to reason.

691
00:47:10,230 --> 00:47:12,930
Speaker 1: You can't just help yourself. It sort of mirrors the

692
00:47:12,989 --> 00:47:16,569
Speaker 1: last argument. You can't just live off borrowed capital of

693
00:47:16,650 --> 00:47:22,000
Speaker 1: morality from Christianity and pretend you're not stealing from a

694
00:47:22,580 --> 00:47:27,259
Speaker 1: different worldview. In the same sense, the presuppositionalists, Cornelius Van

695
00:47:27,300 --> 00:47:30,419
Speaker 1: Til and Bonson and folks like that, will argue that

696
00:47:30,880 --> 00:47:34,509
Speaker 1: right out of the gate, the atheist can't start using

697
00:47:34,610 --> 00:47:37,750
Speaker 1: laws of logic, which they have to the minute they

698
00:47:37,870 --> 00:47:41,900
Speaker 1: utter a coherent sentence, unless they can give based on

699
00:47:41,940 --> 00:47:46,380
Speaker 1: their presuppositions, some kind of justification or warrant for believing

700
00:47:46,420 --> 00:47:51,480
Speaker 1: that the laws of logic exist. As Christians, John 1.1,

701
00:47:51,480 --> 00:47:56,140
Speaker 1: in the beginning was the word. And you know, as

702
00:47:56,180 --> 00:48:02,589
Speaker 1: well as I do, the Greek word here, en-arche-chen-lagos. The logos,

703
00:48:02,630 --> 00:48:06,470
Speaker 1: where we get our word logic from. The Christian universe

704
00:48:06,510 --> 00:48:10,489
Speaker 1: starts before the universe starts. There's already logic in the

705
00:48:10,530 --> 00:48:11,370
Speaker 1: very being of God.

706
00:48:12,440 --> 00:48:14,700
Speaker 2: About 20 years ago, I was speaking to a skeptical

707
00:48:14,860 --> 00:48:18,259
Speaker 2: atheist group at Berkeley, making this argument. And one of

708
00:48:18,280 --> 00:48:22,000
Speaker 2: the responses from a student was something effective. Wait a minute.

709
00:48:22,500 --> 00:48:25,920
Speaker 2: You're saying we can't trust the mind. He said, science

710
00:48:26,020 --> 00:48:29,740
Speaker 2: actually shows that we can't trust the mind. And I said,

711
00:48:29,840 --> 00:48:33,450
Speaker 2: so science is a discipline that relies upon reason and

712
00:48:33,530 --> 00:48:38,890
Speaker 2: rationality and trusting the mind proves that we can't trust it.

713
00:48:39,560 --> 00:48:42,060
Speaker 2: You can only come to that conclusion if you first

714
00:48:42,120 --> 00:48:44,930
Speaker 2: start by trusting it. Now that's not meant to say,

715
00:48:45,390 --> 00:48:47,890
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that as like a gotcha moment, but

716
00:48:47,930 --> 00:48:51,489
Speaker 2: the point here is that there's certain assumptions that we

717
00:48:51,590 --> 00:48:57,339
Speaker 2: bring to the table that are leaps within atheism. So

718
00:48:57,360 --> 00:49:01,300
Speaker 2: of course, atheists can be moral, but objective right and wrong.

719
00:49:02,060 --> 00:49:06,759
Speaker 2: That is not something atheism itself can explain. That's the

720
00:49:06,820 --> 00:49:09,239
Speaker 2: point that we're arguing here. And, of course, Darwin said

721
00:49:09,260 --> 00:49:10,180
Speaker 2: the horrid doubt.

722
00:49:10,070 --> 00:49:14,910
Speaker 1: We're arguing, but that atheists argue. That's a huge point.

723
00:49:15,219 --> 00:49:16,500
Speaker 2: I think that's really fair.

724
00:49:16,960 --> 00:49:21,640
Speaker 1: Yep. So on the moral argument, you don't need, say, C.S.

725
00:49:21,680 --> 00:49:25,900
Speaker 1: Lewis or even Dostoevsky. Again, you can use Arthur Leff.

726
00:49:26,260 --> 00:49:27,700
Speaker 1: You can use Jean-Paul Sartre.

727
00:49:27,739 --> 00:49:28,450
Speaker 2: No, that's great.

728
00:49:29,110 --> 00:49:35,270
Speaker 1: The same applies here on rationality. You don't need a J.P.

729
00:49:35,310 --> 00:49:39,130
Speaker 1: Moreland rationalist. one of the world's leading philosophers of mind

730
00:49:39,210 --> 00:49:41,300
Speaker 1: and a mentor and dear friend of you and I,

731
00:49:42,370 --> 00:49:45,430
Speaker 1: as much as we love JP, you could prove that

732
00:49:45,550 --> 00:49:49,469
Speaker 1: atheism can account for mental properties and rationality and laws

733
00:49:49,510 --> 00:49:55,660
Speaker 1: of logic using atheist philosophers of mind. So some names

734
00:49:55,700 --> 00:49:59,040
Speaker 1: here that our audience should have on their radar, Paul

735
00:49:59,060 --> 00:50:03,609
Speaker 1: and Patricia Churchland out of UCSD, I wrote a book

736
00:50:03,630 --> 00:50:07,180
Speaker 1: called Matter and Consciousness that argues minds can exist in

737
00:50:07,219 --> 00:50:11,580
Speaker 1: an atheist universe. Yeguan Kim, who recently passed away, but

738
00:50:11,640 --> 00:50:14,880
Speaker 1: he was at a Brown University. Kim wrote a brilliant

739
00:50:14,980 --> 00:50:18,060
Speaker 1: short book that's on my shelf right there called Mind

740
00:50:18,120 --> 00:50:20,860
Speaker 1: in a Physical World, where he argues that in the

741
00:50:20,960 --> 00:50:24,860
Speaker 1: absence of God, there's no foundation for mental properties. So

742
00:50:24,900 --> 00:50:28,100
Speaker 1: there's a couple names to show, again, this isn't two

743
00:50:28,160 --> 00:50:32,300
Speaker 1: Christian apologists taking cheap jabs at atheism when no atheist

744
00:50:32,360 --> 00:50:35,460
Speaker 1: in the room. We're pointing you to the atheists who

745
00:50:35,520 --> 00:50:38,629
Speaker 1: are making the arguments probably better than either of us could.

