June 11, 2015 ISI Radio Show with Dr. David Wood on “Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity on the entire planet Earth. This is

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Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday and I'm so delighted that we have back on Iron Sharpens Iron David Wood, who is one of the hosts of the

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Trinity Channel television network. He hosts a program called Jesus or Muhammad, but we're not talking about that today, we're not talking about Islam, today we're talking about atheism.

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In fact our guest David Wood is a former atheist who by God's grace and mercy converted to Christianity and he is a contributor to the book

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True Reason Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism. It's my honor and privilege to have you back,

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David Wood. Hey how's it going Chris? It's going great, thanks to another wizard in the

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Ignacio family. Taylor Ignacio came to the rescue over the phone and helped me troubleshoot a problem that was preventing audio from going out over the airwaves, so we thank you so much.

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First it was Joe Ignacio that saved the day, now it's Taylor Ignacio, so we thank the Ignacio brothers.

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They sound like a circus act, the Ignacio brothers. But anyway, David, what is the

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New Atheism? I think pretty much most people know what an atheist is, somebody that does not believe in the existence of God, and so what's a

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New Atheist? Well, you know, let's say 40 -50 years ago if you thought of an atheist,

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I mean it could be someone, you know, like eventually American atheists came out with Madeline Murray O 'Hare and so on, but apart from that, which is, you know, kind of a sort of a precursor to the

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New Atheism, you know, a lot of the traditional people that would have been associated with atheists were, you know, these sort of gentlemanly scholars, you know, people like Anthony Flew or Bertrand Russell who, you know, were very well educated, very excellent writers, and these are the people that, you know, lots of people would have associated with atheism, you know, several decades ago.

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But more recently, and this is, you know, it kind of built up after American atheists and became, started gaining ground and becoming more popular, but when we get to the

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New Atheism, it's a much more aggressive sort of really an internet mob, mostly.

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I mean, they have conferences, they have speakers, and so on, but for the most part, I kind of think of them as an internet mob, and what you have is, there are several just hypotheses that you just couldn't possibly defend at a scholarly level.

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So, Jesus mythicism is popular among the New Atheists.

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That's the idea that Jesus never really existed. There was never a person named Jesus of Nazareth. It's all just a complete legend like Robin Hood.

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Now, no one at the scholarly level defends that. In fact, there's an excellent clip of Bart Ehrman just blasting these guys at an atheist conference, right, where someone brings that up and says, there's no evidence for the existence of Jesus.

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And Bart Ehrman just goes off. He says, I understand that's popular at your level, which he means a sort of internet atheist crowd.

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He goes, but at my level, there is no one in the entire world who defends that, right? And so, you have that, you have the idea that there's a perpetual conflict between science and religion.

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The actual scholars, the people who deal with philosophy of science and the interaction between science and religion, they hold to a view which is usually called the complexity hypothesis, which means that the complexity thesis is the idea that the relationship between science and religion is complicated.

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Yes, you can have, you know, you can have people in a religion who oppose new scientific views and so on, but you also have, you know, that the scientific revolution came out of Christianity from a bunch of Christians who are convinced that since the universe was created by God and we're created in the image of God, that we have the ability to figure it out, to understand the universe.

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These guys went out and started collecting data in order to, in order to understand the universe.

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So, the idea there is the relationship is complicated. Sometimes a person's religious views might help, you know, advance some science, and other times might cause a problem.

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But, you know, for the new atheists, the relationship between science and religion is just one of endless hostility.

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It's always science trying to push forward and religion trying to hold it back. But, again, this is like an internet popular view.

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It's not something that scholars would maintain because scholars would know too much about the history of science and religion to say that there's this endless hostility.

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So, what you have with the new atheists is a bunch of people, sort of, who can't defend their views, who can't defend their theories at a scholarly level because they'd get laughed out of the room like Jesus never existed, or, you know, there's endless hostility between science and religion.

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People who had these views but can't defend them at this at the scholarly level realized they could take them to a popular level.

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They could spread them among people who don't know much about a topic and, sort of, work up a frenzied mob that will shout down all opposition.

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And that's what you have with the new atheists. You have, I mean, they rarely know anything about their topics.

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They rarely are experts about what they're saying, and they couldn't be. But they're gaining a very wide following, and it's a much more aggressive, much more militant form of atheism.

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I've had one of them. One of them said he can't wait until atheists take over so he can start a bloodbath.

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Now, that guy's a minority, but I am seeing more and more of these hostile views. I've seen several who advocated book -burning.

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We need to gather all religious books together and burn them. So it's not what you'd associate with, you know, the scholarly, gentlemanly atheists of, you know, 30, 40 years ago.

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Yeah, in fact, I have yet to hear any of these nutjob atheists that you're speaking of, but you're involved with them a lot more than I am.

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It's interesting what you said about the mythical or fictional Jesus theory that he never existed, even as a historical figure.

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Originally, David Silverman of American Atheists, the current president, after he debated

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James White on, is the New Testament evil and failed pretty clearly to prove his point, and he lost pretty miserably.

