Engaging Atheism | Special Guest: Alycia Wood

Alycia Wood: Hello. Welcome to the Jude three Project podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Fields. I’m the founder of the Jude three Project. I had a praying grandmother. This was the kind of grandmother that got up for church on Sunday mornings no matter what was going on and put on her nice outfit, put on her hat, and never went to church without her tambourine. Maybe you can relate to that. Maybe you too can say you had a praying grandmother or you had a praying mother. And maybe for you, no matter what church you go to right now, any time that communion comes, you think of Andre Crouch as the blood will never lose its power. In recent decades, the church, a staple part of the Black community, has begun to lose its importance in the Black community. Many people are leaving for other beliefs that affirm their value and their identity, And some people are leaving for non beliefs, such as atheism. So while many people are still growing up in the church, as adults, their commitment wanes and the relationship between the black church and black people seems to be waning a bit. Questions arise from culture, such as why do you believe Christianity? And don’t you know the Bible is made up by men? And when you pray, God doesn’t answer all your prayers. Doesn’t it show you that He isn’t there? And there’s so many Christian denominations. How can anyone know what true Christianity is? In other words, while the person who grew up in church may be able to tell you the names of Jesus’ disciples or tell you all kind of great Bible stories, they may not be able to answer the question why Christianity is true, why they believe it. And so the beliefs that they held in their heart all those years, they’ve never thought through with their mind. And the Christians slowly begin to self reflect and self deconstruct everything they thought was true from the past. And so this leads me into what I want to talk to with you today, and that is the topic of atheism. Now, like a lot of things in our culture, the definition of atheism has changed. Historically, an atheist was someone who said, I believe there is no God. But thanks to a clever wordplay by an atheist turned deist philosopher named Anthony Flew of the last century, the new way an atheist would define themselves is someone who says, I don’t believe there is a God. So it used to be, I believe there is no God, and now it’s, I don’t believe there is a God. I know those sound really similar, and it would take me a whole another forty minute talk, which I do another time, to really break those two those two down for you. So let me just say then for the sake of this conversation and this talk here, that to define atheism, we can just say that an atheist is someone who does not accept a belief in anything supernatural. They believe the physical or natural world is all there is. Just natural physical things that we can touch, nothing super. I think the best way for me to help you through how to engage with people who leave the church for atheism and even atheists themselves is for me to talk you through some reasons why people leave the church for atheism and give you some responses that you can learn from and engage with people in. So here we go. Let’s take a look at the nine. Number one, religion is for theological, irrational, and non thinkers. Number two, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Number three, moral issues. Number four, lack of godly men. Number five, Christianity is outdated. Number six, the problem of evil. Number seven, issues with the Bible. Number eight, atrocities in the name of religion. And number nine, blind faith. Now some of these may be more familiar to you than others, but let’s jump first into the reason that is the most popular and the most common, which is number one. Religion is for theological, irrational, and non thinkers. So why is this a reason that people are becoming atheists? Well, there has been a shift in our culture over the last several generations. It used to be a culture where we would say, okay, here’s a Bible, but, you know, believe in it. Or let’s all go to church and this is kind of what we did. But that culture shift has left that era and has moved into why should I believe? What is actually true? And while theologians and philosophers have been asking these questions for generations, the shift in the general population to only choosing religions that make sense in our minds and that have evidence has led many people to question everything they believed was true. So any Christian who’s not able to engage with Christianity with their minds are looked at as stupid or rational. And I want you to really hear me on this. In my eight years of doing apologetics full time, this is one of the things that I have learned, and I did not know it before. But atheists truly believe that religious people are stupid. They really believe that they are unintelligent, that they are not part of the intellectual crowd because they believe in fairy tales. So you may say, But I have a PhD and I have a master’s in all these things. To them all that means is you have a PhD in fairy tales and illusions. Atheists pride