Where can I go to talk about my doubts? A spotlight on TalkAboutDoubts.com - Podcast Episode 109

Welcome to the God Questions podcast. If you've been tuning in, you've noticed that we occasionally like to spotlight another ministry that we believe is doing some great things for God, great things in the kingdom.

And that's going to be the focus today. And I'd like to welcome back Jonathan McClatchy. He's been on a couple of other times, just discussing some, both apologetics issues and some creationism-related issues.

But today, we're actually going to be talking about a new venture, a new website, a new ministry that he's recently launched called.

TalkAboutDoubts .com. Thank you, Shay, so much. It's great to be here again.

So I'll let Jonathan do the full intro, but what I love most about TalkAboutDoubts .com is that it's very complementary to what we do at God Questions. And at God Questions, our goal is to provide brief answers to questions that people ask, and a lot of those involve doubts.

But so many people come to us and they need something more. They need to actually have a conversation with a real person rather than just an email exchange or even just reading articles on our site. And that's what TalkAboutDoubts .com is all about.

The Vision for TalkAboutDoubts.com

So Jonathan, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about TalkAboutDoubts .com, what gave you the vision to launch the site, and what exactly you guys are doing? So TalkAboutDoubts .com launched in December of.

2021, so last year, but really it's a spinoff of something I've been doing since 2016 on my personal website, which is for many years, I've had a form on my website that people could fill out and write to me to inquire concerning doubts that they might have concerning the veracity of the Christian faith.

And then I would reach out to them and schedule a one-on-one Zoom call to discuss with them their doubts and in confidence, and to help them to develop a protocol for working through doubts in an intellectually responsible way, and also help to engage with their particular concerns that they have.

So last year, in 2021, I had the vision to create a network of scholars and experts and thinkers in different fields. So we have people with expertise in biology or physics or astrophysics or biochemistry or New Testament scholarship or Old Testament scholarship or biblical Hebrew or philosophy or psychology, therapy, and so forth.

And these scholars on our team are willing to schedule private Zoom calls with Christians who are having doubts about their faith, or indeed ex-Christians who've already left the faith who want to explore whether there's perhaps a way back to faith rationally.

And so basically the way it works is someone will come onto the website at talkaboutdoubts .com, and they will fill out a form, and we will distribute that to one of our scholars. We have over 50 scholars on our team.

We'll distribute the inquiry to a scholar who's relevantly qualified, someone who can speak to that particular issue, and then that scholar will get in touch with the inquirer and schedule a time to do a one-on-one or sometimes a two-on-one Zoom call to discuss with them their doubts.

We also now have a private Discord community of past inquirers of talkaboutdoubts .com, as well as many of our team members. And so we're trying to also address a very common recurring theme that I've observed in the many hundreds of calls I've done with doubters, which is that people feel lonely and isolated and feel like there's no one in their family that they can talk to about these matters, or their church community and their pastor doesn't really want to have anything to do with it.

And so I'm trying to address that. We're trying to address that by creating a community of like-minded individuals. We also do weekly Zoom hangouts now as well. We alternate between an emotional support group and a course that I teach every other week, where we review the evidences for the veracity of the Christian faith.

So that's what we're doing at talkaboutdoubts .com.

Common Doubts About the Reliability of the New Testament and the Resurrection

Yeah. So maybe what are a couple of recent examples of people who've come to talkaboutdoubts .com with a doubt, something they're really struggling with, that you've been able to connect them with an expert who's been able to minister to them in that particular doubt they're struggling with?

Yeah. So one topic that comes up very frequently is New Testament reliability. Why can we trust the reliability of the Gospels and Acts, which is one of my favorite topics to address, and also how that relates to a robust case for the resurrection of Jesus.

And so the way that I would present that case is to argue from multiple lines of evidence, both internal evidences within the Gospels, as well as extra-biblical evidences, that the Gospels and Acts are written by individuals who are close up to the facts, well-informed, individually scrupulous.

And that being the case, then we can infer reasonably that the claims in the Gospels and Acts concerning the nature and variety of the post-resurrection encounters with the actually reflect the testimony of those who are purportedly eyewitnesses of Jesus' resurrection.

And so when anyone makes any sort of claim, whether that be a sexual assault allegation, or witness to a miracle, or whatever it happens to be, there are three, and only three, broad explanatory categories which could explain that claim, why they made the claim.

