Atheist YouTubers Critique My Atheist Role Play, I Respond

recently two popular youtubers made a response video to my atheist encounter which i role play an atheist at a christian school and then reveal my identity as they do in their response to me i'm gonna address a couple claims that they made in their video point out two distinct lessons that i've learned through this exchange and then have a suggestion for drew the genetically modified skeptic as he did for me enjoy let's start with the big final suggestion that drew offers to me about how i can improve my interaction with atheists sean expressed three objectives for this event to represent atheists honestly and accurately to challenge his audience to believe and defend christianity only because it's intellectually convinced them and to encourage christians to engage atheists in kindness and love not harsh defensiveness those are commendable objectives and i have a suggestion that would help sean meet them far better than he did here sean when you're having your audience dialogue with an atheist bring in an actual atheist rather than role-playing as or even impersonating one misrepresentation and even representation of atheists as dishonest did happen here the atheist answers given were also limited to those which sean had prepared to discredit if a real atheist were brought in sean wouldn't have to worry about misrepresentation on his part the answers given might be different than those sean could give role-playing providing a better challenge to both sean and the audience it would also give the audience the opportunity to gain experience interacting with a real atheist sean could stand by to model and maintain civility i'm sure he'd be great at it and then make his points about treating atheists with love at the end having an actual atheist present would humanize atheists for the audience making sean's point even more strongly it would be a bit more of a logistical challenge for sean to do this but it's the right thing to do for this reason the mistreatment and discrimination that atheists face from some christians is perpetuated by the fact that the majority of conversations those christians have about atheists happen without atheists present the misguided beliefs that christians use to mock their atheist peers like that atheists think everything just popped into existence from nothing one day continue to exist because atheists aren't present when christians discuss those beliefs in apologetics class the picture of an atheist as someone who just decides not to believe in god one day because they won't have sex before marriage which christian parents often assume of their adult children while refusing to be corrected continues to exist because christians discuss it amongst themselves without atheists present fact check it the name calling and hateful jokes continue with atheist present because many christians mostly tell those jokes and use those names in conversation with each other when atheists aren't present so sean for the sake of reaching your own goals including improving the discourse and relations between christians and atheists i ask you to do this one thing allow atheists to be present in this discussion and to represent ourselves in these dialogues let us make our own mistakes and give our own answers most importantly let us show our humanity to those who see us as pitiful or threatening other christians look up to you and modeling this behavior for others might just help atheists and christians begin healing the broken hearts and broken relationships which have resulted from atheists being left out of the conversation drew and paul have a number of concerns about my presentation perhaps the biggest one is they feel that i've misrepresented atheists to my audience well believe it or not this is a charge that i take very seriously i've watched their video multiple times and try to take lessons and see if they point something out that i need to do better why don't i take this seriously i have a number of atheist friends and family members and i certainly don't want them to think that i misrepresent them and don't care about how they feel and the way they're perceived to the world and to me let me offer a little background information that may help drew suggests that i ought to bring in a real atheist to engage my students rather than role play well here's some context for the past 15 years plus i've been taking students christian students from private christian school on trips to engage people of a range of faiths every year we'll go to a place such as salt lake city to engage members of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints we've gone to l.a to meet with muslims and visit mosques and every year or every other year on average we've taken a group of about two dozen high school students to berkeley in which we meet with atheists skeptics and agnostics each year we probably bring in about three to four atheists and let them speak to our students on a range of topics the historical jesus the existence of god morality and so on so what's interesting is his biggest suggestion to me i've been doing that for years i've also brought in atheists to speak at my home church i brought an atheist to speak in my classroom at biola university in fact visiting another church i brought an atheist up on stage and asked some questions just so we could learn from them so i love the suggestion that drew is offering that's a way forward that christians and atheists can develop more understanding but this is not new news to me i've been doing this with students for a long time so ironically many of the answers that i gave as role playing an atheist came from the very answers that atheists have given to my students when we ga engage them on a range of issues i've taken copious notes and as i've role played i actually will give the very responses that atheists have given to our group now paul and drew might not like those responses they might not think they're good responses they might not think that they represent the majority of atheists so that they have better response they might be right about all those but none of my responses in the role play were meant to straw men or misrepresent atheists but the majority of them actually came from atheists themselves as they've made those arguments to me and to our group did i fall short on a couple responses sure i'm happy to concede that as paul jia pointed out there's a couple facts that i got mistaken but he also pointed out in our interactions together he also got some facts wrong and i graciously pointed that out to him that's a part of doing anything unscripted now their response to me was scripted which is fine my presentation was unscripted now drew points out that when i make a mistake unscripted that has an effect on the reputation of atheists not on me and that's very fair i appreciate him pointing that out when i make a mistake as a christian that really does reflect upon me so you