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But he challenged James to debate on that mythical Jesus issue, and they had agreed to do that, and then later down the road, when

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David could not participate in that because he was going to be in Scandinavia traveling, when

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I started calling other atheists that were among the cream of the crop available that involved themselves in apologetics and debates, every one of them told me, oh, the scholarly atheists don't believe in that mythical Jesus theory.

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We believe he was an actual person who existed, a historical figure. So that's, yeah, that's, yeah, it's, you know, you basically have different levels of skepticism, right?

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Now, you and I, we believe in the Scriptures, we believe in the Scriptures, we believe in inspiration, but even people who don't believe in inspiration will acknowledge that, you know, the

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Gospels are first -century Greco -Roman biographies. They don't believe they're inspired by God, they don't believe they're inerrant, but they believe that they're,

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I'm talking about atheist scholars, agnostic scholars, you know, various types of scholars.

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You know, those who reject God, reject inspiration, will still grant these are early writings and that the

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Christians are trying to use the approach of the

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Greco -Roman biographies, so they're trying to write about Jesus. And even, you know, even those who are very skeptical of the reliability of the

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Gospels will still say there is nevertheless very early material in the

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New Testament. For instance, the the creed that the Apostle Paul quotes in 1st

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Corinthians 15, that he delivered to them what he first received, that Christ died according to the

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Scriptures, that he was raised, and so on. And you have all the appearances listed there as well. You have appearances to Peter, to James, to the 500, and so on.

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It's actually critical scholars, scholars who are critical of the reliability of the Bible, who point out that this is the earliest material, that this can be dated to within a few years of Jesus' death.

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And the reason is that Paul says he's passing on, but it's a creed that he says that he received, and he would have received this when he visited

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Peter and James in Jerusalem, a little after his conversion. So, you know, this, you have the sort of village atheist type.

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You have the new atheist, oh, I don't believe in the Bible, just throw it all out. No one at a scholarly level approaches it like that, right?

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If you reject the inspiration of the New Testament, that's fine. You're still dealing with early writings of the

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Church that you could gain knowledge from. And the point here is, just think about how silly this is.

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I don't believe in, you know, the divine inspiration of the writings of Tacitus, or Suetonius, or any of these ancient writers.

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But I would still say you can get all kinds of information from those sources. Whereas the new atheists,

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I reject the inspiration of the Bible, therefore can't trust anything at all in it.

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It's all garbage. It's all nonsense. And once you adopt that methodology, of course, you know, how could you ever know that Jesus existed?

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We'll just throw out all evidence. But a really, really very strange group. But you're right, at the scholarly level, no one defends that.

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Just out of curiosity, I've heard agnostics like Bill Maher say that the reason why they're not atheists is because they know enough about themselves that they do not know everything.

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Yeah. And so how do the typical atheists answer that claim, or answer that challenge, how can you know there's not a

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God with certainty, which is what atheism is, if you don't know everything? How do they answer that?

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Well, the new atheists, one of the interesting things about them is that they were actually redefining the meaning of the term atheist, so that it's actually closer to agnosticism.

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Back in the day, you know, when I was an atheist, I would say there is no God. I wouldn't have said, I wouldn't have said

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I'm positive of it. But, you know, I put myself in the atheist category rather than the agnostic category.

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I wouldn't have said I'm positive about that, but I wouldn't have said I was positive about much of anything. But the new atheists, because they don't want to actually carry any sort of burden of proof, they usually don't affirm directly that there is...

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well, they'll say it, but as soon as you challenge them on it, they'll just say, I'm not saying definitely that there is no

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God, I'm saying I lack belief in God. So since it's just a lack of belief, I have nothing to defend.

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I mean, you and I both lack belief in Thor. It doesn't mean we have to defend it, we're just saying we don't have that belief.

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So, you know, what's the problem? Hey, speak for yourself, pal. Just kidding. But continue.

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Oh yeah, so it's a... and there's a reason for that. Once someone says, hey, here's my position, my position is there is no

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God, then you can start pressing them on, you know, on, well, how do you explain this? How do you account for that?

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You know, as you pointed out, in order to say, you know, with some degree of confidence that there is no

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God, you'd have to know a lot more than you as a human being know. So, you know, how are you going to say that?

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In other words, you could try to push them from atheism to agnosticism, but the new atheists are just lumping themselves together with agnostics and with anyone else who does not have a positive belief in God and saying, you know, that's our position.

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So the burden is entirely on the theist. The burden is entirely on the theist to prove his case.

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They're just saying, hey, we don't, we lack belief. If you want us to have the belief, give us the evidence for the belief, until then we lack the belief.

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I'm gonna give our email address if anybody has a question for David Wood on atheism or specifically on confronting the irrationality of the new atheism, but it could be any question on atheism or agnosticism.

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Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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And why is the the title of the book specifically confronting the irrationality of the new atheism?

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What is irrational about it? Well, I mean, I'm convinced that atheism is completely irrational, and I don't mean, you know, hey,

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I disagree with it and therefore I'm gonna make fun of it. If we're talking about traditional atheism in the sense of naturalism, right, not, you know, some people will say that they would call themselves soft atheists or something like that, where they're just denying that there is an all -powerful, all -knowing, perfectly good being.

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Maybe there are other supernatural entities that did things, but I'm just denying that one particular being.

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You know, traditional atheism that we think of as atheism is, you know, more accurately called naturalism, right?