One is that they lied about it, one is that they're honestly mistaken, and one is that they're actually giving us a reliable report of what happened. And when one looks at the content of the claim of the early apostles, one discovers that the experiences that are claimed and asserted by those who were purportedly eyewitnesses are multi-sensory, or poly-modal in character, involving multiple sensory modes, not just individual sightings at a distance, but group sightings, group conversations with Jesus, long discourses with Jesus, physical contact with Jesus, eating breakfast with Jesus and throughout the Sea of Galilee, watching Jesus eat broiled fish in Luke 24, or in Acts 1 and 6, same course, 14-day time period, so it's not just a brief and confusing episode, and so forth.

And these are the source of claims that's very difficult to be honestly mistaken about, and then we would want to look at the context of the early Christian community, where we discover that those who were purportedly eyewitnesses of Jesus' resurrection voluntarily endured sufferings and labors and dangers and persecutions and hardships, and in some cases martyrdom, on account of their testimony that Christ was raised from the dead, which goes a long way, I think, to establish their sincerity.

And so having shown the implausibility of those two competing alternative hypotheses, namely that the apostles were lying about the resurrection and the hypothesis that they were honestly mistaken, that in turn redistributes the probability such that the hypothesis that Jesus in fact rose from the dead is the best explanation of the relevant data.

So that's a very common one that comes up, a very common topic that we field, and other topics that are common would include divine hiddenness and the problem of evil. And on divine hiddenness, I would argue that, first of all, I think that God, at least construed in the broad sense, is not necessarily hidden.

I think Paul got it right in Romans 1, where he says that God is not hidden. God is actually plain and obvious from creation, such that men are without an apologetic, without an excuse, because God's nature and divine attributes are clearly revealed through what has been made.

And when one looks at living organisms, for example, I think that one is immediately justified in coming to the conclusion that this is the product of design and engineering, not only that, but brilliant engineering.

And I think that that renders it non-obvious that there's nothing to the Christian claim. So I think that it's incumbent upon one then to investigate the claims of the gospel, almost to the same extent that it would be if one were very nearly convinced of its truth.

So that's one thing I would say on the problem of divine hiddenness. And I have confidence that God will judge justly, and that he holds people accountable for the light that they have been given. So a very common expression of the argument from divine hiddenness is what John Schellenberger would call the problem of non-resistant non-believers, which is the idea that there are non-believers out there who are non-resistant, and that is unexpected on the hypothesis of theism.

And what I would say there is that it's very difficult to justify the assertion that there are long-term non-resistant non-believers, because if someone's a non-resistant non-believer at time t, well, it might well be the case that God's just not finished with them yet.

And we don't really have exhaustive biographical information of anyone besides ourselves. It's very difficult to get inside people's minds and know what their true motivations are, whether they are truly non-resistant or not.

So I do find the problem of divine hiddenness to be as strong an objection to atheism as many people do. So that's often a topic that comes up very frequently.

Doubts About Emotional Experience and God's Presence

Yeah. We've definitely received questions along those lines as well. Aside from the pretty standard, like the does God exist? You mentioned the evidence for the resurrection, which we get tons of questions, of course, around Easter related to that.

But let me hit you with a couple of recent ones we've received just to kind of get how you would respond if someone was expressing this particular doubt. Two that we've been getting recently that really stick out to me, the first one would be someone who they came to faith in Christ, say, several years ago.

And at first, their faith was passionate. They felt love for God and felt love in return. They even felt the presence of the Holy Spirit with them. And then now, several years later, it's not as exciting anymore.

They don't feel God's presence. They don't feel love from him anymore. And that's causing them to doubt. So this is definitely more of an emotional one than an intellectual one. But I'm sure you have or will receive questions along those lines.

How would you and your team respond.

To someone who is in a situation like that? Absolutely. So I would want to help such an individual to manage expectations of what one should expect to find on the hypothesis that Christianity is true.

Now, when we study the scriptures, do we find that individuals who believe in God and have relationship with God and so forth always experience or have a tangible sense of God's presence in their lives?

Well, you don't have to read very far in the Psalms, for example, to discover that people don't always feel God's presence or have a tangible experience of the divine. In fact, the psalmist also struggled with divine hiddenness, as did other biblical authors, in particular Job.

So we understand that God works in different ways in different people's experiences. I mean, I wouldn't claim to have some sort of inner veridical experience, which I think is sufficient to justify my Christian belief.

