Dealing with Dawkins, Hitchens, Gervais, Tyson, Carlin, & Harris

[Music] so hello i'm here today with dr william lang craig and we're looking at some of the quote unquote best atheist arguments that i found on youtube this was actually a video that i found from an uh i guess he's an atheist he's a youtuber but the title of the video was literally best atheist arguments and it was basically a litany of clips about 14 clips from neil degrasse tyson richard dawkins sam harris and some other pretty popular atheist and so what i thought was why don't we have dr william lane craig come on to capturing christianity and share some of his thoughts on this video so before we get started we have 14 clips queued up here and we're going to get into them pretty quickly but dr craig what what are your overall thoughts of of all of the clips that you saw i did preview the clips and i have to honestly say cameron that if these are the best atheist arguments then the atheist side is in real trouble because these are so superficial in fact in the lot there isn't a single argument for atheism and our viewers will see that if they watch carefully as you go through them there isn't a single argument that is given to show that atheism is true in fact a lot of what these videos are is just comedy or more accurately ridicule and that's a deliberate strategy adopted by the atheist side people like richard dawkins have said explicitly we should not engage in debates with people like william craig because that gives them credibility instead what we should do is use ridicule and mockery of religious views and that is a very deliberate strategy that you'll see adopted in several of these videos now fortunately for the atheist side we have to say these are not in fact the best atheist arguments there are serious objections to theism and there are substantial atheist thinkers today like graham oppe and j howard sobel and so if any of our viewers today are sympathetic to the atheist point of view they need to familiarize themselves with these more serious and weighty thinkers rather than with comedians and popularizers such as we see in this array of video clips yeah that's an excellent point i did want to say that as well before we get started that these are not representative of all of the the greatest uh atheistic thinkers you mentioned a few but paul draper is another one i think worth mentioning yeah so if if you're an atheist or an agnostic or a skeptic and you're interested in and what are the the smartest atheists have to say about theism and philosophy of religion those are the people to turn to don't don't turn to these people and you're about to see why all right i've got the first club queued up we're going to watch it listen and then we'll we'll get your response and we'll just keep keep on moving like i said we have 14 clips to go through in total so here is number one what is more likely that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor and in a way that you approve or that you've made a mistake and in each case you must start and especially if you didn't see it yourself and you're hearing it from someone who says that they did all right so that's that's number one what hitchens is expressing here is the old problem of the identification of a miracle and i think his question was correctly posed which do you think is more probable now in assessing that probability it's important to take into account whether you have good evidence for the existence of god because if you have good evidence that there is a personal creator and designer of the universe who set the laws of nature and their boundary conditions and there exists a being who is capable of suspending the laws of nature in the way that hitchens describes and it could well be that in the case of a significant religious and historical context such as the unparalleled life and ministry and teachings of jesus of nazareth that the balance of probability would be that in this case a divine miracle has occurred and that's exactly what i would argue excellent yeah i don't i don't have a whole lot more to add there other than to say that this kind of seems like some human reasoning like david hume's old argument against miracles it's like no amount of testimony is going to overcome this kind of initial improbability that miracles face and you've you've encountered you've interacted with with a lot of people on this question give me like what is your uh what's your response to that to like the human argument against miracles the human argument was formulated back in 1783 before the modern probability calculus was understood and so hume's argument against the probability of miracles is demonstrably mathematically fallacious because he neglects certain key elements in the probability calculus all he considers is what is the probability of the miracle given the general background information the laws of nature but what he fails to consider is the likelihood of the evidence occurring on the hypothesis of a miracle compared to the likelihood of the evidence occurring on the hypothesis that the miracle did not occur and if that ratio is great it can easily outbalance any improbability of the miracle on the background information alone now what i just said a moment ago would also suggest that the probability of the miracle on the background information alone can't be shown to be highly improbable if there is a god who is capable of intervening in the universe and suspending its laws and so i think we need to include in the background information not just the laws of nature but also the existence of god as established by the cosmological teleological moral and so forth arguments all right let's move on to clip number two this one is from ricky gervais why should they take offense that i don't believe in their god or any other god and i'd say to them you know tell me the reasons why you don't believe in all the other gods and that's the reason i don't believe in yours and i've got nothing against people believing in god at all you know um uh in fact if if it you know did make you a kind of person if you only did good things in his name then