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The natural world is all that exists. If we're talking about atheism in the sense of naturalism, there is no supernatural realm.

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It's just this world. It's just the physical world. You have all kinds, you have all kinds of problems that,

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I mean, that there's really no escape from, and the book goes through several of these.

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I give a bunch of these, but go through one example. It's called The Argument from Reason. You know, we generally trust our reasoning ability.

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You know, our reasoning ability is an infallible, but, you know, generally if we focus on something, we can, you know, we trust ourselves to get to the truth of things that we have enough information about, and so we just, you know, just naturally we tend to trust, you know, our reasoning abilities, but if you ever adopt some additional belief that would undermine, completely undermine the reliability of your reasoning abilities, you've got a problem.

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For instance, if you and I decided that we are in the matrix, right? If we believe that we're, you know, in that matrix from the movie, and that we're all in some sort of, you know, computer program, and nothing is real that we see around us, if we believe that, well, we couldn't really trust our senses anymore.

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We couldn't trust our senses anymore because, you know, what's around us is not real. So if we adopted the belief that we're in the matrix, that would undermine our confidence in our own, in our own senses, in our own thinking.

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So if you adopt a belief that really undermines your own reasoning ability, you've got some problems.

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Now, here's the idea. Naturalism does that, right? If atheists would follow naturalism through to its logical conclusion, they'd have to conclude that they cannot trust their own reasoning ability, and the idea here is, how did we get our reasoning ability if naturalism is true?

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Well, it's, you know, you have random, you know, you have random processes, you eventually get life. Once you have life, life develops through evolution, but evolution, natural selection only works on, you've got two, you've got two basic things.

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You've got random mutations, and when one of those mutations happens to be beneficial, then the organism with that mutation has a better chance of surviving and reproducing, and so its offspring will do better than, than others.

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And so the idea here is, natural selection will take beneficial mutations, and then, you know, and then that will, that, that, those traits, those characteristics will spread in a population, because those that lack them won't be as good, and so they'll die.

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So the idea here is, how did, how did human beings get our reasoning ability? Well, we got it through that process, right?

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At some point, some of our ancestors, you know, lower down on the tree of life, were a little bit smarter, and that ability was selected.

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They had an advantage over, over, you know, those, the other organisms in their generation. They had a slight advantage, and that helped them survive and reproduce more.

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Well, here's the idea. Natural selection only selects features that help organisms survive and reproduce.

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It doesn't, it doesn't select anything beyond that. Helps you survive and helps you reproduce. That's all it can select.

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So how do we get our reasoning ability? It was selected for its ability to help us survive and reproduce.

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What this means is that apart from sort of just worldly concerns about finding a mate and finding food, our reasoning ability was not selected for anything beyond that, right?

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It was selected because it helped us find berries. It was selected because it helped us find a mate.

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Now, the problem is that even false beliefs can sometimes help those things, right? If you don't eat the berries, if you don't eat the poison berries because you believe they're poisonous, and I don't eat the poison berries because I believe a witch has cursed them, we both survive, right?

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We both avoid the berries. Either, you know, either way, the false belief helps, helps just as much as the true belief.

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If, if we're equally attractive, but I believe I'm much more attractive, then my false belief might give me the confidence to, to pass on my, you know, pass on my genetic material with women because, you know,

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I'm more confident, even though it's a false belief. If we're equally attractive and I believe

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I'm more attractive, that might make me more confident. My false belief can actually help me reproduce.

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So false beliefs, false beliefs can even help this process. And so our reasoning ability, it's, it's only adapted for finding food, finding a mate, and even then it doesn't need to be reliable.

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It just needs to help you, it just needs to help you find food, find a mate, even if your beliefs are false.

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Well, the point here is this isn't the sort of ability that you could say, well, this will help us determine the origin of the universe, or this ability, our mutant berry -finding ability, is just what we need to discover whether theism or naturalism are true.

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It's not made for that, right? You're, you're, you're, you're reasoning, you're supposed to find food, you're supposed to find, you're supposed to find a mate.

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That's what it's meant for. Things that are right around you. It's not meant for anything beyond that. It wasn't made for that, and now you're taking it to, you know, the origin of the universe and into the eternities and, you know, metaphysics and all this.

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It's not made for that, and so you can't trust it. If you're dealing with something, with topics like naturalism, things like that, you're so far away from, you're so far away from an ability that would, that would be reliable in those cases that you can't trust it at all.

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But, but atheists are saying, yes, we're naturalists. Yes, the universe is all that exists. Wait, you're taking your mutant berry -finding ability, you're making these sorts of claims about the entire universe and ultimate reality.

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That's what we mean by, you know, the irrationality of the new atheism. They're not deep thinkers.

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They haven't really thought through the implications of their worldview, and yet they're the ones running around saying, you know, we're the champions of reason.

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No, no, you, no, you guys are, no, you guys are aggressively hostile to theists and towards Christians in particular, and, but, but you, you're not the champions of reason here.

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You guys haven't even thought, thought through some of these very, some of these very basic issues.

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Now, the atheists that you confront, I'm sure just as within the, those who are theists, there, there must be a spectrum of difference among them.