746
00:50:38,650 --> 00:50:42,110
Speaker 2: And of course, Darwin himself, whether atheists are agnostic, I

747
00:50:42,150 --> 00:50:44,310
Speaker 2: don't really fully know the answer to that, but talked

748
00:50:44,330 --> 00:50:47,469
Speaker 2: about how the horrid doubt always arises, whether the conviction

749
00:50:47,489 --> 00:50:51,280
Speaker 2: of man's mind, which has evolved from the lower animals,

750
00:50:51,410 --> 00:50:54,100
Speaker 2: is it all trustworthy? Would anyone trust the conviction is

751
00:50:54,140 --> 00:50:59,000
Speaker 2: a monkey's mind? If our brains resulted through a blind material,

752
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:03,430
Speaker 2: undesigned process, Why and how can we trust it? Now,

753
00:51:03,469 --> 00:51:05,610
Speaker 2: we're going to keep moving, but both C.S. Lewis and

754
00:51:05,670 --> 00:51:10,870
Speaker 2: Alvin Planska have really developed this kind of arguments. And ourselves,

755
00:51:11,070 --> 00:51:13,469
Speaker 2: and atheists included, we often say that this is a

756
00:51:13,489 --> 00:51:17,260
Speaker 2: kind of leap. All right, the last blind leap, number nine,

757
00:51:17,940 --> 00:51:18,380
Speaker 2: is beauty.

758
00:51:20,340 --> 00:51:27,330
Speaker 1: Oh, man. Oh, this is so good. So let's start.

759
00:51:28,450 --> 00:51:31,830
Speaker 1: Before we even get to atheism here, sometimes in these conversations,

760
00:51:32,850 --> 00:51:37,620
Speaker 1: it's helpful to just share Scripture and let Scripture speak

761
00:51:37,739 --> 00:51:44,480
Speaker 1: on its own merits, its own internal power, thanks to

762
00:51:44,520 --> 00:51:49,870
Speaker 1: the Spirit who inspired it. So our Old Testament, the

763
00:51:49,910 --> 00:51:53,930
Speaker 1: Torah opens, in the beginning God created. So the first

764
00:51:54,570 --> 00:51:58,430
Speaker 1: introduction God makes to us in Scripture is, The first

765
00:51:58,610 --> 00:52:03,130
Speaker 1: attribute that's featured there is his creativity. The first verb

766
00:52:03,510 --> 00:52:04,989
Speaker 1: in the first sentence on the first page of the

767
00:52:05,030 --> 00:52:09,140
Speaker 1: Bible is created. And then what do we see follow

768
00:52:09,320 --> 00:52:16,000
Speaker 1: after Genesis 1.1? God is speaking things into being. The

769
00:52:16,060 --> 00:52:19,850
Speaker 1: heavens and the earth. He's separating the waters above from

770
00:52:19,870 --> 00:52:24,589
Speaker 1: the waters below. He's creating clouds and oceans. He's separating creation.

771
00:52:25,160 --> 00:52:29,240
Speaker 1: oceans from dry land and creating the first beaches. He's

772
00:52:29,410 --> 00:52:37,110
Speaker 1: filling the land with chameleons and flamingos and German shepherds.

773
00:52:37,150 --> 00:52:44,140
Speaker 1: He's filling the sea with blue whales and mandarin fish.

774
00:52:44,200 --> 00:52:50,500
Speaker 1: He's speaking toucans and hummingbirds into existence. He starts speaking

775
00:52:51,520 --> 00:52:58,140
Speaker 1: vegetation like Coffee beans, praise the Lord. He's speaking cocoa beans,

776
00:52:58,200 --> 00:53:02,760
Speaker 1: wherever we get chocolate from, praise the Lord. He's speaking watermelon.

777
00:53:02,780 --> 00:53:09,840
Speaker 1: He's speaking strawberries into existence. And what does the Genesis

778
00:53:09,960 --> 00:53:13,989
Speaker 1: author say at the end of every creation day? He says,

779
00:53:15,489 --> 00:53:19,250
Speaker 1: it's good. That's sort of the chorus of the creation account.

780
00:53:19,330 --> 00:53:21,270
Speaker 1: It's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. God saw,

781
00:53:21,690 --> 00:53:25,950
Speaker 1: it was good. Now in Hebrew here, the term is

782
00:53:26,190 --> 00:53:31,049
Speaker 1: three letters transliterated, T-O-V, it's Tov, or Tov is sometimes

783
00:53:31,090 --> 00:53:35,400
Speaker 1: how it's pronounced. And one scholar who's done a lot

784
00:53:35,420 --> 00:53:38,860
Speaker 1: of work on this is, he was at Taylor University,

785
00:53:38,900 --> 00:53:40,920
Speaker 1: I forget where he's at now, but James Spiegel did

786
00:53:40,940 --> 00:53:44,600
Speaker 1: a brilliant article years ago where he argues that Tov

787
00:53:45,960 --> 00:53:49,280
Speaker 1: in the creation account is not making a moral claim.

788
00:53:49,460 --> 00:53:52,930
Speaker 1: God is not saying it's good to, that strawberries and

789
00:53:52,989 --> 00:53:56,890
Speaker 1: coffee beans exist. He's not saying it's morally good that

790
00:53:57,310 --> 00:54:02,110
Speaker 1: flamingos and betta fish are swimming around. No, he's saying

791
00:54:02,830 --> 00:54:09,239
Speaker 1: it's beautiful. God is making an aesthetic declaration. He's saying

792
00:54:09,260 --> 00:54:15,839
Speaker 1: a universe with watermelons, man, that's good. That's beautiful. He's

793
00:54:15,900 --> 00:54:21,500
Speaker 1: looking at sunsets. He's looking at Saturn's rings. He's looking

794
00:54:21,660 --> 00:54:26,400
Speaker 1: at all this beauty and he's saying, behold, it's beautiful.