great i know but there's the rub uh it's when uh i see some of these religious fundamentalists saying that um they've told their five-year-old children that if they turn out gay they will burn in hell that to me is child abuse well there are a number of points here um he's saying that he is tolerant of people who want to be religious so long as they do not engage in behavior that injures others and of course what sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander one can similarly say we can be tolerant of atheists uh so long as they do not engage in behavior such as uh leninist stalinists did in the old soviet union that hurt others as well so the principle would be exactly the same one correction though would need to be made he says the reason he doesn't believe in um the god of christianity is the same reason that christians don't believe in the gods of say islam or some other religion and that's simply not true what he's assuming is that there is no evidence for any of these religious beliefs and that therefore they're just arbitrary but if you have good arguments for christian theism such as i've offered then it's simply not true that my reasons for disbelieving in say islam are exactly the same as arguments that might be offered against christian theism yeah the only thing uh the only other thing i wanted to add was that this is kind of like a good argument for apologetics yeah right right that we are that our religious beliefs are not just arbitrary but that we have good reasons for what we believe um and good reasons for what we do not believe as well yeah and i think it's also fair to say that his point does kind of apply to a good number of christians who just haven't really thought deeply about why they believe what they believe and so he does he does have something to say about that but it's not going to apply to someone like yourself or other christian apologists other christian thinkers who have spent some time looking at the evidence and then came to the conclusion that christianity was true based on the evidence like that's just not yeah you can't reject right islam because you have evidence for for uh well anyways you get the point all right here's that here's cleveland i just want to say as well i don't know of any christian parent who says to um his child if you are gay then you're going to burn in hell that's i think a cruel caricature uh i don't know of any christian parent who says such a thing yeah that was actually a good point my wife brought that up she was like who is telling their five-year-old kid that they're going to spend eternity in hell if they're gay it's like christians don't do that it's just a weird thing to say yeah and it also is kind of like a caricature of of christian theology right the bible doesn't teach that homosexuals are sent to hell it teaches that unrepentant sinners send themselves to hell yeah all right here's here's clip number three don't you sometimes feel uh sad about breaking all these myths apart no no because i i i think it's uh some myths are deserved to be broken apart out of respect for the human intellect that um no when you're writhing on the ground and froth is coming out of your mouth you're having an epileptic seizure you have not been invaded by the devil we got this one figured out okay i like neil degrasse tyson unlike some of these other folks i feel like he is a credible uh person and good-natured as well um he's using the word myth here in the popular sense of falsehood not in the sense of a literary form and i would agree with him that insofar as you equate myths and falsehoods then we need to use reason and intellect to expose them with respect to demon possession um there i'm skeptical of the claim that it's been proven that there is is no demon possession uh this is not an area of my expertise but i don't see any reason to think that demon possession is impossible and never takes place so i'm i'm rather skeptical of that sweeping claim on his part yeah that's actually an interesting question i was i was thinking about that like what what percentage of philosophers of religion say do you think would accept that something like demon possession is a thing if you could just come up with the number i've never seen anybody even talk about it i it's just not a topic that is much dealt with maybe that would be a good one to to tackle for christian theologians to do a little bit on this area but certainly in things that i've read about the occult occult practices seem to be very real and in some cases do seem to come into contact with spiritual forces that are tremendously evil and destructive and so i would be careful about being too rash and saying that there is no such thing as demon possession that it never occurs yeah i think that's that's right i mean we want to exercise humility in in these a lot of these cases some of them are difficult to explain all right let's move to uh clip number four here we go religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do every minute of every day and the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do and if you do any of these ten things he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever till the end of time but he loves you well kevin this isn't serious critique this is comedy um indeed it's it's mockery and so he sets up a caricature which he then makes fun of the christian conception of god is not a man in the sky um it's a transcendent personal creator and designer of the universe who is the locust and source of absolute moral goodness and the list of ten things i take it that that's a reference to the ten commandments and it's neither the teaching of old testament judaism nor christianity that if you break any of the ten commandments god is going to send you to burn in hell and to torture you rather what christianity is like if i can give an analogy is that it's like a a condemned criminal who has been found guilty of a capital crime and sentenced to death and is on death row and then the governor or the president out of mercy bestows upon him the offer of a complete pardon for his crime which the guilty person is then either