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They're individual people, but what seems to be the common response to how they could possibly have a concept of good and evil if we are mere evolved sacks of protopilism and, you know, evolved from pond scum and so on?

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Well, that, that's actually, that's actually another perfect example of the irrationality of the new atheists.

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Dawkins is sort of the, the champion of the new atheists, but you can open, you know, one of his books and he'll say, you know, hey, at bottom there is, there's, there's nothing, it's all pointless and so on, and then we'll turn right around and start attacking the immorality of, of Christianity or the church or something like that.

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You know, it's, it's, hey, pick one, right? Pick one. If, if you're saying that certain things are really bad, certain things are really good, other things are really evil, if you're saying that, then you better have a worldview that makes sense of that, because right now you don't.

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On the other hand, if you want to say, you know, at bottom there's, there's no point to any of this, it's all just meaningless, well, don't turn right around and then, you know, criticize

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Christianity as if some things are really right and some things are really wrong. So they have these just totally contradictory views within their worldview, and they don't even realize it.

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But, you know, if you're talking about, people will try to defend things in, in different ways. I am aware, now,

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I taught philosophical ethics at Fordham University, so I've been through the material, not from these, not from these, you know, silly new atheists, but from actual, actual people who specialize in ethics.

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I don't know of any, I don't know of any plausible account, given atheism, given naturalism,

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I know of no plausible account that could account for any sort of objective moral facts, and by objective we mean, you know, regardless of your opinion.

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If everyone in the world, you know, decided that raping children is okay, it would still nevertheless be wrong.

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It doesn't, it's not about what people think. And the reason is that, if you start out with naturalism, if you're starting out with, with atheism, how did we come to our, you know, moral views?

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It's no question we, we view certain things as right, and we view certain things as wrong. How do you explain that from an atheistic perspective?

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Well, you basically got two routes. You can say that, you know, in the course of, in the course of evolution, creatures, organisms that had, let's say, a herd instinct, that had some basic level of altruism or caring for other injured organisms, that those would survive better as a community.

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And so it sort of became hardwired into us, this, you know, some basic level of ethics became hardwired into us.

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You could take that road, or you could take the road of, you know, society tells us what's right and wrong, and after being told all our lives that, you know, compassion is good, we think compassion is good, we heard it when we were really young, and, and we believed it.

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So those are, those are the routes you can go, but neither one of those would, would qualify as, you know, objective moral facts about the world.

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You know, saying that this helped my ancestors survive does not make it good.

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I mean, bedbugs reproduced by violent rape, right? The male just completely rapes the female, and it's violent.

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He pierces her abdomen instead of going through the, the vaginal canal. He just, he's just totally brutal and violent.

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So that helps, that helped them survive. They wouldn't survive if they, if they didn't do that. Does that make it good?

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No, it's just, that's, that's what they do. A lion who, a lion that moves into a new pride will kill all of the, all of the young lions in the other pride so that it can pass on its own children.

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Does that make it good that, you know, that helps that lion pass on its offspring? No, it's just that, that's, the point here is saying, hey, this helps this species survive does not make something good.

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And so saying, hey, this trait helps human beings survive doesn't mean, it has nothing to do with good or bad, it's just a description of how, of, of how we got here.

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And of course, society, if you're going to say, you know, it's whatever society tells us. Well, I mean, you know, society say different things.

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You know, Nazi society says some, says some very different things than, you know, than an

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American society. So who's right? Well, if it's just whatever your society tells you, there is no real right or wrong.

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You're back to a kind of relativism. So from a, from a genuinely atheistic perspective, there's no real right and there's no real wrong.

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It's all opinion or it's certain hardwired features. But there's nothing where you can really say, hey, that is evil or that is good.

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And yet these guys are nonstop on the internet. Oh, look at the evils of this. Look at the evils of that.

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Look at the evils of this. Even if, you know, even if they're saying something that we agree with, right, look how evil ISIS is, right?

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We agree with them on that. The difference is we have, we have a worldview that makes sense of what we're saying about ISIS.

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They don't. And they just, they don't recognize it. Yeah. And of course they would attack

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ISIS just to give themselves a platform to attack Christianity because they falsely slander

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Christianity as being the same sort of violent religion in its, in its origins.

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And, uh, it's interesting. He brought up the Nazis, obviously, uh, Hitler and the Nazis believed that the master race would survive, uh, uh, more, uh, strongly and, and would continue to, to, uh, dominate the earth, uh, more effectively if these other races like the

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Jews were eliminated. So this herd mentality or the survival of the fittest, if that is good, uh, in the minds of these warped evil people, then evil is not evil.

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It's good. If you follow what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and, and by the way, you know, we, we, we, the, the, the

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Jews of the Holocaust are the most famous example, but Hitler actually, um, I mean, he was cleaning out, um, uh, you know, sort of children's hospitals and hospitals for the mentally disabled.

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He had portable gas chambers, right? And they, they would, uh, I read some, uh, some, uh, some very sad stories where they would show up to, um, you know, uh, um, uh, one of these, uh, places where they take care of, uh, disabled children.

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And they would say, Hey, uh, come, we're going to take a trip. And they're actually getting onto this portable gas chamber and they start driving away.

