Five Failures of Atheism

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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May 28, 2021

00:00: Good evening, everyone It is good to arrive at the end of another term and tonight is the last night of apologetics introduction to apologetics here at Sovereign Grace Academy And I am very thankful and blessed to be able to have our friend Rich Supplita Here tonight to share his presentation five philosophical failures of atheistic naturalism But before I invite him up I just want to remind you a few things about end of course if you are going to be going for the certificate in this course tonight begins the one month of Time that you have to do your research project.
00:44: So from tonight to this to this date next month you have About four weeks, you know to do your paper and to turn it in you can turn it in via email It still needs to be formatted correctly.
00:57: I prefer a PDF if you know how to do that Send it to me in a PDF format and I will grade it and I will send it back to you graded And you will receive your certificate if you pass the course everybody understand All right.
01:13: Well as I said, we have been looking forward to tonight throughout this entire course We've talked about a lot over the last seven weeks.
01:20: We have looked at the subject of Apologetics which means giving a defense for the hope that is within us and Brother Rich is literally on the front lines of that ministry God saved him out of atheism and now he goes out onto college campuses and he speaks directly with students Many of which who are caught up in unbelief and he shares the gospel with them and he proclaims the truth to them and he Gets into a lot of conversations And a lot of apologetic interactions and so he's taught apologetics in many different Areas and and at his own church.
01:58: We talked about that today And so he's going to share with us tonight Just this will be the carrot or the the cherry on the top of our apologetics Course, so I hope that it will be a blessing to us all and I'm sure that it will So we're going to take this first hour and let him give his presentation Then we're gonna take a break at the end of his presentation if anyone can't stay past the break We understand but this class isn't typically an hour and a half plan to be here until 830 So after the break, we'll come back and we'll have a Q&A session with with rich.
02:30: Everybody understand what we're doing Good.
02:33: Well, let's pray Father in heaven we so thank you for this opportunity to again hear from brother rich and to Be encouraged by his lesson and the ministry that he's going to give to us I pray that you would encourage him strengthen him.
02:46: I know it's been a long day Lord.
02:47: We've already taught together We did a podcast together Lord So I know he's tired, but I pray that you'll strengthen him for the evening and Lord Encourage him in the preaching and proclamation of the truth and Lord I thank you for all the students here at the Academy Lord I pray that you'll continue to bless them and use this to Not only draw them closer to you But raise them up in your church to minister to your people how you would use them According to your glory and for rather according to your will and for your glory We pray all this in Jesus name and for his sake Amen All right, how are y'all doing tonight? What's good to be here I This is fun.
03:40: This place is fun so much going on here.
03:42: They have Karate, they've got you know a seminary here a seminary class that meets and just what a what a great day the Visit we had earlier that was that was a great work that God is doing there with People who are recovering right by the grace of God and so we rejoice in that had a good time with those guys So as brother Keith mentioned, my name is Rich Sepulveda.
04:13: I am the director for a Student apologetics group called ratio Christi.
04:21: That's Latin for reason for Christ, right? So it's an apologetics ministry It's nationwide and we have a little chapter there at the University of Georgia I also do a lot of abortion clinic outreach.
04:37: I do street evangelism Travel to campuses when there's not a pandemic going on.
04:44: So Hopefully by the time August rolls around We'll be back somewhat to normal And so I put my website up there It's it's in progress this summer.
04:59: I'm going to spend two weeks in Colorado I And I'm not sure what I'm getting into Some friends of mine who are a little shall we say a little more charismatic than I am Dearly beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, but they wanted me to join them for two weeks of tent revivals in rural Colorado, so we'll see how that goes certainly keep me in your prayers Because I'm not totally sure what I signed up for yet But when I get back from that, I'll be working on the website for through the end of July So it's kind of a skeleton site right now I'll be adding a lot of content within the next two months.
05:37: And so we'll go ahead and start here with The first slide or the next slide Keith Okay, so I want to give you some background for the talk tonight And we're going to be talking about a area of philosophy called metaphysics and Metaphysics has to do with what you believe is real.
05:59: Okay, what makes up reality? What is reality composed of right as Christians? We would believe that there is both the physical domain There's physical reality, right like this lectern and speaker These are made up of atoms and all of that and we have bodies that are made up of physical matter but we would also believe in the reality of a soul and spirit and so in other words Reality is not made just of one kind of stuff you have material stuff and then you have I guess you would call it spiritual stuff and Those two different types of reality come together in a human being and we're going to look at a The rival worldview.
06:46: So if you go to the next slide there brother The rival worldview, which is one that's very popular among Atheists and I would say about 95% I'm estimating sort of 95% of atheists in the Western world certainly in the United States Would say that their metaphysical belief is something it goes by it has like five different names I'll try to keep consistent with the term.
07:15: I use the term.
07:16: I want to use is Naturalism and I'll do the scare quote scientific a lot scientific naturalism some other terms You'll get that are synonymous with that physicalism materialism Materialistic monism these all mean the same thing and This is the philosophy that all that exists all of reality is just matter Okay, what is real? stuff, okay matter reality is matter and Matter in motion.
07:49: That's it.
07:50: There is nothing outside of of that physical reality And so I like to start here.
07:55: I used to use are y'all familiar with the movie the Matrix? They it was a trilogy, right? I guess you know it got attributed to the Wachowski brothers, which I understand they're now sisters That's a different talk They self-identify differently these days, but supposedly there is a fourth matrix movie coming out believe it or not by the watch house key sisters Not to be confused with the brothers, but I used to use this when I taught psychology at the University of Georgia this little vignette from the first Matrix movie which in my According to me.
08:38: That's the only one worth watching.