free to accept or to reject and if he rejects it then of course he will fall back on to the just dessert of the justice system and the sentence will be carried out so it's entirely up to us whether or not we want to accept god's loving uh and gracious pardon for our wrongdoing or whether we choose to reject his love and forgiveness yeah i was gonna uh before i add to that i wanted to just point out that you called me kevin instead of cameron i think out of habit yes that's from with kevin harris sorry yeah no no worries uh i wanted to point out that you're familiar with this guy jerry walls he's been on our show before he's also been on our podcast and we did an episode that was completely devoted to hell and whether or not that was inconsistent with an all-loving god so if you want to get more on that and some more sophisticated thinking then then check out our podcast with jerry walls on whether or not hell is inconsistent with an all-loving god all right here's clip number five god that our neighbors believe in is essentially an invisible person is a creator deity who created the universe to have a relationship with one species of primate lucky us and and he's got he's got galaxy upon galaxy to attend to but he's especially concerned with what we do and he's especially concerned with what we do while naked [Applause] now it's no part of christian theism to say that the entire universe was created for homo sapiens on this planet for all we know there could be intelligent life forms scattered throughout the universe and if there are i believe that god loves them and is concerned about them just as much as he is about us and when you think about the point that harris is making it's very peculiar doesn't he think that sexual ethics are important that it's important whether we treat for example women with respect or as mere objects does he think that it rape is morally indifferent if there is a loving god who created us shouldn't he be concerned about how we behave towards one another and especially with regard to sexual ethics i would think a god who was indifferent to that would not be a good god so apart from the sort of good comedic timing that he has i don't see anything in what his remarks uh uh in his remarks it was uh substantive or important yeah that that's a good point i mean he didn't have good comedic timing got to give him that he did but i think that it's rehearsed you know just tell it's these lines are practiced to get a laugh i was going to say that everybody has to or should be concerned with what we do naked right you got to be concerned about trafficking sex trafficking and child pornography and in cases of rape like everybody should be concerned about those issues now here's here's another thing i reached out to a bible student friend of mine and i asked him what percentage of prohibitions in the bible are related to to sex and he he looked it up he spent a couple hours doing doing some uh some you know research it was it wasn't completely thorough he may actually do some more it kind of piqued his interest but the point is is that at the end of his research he found that there was only about one to five percent of the prohibitions in the bible have to do with sexuality or sex which is interesting and rather surprising when you think how human sexuality is so enormous an influence upon human behavior and our comportment with one another as human beings i would think this would be a major major part of our interactions with each other um but that's that's fascinating that in fact most of the biblical prohibitions have nothing to do with sex yeah they do have they do have to do with what you do with your body but not necessarily what you do while you're naked um yes and with loving your neighbor as yourself and so forth yeah and i was going to say that i think that his comment and the fact that the audience laughed and everything i i think this kind of actually speaks more about sam harris and culture than it does about christianity how so well i i think that people the fact that they they were laughing at it sort of suggest that they it's it's more of a focus you know these questions of what we do with our bodies and that's what culture sort of focuses on homosexuality and these these other questions i think more people you know um uh circumcision you know these questions circumcision people focus on these these particular things and christians i think do that too we focus on you know certain things that interest us or don't interest us and we kind of ignore all of the other prohibitions so i think it kind of sheds more light on the psychology of sam harris than it does on on christianity all right here's uh here's clip number six just because they're offended by someone being gay it doesn't mean they're right you know it's a strange thing that because of the gay being gay is a choice now being gay isn't a choice you know i want to go go go you try it then if it's a choice have a go see how much you like it you know well the implication here i take it is that if having a homosexual orientation is not a choice if this is somehow either biologically based or it's ingrained into you by your upbringing so that involuntarily you have such an orientation that therefore you are morally free to act out on that orientation and that seems to me to be extraordinarily superficial and even dangerous view of ethics imagine for example that pedophilia was not a choice but had a biological base or was ingrained into someone by child abuse as a young youngster would that person therefore be free to simply act out on that orientation and do as he wills i don't think we'd say that at all so the fact that something isn't a choice in no way warrants or sanctions ethically acting out on whatever those desires or proclivities might be i think at this point it might be good to remind the listeners that again we haven't really seen one argument again or for atheism in this entire thing like that last clip was i played that for my wife and she was like why is this even in a video titled best arguments for atheism it's just bizarre it's really it is astonishing and i think it