The Religious Ads on My Atheist Videos Are Ridiculous

hey every time I watch your videos I always get religious ad clicks on an atheist video gets an apologetics ad who else is watching this video and getting a million ad the ad before this video where scientists work well how every time I try to convert me right got a Christian advert on this video in case I didn't get it three years ago and my channel was first monetized you guys have made sure that I know that ironically you regularly see religious ads on my videos since alerting me to the existence of my ads on my channel might just be the most common type of comet I get across all my videos I think it's finally time we actually talked about it first I want to answer some frequently asked questions do you know religious ads play on your videos yes I've known that ever since getting monetized I tagged my videos with words like atheism evangelicalism X Christian and things like that because those are relevant tags for my videos then religious organizations buy ad space on videos with tags like that in an attempt to reach their target demographic I've always known that it worked that way can you please stop putting religious ads on your videos I mean no I I don't control that YouTube and those who make the ads are in control of that not me I'm not purposely making you watch cringy ads for covenant eyes the Christian app that's designed to keep you from touching yourself no I wouldn't do that to you that's on YouTube the advertisers and I mean possibly you for having a Google search history wild enough for YouTube to maybe try to send you a message do you wish there weren't religious ads on your videos I'm actually pretty okay with it I mean I guess I wish there weren't as many religious ads in existence but if ads about creationism the miracles of Allah or whatever evangelical billionaires the Koch brothers have paid Dennis Prager to say this week are going to be show to anyone I you know want them to be shown to people who will see right through their nonsense I think that's you guys I can't think of a better place for ads like that to play than on videos which will immediately discredit them in front of an audience skeptical enough not to fall for obvious misinformation still even though I don't think these ads convert many of my viewers they're worth addressing at least this once so recently I started replying to comments about these ads asking for screenshots of what mentors are seeing a bunch of you guys came through immediately and sent me way more than enough to make a video about thank you by the way those of you who sent me screenshots made this video possible and I'm very much grateful for that there was some variety in the ads shown but without exception every single person who sent me screenshots primarily saw ads from a single source that source is the YouTube channel what would you say the channels about page reads we are a crowdfunded non-profit creating videos that help Christians understand and discuss the world we live in so it looks like these particular ads are geared more toward Christians who may be watching atheist videos rather than toward atheists who they're hoping to convert to of their videos were very prevalent in the screenshots you guys sent me with the most prevalent one being a video called do you have to choose between science and religion so let's dive into that video and see what it has to say you're talking about faith with someone and they tell you they don't believe in God because they believe in science and they say you have to choose what would you say I don't know what you always have to be judging me so I say the following as an atheist the implication that one can either believe that the scientific method works or believe in God is absurd I've heard atheists say this before so they're not just making this claim up however this is such a vague claim that criticizing it is incredibly easy from a myriad of belief positions I'd criticize it as an atheist in saying that the phrases believing in science and believing in God can have such a variety of meanings that this statement really communicates very little about its users actual ideas does believing in science mean believing a scientific method can be a useful tool does it mean believing that science is a consistently reliable method of discerning truth does it mean personally subscribing to methodological naturalism a foundational principle of the philosophy behind the scientific method and we could go on forever about the different meanings that the phrase believing in God could have are we talking about certainty of a God's existence belief based on supposed evidence and assumption of God's existence or something else entirely and how is this God defined is it subject to the laws of nature is it exempt from them is it ever affected by the natural world has it ever affected the natural world could the natural world exist without it if there are just so many things that believing in and God could mean that I don't believe in God because I believe in science doesn't actually communicate a discernible message I won't fall this video too much for discussing the statement because again I have heard some atheists say this but without some thorough defining of terms beforehand discrediting this statement really isn't much of a win for anyone there are those who believe that science and religion are in conflict and someone must choose whether they want to believe in science or believe in religion okay there's a mistake here that's very common in dialogues about this topic I've probably made it myself in the past but I know better now and so should we all notice how the video originally brought up belief in God then exchange that concept for belief in religion it's using those concepts as if they're interchangeable but they're not religion is not just belief in God there are numerous religions which don't involve God believes such as certain forms of Buddhism Taoism Shintoism Hinduism paganism and more there are even people who practice Christianity Islam Judaism or Sikhism without believing in a God there equivocation of God belief and religion things which are equivalent and their own personal faith is a bit telling are they about to make the general case that religion and science don't have to conflict in an effort to say that science and their religion don't conflict well let's keep watching if you ever hear this argument here are four things to remember first modern science was started by Christians many of the founders of modern science were Christians men like Galileo Kepler Pascal Boyle Newton Faraday and Clerk Maxwell were all firm believers in God they weren't scientists despite being Christians it was their faith that moved them to want to discover more about the natural world they lived in as CS Lewis wrote men became scientists because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a legislature far from hindering modern science faith in God was one of the motors that drove it yeah I don't take issue with this in the way you might initially think I suppose I will say though that science was not founded exclusively by Christians as this may imply and the Christian Church did persecute scientists even some Christian ones like Galileo from the beginning also it was kind of unsafe to be anything but Christian in 16th and 19th century Europe where all the scientists they listed lived I mean the church was known to just straight-up execute dissenters back then