08:39: I thought it was a great movie and the other two were garbage That's just me feel free to disagree But you have neo the protagonist right played by Keanu Reeves and You have Neo is being introduced to this simulated reality Okay, this computer simulated reality called the Matrix and so Morpheus Lawrence Fishburne, I think that's the actor's name Invites him into the Matrix they plug his brain into The machine and it creates the scene you're seeing before you what they call it a loading program It's not actually the Matrix it simulates the Matrix He's his actual bodies in a chair right and with a thing plugged into his brain But the reality he experiences is just like you and I experienced this three-dimensional space right now He's in this room with Morpheus.
09:37: There's these sofa chairs there and Nia reaches his hand forward and He grabs the sofa chair and as Morpheus is explaining the idea of the Matrix to him he says this this isn't real and In Morpheus, I love the line.
09:57: He says well, what is real? What is real if you're talking about what you can hear what you can taste? What you can see what you can smell then real is just electrical signals that are interpreted by the brain And I thought that's pretty good.
10:12: That's pretty good for like Hollywood metaphysics.
10:15: You know, that's not bad Because what that is illustrating is the fact that as far as our senses and perceptions are concerned That is true consciousness is produced by the human brain and what the what the naturalist is going to say what the science scientific naturalist is going to say is There is nothing behind that Functioning of the brain besides physical matter so we could go ahead to the next slide here this philosophy of naturalism Popularized greatly by a an astrophysicist in the 1980s by the name of Carl Sagan And he had a series.
11:05: I think it was 13 episodes in the early 80s.
11:07: It was called cosmos It was revived several years ago by Neil deGrasse Tyson who's also an astrophysicist and Was actually mentored by Carl Sagan as when he was a young man.
11:22: Well, both Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are Essentially atheists, I think they would call themselves agnostics.
11:29: But if you listen to what they say, it's very clear.
11:31: They're actually atheists It's interesting at the beginning of the cosmos series Carl Sagan would start with this quote He would say the cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be I'm going to turn around and read it because I can't small font our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us there is a tingling in the spine a catch in the voice a faint sensation as if a distant memory of Falling from a high falling from a height.
12:04: We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries And so this is Sagan's beginning point and what he's telling you up front is that he fully subscribes to the metaphysical position of Scientific naturalism all that exists is matter all that occurs Is matter in motion? Okay, we can go ahead to the next slide Scientism right and so it's just a small jump really I would say it's the logical continuation going from scientific naturalism to Essentially, what is the worship of science? It's very common on college campuses today.
12:48: It's very common with younger people.
12:51: I Would like to have a dollar for every time.
12:54: I've heard someone say something like you know what rich I don't believe in God.
12:59: I believe in science.
13:00: I believe in science and of course always ask Well, what do you mean by that? Because typically they're not talking about Methodological science you're not talking about doing experiments that can be observed and repeated what their their claim is that? Science at least in theory can explain everything can account for anything and everything okay, not just sodium and chloride molecule coming together to make salt, but things like our human experience of love our Emotions of justice our sense of aesthetics and beauty our human relationships all of these things can be reduced on some level to matter and matter in motion and So this is this is the the worldview shall we say of scientism so Scientism is an epistemology those of you.
13:57: I'm assuming in the class you've talked about epistemology quite a bit, right So somebody tell me what epistemology is Save your worldview, okay, could be a little bit more specific.
14:12: You're right, but just flesh that out a little bit Yeah, so it has to do with knowledge, right and So so epistemology is basically your Philosophy of knowledge, so we all have beliefs and so epistemology is going to be concerned with how do we? Justify those beliefs on what basis can we claim to have knowledge on what basis can we claim to have? true beliefs and the proponent of scientism Okay, and again.
14:51: We want to contrast that not the scientist because the practice of science is something very different The person who subscribes to the philosophy of scientism is saying that the only legitimate tool for making truth claims and substantiating Justifying truth claims about the world truth claims of any type ultimately it's going to be according to them Science that's going to be the arbiter of those types of questions, and so we could go ahead to the next one now and so what I want to do is Hopefully give you some common sense some very intuitive reasons Some intuitive disproofs when I was an atheist that was my worldview metaphysical naturalism scientific naturalism That's what I believed that all that existed was matter all that occurred was matter in motion and Obviously God changed my mind about that, so I want to go through and give you five right I actually have a list of eight or nine Philosophical failures of atheism, but to keep the alliteration going and to keep the talk short.
16:01: I'm just going to give you five What I hope to be five convincing and common-sense Disproofs of this so-called scientific naturalism and so again the goal is What I would call street-level apologetics something that's not you know this is not at the level of writing in a philosophical or scientific journal but What I found is that these are good talking points They've actually given me traction some traction with people on the streets people on the campuses when I'm doing evangelism when I'm doing outreach Who are coming at me from this worldview? Okay, and if the person's being at least somewhat reasonable.
16:42: I found that these can actually be very good at Planting a stone right in their shoe a pebble in their shoe Very few of them if any I can't think of one instance where a person has Dropped to their knees repented of their sins place their faith in Christ and got baptized the next week, okay? That's not what I'm talking about But putting a pebble in their shoe Something that that is going to nag them a question that you plant in there right an idea something They've never considered from that particular angle before That if they're a thinking person if they're intellectually honest They're going to go away, and they're going to give this some contemplation I Know in my own conversion that was that was a big deal that was a big part of where I was ten and a half years ago some of y'all heard me share that yesterday and it was Some of these observations Didn't make me a Christian, but they led me to question atheism.
17:40: They led me they were the The foot in the door shall we say of me parting ways with the atheistic worldview, okay, so You know I know it's a little cheesy, but what I did here is I gave naturalism atheistic naturalism a report card and It gets straight F's it gets in fact that it should be edited to say F Minuses it fails on these very important levels and so I have Five different subjects five different areas here.