shows clearly the superficiality of much of pop atheism in our culture it's comedic it's ridicule and mockery but there are not substantive reasons for what they believe right and uh with that let's move on to clip number seven do you give people who make this case that that was the beginning and that there had to be something that provoked the beginning do you give them an a at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason i'm i don't think they're reconcilable what do you mean well well so let me say that differently all efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise they just fail and so i don't i don't the track record is so poor that going forward i have essentially zero confidence near zero confidence that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile before you respond what do you think the probability is that he's read where the conflict really lies by alvin plantinga zero i mean it's very very clear that dr tyson is not well read in this area he's just sharing his opinion and that's evident in the way the question is framed faith and reason are they reconcilable those are such general terms as to be meaningless what in the world is even meant by faith and reason and yet he thinks they're irreconcilable now what he goes on to talk about is the opening chapter of genesis that is apparently what he thinks he means by faith and that all efforts to reconcile that with science have failed now there's a lot to be said about this as the interviewer suggested the idea that the universe had a beginning at some point in the finite past and was created by god as genesis declares is fully reconcilable with modern astrophysical cosmology which also posits an absolute origin to the universe about 13.8 billion years ago also the fine-tuning of the universe is consistent with the biblical affirmation that it's god who is the ultimate creator of the universe and all of its biological life forms the extraordinary applicability of mathematics that we've talked about on previous capturing christianities is also completely reconcilable and compatible with um a religious perspective on creation such as you have in genesis 1. so it's demonstrably false that faith and modern science cannot be reconciled is the way dr tyson says now with respect to the genesis account it's very important to understand that this is not offering a natural account of the origin of the world this is an account that uh works with the presuppositions of the culture and the assumptions that were made by those to whom it was written to make the theological point that the stars and the sun and the moon the animals the things in the world are not deities as was believed in ancient mesopotamia but rather these are just ordinary natural things which the transcendent god has made and that central theological point uh is not dependent upon the sort of worldview assumptions that may be taken for granted in this chapter it's not a chapter about uh cosmology or biology it's a chapter about how god is the source of the things in the natural world and that therefore they are not to be worshipped we have a couple minutes why don't we talk for uh for just a couple minutes about the evolutionary argument against naturalism and why plantinga thinks that science is ultimately in conflict with naturalism as opposed to theism yes this is a very subtle argument that planning has defended in great depth and it's basically this if naturalism is true then our cognitive faculties have been selected for survival value not for truth it's ultimately irrelevant whether or not our beliefs are true what matters is only if they are beneficial in the struggle for survival and so what planning is says is that if naturalism is true we can have no confidence in the reliability of our cognitive faculties but if that's the case then we can have no confidence in the truth of naturalism because the belief in naturalism was formed by those very cognitive faculties which are shown to be unreliable if naturalism is true so there is a kind of vicious circularity here a kind of self-referential incoherence that is inescapable on a naturalistic world view because naturalism will undermine the reliability of the very cognitive faculties that were used to establish naturalism therefore cannot be rationally affirmed yeah and this this argument is actually explicated a whole lot more in depth in the book that i mentioned at the very beginning of the response to this clip which was where the conflict really lies by album planning a highly recommend picking up that book and giving it a watch so we're at the halfway point i want to mention real quick that we're in the middle of doing 12 apologetics courses for beginners so if you're interested in apologetics and maybe you're just getting into it you're just getting started and you'd like to to find a place to get started we're doing 12 courses these are the courses we have so far i'll just leave them up on the screen you can pause it and take a look at them the ones with the check marks are ones that we've already completed and so we're about halfway through we've got six more and all of them will be available on patreon.com slash capturing christianity i'll put it right here it's also linked in the description of this video you can access all 12 courses for 10 a month of support uh for for this ministry if you've been enjoying the content you want to support the ministry make sure that it continues to to operate and everything then this is the way to do it so patreon.comcapturingchristianity all right with that said let's move on to clip number eight here we go and for those of you who look to the bible for moral lessons and literary qualities i might suggest a couple of other stories for you you might want to look at the three little pigs that's a good one that's a nice happy ending i'm sure you'll like that then there's little red riding hood although it does have that x-rated part where the big bad wolf actually eats the grandmother which i didn't care for by the way and finally i've often always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from humpty dumpty the potter