so all of those people had to be Christian if they wanted to live that's not to say they weren't genuine Christian believers because as far as we can possibly know a lot of the founders of modern science were I just wanted to make all those clarifications so they're skewed presentation of history doesn't propagate any further what I really take issue with here though is the implication that because certain scientific innovators from hundreds of years ago were Christian that means that contemporary versions of Christianity and contemporary science do not conflict at all that's just false a lot of forms of Christianity contain ideas that directly conflict with the scientific consensus creationism which some Christians uphold conflicts with the scientific consensus on evolution by natural selection the idea that Adam and Eve were the first humans conflicts with a scientific consensus that human evolution happened on a gradual continuum not suddenly enough to produce humans distinct from any other Apes within one generation prior studies have shown that prayer Christian or otherwise performs no better than placebo and randomized controlled trials involving the recovery rates of hospitalized test subjects the scientific consensus in the field of psychiatry also conflicts with the idea that gay conversion therapy works or that religious intervention is effective in changing sexual orientation like some Christians believed basically science demonstrates that you can't pray the gay away further some Christians don't believe in human-made climate change because it goes against their theology I race that way but the scientific consensus is that climate change is happening and that humans are the primary cause you can definitely be a scientist and be Christian but that doesn't mean that the scientific consensus is not in significant conflict with many forms of Christian theology second many of the best scientists today are people of faith between 1901 and 2000 over 60% of Nobel laureates were Christians if our best scientists are people with deep sincere religious faith there may be a misunderstanding by some about what religious faith is but there cannot be an essential conflict between being a scientists and faith in God things are getting really muddy here with them using Christianity belief in God and faith in God interchangeably all of those things can have very different meanings and it's almost impossible to criticize an argument that's so sloppily vague even as an atheist I don't think that one has to be non-religious or atheistic to be a scientist however they seem to be saying that because a person can be a scientist and a Christian there cannot be any conflict between any scientific consensus in any form of theism that's an absolute non sequitur the logic simply does not follow in that implication if you want to show that your form of theism or your theology does not conflict with some product of the scientific method then show that directly third science explains how religion explains why one reason science and faith are not in conflict is that they are complementary imagine there's a boiling pot of water and someone asks why is this water boiling you could say because heat energy from the gas flame is being conducted through the copper base of the kettle and is agitating molecules of the water to such an extent that the water is boiling this is a true statement but you could also answer by saying because I wanted a cup of tea and though very different this is also a true statement one answer explains how the water boils while the other answer explains what caused the conditions that made it boil so it is with science and religion they are not in conflict they are complementary as we seek to understand both how and why yes science and religion have historically been used to try to answer some different questions however science and religion have also been historically used to try to answer some of the same questions religious mythology has attempted to explain countless naturalistic phenomena whether agriculture geology seismology cosmology biology psychology and just about every other set of natural phenomena have seen religious attempts at their explanation the thing is religion has never produced a methodology by which any natural phenomena could be studied which has produced anything close to the level of objectively verifiable data which the scientific method produces that's not for lack of trying the reason why you can even say that religion and science attempt to answer entirely different questions is that religion and Sciences methodologies began to go head-to-head several hundred years ago in the Enlightenment and science proved to produce more reliable answers now there are questions which science isn't designed to answer but that does not mean that religion has proved to produce reliable answers to those questions in fact the lack of progress in answering such questions as evidenced by the lack of any standard methodology reproducible data sets or general consensus and theology demonstrates that religion has improved as usefully productive in answering questions within its own domain as science has proved to be in the domain of the natural fourth science can't explain everything science describes the laws of nature but it can't explain where matter came from it can't explain how life began it can't explain the purpose of our lives what it means to love or why we desire to do things we know we shouldn't do it's not only possible to be curious about those big questions as well as scientific questions but it's strange not to the fact is science and religion are not a mutually exclusive choice instead it's more like learning to walk and chew gum so next time someone tells you science and religion are in conflict remember these four things I get the point they're trying to make here but I've to address something else about this section first science can't give complete explanations on the phenomena he said science can explain but science can inform our understanding of all those things an insisting that it can't is just a result of scientific illiteracy science can't definitively explain where matter came from but physicists have been working on that question and making solid progress for over a century now the scientific process discovered that matter and energy are just two states of the same thing it found a reliable estimate for the beginning of the universe as we know it and it's discovered the basic building blocks of all observable matter we don't know everything about matter but everything we do know about matter is thanks to science why can't it answer the question of where matter came from at some point science can't explain precisely how life began but science has allowed us to discover the basic building blocks of life as we know it and has found those building blocks to come about by natural means abiogenesis while still hypothetical is taken seriously across the scientific community as a possible explanation for life's origins which does warrant further study literally everything that we know about the earliest forms of life is thanks to science which is more than can be said for religion science can't explain the purpose of our lives but it can explain a great deal about how humans evolved from previous life forms how our brains developed into their current state how human cognition functions how those cognitive functions developed how humans can successfully reproduce contribute to