themselves, in fact, their actual identity is that they are the rational, reason, science oriented, evidence based thinkers who are in opposition to the irrational, the ignorant, and the soft people of faith. And these people are just picking up these fairy tales of religion to cope with life emotionally. That is really important for you to understand. Because when a Christian run or when an atheist runs across a Christian who is still living on milk and has never moved to the meats, and they aren’t able to defend or explain why they believe what they believe, it only affirms to the atheist how dumb Christians are. You’ve been believing this for all these years, and you can’t even explain to me that it’s true? That’s how they think. And so the current atheist movement requires that belief make sense in the mind and that it’s coupled with evidence. And so for the atheist, science gives us all the answers that we need. It has explained so much for us already, and it will continue to explain things for us that we don’t yet understand it will do in the future. So for the modern day atheist, there’s a heavy emphasis on science being the source of knowledge. That cannot be missed. So how do we respond to this? Well, what’s a Christian to say? Well, look, I like to tell them, first of all, just so you all know, I’m a Christian apologist, which basically means that I like science too. I believe in evidence. I believe in fact. I believe in history. I believe in archeology. I believe in all of these things as well. So you and I are actually on the same page. But the second thing I like to tell my atheist friends who say, well, you guys just don’t have don’t you don’t support science or you don’t believe in things without evidence, is I like to remind them that there’s limitations to science. So for example, science can tell us how to take a chimpanzee and put it in a spaceship, and science can tell us how to create the spaceship and send that, spaceship into outer space with the chimpanzee. But it cannot tell us whether or not we should do that. In other words, science can’t determine morality. It can determine the outcome of things, like when you do certain things, how it affects people. But it cannot determine whether or not something is right or wrong. Another limitation of science is things like color. Science can’t tell us whether red is a better color than blue or whether one woman is prettier than another woman. Science can’t tell us those things. It has limitations. And the third thing I like to tell my atheist friends who hold these, to these views, is I want to point out to them that science is actually not the way in which we know everything. So for example, if I was to say to somebody, how do you know your mother is your mother? They might say, well, she I’ve got memories of her. I grew up with her. She says she’s my mother. My dad says she’s my mother. My siblings says she’s my mother. I’ve got pictures with her. Right? They may say all these things. Imagine if I said back to them, that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t believe you that she’s your mother because you’ve never DNA tested her and that is the only scientific way to prove that she’s your mother. Nobody would expect that’s for that to be an accurate response to some to somebody giving me a case for why that’s their mother. You don’t have to scientifically prove using DNA that your mother is your mother in order for her to be your mother. That’s not the only way we come to truth is through scientific evidence. And nobody would call me irrational for saying my mother is my mother without DNA testing her. We come to belief in things without scientific evidence all the time. We have to because there’s limitations of science. So reason number two, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Why is this an issue? Well, first John two sixteen tells us these things come not from the Father, but from the world. In other words, there really isn’t much for me to say on this. There will always be a cultural battle with the world for things that they, that are attractive, and the delights of the flesh, and the delights of the world around us. That people will just say, I just choose that. That will always be they did that in Jesus’ time and they would do it in ours. We don’t modify our message just because we want people to believe what we have to say. We want to become familiar with the temptations, but we don’t alter our message to make people believe. Number three, moral issues. LGBTQ, sexual abuse, abortion, lack of community involvement of the local black church, injustice, slavery, racism, sexism. In other words, how the church responds to these moral issues, number one, communicates things about Jesus. If the church responds incorrectly, people get upset. If the church responds correctly within Christian doctrine or Christian worldview, but isn’t in line with what the culture wants, people still get upset. But either way, people are looking to how the church responds to understand what Christianity teaches. So how do we respond to this? Well, first and foremost, we need to acknowledge where the church has failed. We need to acknowledge sin. We need to acknowledge wrongdoing. God