Collision w/ Jeff Durbin: Refuting God's Existence?

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What's up, everybody? I am Pastor Jeff Durb and you're watching Collision, and today we are interacting with a very popular

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YouTube video about the arguments for God's existence from genetically modified skeptics.

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So here we go. All right, so let's get into it, shall we?

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So you're trying to convince someone that God exists. You're probably overwhelmed with the amount of information and approaches other theists recommend.

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You need a starting point. As an atheist myself, I've become pretty familiar with the popular arguments for God's existence, both because my theist viewers send them to me literally every day in comments and emails, all that.

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Thanks, guys. And because he's the object of many people's evangelism, so that's very loving of them.

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It's important to me to seek truth in studying arguments contrary to my position. It would be right to ask, appropriate to ask at this point, an atheist who, not sure what kind of atheist he is, but he seems to believe in the neo -Darwinian micro -mutation macro -evolutionary perspective that evolution, we all evolved from the soup, bacteria, and fish, and then on to where we are now down the chain.

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He believes that we are in a universe that doesn't care about us. It is just, as you said before, sound and fury signifying nothing.

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It is ultimately purposeless, meaningless. There's no creator. There's no meaning to any of this existence whatsoever.

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It's just all of us are the random results of evolutionary processes. So it would be right to ask an atheist like this gentleman, why are you so concerned with truth and examining arguments and looking at evidence as though there was some ultimate reason for that, as though there were something beyond yourself as the descendants of African apes and down the line fish and bacteria.

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It sounds like, as we get started, here's a man who wants what only the Christian worldview can ultimately give him, so he has to borrow capital from Christianity to talk about things that matter and truth and reason and evidence and all those things, but let's move on.

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That's why I've decided to create a guide that will illustrate and rank the power of each of the more popular arguments for God's existence.

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Although I've found all arguments for God I've encountered so far to be logically or evidentially problematic in some way,

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I do see some arguments as better than others. Logically or evidentially problematic, and the interesting thing about engaging with something like this is that he's engaging as somebody,

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I would say, who's made in God's image, who's living in God's world, and of course it's a fallen world, so there's a lot to contend with.

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There's a lot of bad reasoning out there, there's a lot of ignoring of truth out there, there's a lot of evil out there, there's a lot of things that ought not be the case in terms of the way the world was made by God, but he is an image bearer of God, living in God's world, and that's something you can't escape from.

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So even with his rejection of God or his denial of God's existence, his suppression of that truth, it's inescapable.

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He's in God's image. He can't help but being what God made him to be as an image bearer, somebody who is concerned with the truth, someone who wants to live in a moral or ethical way generally, someone who cares about reason and things being consistent, but it's important to point out what he's standing on because he's appeals to a general audience of image bearers who essentially can't escape the same things either.

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We want to be consistent. We want to use reason. We want to appeal to evidence and science. Truth matters because we're made in the image of God, and ultimately that's what

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God is like, and so he's going to appeal to image bearers of God in God's world and sort of connect to things like reason and evidence, but the question is, what is he standing on?

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If he's an atheist, he's standing in a purposeless universe. There isn't anything above this guy except for sky, and there's no reason to be concerned morally with telling the truth in argumentation.

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There's no reason to be consistent in argumentation as though those laws of logic were universal in some way.

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These laws of logic that you're appealing to, that you say these things aren't reasonable or logical, are these laws of logic universal?

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Do they apply everywhere? Are these things that are unchanging? Are these laws of logic that he's appealing to unchanging?

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Do they count everywhere? Is this something that exists outside of his own brain, or are these laws of logic that he's appealing to just the result of biochemical responses that are happening in his brain?

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Brain is firing chemical responses, and that's just how he feels at the moment.

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There's atheists who would challenge him that he's not really thinking right now. He is just the result of chemical processes happening in his brain.

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In other words, he's just firing, and that's why he thinks the way that he does.

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Or are these laws of logic that he's appealing to, are these laws of logic simply the conventions of men?

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People get together, and they decide on what is the law of logic. Can they decide on things as logical that are actually contradictions?

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Can they declare new laws of logic? Can they do that in his system or not?

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When it comes to evidence, he wants to appeal to evidence. The question is, well, what is this gentleman standing on?

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Does he have a worldview that can account for the methodology that he's using? This is really, really important because, again, when you're talking to an audience of image bearers of God, they're going to have things that are inescapable as image bearers of God, a demand for ethics that you tell the truth when you're giving arguments, a demand for reason and rationality that you're logical, and a demand that you actually provide proof, evidence for what you're claiming or alleging.

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So he's appealing to the audience who naturally or instinctively, as image bearers of God, wants those things.

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Now, there's one worldview that can provide a foundation for those things, that can actually provide something that gives a justification for appealing to evidence as necessary at all, and that's the

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Christian worldview because it has a framework that's a transcendental framework based upon God's own revelation that provides a justification for appealing to those things.

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And here's what I mean by that. To simplify it, he shouldn't be appealing to evidence as necessary. He's an atheist.

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He lives in a godless, purposeless, meaningless cosmos. He is a cosmic accident, and he lives in a universe that isn't guided, governed, or controlled.

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So in order to do science, in order for the scientific method to be at all appropriate to appeal to or necessary to appeal to, you'd have to have a universe that is predictable.

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You'd have to have something called the uniformity in nature, and that is that when you look into the future, you can predict based upon past experiences what the future will be like because the universe is uniform.

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And this is popularly called in philosophy the problem of induction, that the future will be like the past.

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In order for you to do anything in this life, in this world, in a meaningful way, you have to have that principle of induction, the uniformity in nature, that future experiences will be like past experiences.

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But he's an atheist. He didn't have those things. His universe is godless, purposeless, meaningless, and he's a cosmic accident.

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He doesn't believe there's any guidance or governance of the universe at all. So how does he appeal to the uniformity in nature when he says we need to have an evidence -based system?

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We need things to actually have evidence and have proof. In order to do that, you'd have to have the uniformity in nature.

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And his atheism cannot justify the appeal to reason or evidence that he's making.

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So in other words, as we start this video, he's taking one foot and he's sneaking it over into the

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Christian worldview to gather capital that make his arguments work, to appeal to image bearers to make sense of it.

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And yet, as he continues on, he puts his foot back into atheism and pretends like he's not doing that.

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Hey, what's up guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the

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Christian worldview. There's more as a response to this video and others at apologiasallaccess at apologiastudios .com.

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When you partner with Apologia Studios, you make all of our content possible, and we give you all kinds of amazing other content to help equip you and to train you and your friends and families in the

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Christian faith. And so go to apologiastudios .com, sign up for all access and get more from Collision.