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And, uh, and the, the, the people who worked there who knew where, who knew where these kids were being taken, uh, the kids would say, where are we going?

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And they would say, Oh, you're, you're, you're going on a trip to heaven, right? Cause they're, you know, they're taking them out to, uh, to, to, to gas them.

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Um, but it was, it was, uh, it was, uh, you know, disabled people. Um, it was the Jews because Hitler regarded them as a parasitic on, on the rest of society.

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It was homosexuals because they have, um, you know, they're, they're not for, you know, reproducing the traditional family unit and so on.

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Um, but it's from an atheistic perspective, one, there's nothing really wrong.

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You can't say there's anything wrong about that. Uh, but two, uh, you know, if, if you don't have some underlying views about respecting the rights of persons and so on, which you can't re you can't defend on, on naturalism.

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Um, he's kind of right in some of those situations, right? It's, it's, Hey, if disabled, you know, you have disabled people, you have to see, you have these disabled people over there.

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You don't want to give them a chance to, to pass on their, their defective genes.

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You need to get rid of them in a state of nature before society started taking care of them. They would have died. Natural selection would have eliminated them and they wouldn't have, they would have never passed on until they would have never passed on their defective genes.

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But then we, you know, we protect them and we take care of them. And so natural selection is never able to operate.

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And so you need it to operate again, right? You need it. We need to, uh, we need to use our intellects to do what nature would have originally done, namely weed out people who are going to, uh, you know, sort of hold us back from advancing.

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If you bring this up to one of the new atheists, they'll say, Oh, you can't, you know, you can't really derive morality from, from evolution.

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You can't say that's what you should do just because that's what nature would do. But that, you know, you, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

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They want to say, Oh, you know, Hey, we developed these, you know, this way in the course of evolution. And so that's what we, we ought to do.

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And, but then as soon as you start using that to say, well, actually we should be doing, you know, we, we, we should be just exterminating, uh, you know, weaker people and so on.

31:29

And it's, no, you can't get your ethics from, you know, the history of evolution and so on. So it's, it's, it's really just inconsistency after inconsistency.

31:37

We have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for David Wood, email us at Chris Arnzen at gmail .com

31:45

that's C H R I S A R N Z E N at gmail .com.

31:53

Don't go away, but we'll be right back with David Wood and confronting the irrationality of the new atheists.

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33:29

Welcome back. This is Chris Zarnes and if you've just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today is

33:35

David Wood and we are discussing confronting the irrationality of the new atheism.

33:43

And if you have a question for David Wood, give us an email at chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

33:51

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. It's interesting going back to that whole thing with the the

33:58

Nazis when David Silverman, who is actually an atheist and a

34:05

Jew, when he was confronted in debate with the question because he basically conceded that what is good and what is bad, what is morally wonderful and what is morally evil, that is determined by whatever any given population, any given community believes at any certain period of time.

34:30

What the majority believes is what's good and what they're against is what's bad. And so basically he conceded when he was asked by Dr.

34:41

James White in debate, so you mean to tell me if you are being marched through the gates of a death camp, the most you could possibly say is

34:51

I find this personally offensive. And he admitted that that was true. Yeah, I've had similar statements from atheists.

35:02

I debated, I guess at the end of last year, a former Muslim woman who is now an atheist, but we had a debate on the existence of God.

35:13

And you know, over and over again in the debate she's saying, you know, it's wrong for God to do this,

35:19

God shouldn't do that, God shouldn't do this. But then when she's challenged on the foundations of, you know, morality, that there is no real right and wrong.

35:28

She said it, she said it very clearly, that there is no real right and wrong. But I mean, so think about that. If you're saying

35:34

God did this wrong or God ought to do this, you're saying two things.

35:40

One, you're saying that there are objective moral values that even

35:46

God needs to, that even God is obligated to adhere to.

35:53

And two, you're saying that you have access to them, right? It's not just some, you know, it's not something out there where we don't have access to it.

35:59

It's there are objective moral values and duties, and I know what they are, so that I can even tell

36:05

God that if God exists, this is what he needs to do. And then you turn right around, oh, there are no objective moral values.

36:13

And obviously, since there are none, I have no access to them. And it's just, I mean, it's shocking.

36:19

I mean, you would think, I mean, you would think that this would be an obvious problem to them, right? You sit in there, huh? I'm sitting here, you know, calling down my curses on everyone around me for all the horrible bad things they're doing, and yet my worldview cannot even make sense of what

36:33

I'm saying here. So this is some wild stuff here. Now, in the ad that we just heard, when

36:41

Romans 3 was mentioned, it reminded me of Romans 1. Absolutely, absolutely. That would be the key passage there.

36:48

Yeah, in regard to the fact, are there really any atheists? Because the Scriptures teach that men know the truth.

36:56

I mean, nature even reveals the existence of God, but they suppress the truth. Yeah, and then, you know, and then they become vain or futile in their thinking.

37:04

And I mean, I mean, it's a perfect, it's a perfect, I mean, it's a perfect Scripture that, you know, it's, it's, it's what, once you, once you suppress that truth, you really end up with some, some severely incoherent nonsense going around in your head.