18:13: We'll look at decision-making That naturalism fails to support meaningful human choice I'll try really hard not to say free will okay I'll choose not to say that Hopefully See I got jokes and Epistemology that atheism fails to provide a grounding for objective knowledge claims This next one's a mouthful existential validity, but basically the idea is Does the worldview support? Inherent intrinsic value worth Dignity in to human life to the human experience, and I'm going to argue that naturalism can't do that Ethics it's tied right in really you'll see how connected those two are But when it comes to ethics or morality, and I know those are a little bit different, but they're strongly related terms our moral code Okay naturalism cannot possibly support objective moral truth The best that you could possibly get to is opinion right, so we'll take a look at that and then finally Anthropology the human experience.
19:42: What is a human being? How and so what we're going to pay attention to very closely is how very different Humans are from all of the other animal species on the face of the planet, and I'm going to argue that Qualitatively, and this is very biblical right because we're created in Imago Dei in the image of God as much as you love your dog or cat And you know I see pictures of Janice's dog on Facebook.
20:10: I know she loves her dog.
20:11: That's cool I get it, but you know animals are not created in the image of God humans are and so humans are Qualitatively different okay, so we can go ahead So the approach the main approach I want to use here is something called the Reductio ad absurdum if y'all heard of that in your if you talked about that in your class your apologetics class the reductio Yeah No, okay.
20:40: Yeah, well, I'll try to explain it He would do a better job probably than I will but this is a common tool used in philosophy especially when you're trying to Disprove or Question bring into question a belief or an idea or a worldview, okay? and so the reductio approach actually starts out by a Provisional acceptance of the belief okay, so it's kind of like you put your hat on right you put the atheist hat on you put the naturalist hat on You step into their shoes, and you say okay if we assume I don't think you're right about this, but assuming that you are right Let's trace that out.
21:27: Let's think through that and If you can trace that out to an absurd conclusion or a preposterous conclusion That's the essence of the reductio ad absurdum literally reduction to absurdity That if you if we believe that worldview we accept that worldview provisionally we end up with this unacceptable this ludicrous Result Therefore this is not a good worldview right.
21:56: That's the the idea behind the reductio approach, okay, brother Okay, so we'll look at number one here.
22:04: I love this one.
22:05: This was really my first one as a Neuroscience professor as a psychology professor as an atheist as a naturalist this one really got me and It's really quite simple when you think about it and by the way I don't claim to be the person who was the first to discover these I did come to this one independently I didn't go read someone else and they convinced me it was a process of my own thinking through this But I'm sure people long before me Kind of discovered these problems with naturalism, but the first failure is the failure to support decision-making Okay naturalism fails to account for choice Not free will choice volition.
22:51: Okay Meaningful human choices, and I think we're all in agreement.
22:56: You know, you can you can be a Calvinist and believe People make humans make meaningful choices.
23:03: I'm both a brother Keith is both hopefully you're both But it's really interesting the picture I have there on the right was one that was common For the new atheists back when I was part of that community and you'll notice I have the little yellow arrow pointing to the term free thinker and We loved as atheists, you know stick our thumbs under our lapels.
23:27: We're the free thinkers.
23:29: Yes That's us, you know a very proud sort of gesture Unlike you lemmings you sheep who let other people do all your thinking for you.
23:37: That was the attitude behind that But atheists and you'll still hear them use that term, you know, I don't believe the Bible I'm too much of a free thinker But I want you to think about that think about that claim that the atheist is a free thinker If a person really believes that all of reality is stuff right matter some type of physical stuff and the only thing that that material stuff can do is obey the laws of physics and How in the world where's the room for volition where where's the wiggle room for choice? Where can the idea of making a decision enter into that equation, right? So you have to conclude that the brain this was my area of study this three-pound blob of protoplasm in your cranium The most advanced computer in the known universe by far that ultimately that is just a machine You have input in you have processing by a physical machine you have physical output Okay, and that's it.
24:46: There's if you're a physicalist if you're a materialist, there's no other option okay, and So go ahead to the next slide brother.
24:57: This is Marvin Minsky who is the father of AI? artificial intelligence And I remember learning this little axiom this little slogan shall we say My first or second year of my PhD program at the University of Georgia The mind is what the brain does minds are simply what the brains do Okay, the brain is the hardware the mind is the software But really you have this machine of the brain and it performs different functions one of those functions is to produce your conscious awareness to Produce your personality to produce your likes and dislikes and all of those things But the axiom is that the mind is simply what brains do Go ahead to the next slide there brother.
25:52: Well, I'll elaborate a little bit on that.
25:55: Sorry So what it's saying is somehow the biochemical activity of the cerebral cortex Gives rise to this property this Phenomenon sometimes they call it an emergent property that we call consciousness awareness our experience of reality Okay So at its foundation There's nothing unique about mental activity It's purely a product of fixed physical laws Plus nothing the point.
26:26: I want to really focus on at bottom all that's happening is physical interaction That are governed completely by physical laws.
26:35: Okay, they're tiny.
26:36: They're happening in your synapses with things like norepinephrine dopamine and serotonin and all these Neurotransmitters we could talk about the parts of the neuron communicating with itself But really what are we talking about? We're talking about physical stuff chemicals atoms Obeying fixed physical laws, right? Nothing more nothing less and so again the question comes the question arises Where in the world do we get this notion of choice from humans making choices? I decided to wear these shoes today or she decided to marry him or He decided to steal that car Whatever it happens to be Okay So this is our good friend atheist Matt Dillahunty in that picture.
27:25: I Really liked him when I still like I think he's a good rhetorician.
27:28: He's just wrong about everything But you know skeptics I've actually had this conversation with quite a few people and it's not uncommon for the person to say They'll concede the point and they'll say you know what all you really you're right about that People don't make choices You've never brother Keith has never made a real choice about anything all of his life.
27:52: They think that the That the hyper Calvinists are bad.