better believe i'm concerned with that but as drew brings it to my attention you better believe i will be doubly sure to represent atheists even more carefully in the future i think that's what we should all aim to do not only have i invited in atheists and skeptics to speak to my own group i've actually encouraged a lot of other christians to do the same in a recent book i wrote with jay warren wallace and i only mentioned this to make a point wrote a book called so the next generation will know for christian educators parents and youth pastors one of the chapters towards the end we encourage these different youth leaders to take their students to go visit people of other faiths train them how to ask good questions train them how to engage in spiritual conversations train them how to treat people who see the world differently with kindness and love and respect even at biola university where i teach i have a class for undergrads and i give them two assignments number one go visit a club of on a university campus in which they will hold something such as an ethical or religious view different than their own so maybe for some of my students i'd be visiting a socialist club maybe that'd be visiting an lgbtq club or visiting an atheist club and the assignment is to simply go ask questions meet people and listen and learn that's it i also sign to my students specifically that they're to have three spiritual conversations each semester with someone who's a non-believer i have a series of questions for them to ask it's not a debate it's simply for my students to learn how to listen well to people who see the world differently it's tempting to go point by point through their video and offer a response to each one but i'm not going to i'm just going to respond to two claims and the first one is by apologia in his attempt to catch me in an inconsistency in my response it seems that he's misrepresented my views but a passage that's not disputed as far as i could tell in my doctoral research on james the brother of jesus is the passage in antiquities of the jews chapter 20. the reason it seems largely undisputed is that there's really a political debacle going on and anonymous kind of seizes authority and it literally just mentions that james the brother of jesus the christ was put to death and then it moves on christian sean says that we can be confident in this passage since it's not religious there's really a political debate going on that's very interesting to me because i have argued with sean that the political nature of james's death disqualifies his martyrdom as any kind of guarantee of the truth of jesus's resurrection james died for politics not ideology apology wants to say that the death of james was political murder not ideological but it's not that simple it seems inconsistent to call the murder political when arguing jesus's historicity and ideological when arguing martyrdom unfortunately he left out the longer clip which gives the context and clarification for what i really believe it was a political murder not ideological not a martyrdom apology wants to say that the death of james was political murder not ideological but it's not that simple today we might try to separate our ideology from our politics but in the first century they consistently overlapped in fact we see this in the death of jesus there was certainly a political component of when jesus was crucified and put to death but it was also tied to ideology namely who jesus claimed to be we can't separate him james was preaching a message in jerusalem the very city where jesus was put to death and he preached that jesus was the only way to get to god and had appeared to him james preached this message with full awareness of what it could cost him he didn't shy away from it so yes he was put to death for political reasons but we can't separate that from the ideology that james taught about the identity and the person of jesus the key issue here is not whether james the brother of jesus qualifies as a martyr paul giu would say no i would say yes the key point is in an attempt to point out a seeming inconsistency that i had and at one point saying the issue was religious and another point saying it was political apologia has misrepresented my views see the reality is the position i hold and the longer quote makes clear is that i believe the issue of the death of james is both political and religious they can't be separated that was true for jesus there was a political component of his death but it was also tied to his religious identity and ideology and the same is true for james it's not either or it's both and in an attempt to have a gotcha moment at me it seems that paul gia has misrepresented my view drew is also concerned that he feels like i have misrepresented atheists given that he has the context of this role play alone i can understand why he would feel this way here's the longer video where he raises this claim christian sean acknowledges that there are many people presumably he's referring to atheists who say they don't have a full explanation for consciousness many will just go one route by saying they're agnostic they concede there's no explanation he also says he thinks any honest atheist would say as much bottom line i think any honest atheist or naturalist would say at least minimally they don't know the mechanism of how consciousness or mind can emerge from matter so if christian sean was attempting to represent atheists fairly without straw manning why did he have atheist sean give an answer which was admittedly dishonest rather than having him give one which christian sean himself has heard atheists give if he needs help putting that atheist answer into words for his character might i suggest that he take from a video i released over a month ago where i addressed an extremely similar question just replace the laws of nature with emergent properties and theoretical physicist with neuroscientist here and the answer works well a few comments may help here the idea that consciousness can be explained naturalistically at least in part by appealing to the emergent property of wetness when hydrogen and oxygen come together was actually first presented to me in a conversation with a skeptical student at berkeley you see one of the things we do is we send our students out onto campus we give them conversational surveys and they just go out and they ask students questions about life about meaning about god about the afterlife the idea is just to get into spiritual conversations sometimes i watch over my students sometimes i participate i remember having a conversation with a student about this topic and that was the explanation that he gave he was a skeptical student i since learned that there's a more sophisticated kind of defense of that view but the bottom line is this was a view that had been presented to me by a skeptic so when i'm role playing an atheist keep in mind i don't just have one response i go to every time we've had