37:18

And, but, you know, you don't even have a foundation to get out of it. Yeah, and the, the atheists, what is, what are some of the, the best arguments that they have, that they throw at Christians and theists in general, that typically have the average theist tongue -tied?

37:40

What are some of their, their, their, the cream of the crop of their arguments? Well, it, it, you have sort of two broad categories.

37:48

One would be arguments against theism in general, and then, you know, an argument against Christianity in particular.

37:55

As far as, as far as general, you know, just theism, belief in the existence of God, the only real, the only argument, you know, that should even be taken seriously is the, is the argument from evil.

38:08

And that, that's the conference we're having on Saturday, is that, you know, if God exists, if you really believe this, you know, all -knowing, all -powerful, perfectly good being exists, you know, if we just sat back and thought, what kind of world would that sort of being create?

38:27

Well, you know, you might think, hey, it's not the sort of world where you'd have the Holocaust and God doesn't stop it. It's not, you know, the sort of world where, you know, babies are born with horrible birth defects that, you know, that, that they survive for, survive with for a while, and then die.

38:43

It's not the sort of, you know, it's not the sort of world where, you know, people would starve to death on a regular basis.

38:50

So you might think, hey, you know, what we, what we see in our world is a problem for the claim that, you know, an all -powerful, all -knowing, perfectly good being exists.

39:01

Atheists use other arguments. Atheists use other arguments. There's an argument from, what's called the argument from disteleology, that's the idea that God could have made certain things better, but he didn't, right?

39:12

Like, he could have, he could have, he could have made us better. He could have made us so that, you know, we, it's easier for us to survive.

39:20

And, and there's an argument from divine hiddenness, you know, if God wants us to believe in him, why don't you just come down here and appear to us, things like that.

39:28

But those sort of, if, they only make sense if they're just versions of the argument from evil, right?

39:34

If, you can say God could have made things better, but that only make, that only really make sense if you're just talking about God could have made us better in some way that would, you know, help us avoid pain and suffering or something like that.

39:46

It doesn't mean, hey, we, you know, we could run a thousand miles an hour just for, you know, for no reason whatsoever. There has to be a reason that, that, you know, helps us somehow.

39:53

So really the only, the only real serious argument against theism is, is the problem of evil.

40:02

If God, if God exists, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? And if you, if you went into, you know,

40:08

Christianity in particular, it would be, you know, probably hell. If you got, if you got hell off the table, then, then they don't have much of a case there.

40:17

So problem of evil and, you know, judgment. And for more information on this conference that, that Dr.

40:25

David Wood just mentioned, If God, Why Evil, which is a conference to be held this

40:31

Saturday, June 13th, and it is an all -day event.

40:37

If you want for more information, it's being held on Long Island, New York, and that is in Franklin Square, I believe.

40:45

Franklin Square, Long Island, New York. For more information, go to the website of New York Apologetics, which is

40:51

NewYorkApologetics .com, and write out the full words NewYorkApologetics .com,

41:00

and you could look up in upcoming events all the details that you need for this conference featuring

41:05

Dr. David Wood and other speakers. I also want to quickly remind you, when you hear books like True Reason, Confronting the

41:15

Irrationality of the New Atheism, and other books, whenever you hear books mentioned on Iron Sharpens Iron, please go to one of two sources, or both sources.

41:28

Go to the Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, which is CVBBS .com.

41:35

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The latter is not only a book distributor, but also a publisher of works, not only old, reliable, and beloved books that have been brought back into print, but also contemporary works written by the finest of today's authors.

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So please remember those, because they are helping to keep Iron Sharpens Iron on the radio.

42:16

Is atheism really becoming more popular? Obviously, true biblical

42:23

Christianity is a tiny minority in this world, but is atheism really a rival, or is it growing stronger than not only

42:35

Christianity numerically, but theism in general? Yeah, you have two things.

42:41

One is the actual, you know, there are, in certain demographics, that it is increasing, and it's younger people.

42:51

But there's a whole general shift towards, you know, people, even people who don't qualify as atheists or something.

42:59

It's kind of, if you think of, you know, a spectrum where you have your diehard atheists at one end, and your diehard

43:05

Christians on the other end, it's kind of shifting towards the direction of atheism, so that, you know, people who would be a diehard

43:13

Christian aren't really as diehard anymore, and people who would be, you know, conservative Christian aren't as conservative anymore, and things like that.

43:19

So it's kind of a general movement in that direction. Really, I mean, think about it.

43:25

There's no new argument, right, against theism or against Christianity. There's no new evidence.

43:31

They didn't just find some, oh, here's some, you know, hey, we just found the bones of Jesus. Christianity is nonsense, right? There's nothing like that.

43:38

In fact, it's in, as far as the evidence is concerned, the evidence is getting better. The evidence, you know, back in the day, a couple centuries ago, you could sort of look at the universe and say, hey, isn't it amazing that the universe supports life?

43:54

Well, now we actually know about the fundamental constants of the universe, and how specific they need to be, and that if they were even, if they were altered even slightly to an unimaginable, minute, unimaginably minute degree, life wouldn't exist.

44:12

So now we can actually put numbers on it. So the evidence is actually better. It used to be, wow, what an amazing universe, it really looks amazing, to now we know that this is almost impossible.