27:56: This is just as bad It's saying that all any impression any thought you have you think you're making a choice, but you're not it's just a complex illusion and That's what most atheists actually believe Okay Okay free will is an illusion so what we're social animals and We have to pretend We have to invent this idea that we're making meaningful decisions, even though the reality of the matter is Over the entire course of your life.
28:31: You'll never truly decide anything Okay, we'll go ahead to the next slide So this is Cliff Connectly Anybody know Cliff watches videos Nobody huh? Okay, that's fine.
28:45: Check him out Warning fair he is Arminian, and he's an older earth guy, but he's got some really great stuff especially when it comes to the existential questions, I really like him on that he has a YouTube channel called ask cliff CLI FFE and he has a podcast called give me an answer and It's a lot of campus-based apologetics, and so what I like about cliff.
29:11: I see him do this so often And it is Perfect illustration of the reductio ad absurdum.
29:18: He's challenging the atheist live that out.
29:20: Okay, I challenge you you you believe There's no free choice.
29:24: You believe nobody really makes a choice about anything a decision meaningful decision about anything Okay, that sounds good when you're writing a philosophy paper, right when you're doing your philosophy homework That sounds okay in the classroom when we're just talking about ideas But take that out into the real world and try to live that out It has no existential validity right as soon as somebody smashes your window and Steals your radio out of your car you feel wronged you're convinced that person made a wrong decision They shouldn't have done that right they should have done something differently They made a choice and that choice was a bad choice.
30:04: It was an unethical choice that choice harmed you In other words nobody can really live out that worldview So that's a problem for the atheistic world if you think about it if your worldview requires you at every turn to believe one thing But pretend that something else is true.
30:25: I would argue that that were the worldview needs to be replaced That's not a very good worldview.
30:30: It requires you to contradict yourself all of the time and so one of the criteria for Evaluating worldview should be can you live this out rationally? Can you live this out without? Contradicting yourself at every turn and this is a great example of atheists not being able to do that.
30:47: Okay, go ahead to the next one you may have noticed that I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but most atheists that I meet okay tend to be very strong supporters of like Hashtag campaigns they tend to be decidedly on the far left politically I'm not going to get into a critique of that and many of these things we as Christians would certainly agree with them about you know Racism is evil.
31:21: I don't probably hopefully everybody in here would agree with that resoundingly You know we we don't support abusing Members of the so-called LGBTQ community we don't think they should be pushed off buildings, right? We don't believe they should be in prison We don't believe they should be kept from making a living We would stand against something like Intimate partner abuse for sure But my point is the leftist can be very passionate about these causes can't they y'all probably have noticed that Put signs in their yards, they'll be there for the rallies Demonstrations, whatever you want to call them But do you see the contradiction Do you see the contradiction with their worldview? Because according to their worldview the man who beats his wife or girlfriend really didn't choose to do that just because of his genes and because of his upbringing and because of his Environment because of the lunch he ate that day Because of his balances of serotonin and his prefrontal cortex if you take all of those factors into consideration No other outcome was possible according to their worldview than him doing what he did Okay, so you've got a major contradiction there, and that's what I'm hoping to illustrate with that slide.
32:45: Okay, brother All right, so we want to contrast that before we move on into point number two With biblical Christianity this so this is the first f-minus that atheistic naturalism gets it cannot support Meaningful human choice, and I want to contrast that with the scripture And then yes, I'm using the Joshua verse in front of a bunch of Calvinist, but it is in the Bible I'm more or less a Calvinist.
33:16: We won't choose this day whom you will serve the Bible says that right? It's it's right there biblical Christianity supports meaningful human choice Okay, atheistic naturalism does not That's a big check mark in the column in favor of biblical Christianity.
33:34: Okay, go ahead Let me catch up here with my notes Okay failure number two.
33:41: We're going to go back into epistemology Naturalism fails to provide an objective grounding for truth claims I know you guys have explored this a lot in your in your class in your apologetics class because this is the bread and butter butter of Presuppositional apologetics isn't it I mean for the most part it can you justify Your Knowledge claims or your truth claims as being something that are Non-arbitrary something that is non-arbitrary something that is objective in true Okay, so you're not just giving opinions.
34:21: You're not just saying I think or maybe this is the case But we want to go beyond that to make truth claims that are solid Okay, and what I'm going to argue here is that naturalism cannot do that.
34:38: All right, go ahead and so epistemology just as a refresher is um Philosophically has to do with the theory of knowledge the idea of epistemology is How do we basically how do we know what we know? We all claim to know things on what basis do we claim that that knowledge is valid that knowledge is true? that other people should look at that knowledge and Come to a similar conclusion that we do go to the next one And so for the for the atheistic naturalist for the quote so-called scientific naturalist the main Epistemological tool that they'll use is something called empiricism, right? Empiricism is and we're not anti empiricists we would say that empiricism is a valid tool for knowledge, but empiricism basically is saying that all knowledge is Registered through our Senses and our perceptions comes in through our I'll say at five senses even though you really have seven or eight senses But most people think you only have five so we'll stick with that Okay Touching and tasting Now for humans, especially it's our our auditory sense our sense of hearing our sense of vision We're very very very visual learners Okay, but that At the end of the day It's it's information coming in through our senses that we're going to use to justify our knowledge claims And this is very basic to the scientific method.
36:24: Okay, brother and so According to the empiricist.
36:30: There's literally no other apparatus You have your brain you have your senses you have perception But at the end of the day that is on the individual level that's your only apparatus that's your only mechanism For justifying any type of knowledge claim is what you experience through your senses Do you see that? Somehow you're getting information from the outside world.
36:55: You're hearing it.
36:56: You're reading it.
36:57: Maybe you're tasting it That's rare, but it can happen if you have cove it it won't work probably right but It's your sensory system that's being stimulated and that information reaches your brain you perceive it and then you're going to use that to Convince you that something is true or something is not true.