For me, it's only I'm persuaded that Christianity is true because and only because I'm convinced by the public evidence for Christianity. Now, there are other people such as William Lee Craig, for example, or Alvin Plantinga.

He would argue that they have some sort of inner witness experience and that that is sufficient for them to justify Christian belief. I don't know about their case because I don't have insider knowledge into their lives, but I can only speak for myself and say that I don't have that.

And nonetheless, I think that God works in different ways in different people's experiences. Now, if our own personal experience would be sufficient to justify belief in, say, a miracle or something like that, then I think that it's rational to consider other people's experience.

I think we should be careful not to limit the scope of our inquiry to our own personal experience. And when we study the works of, for example, Craig Keener in his two-volume set on miracles or the work of Christian philosopher Robert Larmer, or at least Strobel has a big call that the case for miracles and so forth, we discover that there are well-documented contemporary miracles.

Not all of the examples discussed in those volumes are equally persuasive or equally well-documented, but there are enough of them that are sufficiently well-documented that I am convinced that there's something to this claim that God seems to be still at work in the world today.

And so I think that I would encourage one not to base their assent or otherwise to Christianity on the basis of emotions or personal experiences. Emotions come and go. They're fleeting. But I would encourage people instead to base their faith on the public evidence, which I think is quite compelling.

So I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation from what I've read of Plantinga and William and Craig. I believe they call it the sensus divinitus. It's the inner sense of God. And there's been times in my life where I think I definitely have sensed something that I cannot ascribe to anything other than God's presence.

But then there's other times where I don't. And so not basing my entire faith on a feeling I think is very important. And I'm not the most emotional person out there, but I know for other people, emotional engagement and attachment is a much bigger deal.

So I think the advice he gave is to not base the veracity of your faith on a feeling is very wise counsel. At the same time, not denying that there can be that emotional attachment, that God can reveal himself in that way to some people because he clearly does.

For sure. And I mean, you've heard stories, I'm sure, of Muslims who have converted to Christianity having received a vision or a dream of Jesus. And I actually know someone within my own circle of contacts who was a Muslim woman who received, she didn't have a Christian background at all and very limited Christian contact.

And she wasn't really interested in Christianity at all. And then Jesus appeared to her in a dream and she's become a Christian since then. So, I mean, that sort of thing does happen. God does reveal himself in special ways.

And I think that for someone like the Amazonian tribesman, for example, who doesn't otherwise have access to the gospel or the biblical texts and so forth, I think God will judge such a person on the basis of the light that be given.

And I think that it's quite plausible that God could have alternative arrangements for such individuals, including perhaps revealing himself in other ways, such as through dreams and visions or something along those lines.

Dealing with Doubts Caused by Hypocrisy and Church Scandals

Yeah. Excellent. Well said. I mean, question number two, and you'll instantly recognize that maybe the context of where this is coming from, recent events in the various churches have given Christianity a bad name.

We're receiving a lot of questions from people who are, whether they've had something bad happen to them in the church or whether they know of other people or they've just heard of it. People who are denying the faith or having doubts due to the extremely poor behavior of other people who are claiming the name of Christ.

Well, if this person was fake or if these people who I used to admire were willing to do this or allow this or cover this up, how can I buy into a faith where people are doing those sorts of things? How would you respond to someone with that particular doubt?

Yeah. I mean, there's unfortunately people that.

Are hypocrites in all walks of life, but here it's to all worldviews. So I don't think you're going to find a worldview where everyone's doing things that you would approve of. Now, if Christianity is true, then it actually predicts that there are going to be people who are hypocrites and people who profess to be Christians who are in fact not.

That's clear from the teachings of Jesus. Read Matthew 7, for example, that describes false teachers. And so the fact that we do in fact find hypocrites and false teachers and false converts, people who are professing the name of Christ and yet know him not, should not be particularly surprising on the hypothesis that Christianity is true and therefore it cannot be taken as a grave blow.

Against the veracity of Christianity. Does that make sense? It does, for sure. Have you had anyone even recently who has come to talk about doubts .com with this particular struggle based on.

Current events? No, actually, it's not a common one to come up at all. Most of our inquirers are asking intellectual questions about science and faith or the biblical text, reliability of the scriptures, and also there are quite a number of people that have more emotional doubts than rational doubts.