never asks us to defend sin. Don’t defend it. Don’t defend evil actions by the church. And we need to recognize that the church is a place of trauma for many people. It has been a place of abuse. It’s been a source of pain. And there are so many things, so many items that I can bring up of where the church has gone wrong in the history. But because I’m focusing on black atheism, I actually want to take a few minutes and sit on the slavery topic just for a bit. Because here’s my question for my atheist. Here’s part of my response that I have for my atheist friend who says that moral issues such as slavery is what led them out of Christianity. We know the Church’s history was slavery. We know it’s well documented. But my question is, do you find safety in atheism when you leave Christianity for atheism? In other words, does atheism give you a better response to slavery? See, every moral system is grounded in something or in someone that validates and gives credibility to the moral system. So that can be a philosophy, that could be a theology, that can be a God, it can be a political theory, it can be oneself. I mean, there’s a whole plethora of places that people draw their moral source from. For Christianity, Christians ground their source actually, or their source and morality actually in the nature of God, right? So isn’t that God is just arbitrarily saying that love is good and rape is bad. Actually, God commands and tells us to do things that are aligned with his perfectly good character. So we have the ability to know that what God is telling us is good because it’s going to be consistent with a perfectly good, perfectly moral being. He’s not just arbitrarily picking right and wrong. In other words, we can trust the source of our morality as Christians and therefore know when I do this, it is good, and when I do this, it is bad. But what about the atheist? What’s their source of morality? Is it a philosopher? Is it the government? Is it themselves? Is it common sense? Is it doing what’s best for the most number of people? The atheist Bill Flavell, writing for the Atheist Alliance International, says that when you have a choice that affects another human, the moral act is the one that reduces or prevents suffering or increases well-being. The immoral act is the choice that increases suffering or decreases well-being. In other words, the effect of your action determines if it’s right or wrong. If it hurts somebody, it’s bad. If it makes them better, it’s good. So when it comes to slavery, then my question for Bill is which human suffering am I to prevent? If I’m supposed to say, well, I want to reduce the suffering of the slaves, well, then let’s go ahead and abolish slavery. But what if I want to help the well-being of the slave owner? If that’s the situation, then actually I would have to be pro slavery. In other words, what if I said, okay, if I could enslave 10 people, and yeah, that would give them a lot of discomfort and pain, but it would help the writ and raise well-being of an entire town, well, then I should be proslavery. In other words, atheism doesn’t get me any closer to being for the value of human beings and being antislavery. It doesn’t tell me which person’s well-being or suffering I’m supposed to consider. Even more so with atheism, it’s perfectly consistent to say that slavery is just a demonstration of the strong over the weak, which is a fundamental part of survival of the fittest. In other words, we want the strong to continue to reproduce, to have more children. We want these intellectual people to continue to let their genes flow through our human race. And we want to eliminate the weak and the sick and the uneducated. Does that sound familiar? Nazi regime, eugenics movement, this idea of encouraging the strong to survive and eliminating the weak. That is a fundamental part of atheism within any, animal species or human species is survival of the fittest where the strong survives and the weak don’t. And I understand that we can say, Well, look at Christianity’s past. It is a horrible past of slavery. And it does. And the people then knew that if they gave the slaves a Christian Bible, they would read freedom from oppression. They would be saying the slaves would be set free. They would read that they’re valuable. And so what did they do? They gave them an alternative Bible, a slave Bible. Why did they do that? Because the issue was not with Christianity. The issue was with the Christians. The Christian slave owners who were wanting to shelter these people from the idea that they could be free. And so they altered the Bible to give them this message. Because the reason why that’s important is because it’s that same Bible, that same Christian Bible that the slave owners hid, that led William Wilberforce to seek the abolition of the England slave trade. Because when read correctly, the captives are set free in that Bible. The Christians were the issue, not the Christianity. Number four. Lack of godly men. Now this may seem like an odd one as to why people are becoming atheists, but hang with me for a bit. Because the reality is as men leave the church, it impacts women and it impacts their children. When the man leaves, many