44:23

It's almost impossible to get what we've got here. And so the evidence is actually getting better.

44:28

You know, if you go back to the 1800s, you had a lot of skepticism.

44:34

You had a ton of skepticism that, you know, that anything in the New Testament is reliable. You had people saying, you know, these documents came from two or three centuries after the time of Jesus, and this is tons of time for evolutionary, legendary development of myths about Jesus.

44:51

So, man, we don't know if we can believe anything about Jesus. Well, now we know we have material that we can trace back to within two to three years of the life of Jesus, and in that material that we can trace, and it's not according to conservative

45:08

Christian scholars, it's according to atheist scholars, that we have material. It's according to people like Bart Ehrman and the

45:14

Jesus Seminar, and I mean, these guys, right? Guys who criticize Christianity regularly, who say, yes, within just a couple of years after Jesus' death, we have clear proclamations that He died on the cross for sins, rose from the dead, and appeared to His followers.

45:31

So now you don't have centuries or even decades to say that there was time to, you know, develop legends and so on.

45:41

You don't have time to develop legends if you're talking about two years after the event. So the evidence is actually getting better, and yet things are shifting.

45:49

Things are shifting in the other direction, and a lot of it has to do with, you know, as far as the new atheists are concerned, that it's just becoming much more vocal, right?

46:02

Once you have an internet mob, then if you're a, you know, 15, 16 year old, you know, person who's raised, you're raised in a

46:10

Christian family, but you're not sure, these are the guys that are just mocking, relentlessly mocking, religion and, oh, you believe in science, science, we're the people of science,

46:21

Christians are the people who hold science back, and wow, man, I don't want to be part of this Christianity.

46:26

It's a, you know, this is the group that stops the advance of civilization and humanity, whereas atheists are the champions of reason and science, and historically it's just total nonsense, but if you're a young person, you don't know that, and so a lot of people, a lot of people are falling for it.

46:45

We have two listeners who have emailed us questions for you. We're gonna get back to those right after these messages, and this is your last opportunity, if you want to email

46:56

David Wood a question, chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

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We'll be right back after these messages, so don't go away. I'm James White of Alpha Omega Ministries.

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That's WRBC .us. Welcome back.

48:52

This is Chris Arns. And if you've just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today is Dr. David Wood of AnsweringMuslims .com.

49:02

That's AnsweringMuslims .com. And he is an atheist who converted by God's grace and mercy to Christianity.

49:10

And we are discussing one of the books that he contributed to, True Reason, Confronting the

49:16

Irrationality of the New Atheism. And we have two questions for you from listeners.

49:24

One is from CJ from Long Island, New York. CJ wants to know, is it true that religion is the cause of most of the murders and deaths in the world, including wars?

49:42

No, that's actually false. But that's a perfect example of sort of a myth.

49:51

If you were to ask one of the new atheists, hey, you know, what's the cause of most of history's wars?

49:58

What percentage of history's wars were caused by religion, any religion?

50:06

They would say, most of them. You know what, you're talking 90 % here, 90, 95%. There's actually a,

50:13

I can't think of it off the top of my head, but there's a collection of, there's a volume of books where they actually, they listed all the known wars of history and what the causes were.

50:25

And religion, as far as being done in the name of a religion, only accounted for just a few percent.

50:31

I think it was like 3 or 4 % of history's wars, and I think half of those were Islam. So you're talking something that's just a few percent, right?

50:39

Just a few percent of history's wars were actually done in the name of a religion.

50:46

But if you were to ask people, you know, your average 18 -year -old atheist, he's going to answer 80, 90%, 95%, maybe 99%.

50:55

He's going to answer something like that. And that's a great example of how things are really being skewed.

51:02

But I mean, if you think about it, if you're talking about numbers, because the question is, you know, most of the, you know, most of the deaths and so on.

51:09

I mean, the bloodiest wars in history, the biggest massacres. I mean, you know, you've got

51:14

Stalin, you've got Mao in China, and you've got Hitler. None of these have anything to do with Christianity or even

51:23

Islam here. These were, I mean, you know, Stalin, definitely an atheist, Mao definitely an atheist.

51:29

Hitler, he said certain things about Christianity in public, but those were his advisors and later wrote down what he really said.

51:36

He had complete contempt for Christianity. He believed it was holding people back. Yet he actually had much more respect for Islam because it's aggressively militaristic.

51:46

And so, no, I mean, if you're just talking about the numbers of people who died, the sort of atheist and secular regimes had,

51:56

I mean, religions can't hold a candle to them. And if you're just talking about the number of wars in history, even that's a tiny minority.

52:03

So it's just false. The other question comes from an anonymous individual in Medford or from Medford, Long Island.

52:14

Is atheism in and of itself a religion, despite the protests from atheists that it's not?

52:24

Yeah, it's a tough question, because you can define religion, you can define religion in various ways, right?

52:30

I mean, and all you have to do if you want to deny that, deny that atheism is a religion or to claim that atheism is a religion is just modify, modify what you're claiming.

52:43

I mean, modify your definition of what a religion is. So, you know, I would, you know, an atheist could adopt a definition of religion as having something to do with God.