795
00:54:26,460 --> 00:54:29,600
Speaker 1: So this is God, the artist. And so what that

796
00:54:29,680 --> 00:54:33,500
Speaker 1: means on a Christian story of our origins is that

797
00:54:33,540 --> 00:54:35,589
Speaker 1: when a few years ago, a couple of decades ago now,

798
00:54:35,620 --> 00:54:39,780
Speaker 1: when the Hubble telescope started relaying pictures back to earth

799
00:54:40,830 --> 00:54:45,410
Speaker 1: of the helix nebula or the Eagle nebula or the

800
00:54:45,530 --> 00:54:49,899
Speaker 1: Orion nebula and humanity first set eyes on on these

801
00:54:50,120 --> 00:54:56,930
Speaker 1: towering pillars of glowing space dust, what was regardless of

802
00:54:56,950 --> 00:55:00,290
Speaker 1: your skin tone, your culture, your education level, your age

803
00:55:00,330 --> 00:55:03,189
Speaker 1: or anything. When we saw those pictures from the Hubble

804
00:55:03,210 --> 00:55:08,170
Speaker 1: telescope and by we, I mean humanity, the response was

805
00:55:08,270 --> 00:55:16,060
Speaker 1: something like Tove. That's beautiful. I didn't hear anybody be like, Oh,

806
00:55:16,120 --> 00:55:18,120
Speaker 1: that's ugly. Look at all that stupid space dust.

807
00:55:18,600 --> 00:55:18,739
Speaker 2: Right.

808
00:55:19,180 --> 00:55:21,840
Speaker 1: Now with the James Webb telescope, we're getting even higher,

809
00:55:22,140 --> 00:55:26,040
Speaker 1: high definition photos from deep space. And we've seen the

810
00:55:26,120 --> 00:55:30,690
Speaker 1: Orion Nebula in far more glorious pink and fuchsia detail

811
00:55:30,730 --> 00:55:34,850
Speaker 1: than we ever did before. And again, what's the response? Tove.

812
00:55:35,050 --> 00:55:37,009
Speaker 1: I think this is an appeal we can make to

813
00:55:37,050 --> 00:55:43,520
Speaker 1: the atheists. What is an experience in life? Maybe it's

814
00:55:43,560 --> 00:55:47,190
Speaker 1: a song that moves you. Maybe it's a location, a

815
00:55:47,830 --> 00:55:51,370
Speaker 1: sunset spot. Maybe it's a mountain you've hiked to. Maybe

816
00:55:51,410 --> 00:55:55,259
Speaker 1: it's a vista you get from a certain mountain view.

817
00:55:55,300 --> 00:55:59,060
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a starry night. Maybe it's a certain beach.

818
00:55:59,140 --> 00:56:04,259
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a movie that moves you. Maybe there's a

819
00:56:04,430 --> 00:56:11,069
Speaker 1: food that is just so savory and satisfying to you.

820
00:56:12,910 --> 00:56:18,540
Speaker 1: Dear atheist friend, Do you believe which of these two options?

821
00:56:18,960 --> 00:56:23,399
Speaker 1: That you're just fabricating beauty? You're projecting aesthetic qualities into

822
00:56:23,460 --> 00:56:26,719
Speaker 1: a void? Or do you believe instead of fabricating, you're

823
00:56:26,760 --> 00:56:32,890
Speaker 1: actually finding beauty? You're discovering it. Which means that Orion

824
00:56:32,950 --> 00:56:36,469
Speaker 1: and Helix and Eagle Nebulas, they were beautiful before the

825
00:56:36,510 --> 00:56:40,470
Speaker 1: Hubble telescope ever left our atmosphere. Because God was declaring

826
00:56:40,530 --> 00:56:44,660
Speaker 1: Tov over his universe. If we all went blind tomorrow,

827
00:56:45,489 --> 00:56:50,710
Speaker 1: Guess what? Peacocks would still be beautiful. If we all

828
00:56:50,750 --> 00:56:54,819
Speaker 1: went blind tomorrow, the Orion, the sunset would still be beautiful.

829
00:56:54,860 --> 00:56:59,020
Speaker 1: So there's an objective beauty in a universe that was

830
00:56:59,239 --> 00:57:02,800
Speaker 1: began by an artist that we meet in the very

831
00:57:02,880 --> 00:57:06,560
Speaker 1: first pages, the very first sentence of scripture. And so

832
00:57:06,600 --> 00:57:08,759
Speaker 1: here I would just kick it to the atheist and

833
00:57:08,800 --> 00:57:12,379
Speaker 1: just say, it's sort of Greg Kokel's strategy of put

834
00:57:12,420 --> 00:57:14,969
Speaker 1: a rock in their shoe. They might in the moment say, well,

835
00:57:14,989 --> 00:57:18,390
Speaker 1: it's all subjective. It's all a projection into the void.

836
00:57:19,130 --> 00:57:22,450
Speaker 1: But the next time that sunset knocks them on their butt,

837
00:57:23,390 --> 00:57:27,340
Speaker 1: the next time they see a seagull riding the waves,

838
00:57:27,780 --> 00:57:31,760
Speaker 1: any time now that they're affronted by beauty, there's going

839
00:57:31,780 --> 00:57:33,820
Speaker 1: to be that rock in their shoes saying, hey, I

840
00:57:33,900 --> 00:57:35,680
Speaker 1: see all this art. I wonder if there is an

841
00:57:35,820 --> 00:57:36,690
Speaker 1: artist after all.

842
00:57:37,570 --> 00:57:39,910
Speaker 2: I love the way you frame this. Is beauty something

843
00:57:39,990 --> 00:57:43,550
Speaker 2: that we read into nature or something that we discover?

844
00:57:44,300 --> 00:57:48,160
Speaker 2: Because physical things can be arranged in a beautiful fashion,

845
00:57:48,320 --> 00:57:52,860
Speaker 2: like a painting, but beauty goes beyond matter, like a

846
00:57:53,040 --> 00:58:01,030
Speaker 2: poem or a song. These are immaterial things that have beauty. Well,

847
00:58:01,330 --> 00:58:06,180
Speaker 2: we all act as if certain things have beauty within themselves.