and his family follow suit. And it’s really hard, guys, to talk to somebody about a loving Heavenly Father if you don’t know what a loving Father is. How do we respond to this issue? Well, I’m going to be very counterculture here. Let you know I’m a woman. I was raised by a single mother until I was 13. I, come from a family of very strong women. But our culture has a tendency to deal with oppression in in the sense in which they try and raise the person or the group that’s oppressed by oppressing or reducing the value of another group. So for example, they say women are being oppressed. They’re not getting paid the same way. They’re not valued or treated the same way. And so in order to raise women, we need to emasculate and lower the men. That is how our culture solves things. In order to raise one, we decrease the other instead of seeing that they both can rise together. And so the reality we need to face is that our culture has looked at how women have stepped in to the family role when a man isn’t present. And they said, well, that should be normal. Rather than asking if that is how things should be. The absence of fathers is a problem. I want to read you some statistics that talk about this because it’s not just a problem in your local circle, it’s a global problem. And so I want to read you first from a study in The United Kingdom where lone parents, it used in this study, means somebody without their biological father. So let me read you some facts here. After controlling for other demographic factors, children in lone parent households are two and a half times as likely to be sometimes or often unhappy. They are 3.3 times as likely to score poorly on measures of self esteem. After controlling for other demographic factors, children from lone parent households were 3.3 times more likely to report problems with their academic work and fifty percent more likely to report difficulties with teachers. Boys from lone parent households are more likely to show hostility to adults and other children and be destructive of belongings. Children from lone parent families, meaning without the biological father again, are twice as likely to run away from home as those from two birth parent families. According to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, children from lone parent households were more likely to have had intercourse before the age of 16 when compared with children from two natural parent households. Boys were 1.8 times as likely and girls were 1.5 times as likely. Girls from lone parent households were 1.6 times as likely to become mothers before the age of 18. And children ages 11 to 16 years were twenty five percent more likely to have offended, meaning commit a crime, in the last year if they lived in lone parent families. Seventy percent of young offenders identified by youth offending teams come from lone parent families. Now that was The UK. So let’s come home to America. Is anything different? Is anything better here? Well, not much better, I’m afraid. Not different. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, when there’s no biological, step, or adoptive father in the home, a child is four times greater a child is at four times greater risk of poverty, seven times more likely to become pregnant as a teen, Infant death within the first twenty eight days of life is four times higher for those with absent father fathers than those with involved mothers. Children are more likely to face behavioral problems, abuse drugs and alcohol, commit crimes and go to prison. Individuals from father absent homes are two seventy nine percent more likely to carry guns and deal drugs than peers living with their fathers. And they’re also twice as likely to drop out of high school. This is one of the challenges, actually, that I don’t think the same sex marriage community is really considering. When we advocate for same sex women relationships where there is no men in the household, these statistics will apply. And we are beginning to raise a generation of young people who don’t have male influence. And men are important to the family unit. Godly men have a huge role in the body of Christ. If we want to impact our future generations and our future congregations, we cannot leave the men out. Their impact and influence on the youth is monumental to the futures of their own children and to our society. Number five. Christianity is outdated. Why do people say that Christianity is outdated and this is the reason why they would leave Christianity for atheism? Well, they look at Old Testament laws which seem to have no relevance today. They look at the Bible being written so long ago, how does it know to deal with modern day situations? And all these stories about getting swallowed by a a fish and all these kind of things, these don’t apply today. So there’s nothing from modern day that I can take from this ancient book is pretty much what they’re getting at. Well, how do we respond to this? Well, let me ask you this. Are questions about the origins of the universe outdated? Are questions about the meaning of life, are those outdated? Are questions about human value, are those outdated? Are questions about morality, what’s right and wrong, are