some atheists come in and speak to our group and argue that morality is subjective we've had others come in and argue that morality is objective we've had others talk about consciousness more like daniel dennett that it's an eliminativist view or others like the student describe so really sometimes i just put forward a naturalistic explanation with these christian students to see if they can think on the spot and engage somebody conversationally as i had a skeptic engage with me now do i think that any skeptic who puts that forward or an atheist is dishonest after all in my review video where i responded to my atheist self i made the claim that drew picks up on that any honest atheist would recognize that there's no entirely pure naturalistic explanation for consciousness now what i meant by this and i didn't clarify is i don't just mean any atheist you run into anywhere my reference was to an atheist who's aware of the depth of the scholarly research on this would rightly recognize that there's not a full naturalistic explanation for this question and drew seems to agree with me so my point was not to set up a straw man my point was not to portray atheists as dishonest since this is an argument an atheist made to me but with that said given the perspective that drew has of looking at this i can see why he would come to the conclusion that he did to and i will definitely be more careful as i present this going forward in the introduction i mentioned that i would have a couple takeaways from this exchange the first one is is it's really hit home with me the importance of precision and clarity in terms of how we represent other people's views it grieves me to think that drew and paul and any other atheist or skeptic who's watched this thinks that i unfairly or misrepresented their views look again i have a number of atheists and skeptical and agnostic friends i have atheist family members i love them and always want them to think that i understand who they are i care about what they believe and aim to represent them accurately drew and paul know that i watched your video multiple times and listened and said okay were some pointers that i can take to do better communicating what i believe about the atheist worldview and my atheist friends in particular second that misrepresentation and misunderstanding goes both ways you both clearly feel like i misrepresented atheism now there's a ton of atheists who've told me that they disagree with some of my responses but appreciate the way i defended atheism that's fine but nonetheless you feel like i misrepresented your views and i want to do better but on the flip side i also feel like you have at least in part misrepresented my views as i went through the response bottom line all of us atheist skeptic or some other belief system have had our views misrepresented and it doesn't feel good the question we need to ask moving forward is what do we do about it so why would i do an atheist role play in the first place well the biggest reason was is i was motivated because of our trips to berkeley where we brought in dozens and dozens of atheists and challenged my high school students live to defend their beliefs and have substantive conversations with people respectfully who see the world differently i started thinking how can i take that experience simulate it to other christian kids at schools camps conferences who won't be able to go on these trips with us so i did my best to start role playing an atheist in these different settings and the biggest goal which drew you recognize and i appreciate when it's all said and done is to encourage christians to engage non-believers more graciously and kind and effectively that's the biggest takeaway as soon as i step out of character and normally it's at an event where they know i'm a christian and i'm simply role playing the first question i ask is how did you treat your atheist guest and the faces for many christians tells it all they'll often use words like hostile defensive depersonalized and it gives me an opportunity to push back on christians and say we need to be better at this we need to learn how to ask good questions how to love people and how to treat people who see the world differently with dignity and respect and the love of jesus so drew based upon listening to your video and hearing your story and some of the ways that you have been treated by christians i think you and i are greater allies in a bigger cause than we maybe realize so i want to make a suggestion for you at the end of this video as you did for me at the end of my video but first let's hear again your suggestion of what you want me to do so sean for the sake of reaching your own goals including improving the discourse in relations between christians and atheists i ask you to do this one thing allow atheists to be present in this discussion and to represent ourselves in these dialogues let us make our own mistakes and give our own answers most importantly let us show our humanity to those who see us as pitiful or threatening other christians look up to you and modeling this behavior for others might just help atheists and christians begin healing the broken hearts and broken relationships which have resulted from atheists being left out of the conversation great suggestion drew as you've heard in this video that is something i've done over and over again for the last decade and a half and i'm going to continue to do it my ministry moving forward with atheists and people from a range of different backgrounds but as i think about it there's actually something i haven't done yet i'm newer to youtube than you are really it's been the past year that i've been engaging youtube i've had on mormons i've had on a progressive christian i've even had on an ex-evangelical who has a spiritual belief system was an atheist for a while but no longer would describe himself that way and it hit me as i was watching a video and thinking about this that i haven't had an atheist yet on my youtube channel so as you know probably most of my audience are christians i have some skeptics and non-believers who follow but most are probably christians i would like to invite you on to have a conversation with me not a debate i actually just want to listen i want to hear your story of leaving your faith i want to hear some of the heartbreaking stories if you're willing to share them about how christians treated you and i want to hear your suggestion for what you think christian apologists and other christian leaders and even just lay people can do better to engage skeptics in the way that jesus would the ball is in your court

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 45,898

Rating: 4.761302 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, atheism, role-play, conversation, dialogue, Genetically Modified Skeptic, Paulogia, school, students, Christian, faith, belief, skepticism, skeptic

Id: hzza5M3abxQ

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021