848
00:58:06,240 --> 00:58:09,010
Speaker 2: We act as if a rainbow is beautiful. We act

849
00:58:09,070 --> 00:58:11,830
Speaker 2: as if a waterfall is beautiful. We act as if

850
00:58:12,550 --> 00:58:17,110
Speaker 2: a galaxy and the nebula in themselves are beautiful. And

851
00:58:17,130 --> 00:58:20,170
Speaker 2: what's crazy is we find beauty in the depths of

852
00:58:20,210 --> 00:58:24,470
Speaker 2: the ocean and in the depths of the galaxy, which

853
00:58:24,550 --> 00:58:30,410
Speaker 2: have no relevance for evolution on our small, insignificant, tiny planet.

854
00:58:31,440 --> 00:58:34,169
Speaker 2: That's the challenge. And let me wrap it up by

855
00:58:34,290 --> 00:58:36,850
Speaker 2: saying this, and I've one or two landing questions for you.

856
00:58:38,270 --> 00:58:40,930
Speaker 2: One of the things we're asking people to wrestle with

857
00:58:41,210 --> 00:58:45,030
Speaker 2: is what do you deeply believe? Well, for example, one

858
00:58:45,150 --> 00:58:48,220
Speaker 2: explanation for the universe is that the universe is Maya.

859
00:58:48,340 --> 00:58:52,120
Speaker 2: It's an illusion. None of us live as if that's

860
00:58:52,180 --> 00:58:58,710
Speaker 2: the case. Consciousness, some atheists to explain it, a within atheism,

861
00:58:58,770 --> 00:59:04,740
Speaker 2: have denied consciousness. But even denying it takes place within consciousness.

862
00:59:04,820 --> 00:59:08,230
Speaker 2: We all know we're conscious. We know that we make

863
00:59:08,370 --> 00:59:12,500
Speaker 2: choices and that we're not operated on externally by forces,

864
00:59:12,560 --> 00:59:16,030
Speaker 2: but there's a self that acts. We know that we

865
00:59:16,070 --> 00:59:20,270
Speaker 2: can trust reason, at least insofar as it goes. It's

866
00:59:20,330 --> 00:59:23,410
Speaker 2: a useful tool. We know there's right and wrong. And

867
00:59:23,450 --> 00:59:26,710
Speaker 2: we know that beauty is in the world. In fact,

868
00:59:26,770 --> 00:59:30,990
Speaker 2: not only if somebody doesn't recognize a beautiful galaxy, we

869
00:59:31,090 --> 00:59:34,240
Speaker 2: actually correct people. If they go, that's ugly, we'd be like,

870
00:59:34,300 --> 00:59:37,260
Speaker 2: what's wrong with you? The problem is you are not

871
00:59:37,380 --> 00:59:41,320
Speaker 2: seeing the beauty and we all live that way. So

872
00:59:41,560 --> 00:59:44,360
Speaker 2: our argument here, which isn't really us, for most of these,

873
00:59:44,380 --> 00:59:48,640
Speaker 2: you pointed towards atheists saying this themselves, that these are

874
00:59:48,680 --> 00:59:52,270
Speaker 2: all things we take for granted and but atheism cannot

875
00:59:52,330 --> 00:59:56,390
Speaker 2: explain any of these adequately. Now I have a few

876
00:59:56,430 --> 00:59:57,850
Speaker 2: that I wrote down as I was thinking about this,

877
00:59:57,910 --> 00:59:59,550
Speaker 2: but can you think of any, like just list them

878
00:59:59,630 --> 01:00:02,030
Speaker 2: off quickly. Any other things we're not going into detail

879
01:00:02,050 --> 01:00:05,080
Speaker 2: here that you consider further blind leaps of atheism?

880
01:00:06,480 --> 01:00:10,340
Speaker 1: Sure. So one, this, this just piggybacks on, uh, the

881
01:00:10,380 --> 01:00:13,560
Speaker 1: last point on beauty. There's a quote, uh, I'm a

882
01:00:13,600 --> 01:00:17,820
Speaker 1: huge Sherlock Holmes fan. A lot of, uh, apologists love

883
01:00:18,120 --> 01:00:23,770
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone and Sherlock Holmes. Uh, that's almost universally true

884
01:00:24,030 --> 01:00:28,990
Speaker 1: and Sherlock Holmes rarely in any of Arthur Conan Doyle's

885
01:00:31,130 --> 01:00:35,900
Speaker 1: stories or mysteries has Sherlock make a theological point it's

886
01:00:35,980 --> 01:00:39,040
Speaker 1: very rare but I found one example that answers your

887
01:00:39,080 --> 01:00:43,680
Speaker 1: question this is from the Naval Treaty is the name

888
01:00:44,620 --> 01:00:48,060
Speaker 1: of this particular adventure or mystery and this is such

889
01:00:48,080 --> 01:00:51,100
Speaker 1: a good argument for God It comes from the lips

890
01:00:51,220 --> 01:00:56,360
Speaker 1: of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction, where Holmes

891
01:00:56,880 --> 01:01:00,040
Speaker 1: grabs a rose and he says, What a lovely thing

892
01:01:00,060 --> 01:01:04,640
Speaker 1: a rose is. Our highest assurance of the goodness of

893
01:01:04,720 --> 01:01:09,600
Speaker 1: provenance seems to me to rest in the flowers. Other

894
01:01:09,660 --> 01:01:13,510
Speaker 1: things are all really necessary for our existence in the

895
01:01:13,550 --> 01:01:17,490
Speaker 1: first instance. But this rose, I love this language, this

896
01:01:17,610 --> 01:01:22,140
Speaker 1: rose is an extra. its smell and its color are

897
01:01:22,160 --> 01:01:25,230
Speaker 1: an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. And

898
01:01:25,250 --> 01:01:30,810
Speaker 1: here's his conclusion. It's only goodness, which gives extras. It's

899
01:01:30,870 --> 01:01:33,730
Speaker 1: only goodness with a capital G that can give these extras.