those outdated? Aren’t those all questions that we are still asking and trying to sort out today? For example, there’s many atrocities that occur when you when you no longer wrestle with the truth of human value and identity, when we no longer want to deal with whether or not people are valuable, where does that leave us as a culture? Think about the little four year old that’s jumping on the bed, having a great time, right? They don’t care about jumping on the bed. It doesn’t mean anything to them. It’s just a bed. And then mom walks in and is like, stop jumping on the bed. You’re gonna hurt ruin the bed, which is valuable to her because she just has to pay for a new one. You’re gonna hurt yourself, which is valuable to her because you’re the you’re her child. Right? So she sees value, so don’t do it. But for the child, he doesn’t see any value to the bed. So he has no problem jumping on it. Why? Because the minute you devalue something is the minute it’s easier for you to abuse it. Imagine he wanted to jump on his little sister. And his parents said, No, you can’t jump on her. She’s important. We love her. We care about her. Even if he doesn’t see value in his little sister, they will teach him she is valuable. You cannot treat her this way. When we establish value, it changes the way in which we act and respond towards something. When we strip it of its value, we then abuse it. This idea of value and identity is not something of the past. When Christianity speaks of these things, it’s not outdated. It’s relevant and significant to this point in our lives as it will be in the future. You know, if you go to a museum and you see a beautiful painting, a beautiful sculpture or whatever it might be, and let’s say you see this painting and you’re like, Wow, this is amazing. You’re going to look in the bottom and you’re going to see the name that’s on the bottom. And And you may ask, what is somebody going to pay for this painting? And see, the value of something is closely related to how much somebody is willing to pay for it. And what determines how much somebody’s going to pay for it is whose name is written on the bottom of that painting. If you look at that painting and you see Van Gogh, or you see Da Vinci, or you see Rothko, or something, that painting intrinsically and inherently has a value. And people are willing to pay a lot, not because of the painting, but because of the artist who created the artwork. The value of something is tied up in its artist. The value of creation is tied up in its creator. When Christianity links closely that the value of a human being comes from its source, comes from its creator, it eliminates the ability to devalue it and abuse it because of the name of the creator that’s imprinted on all of us. And that means that we have value. Whether or not somebody wants to pay $5,000,000 is irrelevant. You can’t change the value. You can’t take it away because the name is already there. There’s nothing outdated about that concept. It is not irrelevant. It is very relevant for this day. And my question for the atheist then is what value do you want from me in atheism that is greater than that? Number six, the problem of evil. Because we’ve all gone through pain and suffering and we’re tired of being powerless to stop it, this question of evil and why it’s allowed to happen, why doesn’t God stop it will never go away? And for many people, they just leave Christianity because God didn’t intervene in the evil act they want Him to. God didn’t stop the pain. He didn’t stop the suffering. So therefore He must not be there. And so they leave Christianity for it. But my response as somebody who does this is that I want you to understand that there’s no answer to the problem of pain or suffering or evil that anybody can give you that should ever make you feel okay with pain and suffering and evil. There’s no answer I want to give you that makes you walk past a starving child and no longer have compassion. Those things are supposed to hurt us. Those things are supposed to make us cry. And the reality is is we keep asking this question because we think somebody will give me the answer that will give me peace. Somebody will give me the answer that will give me, the ability for this to no longer hurt, for pain and suffering no longer hurt. And that should never happen. No answer should ever make you feel okay with it. That’s why we continue to ask this question no many no matter how many answers have been given. So my question for the atheists is what do you have? What does atheism offer? And for the person who leaves Christianity for atheism, their response is going to be, well, when the tsunami happened, it didn’t really care about your feelings. And when the hurricane happened and killed a thousand people, it didn’t really care about your hurt feelings. In other words, the natural world doesn’t care about your pain and your feelings and your hurt. So why shouldn’t there be suffering and evil? Why do you think it shouldn’t be there? The universe does not care about your feelings and it doesn’t care about your pain. Or another answer, if an atheist is being honest, that they might respond to this kind of question would be, well, you know