So we have therapists and pastors and psychologists on our team also who are able to do calls with individuals who are struggling more with the emotional aspect of that too.

The Problem of Evil and the Limits of Evidence

Yeah. So, okay, what would you say is the... People ask me this question all the time. What is the most difficult question to answer? So with talkaboutdoubts .com in mind, what is the most difficult doubt to deal with?

I think the problem of evil would be the most.

Challenging question that we receive. It's also a very popular question, of course. And it's difficult because there's both an emotional component to the question as well as an intellectual component.

People are very moved by the sort of suffering that we observe in recent times in Ukraine, for example, or starving people in Africa or people afflicted with AIDS or and all kinds of human trafficking or all kinds of really horrific things that we observe in the world, the Holocaust or concentration camps in North Korea.

I mean, there's just some really horrific things going on in the world. And the question is, if God exists, why would He allow such things to go on? Why would He not intervene? And why does He allow so much suffering in this world?

And I think that we have to confess that that is a very difficult question. I think it undermines our credibility when we try to trivialize that sort of question. I think it is a difficult question. Now, I'm of the position that the problem of evil constitutes some evidence that tends to disconfirm Christianity.

I don't think that it's sufficient evidence. I think that the evidence for Christianity is much stronger than the evidence against it. But I think the problem of evil would count as evidence against Christianity.

And I think a very common mistake people make, by the way, is to think of evidence as binary, that is either all or nothing, that either fully justifies a conclusion or it's good for nothing. Or if you have any evidence going against a hypothesis, it justifies abandoning or rejecting that hypothesis.

And I don't think that that's a very reasonable way to think about evidence. I think that for any complex topic, whether we're talking about Christianity or evolution or climate change or whatever it happens to be, there's going to be evidence both for and against the proposition in question.

And if you encounter someone that tells you for any complex topic that all of the evidence supports the position that they happen to adopt, that should be a major red flag that this is perhaps something you want to listen to, because confirmation bias is a major factor in that person's thinking.

Now, I think that people sometimes overestimate the potency or the strength of the problem of evil. And this is because people typically, when they talk about the problem of evil, are impressed with the sheer number of instances that exist of apparently gratuitous suffering in the world.

But one point that often gets overlooked is that these instances of suffering in the world are not epistemically independent. They're epistemically dependent. What I mean by that is that if we consider the first instance of suffering that we discover in the world, it doesn't necessarily follow that the second piece of evidence of suffering and evil in the world carries the same evidential force as the first one.

Because if God has a morally sufficient justification for the first instance of suffering in the world, you may well have a similar morally sufficient justification for the second one and the third one and the fourth one and so forth.

And so this is what's called the problem of reducing returns by multiplying examples, that the evidential value of each successive instance of suffering in the world actually depreciates over time as each successive example is added.

And so by contrast, though, when it comes to the evidence for theism more broadly and Christianity more particularly, the evidence is not only, in my view, extensive, but it also varies in kind. We're not just talking about lots of different examples of the same thing, but we also have varied evidence.

It spans multiple disciplines. And so given those two competing cumulative cases, I'm inclined to favor the case for Christianity, which spans a lot more different disciplines and is a lot more varied.

In terms of the kinds of evidences that one can choose. Yeah. So Jonathan, this has been a great conversation. And again, I'm incredibly excited about talkaboutdoubts .com. There's a huge need for something like that.

And I really don't know of anyone else who's doing something exactly like that. And that's pretty unique. I mean, Christians have been now doing internet ministry for, got questions around for over 20 years.

And I know there's some Christian websites that predate us, but to come up with something like this, I mean, it's clear God was leading in this. And I'm praying for you guys to have wisdom and discernment what direction God wants it to go.

And I'm excited to have a ministry that I know the leadership is trustworthy that I can send people to who can take people the extra step beyond what got questions can do. And I look forward to our future conversations of how we can possibly make this a little more formal or link to talkaboutdoubts .com more than we do, because it's a fantastic ministry, well-needed.

So good on you for listening to God and jumping into this new endeavor.

Well, thank you, Shay. Great to be on. Thanks for having me.

So this has been the Got Questions podcast with Jonathan McClatchy, founder of talkaboutdoubts .com. We'll include links to where you can learn more about Jonathan and of course, the talk about doubts ministry and the show notes also on the description.

And when this video goes live on YouTube and also at podcast .gotquestions .org. Got questions? Vibralize answers. And we'll help you find them.