37:18: And so you may have seen this type of overlapping Venn diagram What it's getting at is when we say that we know something.
37:26: What does it mean? Philosophically to say that I have knowledge that I that I know something's true And so notice how knowledge is right in the intersection of those three circles To have a true a valid knowledge claim The belief it something must be believed.
37:45: Okay, that's the red circle.
37:47: You must believe it But that's not enough there's a lot of things that people believe that are false So it has to be believed and that has to be true.
37:57: Okay has to be a true belief But even that's not enough to say that you know something, right So that's where the idea of justification the yellow circle comes in totally different Justification than we talk about in Romans.
38:12: Okay We're not Talking about being declared righteous tonight.
38:16: We're talking about epistemology okay, so a When you know something it's a true belief and you have good reason you have good reasons for believing that it's a Bit of knowledge is a justified true belief We have any flat earthers in here tonight Don't feel shy and raise your head Okay, so we're all convinced that the earth is is roughly spherical I understand that it's a little bit wider than it is telling you know, it's close, but it's pretty much basketball-shaped and So So we would say that we know that right I would say that I know that the earth is round and So I would say that that is a belief.
39:01: I have I believe the earth is round That is a true belief And it's something that I can justify for example, I might and there's all kinds of ways When you're dealing with a flat earther, hopefully you won't have to do that.
39:15: But You know you could point to the shadow during an eclipse right that That goes over the Sun or the moon and it's circular.
39:24: That's the shadow of the earth.
39:26: It's it's round.
39:27: It's not like Flat so you could appeal to seasons and things like that or maybe you've been on an airplane and you've traveled West and noticed how long your day was because you know You're going 600 miles an hour to the west and it extends your day out And so you have these justifications for your true belief that the earth is round.
39:51: And so that's the issue of knowledge But again on empiricism the only instrument that we have the only apparatus for justifying our beliefs is What what appears in your sensory and your perceptual register could go ahead to the next one Okay, so I have four issues with this we'll go through these kind of quickly Number one, we never experience the world directly.
40:19: Have you thought about that before you never do your brain your perceptual The perceptual parts of your brain in your cerebral cortex that outer layer of your brain.
40:29: That's about as thin as a dime Has zero direct connections with the world Okay, so everything that you ever experience is Processed before it gets to your cerebral cortex You have gaps you have The nerve cells are talking to each other.
40:47: They're changing information.
40:48: They're amplifying some signals They're ignoring other signals and then you have these gaps right these synapses usually several synapses between the outside world and The perception of you guys in this room and everything else in here that I'm experiencing right now Never in my life while I experience the outside world directly it seems like I am it seems like going back to Neo It seems like I'm touching the podium and I am but I that's not a direct type of thing Okay, there's a lot of processing that goes on on the intermediate levels I would point to that as being a shortcoming of empiricism number two And I'll illustrate this in the next couple of slides our nerves our neurons greatly modify information on the way to the brain We'll go ahead to the next slide and then I'll go back to three and four.
41:36: So this is a Schematic of your retina your eyeball you see the little eyeball and then in the back what they're showing is sort of a blown-up Representation of what's called the retina? These are the cells that begin the process of seeing right there in the very back of your eyeball And you have you probably remember this from high school biology, right? You have rods and cones These are the photoreceptors.
42:03: And so they respond to environmental light and What they do They become active they send signals to these cells that are called those little ones in the middle those blue ones They're called the bipolar cells.
42:17: No, they're not manic-depressive.
42:19: That's a different type of bipolar and Those signals are modified by Horizontal cells and amacrine cells, but then so there's another synapse and then you have these ganglion cells they're in the red and The cables the axons of those ganglion cells come together to form the optic nerve So even before that information leaves your eyeball It's been through two synapses and it's been greatly modified by a bunch of other neurons Go ahead to the next slide brother And those projections so we're going from the top back those projections you see the eyeballs you see that crisscross Plugs into a part of the brain in the midbrain called the thalamus And then you have another junction you have more processing that goes on you have more amplification of certain signals more inhibition of other Signals you have another synapse and then it sends that information to the back the very back of your brain Which is actually the beginning part of the seeing brain the occipital lobe in the very back of the head go ahead to the next one and Then in the human brain you have two different paths of processing for vision that happen in parallel You have a path that goes up into the parietal lobes on either side.
43:34: We call that the wear pathway It's concerned with where things are located in your environment Okay, then you have another parallel pathway that goes into the temporal lobes, which is mainly it's concerned with Recognition, what is it that I'm seeing? Is it a pencil? Is it a person's face? Is it a communion tray is it you know is it Keith? What am I looking at here? Is it a Corvette you know so it's it's object recognition the human brain has 30 different at least 30 different brain areas devoted to visual processing All of this is going on at the same time in parallel And then there's this final step that neuroscientists haven't figured out.
44:17: It's a big mystery It's called the binding problem and the binding problem is how does all of that activity come together? What what apparatus what mechanism? What does the brain do to pull all of this information over these vast fields of the brain? Bring it all together and somehow that gives rise to what we experience as vision our normal everyday awareness of our environments They don't have a great answer for that okay, but the main point go to the next slide Is I hope this works if you click that what happens if you like click the middle of that? Nothing, okay, that's unfortunate We'll have to describe it.
45:01: It's okay But you have all of these gaps you have no experience of the outside world directly This is a big problem for empiricism.
45:10: Okay.