what? This let’s say somebody is assaulted, and the atheist isn’t sure says, you know what? That’s wrong. But then they but they might have to say, well, you know what? Maybe in forty years from now though, if we could see into the future, we would see that, you opened up a nonprofit because of that assault that helps people with abuse. And you, maybe you’ve been able to be really compassionate or you have a lot of strength or courage because of your assault, whatever it might be. So then the atheist might look if they could look into the future, might say, Hey, you know what? Maybe assault is okay. Maybe it is okay to assault somebody because it makes them better people. In other words, they have a hard time saying what is right or wrong because they can’t always tell the outcome. Remember, their morality isn’t grounded in a source, so they’re looking for other ways to tell us that these things are wrong. So when it comes to evil and pain and suffering, why wouldn’t the world just be like this? Why do you think it should be any different? Do you see how leaving Christianity because of evil and suffering doesn’t mean that you avoid dealing with this question? All that changes is your answer. And while you may not find the Christian answer comforting, I’m not sure if many people find the atheist answer any better. Number seven, issues with the Bible. The Bible is corrupted. It’s written by man. There’s unbelievable Bible stories. I mean, you’ve heard the list goes on, on and on and on about a verse here and there that is a problem. All of these things. Slaves obey your masters. All of this stuff, right? People see these verses and say there’s a problem with the Bible. I reject this Christianity, and they move on. Okay. There’s a ton of things that we can say on this, and there’s hundreds of popular passages that people use. So I can’t go through them all. But here’s four things I would say in response to the atheist who uses this argument. Number one, you need to not read the Bible through Western modern day eyes. The Bible was written in Eastern ancient culture, which means that a lot of things that they’re talking about is written in with a certain perspective that you don’t have a responsibility to learn about in order to accurately interpret it. Number two, you need to understand culture and context. Number three, you need to look at the issues and ask why is God addressing this? Why is He saying things in this way? In other words, you need to understand better the issues and the situations that are going on. And the fourth thing I say to somebody who says, Look, there’s all these issues with the Bible without specifically answering, responding to each one of them. The fourth thing I would say to them is, number one, I need you to actually not just pull a verse off of Google, but to actually read the verse before it and the verse after it and the chapter before and the chapter after it and even the whole book to really understand what’s being said here. A lot of people just hear things on the Internet and then they come and they say, Oh, this is why I don’t live in Christianity, and they don’t do further research. So that is one of those are the four things that if I’m going to engage with somebody, I want to bring them back to these four points and then begin to unpack particular issues that they have with the text. But in the same way, Christians, we need to understand the Old Testament, the New Testament, the culture, and the context. We need to know so that we can better respond to these questions. And at the end of the day, regardless of whatever issue somebody has with the Bible, here’s three things that we know for certain. Jesus lived, he died, and something happened three days later. And I don’t need the Bible for any of those three. I can find, texts that talk about that outside the Bible. So you can have all the issues with the Bible that you want, but it doesn’t absolve you from dealing with those three things. That He lived, that He died, and something happened, and His existence changed the world. So at least you need to look into that. Number eight, atrocities in the name of religion. One of the teachings of modern day atheism is that religion is the cause of so many wars and persecutions and crusades and atrocities and all of these things. And if we just eradicate religion, all of that stuff will stop because a religion is to blame for those things. The Nobel physicist and atheist, Steven Weinberg, once said, religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. In response to Weinberg, the agnostic, somebody who doesn’t necessarily believe in a God or doesn’t know whether or not there’s a God, I should say, not sure whether or not there’s a God. The agnostic David Berlinski in the devil’s delusion, responded to Steven Weinberg by saying, just who has imposed on the suff imposed on the suffering human race, poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons. If memory serves, it was not the Vatican. Let me read you a list of some of the atrocities from the twentieth and twenty first century, and you might be surprised how many have nothing to do with religion. And I want to read you as well the number of deaths that came