liked the best all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put humpty dumpty back together again that's because there is no humpty dumpty and there is no god well that's really stupid isn't it to compare humpty dumpty to god in all the nursery rhyme books i've seen the reason umpty dumpty can't be put back together again is because he's an egg and falls and shatters and so they can't reassemble him this just has nothing to do with theism or christianity it's just silly yeah there's there's not really much else to say other than don't don't yeah don't simply go to the bible because it has nice moral principles go to the bible because it's true right i mean that's that's that's what we should be doing in this in this anyways all right here's uh here's clip number nine many people claim to find it impossible to believe or to imagine that they won't exist after death um just try it for a second i mean you imagine that everyone in paris right now is getting along fine without all of us none of us are in paris we are really really materially absent from whatever is going on in every other city on this planet right now you were absent for all of human history before your birth uh the idea that you that you simply can't imagine not existing after death is really kind of just for lack of trying i think [Music] well i'm baffled at this one this is supposed to be an argument for atheism um i've never think i think this guy just kind of wanted to to put together some clips that he liked of like you know people atheists saying things that he liked i don't know yeah or comedic again i've never met anyone uh cameron in my life who has difficulty believing that they will die and no longer exist uh i've never met anybody who thinks that that's unimaginable that they would not exist after they die on the contrary they would need good grounds for thinking that they will continue to exist after their death what i would say in response to harris is people who think that they cannot continue to exist after they die are the ones who haven't been trying very hard they're the ones who lack imagination those who think that when you die it's lights out and that you don't continue to exist that may be a lack of trying uh and its own right well what do you think about the evidence for near-death experiences dr gary habermas has put a whole lot of effort into studying those cases what do you make of of the evidence oh jpmorland as well what do you make of jp moreland my colleague i'm simply not qualified to have an opinion on that i'm intrigued by them um but i find some of them disquieting for example i don't remember some years ago this little colin burpo i think was his name claimed to go to heaven and wrote a very vivid description of what it was like there and he saw his little sister whom he didn't even know he had she had died years earlier as an infant saw his grandfather but he also saw a comic book monsters that he was familiar with and it seemed to me that a lot of that was just mental projections on the part of a little boy uh rather than veritical visions of of of heaven which in one sense doesn't even exist yet because when we die we go into an intermediate state according to the scriptures and will not have bodies until the resurrection at the return of christ so i i don't know what to make of these and i've never cared to devote time to studying them all right with that let's move on to clip number 10. here we go if someone said we're banning religion i'd march to not have it banned because it's your right to believe what you want um and it's your right to be wrong and i'll fight for that right great that's wonderful that's you know that's what tolerance really is i may disagree with what you say but i will fight to the death to defend your right to say it and i applaud him for understanding the correct meaning of toleration in a civil society yeah well what do you think about this because i mean talk of rights seems like it might presuppose morality or at least moral knowledge and moral knowledge on the other hand kind of conflicts with atheism so in in one sense this this might be an argument for theism as opposed to uh to atheism ha that's a that's a clever response cameron um perhaps the best thing that he might say in response to that would be that he's talking about political rights rather than moral rights perhaps as an atheist he would recognize that you have no moral rights to anything but that in a pluralistic society governed by the u.s constitution or in great britain you have the political right to freedom of religion and that certainly is a valuable right that is under great pressure today not from the right but from the left uh people who want to suppress that freedom of religious expression so this is something we need to applaud and uh agree upon yeah all right well let's leave it there i was going to make another joke but here we go let's move on clip number 11. we're we're going pretty quickly through these so that's great here we go they're not very something about science and you read say the bible the old testament which in genesis is an account of nature that's that's what that is and i said to you give me your description of the natural world based only on this you would say the world was created in six days and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun in fact they can fall out of the sky right because that's what happens during during the um revelation you're one of the signs that the second coming is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on earth to even write that means you don't know what those things are everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on bible passages got the wrong answer so what happened was when science discovers things and you want to stay religious or you want to continue to believe that the bible is unerring what you would do is you would say well let me go back to the bible and reinterpret it then you say things like oh they didn't really mean that literally they meant that figuratively there's so much to say about this for one thing notice the confusion between genesis 1 and the book