900
01:01:34,030 --> 01:01:35,650
Speaker 1: And that to me is one of the most compelling

901
01:01:35,720 --> 01:01:39,340
Speaker 1: arguments for God because we're surrounded by extras, by things

902
01:01:39,380 --> 01:01:44,040
Speaker 1: that like, I don't deserve the breeze blowing in my

903
01:01:44,080 --> 01:01:48,000
Speaker 1: window right now. I don't deserve the hummingbird that's whizzing

904
01:01:48,060 --> 01:01:51,690
Speaker 1: around outside. my window. I don't deserve the beautiful Magnolia

905
01:01:51,790 --> 01:01:55,140
Speaker 1: tree three feet away from me. Like all of those

906
01:01:55,300 --> 01:02:02,240
Speaker 1: undeserved extras point to the, the goodness with a capital G.

907
01:02:02,320 --> 01:02:05,700
Speaker 1: And that means we are literally surrounded by, we are

908
01:02:05,720 --> 01:02:11,020
Speaker 1: immersed in arguments for a good God's existence, uh, more

909
01:02:11,100 --> 01:02:13,460
Speaker 1: times a day than we can count. So I find

910
01:02:13,480 --> 01:02:16,430
Speaker 1: that compelling. It very, very quickly. I think the argument

911
01:02:16,490 --> 01:02:20,450
Speaker 1: from awe that, uh, The field of positive psychology is

912
01:02:20,510 --> 01:02:24,050
Speaker 1: finding that people don't want to be awestruck. They need

913
01:02:24,110 --> 01:02:28,890
Speaker 1: to be awestruck. And so you get over 50,000 people

914
01:02:28,950 --> 01:02:33,620
Speaker 1: a year making the inconvenient trek to Nepal to try

915
01:02:33,640 --> 01:02:37,900
Speaker 1: to climb Everest. You have 1.5 million a year going

916
01:02:37,980 --> 01:02:43,110
Speaker 1: to Yosemite, 2.5 million going to Niagara Falls. we go

917
01:02:43,120 --> 01:02:47,750
Speaker 1: to huge blockbuster movies like Christopher Nolan's recent Odyssey, which

918
01:02:47,810 --> 01:02:51,570
Speaker 1: is this huge, you know, visual spectacle, or I took

919
01:02:51,610 --> 01:02:55,370
Speaker 1: my son yesterday to see the new Spider-Man movie. I

920
01:02:55,390 --> 01:02:59,530
Speaker 1: know you're a huge Spidey fan. We don't just want

921
01:02:59,730 --> 01:03:02,570
Speaker 1: to be awestruck. We need to be awestruck. And I

922
01:03:02,630 --> 01:03:05,680
Speaker 1: think that makes really good sense if we are created

923
01:03:05,840 --> 01:03:10,410
Speaker 1: for awe, which is, By the way, the most frequent

924
01:03:10,470 --> 01:03:13,150
Speaker 1: command in all of Scripture is to fear the Lord,

925
01:03:13,210 --> 01:03:16,450
Speaker 1: and it's a Hebrew term, yirah, which means to revere,

926
01:03:16,530 --> 01:03:20,430
Speaker 1: to be awestruck at. So there's a handful of arguments

927
01:03:20,490 --> 01:03:21,300
Speaker 1: I find compelling.

928
01:03:21,320 --> 01:03:24,380
Speaker 2: That's awesome. I thought of a few other leaps. That

929
01:03:24,460 --> 01:03:28,800
Speaker 2: is explaining away the person and identity and evidence surrounding

930
01:03:28,880 --> 01:03:34,090
Speaker 2: Jesus and the worldwide impact this carpenter would have who

931
01:03:34,110 --> 01:03:39,150
Speaker 2: had no government, military position, an obscure area. realm of

932
01:03:39,210 --> 01:03:44,580
Speaker 2: the Roman Empire, near-death experiences, this phenomena that leads to

933
01:03:44,700 --> 01:03:50,000
Speaker 2: a transformation of people's lives. And I recently had an

934
01:03:50,200 --> 01:03:56,610
Speaker 2: expert on Randy Kay, 140 carefully vetted and confirmed near-death experiences.

935
01:03:57,250 --> 01:04:00,630
Speaker 2: Gary Habermas would say there's over 500 evidential ones One

936
01:04:00,670 --> 01:04:04,640
Speaker 2: of Craig's top arguments, William and Craig, is the inexplicable

937
01:04:04,840 --> 01:04:09,140
Speaker 2: applicability of math, meaning these laws that you talked about,

938
01:04:09,740 --> 01:04:13,240
Speaker 2: why we can do science and it applies to the

939
01:04:13,280 --> 01:04:17,140
Speaker 2: natural world seems like a coincidence on atheism, but makes

940
01:04:17,200 --> 01:04:21,510
Speaker 2: sense if there's design, stories of miracles that people have.

941
01:04:21,610 --> 01:04:24,910
Speaker 2: I mean, there's so many things we haven't even talked about. Now,

942
01:04:24,930 --> 01:04:27,540
Speaker 2: of course, atheists wouldn't believe in those. But there's a

943
01:04:27,560 --> 01:04:29,080
Speaker 2: lot of people looking at it and saying, wait a minute,

944
01:04:29,240 --> 01:04:31,790
Speaker 2: these things seem to be a part of the world

945
01:04:31,970 --> 01:04:36,890
Speaker 2: in which we live. They need an adequate explanation. All right,

946
01:04:36,930 --> 01:04:39,490
Speaker 2: so last question for you. We're not going to walk

947
01:04:39,530 --> 01:04:41,650
Speaker 2: through here, but we will walk through how we believe

948
01:04:41,750 --> 01:04:43,580
Speaker 2: each one of these not only is a blind leap

949
01:04:43,620 --> 01:04:46,240
Speaker 2: of atheism, but actually points towards design. For example, if

950
01:04:46,300 --> 01:04:49,800
Speaker 2: the universe exists and had a beginning, that points towards

951
01:04:49,820 --> 01:04:53,120
Speaker 2: the beginner outside of the universe. We know minds can

952
01:04:53,220 --> 01:04:58,250
Speaker 2: fine-tune things. We know if God is a conscious agent

953
01:04:58,860 --> 01:05:02,580
Speaker 2: and God is free, it makes sense he'd make conscious

954
01:05:02,860 --> 01:05:06,680
Speaker 2: agents who are free. If God is the basis, God

955
01:05:06,740 --> 01:05:09,040
Speaker 2: is holy, God is just, it would make sense that

956
01:05:09,080 --> 01:05:12,070
Speaker 2: he would make beans with moral commands. If God is

957
01:05:12,120 --> 01:05:17,130
Speaker 2: the logos, it would make sense that we've been made

958
01:05:17,170 --> 01:05:21,230
Speaker 2: with minds to understand reason. And finally, taste and see

959
01:05:21,270 --> 01:05:24,590
Speaker 2: that the Lord is good. God is good and God is.