as a result of them. The first World War, 1914 to 1918, led to fifteen million deaths. The Russian Civil War, 1917 and 1922, led to nine million deaths. The Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime, 1924 to 1953, led to twenty million deaths. The second World War, 1937 and 1945, resulted in fifty five million deaths. The People’s Republic Of China, Mao Zedong’s regime, 1949 to ’75, forty million deaths. Congo Free State, 1886 to nineteen o eight, eight million deaths. China, 1917 to ’28, eight hundred thousand deaths. China nationalist era, 1928 to 1937, three point one million deaths. Korean War, 1950 to 1953, two point eight million deaths. The second Indochina War, 1960 to 1975, three point five million deaths. Algeria, 1954 to 1962, five hundred and thirty seven thousand deaths. Sudan, 1955 to 1972, five hundred thousand deaths. Uganda under Idi Amin’s regime, 1972 to 1979, three hundred thousand deaths. Angola, 1975 to two thousand ‘2, five hundred and fifty thousand deaths. And Uganda, 1979 to 1986, three hundred thousand deaths. Do I need to keep reading or do you already get the hint? There are so many things that are results not of religion, but just of human nature. And in fact, many of those are caused within the absence of religion. It’s not true that religion is responsible for all murders and atrocities on a grand scale at all. Several years ago, a gentleman named Doctor. Jesse Behring, who was an agnostic, once again, someone who’s not sure whether there’s a God. He’s an agnostic experimental psychologist who specialized in evolutionary psychology and human behavior. Several years ago, he did an experiment with five and six year olds and eight and nine year olds in which he brought them into a room, these kids, and he showed them, like, a Velcro dartboard. And he said, I want you to take this ball and throw it at the board, and whoever gets the most points gets a special prize. He says, but here’s the rules. You have to stand this far back, you have to turn your back to the board so that you can’t see it, and you’ve got to throw with your weak hand. If you’re right handed, you’ve got to throw with your left hand. And he left one child in the room and brought all the other kids out. And there, of course, were hidden cameras in the room that the child didn’t know about. So he watched this. And of course, the child the children start by just following the rules, doing what was asked, but they realize I’m not doing very well. So in turn, what they do is they look around and they see nobody’s there. And so they quickly run up and throw the ball there and they run back to their spot. And they would do this where they would just start to cheat because nobody was there. Doctor. Behring ran the experiment again, but this time he would put adults in the room and see what the children did. And the third time he put Princess Alice, who was a special invisible princess, into the room. And she was going to sit right next to the dartboard while the child was alone and threw the balls to the dartboard. And what did he find after testing hundreds of kids? When the adult or Princess Alice was in the room, kids were significantly less likely to cheat. What does all this mean? According to Doctor. Jesse, an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful interventionist, interventionist, moralistic deity. That helps steer people in the direction of good behavior. Remember, he’s not a Christian. Would you embezzle $5,000,000 if you knew you wouldn’t get caught? How do you drive when there’s a police officer behind you versus when he’s not? Who are you when no one is watching? In 12/26/2021, the MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posted an article in its Technology Review. The article was titled The Metaverse Has a Groping Problem Already. They looked at people who played in video games. And sometimes in video games, you create these avatars of kind of like yourself. It could be, so if it’s a female, she’s going to create maybe a picture of my avatar that kind of operates in the game and acts like her. It may look like her. It may be different than her depending on the game. But it’s like a person that moves around that represents her. So in a game, you’ll have male and female avatars. And what they discovered is that there would be times, well, while a woman avatar is doing her things in the game, a male avatar would come up and he would start to touch her and grope her inappropriately. Now keep in mind, the woman is sitting at home on her couch playing a video game, so there’s nothing she can do but watch this happen. And she has a sense of helplessness and lack of control because she can’t stop it. Even if she’s screaming, they’re like, Stop touching me that way. But she can’t do anything because it’s in the video game. But see, it’s easy for somebody to do that because they’re sitting at home by themselves. Nobody’s saying that they’re touching this woman in this video game this way. Nobody sees what’s happening. And so now they’re starting to have to put in some safeguards so that women can protect themselves, not from physical sexual harassment, but from video sexual harassment. Because not having accountability