52:54

So you can say it's a belief about God's from which a moral code is derived. And, you know, given that you can say, look,

53:01

I don't I don't derive my moral code from this, and I don't believe in God or something like that. So you could define it and define it in different ways.

53:08

I would just say, you know, it's a worldview along other side of worldviews. And the question is, which worldview can account for basic experience that we're that we're familiar with, and it ain't, it ain't atheism.

53:22

Don't you think it's it's wise for Christians not to be too caught up in the bandwagon of conservatism that gives the impression that we should be standing up for theism at all costs, when in reality, if we are

53:40

Christians, and we believe in the, the uniqueness and exclusiveness of Christianity and the

53:46

Bible, we believe that all other religions are in essence evil, even if they have some morally good principles connected to them.

53:57

We in the long run, when the rubber meets the road, and at the end of the day, we believe all of these other religions are evil.

54:05

And therefore, we shouldn't be too quick to protest or reject the atheist who says that religion is the cause of so much evil in this world.

54:14

Isn't that true? Yeah, I kind of see things on both sides of this issue.

54:21

I mean, on the one hand, you know, you point out you could refute atheism all day long if the person just, you know, goes and blows himself up for Allah.

54:32

You haven't helped that person a whole lot. So yes, I mean, we are Christians, we want to preach the it just in terms of, you know, the, you know, the discussions that we're going to have, the main living alternative, the main live alternative, the main live options, as far as people in the

54:55

West, the main living alternatives to Christianity or naturalism, and Islam, right?

55:02

And Islam only only much more recently. So if you can really just blast atheism, you're, you've, you've, eliminated one of the main options as far as it, you know, people are going to think, hey, you know,

55:15

I want to look into something, I want to study something. You know, we don't have to worry about, you know, refuting, you know, the

55:22

Greek gods or anything like that. People don't take that seriously anymore. As far as what they take seriously, there's only a couple of major options on the table.

55:29

So if we can, you know, sort of expose one of those options, then, you know, basically, you know, cornering people with, hey, eventually you're going to have to look at, you're going to have to look at the gospel, because it's one of the only contenders that you're dealing with here.

55:43

I definitely want to have you back to continue this discussion. But do you know of any well known atheist apologists, people who have reached that point, where they're in the apologetic arena, opposing theism and Christianity, who have actually converted to Christianity?

56:05

I believe Anthony Fluke converted to theism, but not necessarily Christianity. But if you could expand on that.

56:14

As far as I've heard of, not people like on the level of Dawkins and so on, but people who are, you know, who are blogging about their atheism and so on, people who, you know, who used to be on the atheist sites and stuff, and then a couple years later, you find out they became

56:32

Christian. So there's no question there are people like that. As far as famous, famous individuals, one of the one of the top theoretical physicists in recent decades was

56:43

Frank Tipler. And Tipler wrote, I think back in the 80s, he had an essay at the end of one of his books titled,

56:54

Why I'm Not a Christian. But now he has books, I mean, he eventually became a

56:59

Christian, and he wrote a book called The Physics of Christianity. And it was just, it was interesting, because he sent me the paper that he wrote before he was a

57:10

Christian, and he argued that the cause of the universe must be triune, right?

57:15

And so it was wild, wild stuff. He argued that the, and this is just, it was just, it was just, it was just massive equations and stuff, where he's arguing that, you know, based on singularities and stuff like that, that the cause of the universe is triune.

57:29

And it wasn't until later he said, whoa, this is what Christians have been saying. And so you, so as far as famous people, that would be, that would be an example of someone who is a high -caliber intellectual who became a

57:39

Christian. If you could, David, leave our audience today with what is most pressing upon your heart and mind that you want to have etched in their hearts and minds and souls when they leave this broadcast today.

57:54

Well, it's, we, I mean, Christians, we, you know, we look around and we see, we see what's going on in the world.

58:01

It can be very depressing. I mean, over in the Middle East, you have ISIS and it's blood, and it's just bloodbath after bloodbath.

58:07

And over here, it looks like Western civilization is, you know, on the verge of collapse.

58:15

But, I mean, at the same time, we have an, we have opportunities that people have never had in history, right?

58:22

I can, I talk to Muslims every day who are from Pakistan and from Saudi Arabia, because of technology, right?

58:30

Back in the day, if you wanted to talk to Muslims, you're going to be in trouble. Right now, you can talk to them today. And so, we have, through technology and through different cultures, sort of, you know, people coming to the

58:41

West to go to school and so on, we have an opportunity to share the gospel with more people than anyone else has ever had, right?

58:50

We have, we have this. And so, certainly don't want to, don't want to stand before the Almighty knowing that we sat back and whined and cried during this, during what can be an amazing time in history.

59:03

Thank you so much, Dr. David Wood, for being on our program. Don't forget the conference this

59:09

Saturday. Go to NewYorkApologetics .com and you spell all those words out,

59:15

NewYorkApologetics .com, no abbreviations. And, of course, David Wood's website is

59:21

AnsweringMuslims .com, AnsweringMuslims .com. The conference info is on my site now, too.

59:27

Okay, great. And I want to thank you all for listening, and especially Dr. David Wood.

59:32

And I want you to always remember, for the rest of your lives, that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater Savior than you, our sinner.