960
01:05:25,090 --> 01:05:27,980
Speaker 2: is beautiful in his character and makes sense that we

961
01:05:28,000 --> 01:05:30,720
Speaker 2: would yearn for beauty and awe like you said. What

962
01:05:30,740 --> 01:05:33,240
Speaker 2: would your last thing be to somebody who goes, okay,

963
01:05:33,740 --> 01:05:36,960
Speaker 2: you don't understand the history of the trajectory of thought.

964
01:05:36,980 --> 01:05:40,420
Speaker 2: These things that we believed couldn't be explained by God.

965
01:05:40,520 --> 01:05:44,220
Speaker 2: As science progresses, we've explained them. So what would you

966
01:05:44,240 --> 01:05:46,940
Speaker 2: do for somebody who holds out with that approach?

967
01:05:48,180 --> 01:05:51,800
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let me give two kind of quick preliminary

968
01:05:51,860 --> 01:05:53,520
Speaker 1: points and then get to the meat of the question.

969
01:05:54,600 --> 01:05:59,180
Speaker 1: So I had a professor at Biola, one of the

970
01:05:59,220 --> 01:06:02,520
Speaker 1: world's experts. He still teaches, I think, a summer class

971
01:06:02,960 --> 01:06:05,520
Speaker 1: on the theology of C.S. Lewis, and that is Dr.

972
01:06:05,620 --> 01:06:07,240
Speaker 1: Jerry Root. Do you know Jerry?

973
01:06:08,140 --> 01:06:10,640
Speaker 2: I don't know him well, but have followed him for

974
01:06:10,660 --> 01:06:11,180
Speaker 2: a long time.

975
01:06:12,120 --> 01:06:16,400
Speaker 1: Okay. So Jerry was invited to Oxford to give a C.S.

976
01:06:16,440 --> 01:06:22,140
Speaker 1: Lewis lecture. And before his lecture, he's sitting around surrounded

977
01:06:22,620 --> 01:06:27,280
Speaker 1: by all these– you know, academic elite, you know, the

978
01:06:27,580 --> 01:06:31,790
Speaker 1: very erudite company, these Oxford dons. And somebody looks at

979
01:06:32,590 --> 01:06:36,890
Speaker 1: Jerry Root at this dinner and very condescendingly asks, talk

980
01:06:36,910 --> 01:06:40,350
Speaker 1: to Root. They tell me, you're a Christian. Like, pray

981
01:06:40,430 --> 01:06:45,990
Speaker 1: tell why you would believe in Christianity. He thought about

982
01:06:46,010 --> 01:06:49,410
Speaker 1: it for a minute and he answered in one sentence.

983
01:06:49,450 --> 01:06:51,950
Speaker 1: He said, you know, I think when it comes down

984
01:06:51,990 --> 01:06:55,330
Speaker 1: to it, I realize just how much grace I need.

985
01:06:55,350 --> 01:07:00,900
Speaker 1: I realize just how much grace I need. And how

986
01:07:00,920 --> 01:07:05,180
Speaker 1: does the atheist respond to that? Like, no, you don't.

987
01:07:05,320 --> 01:07:08,680
Speaker 1: Or maybe you do, but I don't. There's just something

988
01:07:09,180 --> 01:07:11,260
Speaker 1: to that kind of argument where we can go through

989
01:07:11,360 --> 01:07:17,100
Speaker 1: cosmology and teleology and microbiology and consciousness and philosophy of

990
01:07:17,160 --> 01:07:20,340
Speaker 1: mind and And I think those arguments are valuable. They

991
01:07:20,410 --> 01:07:24,510
Speaker 1: have their place. But on the human level, to just

992
01:07:24,610 --> 01:07:27,710
Speaker 1: be able to tell people, hey, here's really good news.

993
01:07:27,790 --> 01:07:31,050
Speaker 1: Jesus has grace. He has saving grace. He can forgive

994
01:07:31,110 --> 01:07:35,320
Speaker 1: you of your sins. He can take up residence in

995
01:07:35,340 --> 01:07:37,980
Speaker 1: your soul by his Holy Spirit. He can instill and

996
01:07:38,040 --> 01:07:43,380
Speaker 1: infuse you with life and meaning and hope. Sometimes as apologists,

997
01:07:43,480 --> 01:07:46,320
Speaker 1: we make it a little too complicated for ourselves and

998
01:07:46,390 --> 01:07:49,170
Speaker 1: for the person we're sharing Jesus with where it's like,

999
01:07:49,490 --> 01:07:52,050
Speaker 1: I learned these 80 arguments. Let me get through all

1000
01:07:52,070 --> 01:07:56,050
Speaker 1: of them before I get to Jesus. Sometimes getting to

1001
01:07:56,070 --> 01:07:58,900
Speaker 1: the gospel cuts through the static. So that's the first

1002
01:07:58,920 --> 01:08:04,440
Speaker 1: sort of preliminary point. A second one is probably my

1003
01:08:04,540 --> 01:08:08,860
Speaker 1: nearest and dearest argument for God is the breath in

1004
01:08:08,900 --> 01:08:12,370
Speaker 1: my lungs. I did an episode of my show, the

1005
01:08:12,390 --> 01:08:14,550
Speaker 1: shed and beam. Maybe you can link it down in

1006
01:08:14,590 --> 01:08:17,860
Speaker 1: the show notes. but how God saved me from Mormonism

1007
01:08:18,100 --> 01:08:21,849
Speaker 1: and suicide. I was raised Mormon. When my parents left,