and being anonymous leads us to do some wild things. I’m not saying people can’t do good things without God. That is absolutely not true. But I’m just saying that the abolition of religion will not make us as good as we think. Maybe the abolition of some religions, absolutely. But definitely not the abolition of Christianity. It provides an accountability, and it means that somebody is watching and holding your actions accountable. So reality is all people, especially people with no moral authority, that are that they’re being held accountable towards, are at risk of committing to even greater extents, not just video game avatar groping, but more wars and genocides that could outnumber those that I’ve just read. Atrocities do not just happen in the name of religion. And finally, number nine, blind faith. If someone was to ask you, how do you know Christianity is true? And you just say, well, I just I just believe. It might bring along a bunch of sneers and snickers. Why? Because for many of you in the atheist community, this answer makes it seem like there’s no evidence for Christianity. There’s nothing solid about it. And Christians will follow Christianity with their eyes closed because somebody tells them to do it. They follow blindly. When I hear this, and I hear this a lot, this is a big one, I like to remind people or inform people if they’ve never heard this before of the story of Doubting Thomas in John chapter 20. You’re familiar with the story, so I’ll just go through it very quickly. But Jesus, rises from the dead, He appears to the disciples, and Thomas isn’t there. Later on, Thomas comes back and this guy was like, We’ve seen Jesus. And Thomas is like, Uh-uh, uh-uh, unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into His side, I will not believe. Then Jesus appears again. He comes back and He says to Thomas, Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe. To which Thomas replied, My Lord and my God. If faith is blind, if there’s no evidence in faith, guys, then Jesus got it wrong. Jesus first gives Thomas evidence. Look, touch and see. I’m right here. Go ahead and get your evidence. And then he says, Stop doubting and believe. And that Greek word for believe is the Greek word pistos, which we translate as faith in other places. In other words, stop doubting and have faith, Thomas. Now that you’ve seen the evidence, put your trust in me, follow me, have faith in me. We need to do a better job with explaining what faith means in our churches because this idea of blind faith is making Christians look very dumb. And people need to know that Christianity is an evidence based, belief using history and facts and philosophy and logic and archaeology, and all of those things. And those things are essential for an atheist. You cannot miss this more accurate explanation of Christianity when you talk to the atheist. Well, we’ve gone through a lot of reasons. Hopefully, you’re feeling like you have a better understanding of the atheistic perspective and how to better engage with some of their arguments. Some people say that, you know, religion was invented so people can explain the origin of the universe or get some comfort in their pain. And I just don’t see that as true. I actually think that belief is much more inherent in us than we realize. This is why when you go to remote parts of the world and, like, you know, remote villages that are in some forest somewhere, you never go there and meet these atheistic tribes. They believe in a sun god, an ancestor god, a tree god, some spirits in nature. In other words, there’s always a sense in which there’s something more. If atheism was inherent in us, you would expect these tribes to be atheistic where nobody’s gone to them. But in fact, you find that they believe in something. I actually think that atheism is something that mankind invents because they want to be their own God. They want to determine their own morality. They want to be their own authority. In fact, I challenge this idea that there’s no such thing as atheism. I think we actually all worship something. It could be money or fame or beauty or themselves, or in the case of atheists, it’s going to be science. Because for atheists, science gives us the answers. Whatever you worship becomes your God. I’m much more inclined to think that we all worship something. Atheists just don’t recognize their gods. And if it’s true, then is it possible to have a world where people feel they no longer need God? The theologian Dallas Willard once said, because I make my living as a university professor and philosopher, I’m frequently asked in so many words, why do you follow Jesus Christ? My answer is always the same. Who else did you have in mind? To the atheist who wants me to leave Christianity, my question is to what would you have me go? As I watch the many vocal black atheists online like Mandisa Thomas and Siobhan Taylor and Nadia Duncan, I’ve yet to hear an alternative to to Christianity that would help wrestle me if I was on a bed of suicide to get up and to live again. Something that wouldn’t just give me a false hope, but a living one. Atheism offers a life without God, but it seems to me that it’s a life that none of us truly want.