of revelation genesis 1 says nothing about the stars falling from the sky that's from a work of apocalyptic literature employing lots of symbolism um and hundreds of years later yeah right so he's just confused there now when you get to genesis 1 as i said the purpose of genesis 1 is not to give an account of nature it is not a science book the purpose of genesis 1 is to show that the things that exist in the world are just creatures rather than deities to be worshipped and served that god is the transcendent creator and designer of everything that exists and honestly if you read genesis 1 it really gives you a very logical order of creation beginning with uh darkness and then a primordial sea the emergence of dry land and then vegetation and animals and finally man is the very last the crown of creation on earth it's it's not grossly unscientific in the way many mesopotamian myths were it's quite astonishing but in any case i i don't think that taking the passage non-literally is a later imposition as neil degrasse tyson says i believe cameron that there are indications in the text itself that the author did not intend for these to be taken as six consecutive 24-hour days for example when it says on the third day that god created the vegetation it says let the earth bring forth vegetation fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind and vegetation bearing seed after its kind and it was so the earth brought forth fruit trees bearing fruit and so forth now every ancient israelite knows how long it takes for say a date palm to spring up out of the ground and grow into a tree and finally bear dates uh for this to happen within 24 hours he would have to be imagining something like a time lapse film being run on fast forward so that the tree would pop up out of the ground grow into a huge tree and pop out the fruit on it all of a sudden within a short amount of time and i don't think that's what the author of genesis had in mind also notice on day two on that day the primordial ocean drains away and the dry land emerges now the author of genesis would have known that this can't happen within 24 hours to have a primordial seed drain into lakes and rivers and ponds and so forth would take a long time and that's not just my speculation when you go over to genesis 8 and you read the account of noah and the the flood after the flood returns the earth to this primordial sea covering the land how long does it take for the waters to drain away and for the nine uh the dry land to emerge well in the case of the flood it's 150 days before the dry land appears so right in the genesis narrative itself you have indications that the author is not speaking here of six 24-hour consecutive days but rather this is an account that employs figurative and metaphorical imagery to communicate the theological truth that god is the creator of everything and is alone to be worshipped not the finite creatures in the world one of the things that you do in your work is you talk about the fact that the the doctrine of creatiox nihilo has been around for a long time long before we had any evidence of the big bang or anything and so that might be a case where science confirms what the bible has taught for a long time that's one point another point is that i believe it's augustine or yeah augustine who believed back in the fourth century that the the first six days were not consecutive 24 hour periods and so there's already this impetus not to to take these as literal 24-hour days all the way back then yes and and that was uh 1500 years before darwin came on the scene but as i say even more importantly i'm not going to turn to augustine or oregon or any church father for my interpretation of genesis 1. i want to look at the chapter itself and i think when you do that you have indications in genesis itself that this is not intended to be taken that's six literal consecutive 24-hour days all right what that here is clip number 12. i say fine pray for anything you want pray for anything but what about the divine plan remember that the divine plan long time ago god made a divine plan gave it a lot of thought decided it was a good plan put it into practice and for billions and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine now you come along and pray for something well suppose the thing you want isn't in god's divine plan what do you want him to do change his plan just for you let it seem a little arrogant it's a divine plan what's the use of being god if every run-down schmuck with a two dollar prayer book can come along and [ __ ] your plan and here's something else another problem you might have suppose your prayers aren't answered what do you say well it's god's will thy will be done fine but if it's god's will he's going to do what he wants to anyway what father praying in the first place seems like a big waste of time to me now here cameron i think a molinist perspective on prayer can be very helpful in understanding this as the uh comic said god put a lot of thought into this divine plan and i believe that one of the things that he took into consideration was how people would pray in the future and he factored that into his divine plan when he made it so that god's plan already factors in our prayers and can take account of them so what that means is that while our prayers do not change god's plan they do affect god's plan they help to determine what god's plan is and that alone gives good reason to pray i have two two more things on that one so petitionary prayer is just one type of prayer and i think the atheist when they try to raise objections to christianity prayers in particular they like to point to one type of prayer petition your prayer and say that prayer is therefore pointless because this one type of prayer maybe there's not a whole lot of evidence that it works or whatever they think it is and i just wanted to point out that there are many types of prayers prayers of gratitude praise of adoration prayers of confession praise of lamentation and there's even prayers of silence some people some some people pray in the form of just being silent and sort of listening to god and