45:10: This is a sorry Scientific naturalism what this was supposed to illustrate if you get on your computer when you go home type in green dot illusion Green dot dot illusion and What you'll see is The plus sign in the middle you look at that and what happens is these dots Start disappearing for just a fraction of a second in a clockwise direction So the one at the 12 o'clock position will flash off just for a fraction of a second It'll come back on One next to it will flash off and it does that in a sequential pattern and as you stare at that plus sign What happens is the pink dots disappear? You don't see the pink dots anymore They start disappearing and reappearing, but you'll very distinctly notice that the pink dots disappear and in their place What you'll see is a green dot that's traveling in a a clockwise pattern Well guess what there is no green dot.
46:12: There's no stimulus for a green dot the green dot does not exist Okay, but you end up perceiving a green dot The the pink dots that are actually there.
46:23: There's stimuli for those you end up not perceiving Do you see the problem for empiricism? Do you see the problem for? that epistemology Because if you're relying on your senses your senses are telling you there's a green dot They're moving in a clockwise direction when there's not and it's telling you there are no pink dots there when there are So if a person says I'm putting all of my stock for justifying my knowledge claims based upon my senses and perceptions Well, you've got a big problem.
46:52: This is the whole basis of optical illusions visual illusions Is that your brain your mind can play tricks on you? It doesn't always correspond to what's actually out there in the environment.
47:03: Okay, go to the next slide brother So that's a big problem for empiricism number three very quickly on naturalism our brains evolved to maximize Reproductive success and survival.
47:18: Okay, not to evaluate abstract philosophical concepts, this is the essence of something called the Alvin Plantinga the evolutionary argument against naturalism and Basically planning guy who's a Christian philosophy's Catholic philosopher.
47:37: So I don't know if he's a Christian or not can I bite my tongue He argues that He I think he believes in evolution, but he believes in guided evolution, but he says that His understanding of evolution would prove that naturalism is false okay, why is that because If you're a naturalist you believe human brains evolved over millions and billions of years They didn't evolve to sit around and talk about whether God exists talk about mathematics talks about physics talk about philosophy they evolved to Aid in reproduction and survival Okay, so why in the world would we turn around and trust those brains? to give us true and valid information about philosophical ideas Okay, so so that undermines Itself and finally number four.
48:41: Oh, there it goes.
48:42: Hey, you got it.
48:44: Okay.
48:45: Look everybody look a little plus sign Do you see what it's doing and it's better if you're closer But you get an idea of it there if you're closer to the screen more of the pink dots will disappear Do y'all see the green dot? Okay, there is no green dot All right, and finally empiricism number four cannot be empirically substantiated This is this is the real easy go-to right here number four forget the rest of them.
49:10: Just go with number four Empiricism, what's it saying? It says you should only You can only justify knowledge claims based upon information coming in through your senses In other words, there is no other justification for knowledge claims that we should be accepted But do you see the problem there because that's a knowledge claim that the empiricist is making Right, and they're not giving you any Sensory or perceptual evidence for it.
49:41: They're just expecting you to take it on face value of the logic You see what I'm going for there.
49:47: They're not giving you Empirical evidence for empiricism.
49:51: They're giving you logical or rational a case for For empiricism and so it kind of breaks down at that point.
50:00: In other words, it commits philosophical suicide In order for it if it were true, it'd be false, right? It that's why I had the picture of the person sitting on the tree branch with the saw and they're Literally cutting off the branch that they're trying to set on.
50:15: Okay So failure number two naturalism fails to provide an objective grounding for okay.
50:20: There we go And so again, how do we how do we compare this to biblical Christianity? biblical Christianity anchors knowledge and the perfection of God Proverbs 9 verse 10.
50:33: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the holy is understanding So where does the biblical Christian anchor ultimately all of their knowledge claims? It's in the perfect complete Objective true person of an eternal God Okay, your senses can fool you.
50:56: They very often do fool you people can lie to you.
50:59: They can unintentionally mislead you Information may be true.
51:03: It may be false, but God can in his word can always be Relied on so the Christian is on solid ground there.
51:11: The empiricist is not okay, brother number three existential validity Okay Naturalism fails to provide a basis for meaning and leads to despair This is real a real bundle of joy statement here.
51:29: Let me read it to you This is from existential nihilist wordpress.com Walk in a room room is empty realize that you're adrift in an uncaring world in which everyone is only out to help themselves Sounds like an emo teenager kind of right That all human interaction is based on lies and selfishness Realize you'll never find true love because love doesn't exist realize that your entire life will not leave a lasting impression on the world Your entire legacy will be reduced to an empty soulless corpse.
52:01: Doesn't this just make you happy? Realize that no matter how many people you surround yourself with you will die alone Wow There's some pretty heavy stuff, but you know, this is where This is where the empty philosophy of naturalism leads.
52:18: It leads to despair.
52:19: It leads to hopelessness provides no basis for meaning okay, and So what I would like here is a you know an evolutionary psychologist evolutionary biologist to weigh in on this So this is our good friend Richard Dawkins the author of the God delusion and Dawkins affirms what the person just says he affirms their existential Nihilism the universe we observe has precisely the properties We should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil No good nothing, but blind pitiless indifference This is Richard Dawkins analysis of the world of the universe of his life of your life Okay of reality Okay, so here's his colleague dr.
53:12: Richard Dawkins Which is a little bit off topic, but I hope that you see the irony here who in a different place where he's writing is Talking about the God of the Old Testament the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction jealous proud petty unjust unforgiving control freak vindictive bloodthirsty Ethnic cleanser misogynistic homophobic racist and fanatical on and on and on Sounds like he does not like God very much doesn't sound like he's a big fan of God Now, but you know thankfully he did not use the word evil right? Because he just said that there's no such thing as evil Do you see how Dawkins is contradicting himself there? Go ahead to the next slide brother.