well-being and foster well-being of their own it can also make some reliable predictions about future events so science can't tell us what our purpose is but it can give us a good deal of reliable information about where we came from who we are how we function how to function depending on our subjective goals and where we're going all of that can greatly inform our own subjective senses of purpose and even help us understand why our brains evolved to desire and create a sense of purpose in the first place science can explain what it means to love but in a way it can we know what parts of the brain surge with electrical activity when different forms of what we call love are experienced we also know what chemical compounds become active in the brain when what we call love is Experion science hasn't explained everything about love but every piece of reliable information we have about love as a result of our brains is a product of science okay this is the last one of these science can't explain everything about why we desire to do things we feel we shouldn't but it has helped us discover that what we call morality is a result of our evolved nature as a social species humans who refrain from hurting others in their group help others within their group maintain non-aggression in times of peace and fight those who try to hurt their group are naturally selected for as their groups propagate more successfully science hasn't explained everything about morality but the fields of evolutionary and moral psychology have produced a wealth of reliable information about morality all that said the primary issue I take with this part of the video is the implication that since science can't explain everything that makes their religion or belief in the supernatural a useful means of seeking reliable information when we haven't found an answer to a question using the most reliable tool of inquiry we have that doesn't mean it's best to utilize a tool like theology that's produced only wildly inconsistent results for its entire existence those of us who prefer to use science to answer our questions don't refuse to explore the big questions in life as this video implies many of us myself included just prefer to use exclusively reliable tools of inquiry to answer questions and when we reach the limits of those tools we'd rather admit that we don't know the answer then to invent an answer through unreliable means utilizing the scientific method and practicing a religion are not necessarily mutually exclusive however religion absolutely can get in the way of scientific inquiry when a person decides that science hasn't explained something to their satisfaction so they decide to permanently settle for an unreliable explanation provided by theology I think doing that is an unwise way to practice scientific inquiry or religion if you only embrace Sciences past discoveries and resort to using theology whenever science hasn't yet explained something then you'll never allow science to teach us more about the world if you use theology primarily to understand what science hasn't explained then your theology is little more than a placeholder in the ever-shrinking gaps of scientific knowledge doing this is not a productive way to learn more about the world or have a healthy religious practice it's a useful way to hold on to unscientific ideas for as long as your personal level of intellectual honesty will allow okay so to recap some points about this ad throughout the video they equivocate religiosity belief in God faith and Christianity as if they're all the same thing this may just be sloppiness in their argument but it creates the implication that if science and religion are inherently or always in conflict that means their version of Christianity doesn't conflict with any scientific consensus it also shows some lack of understanding of the efficacy of science as a tool to be used in answering some complex life questions now there's only so much nuance one can include in a video under four minutes long so I acknowledge the limitations they were dealing with in producing this that said I still have some thoughts on this videos intended purpose as an ad to be played on or before atheist videos there is simply too much nuance and precision lacking from this video to make it a useful tool for Christians to utilize in defending their faith against skeptics which is both this channels admitted goal as well as the goal of Christian apologetics in general discussing weak representations of skeptics objections to the faith and teaching similarly poor cliche arguments against them might have worked well when we had less access to information and less exposure to other worldviews but I don't think that these are going to cut it for as many people anymore people are leaving organized religion including Christianity at an unprecedented rate Christian apologetics needs to both improve their arguments and represent the objections of skeptics better if they want to keep people in the faith after seeing this video I'm totally fine with it playing as an ad on my videos I mean I don't have to rely on misrepresentation of others in order to contend with their ideas my positions in epistemology are also not dependent on scientific illiteracy if I discover new reliable information which should affect my worldview I'll just allow it to do that now I'm by no means perfectly skeptical and there are almost definitely error or weaknesses in some ideas and positions of mine but I think plenty of viewers here on YouTube are discerning enough to see how poorly many exercises of Christian apologetics like this ad stand up to basic scrutiny my own discernment of that is what led me out of a lifetime of intense devotion to Christianity and I get messages from multiple people every day who share that experience so go ahead Christian Ads say what you'd like before my videos play my message can handle your attempt to scrutiny the question is can yours alright so that's the video for today but I'd like to address more than one ad that's been playing on my channel for those of you who have been requesting this for so long so what I'm going to do is respond to another similarly common ad from this Christian channel but this time I'm going to do it live on my patreon if you're interested in seeing that you can pledge any amount on my patreon page to gain access to that stream the date and time for that is right here on the screen then starting in July I'm going to be doing twice monthly streams and hangouts with patrons for more details on that just head over to my patreon page ok thanks for watching I've been drew of genetically-modified skeptic if you want to hear more from me subscribe and follow me on social media at the handles below if you're an apostate in need there are resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support remember to always be kind to others in the comments and until next time stay skeptical

Channel: Genetically Modified Skeptic

Views: 523,720

Rating: 4.940906 out of 5

Keywords: atheism, atheist, agnostic, skeptic, skepticism, genetically modified skeptic, gm skeptic, Christian turned atheist, religion vs science, atheist vs christian, response video, atheist reaction, religious advertisement, Christian ads, christian apologetics, Do science and religion conflict?, Is faith reliable?, what would you say, God of the gaps, christianity vs science, arguments for god's existence

Id: lPV_Z2qbAGI

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020