if you want to learn more about this objection and how philosophers currently respond to it see my interview with dr scott davison i interviewed him the title of that interview is if god knows the future why pray and that's actually linked in the description of this video if that interests you so unless you have any thoughts we can move on uh well i had thoughts but i've shared them already great all right here's a clip number 13 which is actually from sam harris in his debate with you on the moral argument here we go yeah okay just just think about the muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up okay convinced that they are agents of god's will there is absolutely nothing that dr craig can can say against their behavior in moral terms apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong god if they had the right god what they were doing would be good on divine command theory now i'm obviously not saying that all the dr craig or all religious people are psychopaths and psychotics but this to me is the true horror of religion it allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own okay if you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of elvis presley okay you have lost your mind okay but if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker in the body of jesus you're just a catholic now here again i think atheists so often fail to realize that's what sauce for the goose's sauce for the gander the same point applies to harris's view um on the naturalistic view on atheism plausibly there are no objective moral values and duties and therefore millions and millions of people can engage in horrible and despotic acts such as we saw in marxist leninism or in nazism in national socialist germany and the same question could be posed of harris he thinks that the basis objective moral values is the flourishing of sentient life well i could say but what if the flourishing of sentient life were not the basis for objective moral values then what then you would have nothing to say other than your faith based claim that the flourishing of setting it life is the basis of moral values it's it's the same thing that he accuses me of now what i would say with regard to the muslim is that the muslim is worshiping a god who doesn't exist there is no such person as allah as described in the quran and therefore we can be grateful that moral values and duties are not determined by allah rather moral values are rooted in the essential nature of god himself which is necessarily good is not a result of human convention or arbitrary decision and that his commands to us reflect his necessarily good moral nature so i think this provides a very firm non-arbitrary non-conventional basis for objective moral values and duties something that i do not think atheism can do i was gonna talk a little bit more about well i'll just mention this so i hosted a debate or discussion between matt flanagan and joshua thibodeau on the euthyphro dilemma which kind of touches on some of the issues at least in the first part of this clip that sam harris was touching on it's like these other religions they believe these things and if that was true these would be really horrible things but on divine command theory this this theory of ethics it would seem to follow that these horrible things are therefore moral to do and that just seems really weird it's a bad it's sort of an argument against divine command theory so if you want to to hear a dialogue about some of those objections check out that dialogue that i hosted did you want to say something on that not further i think well okay i heard you take a breath pertains to the point okay yeah so um there's a lot of interesting things to that that matt flanagan in that debate points out so i just uh recommend that you check that out i did want to say something else though about the the end of it he says that that you know religion can make otherwise sane people believe in sane things and i want to say that science can make otherwise smart people believe some insane things quote unquote insane things and all that we mean by that is that there are some claims that have a very low prior probability just on the face of it they seem really weird okay take a scientific example atomic theory implies that most of the things that we interact with are made up mostly of empty space that seems like an insane thing to believe until you start to gather evidence for atomic theory in quantum mechanics there's a thing called quantum entanglement where two different particles even uh we have a lot of evidence now that this happens across vast distances where two particles can it can start to do some of the same things faster than the speed of light there's this sort of spooky action at a distance according to uh that's what our albert einstein said about it and so there's things that we discover in science that just seem wacky on the face of it but really what matters and this is the same thing when it comes to christianity religion really what matters is not the prior probability of something but the evidence for it and whether or not we have good reasons to think that thing is true in the long run yes keita harris's statement or argument uh and the audience may have missed this was the word faith based he characterized the theistic view as faith-based which suggests there isn't any evidence for it but as you say cameron if we have good evidence for the existence of god and for grounding moral values in god then you escape his criticism on the contrary i think it's harris's view that is faith-based i can't think of any reason on a naturalistic atheistic view for thinking that the flourishing of sentient life is somehow morally valuable all right let's get to the last clip for today and then we're going to close out the live stream here we go clip number 14 featuring everyone's favorite atheist richard dawkins probably going to be the most simplest one for you to answer but what if you're wrong well what if i'm wrong i mean anybody could be wrong we could all be wrong about the flying spaghetti monster and the pink unicorn and the flying teapot you happen