54:01: Let me dismiss that And I want to that to stand over against what CS Lewis had to say You know if the whole universe has has no meaning we should never have found out that it has no meaning Just as if there were no light in the universe Therefore no creatures with eyes We should never know it was dark dark would be without meaning Okay, it's the same thing with the idea of Meaning and significance The very questions the person was asking on that opening statement that depressing vignette About lack of joy not being able to find love dying alone you see how those all only make sense over against a backdrop of meaning and purpose Those can't exist in a vacuum right to to be Complaining that you may never find love Presupposes that you believe that love could be found otherwise you would never come to the conclusion that so and so is not going to find love and So again It doesn't work because you have to what you're trying to disprove you have to start out Presupposing that that is the normal state of reality So maybe you've heard this this statement before people will say well we create our own meaning you know That's what humans.
55:29: Do we create our own meaning you got all heard something like that before Similar to that yeah, it's real common when you talk to these Existential types say well, you know there is no one meaning for the universe that applies to everyone It's up to you, and I this is what Dawkins actually says to create our own meaning now I'm meeting an old friend for tea.
55:57: He's British next week, and so that gives my life meaning But see the problem with this go to the next slide is that I'll get to that in a second the problem with this is that We do compare people's meanings if I say my meaning in life is to Feed hungry children and people are like wow that's a great meaning my my Mission in life is to house the homeless to find jobs for people who are unemployed Society gets behind you like wow that's a great cause you're devoting your life to something that is dignified and is noble but what if somebody comes by and says you know my My I understand the meaning of my life to be to Spread as much hate as possible To kidnap as many kids as possible you have the soldier the officer in the Third Reich you know my Mission in life, I derive meaning in life from persecuting Jews That we recognize that's repugnant.
57:03: That's repulsive So do you see the problem there? We recognize that it's not up to the individual to Just pick whatever meaning that they want to go with right that there's a standard outside of their own self-definition their own self evaluation and Their meaning is either going to be a meaning that is is justified Good positive helpful noble true, or it's going to be something.
57:33: That's not I came up with this sort of at the last minute, so I'm going to read it Which I try not to do that I try not to read things verbatim but This is becoming very popular this notion of self-directed meaning So the notion of self-directed meaning fails for the same reason examined in failure number one Namely creating one's own meaning Presupposes a decision to create meaning do you see that? We're going back to decision.
58:03: We're going back to choice So if you say it's up to the individual to create his or her own meaning that presupposes that they're making a choice About what meaning they're creating Without the will without the volition to create meaning any experience of meaning would reduce to The mere illusion of meaning it's not real meaning.
58:25: It's just you're perceiving meaning, but there's not actually meaning there It's an illusion of meaning But an illusion of meaning is not real meaning You see the problem with that it just doesn't work okay, go ahead and again, we're going to Set this out against biblical Christianity Biblical Christianity infuses life with purpose both now and for eternity John 17 3 Jesus says This is eternal life in the high priestly prayer right this is and this is life eternal They might know you the only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
59:01: It's a knowledge of God There is real meaning there's objective meaning it's anchored in an eternal God and the knowledge of that God something that transcends begins in this life, but it transcends this life and Because God is objectively true, right? God's life is objective objectively meaningful.
59:22: It's not transitory.
59:24: It doesn't change.
59:25: It doesn't pass away Then our meaning and purpose in life can be objective as well Okay, go ahead Failure number four moral truth, and I'll try to get through these quickly so we can take a break and have some questions It kind of picks up right where that left off naturalism fails to furnish a basis for moral facts This is my go-to I get more mileage out of this one on the street Right now in the contemporary context of America than any of these others put together Have you all seen this sign before? Are these common down here? I live in a very liberal neighborhood in Athens, Georgia and And I I've seen them in other place.
01:00:12: I think the first time I saw this I was actually in Austin, Texas not surprisingly and but they started popping up everywhere and so you had these little slogans of the Sociopolitical left right in this house.
01:00:24: We believe black lives matter women's rights or human rights No human is illegal science is real.
01:00:30: Whatever that means Love is love and kindness Is everything and so, you know, I thought about I'll get to that one in a second, but I thought about this what if you were to you saw a sign like that in your neighbor's yard and Do an experiment go up and knock on their door and when they come to the door Ask them say I saw the sign in your yard And ask them are those statements statements of opinion or fact Are you just giving us is it just your opinion that no human is illegal? Is it just your opinion that women's rights or human rights? Look, everybody's entitled to their opinion Or is it a matter of fact because if the person is Doesn't believe in God the person is a naturalist They have no basis for claiming that these statements have any Objective reality or truth to them.
01:01:32: So yeah, I suggested a modification on the next one It says many of the same things, but at the bottom it says Peach milkshakes are right polo shirts are evil, right or whatever arbitrary thing you want to put on there Because really, you know, this is where The this is where naturalism lands you There there is no since there's no objective standard of moral truth, then all we can do is get to Maybe a Majority view on an opinion.
01:02:08: Okay, if somebody comes up to you and says Go back to using racism as an example Racism is is wrong.
01:02:18: Racism is evil And if you say racism is not evil then you're wrong about that You all would agree with me on that, right? Racism is wrong.
01:02:28: It's evil.
01:02:29: And if you deny that if you say it's not then guess what you're wrong I'm not just disagreeing with your opinion.
01:02:37: I'm telling you matter of a fact you're wrong on that There are such things as moral facts.
01:02:42: This is one of them Right treating people poorly based upon Their race their ethnicity That is morally repugnant.
01:02:52: It's not my opinion And if somebody comes up and says well, you know, I I don't really do the racism thing But if somebody else wants to do that, you know, it's their life you do you? Nobody says that it's because we realize that there are moral facts.
01:03:07: There are moral truths It's not just a matter of opinion Now if I came up to you and said, you know what Italian food is, right? And Mexican food is wrong.
01:03:18: It's evil You would look at me just as quizzically wouldn't you? Because what I'm telling you in that instance, I'm giving you a statement of preference of opinion my opinion and I'm trying to say I'm trying to put it into this category of absolutely true good or bad.