1008
01:08:22,290 --> 01:08:27,030
Speaker 1: I became suicidally depressed around age 14 and in a

1009
01:08:27,090 --> 01:08:33,110
Speaker 1: pit of utter nihilism and despair. The breath in my lungs,

1010
01:08:33,130 --> 01:08:37,470
Speaker 1: the fact that Jesus saved me, every breath and every

1011
01:08:37,530 --> 01:08:41,500
Speaker 1: heartbeat is another argument, not just for a beginner or

1012
01:08:41,520 --> 01:08:45,160
Speaker 1: a designer or a moral lawgiver, What a gracious God

1013
01:08:45,200 --> 01:08:49,770
Speaker 1: who saved a schlub like me. So to the argument,

1014
01:08:50,110 --> 01:08:53,530
Speaker 1: is this just Williams, McDowell, are you guys just doing

1015
01:08:53,550 --> 01:08:57,429
Speaker 1: this God of the gaps thing? Eventually, science will plug

1016
01:08:57,550 --> 01:09:01,590
Speaker 1: up all these gaps, leaving your God permanent. unemployed, an

1017
01:09:02,490 --> 01:09:10,200
Speaker 1: outdated hypothesis. It's an important objection. And I think it's

1018
01:09:10,240 --> 01:09:15,000
Speaker 1: important here to dive into the actual arguments. And I'll

1019
01:09:15,020 --> 01:09:17,950
Speaker 1: make it quick to see that. These are not like

1020
01:09:18,010 --> 01:09:23,769
Speaker 1: historic God gaps that were closed. Rather, these gaps keep growing,

1021
01:09:24,270 --> 01:09:28,680
Speaker 1: demanding even more of a transcendent or divine or supreme

1022
01:09:28,729 --> 01:09:32,280
Speaker 1: intelligence to explain the phenomena the more we learn about

1023
01:09:32,300 --> 01:09:35,640
Speaker 1: the phenomena. So I hinted at an example earlier. In

1024
01:09:35,680 --> 01:09:42,560
Speaker 1: Darwin's day, oh, there's cells, an unsophisticated bag of organic jello, basically.

1025
01:09:43,290 --> 01:09:47,189
Speaker 1: And then science, more science gets done, microbiology, It comes

1026
01:09:47,270 --> 01:09:50,070
Speaker 1: around in the 20th century in biochemistry. And it's like, whoa,

1027
01:09:50,750 --> 01:09:53,969
Speaker 1: there's way more explaining that needs to happen here because

1028
01:09:53,990 --> 01:09:59,590
Speaker 1: this is remarkably sophisticated. You mentioned Doug Axe. He has

1029
01:09:59,630 --> 01:10:02,430
Speaker 1: done so much work on, like you said, information and

1030
01:10:02,510 --> 01:10:05,880
Speaker 1: information theory. And where do you get the new genetic

1031
01:10:06,100 --> 01:10:10,640
Speaker 1: information to explain the diversity of species? Here's another example

1032
01:10:10,680 --> 01:10:12,960
Speaker 1: of the more science is done, the bigger the God

1033
01:10:12,979 --> 01:10:17,270
Speaker 1: gaps become. Let's, let me close with this thought on

1034
01:10:17,490 --> 01:10:24,810
Speaker 1: the God of the gaps. Consciousness has, we talked about

1035
01:10:24,850 --> 01:10:27,590
Speaker 1: maybe four or five features of it. There's several more.

1036
01:10:28,910 --> 01:10:32,300
Speaker 1: This is not an area where the more science or

1037
01:10:32,320 --> 01:10:36,140
Speaker 1: philosophy is done, the more it seems like God is

1038
01:10:36,220 --> 01:10:41,660
Speaker 1: being nudged off stage. Precisely the opposite. The more philosophy

1039
01:10:41,700 --> 01:10:47,490
Speaker 1: of mind that's done, we come to see that material

1040
01:10:47,570 --> 01:10:55,570
Speaker 1: causes have material effects. Put it this way, you put

1041
01:10:56,490 --> 01:11:01,769
Speaker 1: a beaker of mercury above a Bunsen burner, physical cause,

1042
01:11:01,830 --> 01:11:05,410
Speaker 1: physical effect, that thing's going to boil around 582 degrees,

1043
01:11:05,479 --> 01:11:09,230
Speaker 1: something like that. We have a physical cause, physical effect.

1044
01:11:09,800 --> 01:11:12,760
Speaker 1: What the atheists would have us believe here, it would seem,

1045
01:11:13,840 --> 01:11:18,620
Speaker 1: is that physical cause could have a non-physical effect. That

1046
01:11:18,900 --> 01:11:24,220
Speaker 1: you could have the precise arrangement of brain chemistry and poof,

1047
01:11:24,340 --> 01:11:29,150
Speaker 1: the laws of logic sprout into being. So non-physical effect

1048
01:11:29,189 --> 01:11:33,770
Speaker 1: from a physical cause defies every single experiment being done

1049
01:11:33,830 --> 01:11:36,689
Speaker 1: in every laboratory in the world all day, every day.

1050
01:11:37,170 --> 01:11:42,340
Speaker 1: Physical causes have physical effects. Every time, every experiment that

1051
01:11:42,420 --> 01:11:46,120
Speaker 1: reinforces that just goes to show that this gap keeps

1052
01:11:46,160 --> 01:11:49,589
Speaker 1: getting bigger and bigger and bigger for the atheist having

1053
01:11:49,630 --> 01:11:54,509
Speaker 1: to explain how all of these non-physical realities, like choice-making power,

1054
01:11:54,570 --> 01:12:00,559
Speaker 1: like semantics, like aboutness or intentionality, like the laws of logic,

1055
01:12:00,920 --> 01:12:06,729
Speaker 1: like aesthetics, like moral categories and oughts, The gap just

1056
01:12:06,770 --> 01:12:10,730
Speaker 1: keeps growing and growing and growing. And final, final thought

1057
01:12:11,170 --> 01:12:14,090
Speaker 1: is I think here there's also a confusion on the

1058
01:12:14,189 --> 01:12:20,550
Speaker 1: atheist part between causes. You know, Aristotle distinguishes between a