to have been brought up i would presume in the christian faith you know what it's like not to believe in a particular faith because you're not a muslim you're not a hindu why aren't you a hindu because you happen to have been brought up in america not in india if you've been brought up in india you'd be a hindu if you were brought up in in denmark in the time of the vikings you'd be believing in thor if you were brought up in in classical greece you'd be believing in zeus if you were brought up in central africa you'd be believing in the great juju up the mountain there's no particular reason to pick on the judeo-christian god in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up and asked me the question what if i'm wrong what if you're wrong about the great juju at the bottom of the sea [Applause] [Music] now it was very obvious to me that richard dawkins was thinking on the fly there that he was taken off guard and the question morphed from the question the girl asked to a question about religious pluralism what the girl was i think trying to express cameron was pascal's wager so that she would be very happy with the question posed by dawkins at the end what if you were wrong and she would say that when i estimate the risk rewards involved the risk of being wrong is much much greater for the atheist than it is for the theist because if the atheist is wrong he risks forfeiting eternal happiness and eternal life whereas if the theist is wrong all he forfeits is the pleasures of sin during this lifetime so that um the risks of being wrong she's arguing are much much greater for the atheist and that should give the atheist significant pause i think before confidently expounding his worldview now what dawkins does as i say is to try to shift the question to the question of religious pluralism that says that the beliefs that a person typically holds are the beliefs of the culture in which he was raised well of course that's true sociologically but so what that doesn't prove that therefore your views are false to think that it does is to commit the genetic fallacy which is trying to invalidate a point of view by showing how the person came to hold it and that is a logical fallacy if somebody says well the only reason that you believe that democracy is the best form of government is because you were raised in 20th century america well that might be true but that doesn't prove that your belief is therefore false moreover the argument is again it's another one of these sauce for the goose's sauce for the gander if richard dawkins had been raised in pakistan he would likely be a theist he'd likely be a muslim does that therefore mean that his belief in atheism is unjustified and therefore false well obviously not so the very argument that he's using against theism namely its cultural relativity bounces back on him and would make his own atheistic beliefs unjustified and false i have uh just two things to add there and i don't have anything to add to what you already said just to just to say that i've actually interviewed a philosopher thomas bogardus about the if you had been born elsewhere objection to theistic or christian belief and that interview is one of my favorites it's actually one of the lesser reviewed for some reason but it's just it's one of my favorites he goes very deep into this objection he provides responses from alvin planinga who gives counter examples like you know if you had been born in spain you wouldn't believe that you were born in the u.s but that doesn't really undermine your belief that you're born in the u.s so there's easy counter examples you can find to this claim and he modifies it in certain ways to try to get around some of these objections super fascinating interview definitely recommend go check that out um and then the last one is that there's a great book on pascal's wager by a guy named michael rota and i've interviewed him on my podcast not on the youtube channel yet maybe we'll we'll have him on but the book itself is amazing he updates the pascal's wager to uh to address some of the common objections that you see to it like the many gods objection how there's different religions how we can account for all of that and so that book highly highly recommend it comes in three different sections the book is split up into three sections all of the sections are terrific it's an amazing book pick it up and read it today that's all we have so thanks dr craig for coming on to uh to do this video i hope that it was you know like we said maybe it's it's worth pointing out one more time that these clips that we played do not represent the best atheist arguments that professional philosophers give these represent the best atheist arguments that one random youtuber labeled as the best atheist arguments which really in the end don't really amount to much but hopefully you guys have seen that it's yeah so one of the reasons why we did this video in the first place is because it has that video had three million views it's incredible it's incredible yeah all right well is there anything that you'd like to leave the audience with well just to say that um [Music] our viewers need to be very critical uh in what they see on the internet this kind of stuff is rampant uh on youtube and social media and i just would hope that people would think more deeply about these subjects rather than allowing themselves to be swayed by ridicule mockery and comedy rather than serious thought because these are deep questions about the most important issues in life and they deserve to be taken seriously

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

Views: 16,883

Keywords: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, God, Jesus, Theology, Philosophy, Bible, Scriptures, History, Science, Universe, Cosmos, Mathematics, Newton, Einstein, Numbers, Creation, Theism, Atheism, Apologetics, Capturing Christianity, Cameron Bertuzzi, Ricky Gervais, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Christopher Hitchens, George Carlin, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins

Id: rRAQuKwjcsk

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020