01:03:36: It just doesn't work Go ahead brother to the next one.
01:03:41: So there are The let's just go ahead and skip these for time sake go down to the next one.
01:03:48: Yeah Yeah, we'll go down number five Okay, and so failure number five is anthropology Sorry, I must have ad-libbed a little too much there earlier But naturalism fails to account for the uniqueness of human beings.
01:04:05: I have an entire presentation on this I'm just going to try to bring up a couple of points and What I would argue is this that You know, they always tell us go to the next slide that chimpanzees right humans are 98% Genetically identical to chimpanzees actually thought about buying a shirt like that when I was an atheist I don't know why turns out that's false by the way, and I actually have I think it's Jeffrey Tompkins I can't read it from here who is a researcher.
01:04:33: He has a doctorate in Biology he's with ICR the Institute for creation research and they went back and did an analysis of a whole genome analysis comparing the human genome chimpanzee genome and The number was I forget exactly what it was like 85 86 percent I want to say far far short of the 98 percent that you hear touted all the time Humans and chimpanzees are not that close Closely related genetic you're talking about billions of base pair Differences between the chimp genome and the human genome, okay? But you take this ostensible according to the theory of evolution our closest evolutionary cousin And I'm going to argue with you and hopefully you'll see this in here that a chimpanzee lives a life That's much more like your dogs than it is like yours a chimpanzee lives a life That's much more like a squirrel's life or a possum's life Okay, then it is like your life as a human being This is just a comparison of the brain you see some external differences The human brain is about four times by the by the way the size the volume the mass of a chimpanzee brain Go to the next one language comparison You know the evolutionists love to tout this they had a couple of chimpanzees washoe and Kwanzee and some other ones They try to teach them ASL they try to teach them to use symbols to make sentences Compare that to a human library, right? You know what the monkeys did the chimpanzees did with their knowledge of things like ASL and symbols They said things like me want banana ball outside play They didn't talk about right and wrong.
01:06:23: They didn't moralize about politics.
01:06:25: They didn't talk about shoulds and shouldn'ts They just made very basic Statements about what they wanted or what they didn't want and they never used their knowledge of language to do what humans do Spontaneously you put two strangers who speak the same language in the room together and well before the advent of cell phones They start talking they start talking about ideas.
01:06:48: They talk about the weather they talk about sports.
01:06:50: They try to make connections Animals never do that.
01:06:53: They only talk about physically what's right there in their environment They don't use language to share ideas and that's what humans do almost exclusively.
01:07:02: Go ahead go to the next one.
01:07:04: I Love this one technology comparison And this this was like breaking news we found that chimpanzees use rudimentary tools and yes, they'll take a Branch off of a tree and they'll sharpen the edge of it kind of against a rock and they'll stick it into a tree There's a little primate called a bush baby that lives in the tree and they'll use it as a spear to try to I know It's sound sad to kill that bush baby and to eat it And so it's like wow Look at how how much like humans the chimpanzees are and then on the right you probably can't tell what that was It's from a few years ago when we sent humans Designed a rocket to land on a comet.
01:07:48: Do you remember that about five years ago or so? We successfully landed a Spacecraft on a comet as it flew by Okay So we're really impressed with the chimpanzees go to the next slide and then they found Lo and behold that Crows Ravens, what do they do? They they tear branches off of trees and they use them to stick in holes to get bugs and stuff out of there But as far as I know, nobody's trying to claim that we evolved from crows All right, go to the next one You guys remember this from a few years ago the Eclipse Day All over the world, you know People were gathering in this in the shadow of the Eclipse to go outside to put those silly glasses on To look up at the Sun.
01:08:38: It was a big to-do In Athens, they filled up half of a Sanford Stadium with students Yes, I was there me and cheeky and Bobby McCreery were actually doing outreach At the at the primate research laboratory in of Emory University they actually wanted to see what the chimpanzees would do so they gave him some of these protective goggles and They said when the Eclipse happened none of the chimpanzees started vocalizing.
01:09:14: None of them looked up in the sky They were completely unimpressed with that and most of them either tried to eat or destroy the glasses So apparently chimpanzees have absolutely no appreciation for Astronomical rare astronomical phenomena believe it or not.
01:09:31: That's a uniquely human Endeavor go to the next slide.
01:09:34: We're getting close to the end And so this is just a short list of things that are unique to human beings again the main point We're supposed to be so closely related to chimpanzees Chimpanzees live most of their lives like the other animals and completely unlike humans So what is unique to human things like art, you know dance theater comedy humor? Aesthetics appreciation of beauty, right? Ah The appreciation of nature you don't see chimpanzees Climbing up a hill and watching sunsets.
01:10:08: They don't pull over to the side of the road like wow This is such a beautiful scene out here.
01:10:13: They don't do it the quest for knowledge Philosophizing adventure thrill-seeking you don't see that in non-humans codes of ethics and justice abstract logic things like mathematics They tried and tried and tried to teach chimpanzees just very rudimentary math and they're terrible at it They never have that epiphany, you know, they can learn with enough trials Through operant conditioning one plus, you know one two They can learn how to count and press numbers in a sequence on a screen It takes forever, but they never get that epiphany that all humans get They to get to the next higher number.
01:10:56: All you got to do is add one That never occurs to chimpanzees, right? And then finally the last one which I think is the most important one is worship You don't see this in dolphins.
01:11:07: You don't see it in chimps.
01:11:09: You don't see it in bonobos This is something that is a uniquely human phenomenon.
01:11:15: What do we see with humans all around the world? right, you see some form usually it's Idolatrous or in error but you see Religious worship that is unique to human beings Why because human beings are created in Mago day in the image of God to know God to relate to him To make God known and guess what the other animal species are not they're placed under the dominion of man Okay, brother.