1059
01:12:20,770 --> 01:12:25,250
Speaker 1: material cause. That's what something's made of. That's different from

1060
01:12:26,430 --> 01:12:29,630
Speaker 1: the efficient cause, which is who is arranging this stuff,

1061
01:12:30,390 --> 01:12:33,070
Speaker 1: which is different from the formal cause, the shape the

1062
01:12:33,330 --> 01:12:36,639
Speaker 1: material cause takes. And all that's different from the final cause,

1063
01:12:36,700 --> 01:12:40,080
Speaker 1: what that thing is for. And so I built my

1064
01:12:40,140 --> 01:12:44,080
Speaker 1: son a go-kart the other day. There's the metal, that's

1065
01:12:44,120 --> 01:12:48,080
Speaker 1: the material cause. There's the formal cause, the shape the

1066
01:12:48,120 --> 01:12:52,019
Speaker 1: metal takes with the wheels. There's the efficient cause, me,

1067
01:12:52,189 --> 01:12:55,470
Speaker 1: the guy putting it together. And there's the final cause

1068
01:12:55,510 --> 01:12:58,090
Speaker 1: for my son to have a good time riding his

1069
01:12:58,150 --> 01:13:02,610
Speaker 1: new go-kart. And so the atheist commonly makes the mistake of, well,

1070
01:13:02,630 --> 01:13:07,950
Speaker 1: if we understand more about The material cause, therefore, we

1071
01:13:07,990 --> 01:13:10,170
Speaker 1: don't need an efficient cause and we don't need a

1072
01:13:10,229 --> 01:13:13,189
Speaker 1: final cause. And I think that's just a basic philosophical

1073
01:13:13,270 --> 01:13:16,639
Speaker 1: blunder that I hear atheists make all the time. No

1074
01:13:16,740 --> 01:13:22,540
Speaker 1: amount of material causal explanations could alleviate the need for

1075
01:13:23,040 --> 01:13:27,620
Speaker 1: an efficient cause. Who's the designer? And a teleological cause,

1076
01:13:27,660 --> 01:13:29,280
Speaker 1: what is it designed for?

1077
01:13:31,750 --> 01:13:33,750
Speaker 2: And by the way, a reminder, so many of these

1078
01:13:33,810 --> 01:13:37,190
Speaker 2: discoveries were not from Christians saying, hey, let's go prove

1079
01:13:37,229 --> 01:13:41,070
Speaker 2: Genesis chapter one. No, the science started pointed towards the

1080
01:13:41,100 --> 01:13:44,080
Speaker 2: universe having a beginning and it was resisted. Even some

1081
01:13:44,120 --> 01:13:47,240
Speaker 2: of the fine tuning was discovered by an agnostic, maybe

1082
01:13:47,320 --> 01:13:50,559
Speaker 2: even atheist scientist who was surprised by this. It didn't

1083
01:13:50,720 --> 01:13:55,040
Speaker 2: fit his worldview. So this isn't a big agenda from

1084
01:13:55,080 --> 01:13:58,200
Speaker 2: Christians pushing this forward. It's actually comes as a surprise

1085
01:13:58,240 --> 01:14:01,100
Speaker 2: from people who discovered this about the universe and And

1086
01:14:01,140 --> 01:14:03,780
Speaker 2: the further we've gone, I think the argument is that

1087
01:14:03,800 --> 01:14:06,389
Speaker 2: we see more of these fingerprints. I'm going to invite

1088
01:14:06,400 --> 01:14:08,689
Speaker 2: people to check out your book, Reflecting the Sun. I

1089
01:14:08,700 --> 01:14:14,750
Speaker 2: endorsed an earlier version of this. And you talk about philosophy, science, art, psychology.

1090
01:14:14,790 --> 01:14:17,769
Speaker 2: This is really a broad book about what it means

1091
01:14:17,810 --> 01:14:21,250
Speaker 2: to worship and follow Jesus. So if there's any atheist

1092
01:14:21,270 --> 01:14:23,769
Speaker 2: who's like, okay, I've been challenged a little bit. What

1093
01:14:23,790 --> 01:14:26,050
Speaker 2: would it look like to live this out? First, read

1094
01:14:26,070 --> 01:14:28,790
Speaker 2: the Gospel of John. Second, check out Reflecting the Sun

1095
01:14:28,810 --> 01:14:31,470
Speaker 2: by Thaddeus Williams. where Christians are like, okay, I want

1096
01:14:31,490 --> 01:14:33,769
Speaker 2: to live out this faith. What does it look like?

1097
01:14:34,270 --> 01:14:37,770
Speaker 2: Your book is excellent. Heartily endorse it. People watching, come

1098
01:14:37,810 --> 01:14:40,870
Speaker 2: think about studying with us at Biola Talbot School of Theology.

1099
01:14:40,890 --> 01:14:42,710
Speaker 2: You and I both taught there. I went to Biola

1100
01:14:42,890 --> 01:14:46,610
Speaker 2: and Talbot together back in the 90s, early 2000s. Make

1101
01:14:46,729 --> 01:14:49,090
Speaker 2: sure you hit subscribe. Let us know what you think

1102
01:14:49,110 --> 01:14:51,310
Speaker 2: about this episode. This is a little different than some

1103
01:14:51,330 --> 01:14:53,590
Speaker 2: of the typical episodes that we did. If you're an atheist,

1104
01:14:53,610 --> 01:14:56,450
Speaker 2: you're not convinced. I'm not looking for a fight, but

1105
01:14:56,490 --> 01:14:59,380
Speaker 2: I'd love to know, honestly, if you have thoughts and reflections.

1106
01:14:59,820 --> 01:15:02,880
Speaker 2: Here's where I agree. Here's where I disagree. Here's my take.

1107
01:15:03,229 --> 01:15:05,330
Speaker 2: Write it in and I will take a look at

1108
01:15:05,370 --> 01:15:07,990
Speaker 2: the comments. Dad, thanks for coming on. This is fun.

1109
01:15:08,010 --> 01:15:11,280
Speaker 1: Hey man, I appreciate you. I'll see you soon.

1110
01:15:11,300 --> 01:15:12,140
Speaker 2: You got it.