CARM.org, Responding to 4 Weird Questions that Might Make You an Atheist

Opening Remarks and the Plan for Reviewing the Video

Alright everybody, welcome to the first discussion, examination, review that I'm going to be doing along with friends on the issues here that relate to apologetics of Christian faith and others. Tonight I'm going to be going online here with Eli Ayala.

He's a well-known apologist. He's a great guy. We're going to be examining an atheist YouTube video called Four Weird Questions That Might Make You an Atheist. So we're doing that. What I'm going to do is get him on right now and you can take a look at him while I'm explaining that.

What we're going to be doing is going to the video and then he and I are going to be stopping at periodic times to make comments. This particular video has four questions. Now I have not seen the video but Eli has.

Unlike Eli, I don't have any spare time. I can't just sit around doing nothing and he just sits around. He doesn't do much and so but I've been so busy so I figured it might be good but I haven't seen it.

He has and we're going to go through the stuff. So anyway, here we go Eli. Why don't you introduce yourself, how people get a hold of you and we'll just start in.

This thing. Yeah, well my name is Eli Ayala. I am the founder of Revealed Apologetics which is a Christian YouTube channel with a focus on apologetics generally speaking and with a main focus on presuppositional apologetics, how to apply it in various contexts.

I try to defend that methodology and answer all sorts of questions relating to that methodology. I also have a website. Folks can check out some articles that I've written and they could do all sorts of things there.

I've got courses that are found there and that's how people get in touch with me if they want to reach me for speaking engagements and things like.

That. So that's about it. Good, good stuff. Eli's one of the guys I was hoping that somehow, someway he'd be able to work with Karm. But you know, he's one of the few guys. Actually, I'm going to craze you up here a little bit Eli.

Okay. How old are you incidentally? How old are you? I'm 42. He's 42. I'm 67 and you know I've been around the block a few times. I think he's been around once. I'm still on my way around the block. Still on your way around.

And so I've learned a great deal and there are not too many people that I know that I can go to and say, let me run something by you. See what your attitude or your input, your response to this might be.

And he's one of the few guys that I can trust that way. And so there you go Eli. I have just a couple, three guys I can do that with who know stuff. I can just ask questions about and see how it sounds to them as well.

See if my ideas are on par. I actually use you as a good sounding.

Board brother. I appreciate that. All right. All right. You ready to get.

Started? We're just gonna jump right in and I just want to hear where to get this URL. Where to find this URL so people can look at it. We'll figure that out later. All right. So here we go. Let's just jump in.

Doubts, Questions, and the Need for Christian Answers

Back when I was still a.

Christian but was beginning to explore. You want to stop right there? Just real quick. I started having questions about. There we go.

So that it wasn't showing. Yeah that's fine now. I had to hit the button trying.

To work it and I missed it. So there we go. All right. God pop into my head just.

Annoyingly often. Those questions eventually piled up so high that I realized I really had to face them all head-on if I ever wanted to sleep again. I hoped that once I explored those questions rather than pushing them aside out of fear, I'd regain some sense of normalcy and that those nagging questions would just stop.

That did and didn't happen. I eventually became an atheist and was no longer afraid of looking into hard questions about religion and God. But the questions themselves just kept coming. They didn't occur to me at the same rate as when I was first questioning.

But they definitely didn't stop. Even today a few years later new questions still pop into my head pretty regularly. Over time though with the more obvious questions out of the way at the beginning, they've gotten a little more unique.

So I thought you guys might like to explore a few of those with me. I have a couple of notes before we begin as usual. These questions pertain to... All right. I think that's important to keep in mind that a.

Lot of people have questions that pop into their head, and I know that in some contexts, and I know you're aware of this too Matt, that in certain churches, in certain contexts, questioning things is not encouraged.

But I think that people should not run away from questions. We want to explore those questions. We want to surround ourselves with reliable people and good resources to be able to engage those difficult questions.

And even with people struggling with doubt, you know, when I work with teenagers and things like this, and I say that if you're going to doubt, doubt towards God. Don't allow doubting to be something automatically moves you away, but rather it draws you closer to God in terms of searching and relying on Him to provide you with guidance in terms of finding answers.

And so if you're going to doubt, doubt towards God. That would be my.

Advice, but we shouldn't run away from questions. And also go to karm .org and look up questions and see if you can answer them. Call the radio show. You can talk to Eli. You can talk to myself. There are answers to this stuff.

Yeah, there are. All right, let's get going.

...pain to a more Abrahamic idea of God, as in one that is supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and the creator of all that is. For brevity, I'll occasionally refer to this kind of God as tri-omni, as in embodying all the omni traits I just mentioned.

These questions don't have much bearing on the concepts of gods to which many polytheists hold. I'm sorry to make a.

Comment. A lot of times atheists will say, they'll talk about the Trinitarian God, and they'll say he's omnibenevolent. And I'll ask him what that means. Could you please define that? We understand what omniscience is and omnipotence, but what do you mean by omnibenevolence?

Is there, within the omnibenevolent issue, is there the capacity of God's anger and judgment? Because if he's all of something, can he not be something else? And I ask him about this. And this is where the wheels come off the cart.

They're not really thinking through the issue here, because what they want to do often is represent God, the Trinitarian God, by one of his attributes and elevate that above others. And then it's called a fallacy of composition, I believe, where they say this one part represents the whole, and then they say, well, how come God would do this?

And they fail to understand some of the other issues. Maybe he's going to be doing the same thing. But anyway, that phrase, omnibenevolent, is a catchphrase that I've seen them use that way.

Right. I also think what we should, because I know a lot of the people who watch your stuff and watch my stuff are going to be coming from a kind of a more presuppositional perspective. I think one thing that you want to catch is the generic nature of the God he's critiquing.

Cornelius Van Til called this, when we talk about the God hypothesis, or when we talk about kind of a generic theism, we're beginning, Van Til said, with an abstract universal. There's no content to that.

It's very vague. And so once you fill in the data of the Christian God, many of these questions can actually easily be answered because we have the resources of knowing the details of this God and the revelation that he's provided.

So again, when we're arguing for God or when people are critiquing God, we want to be specific with the sort of God that we're talking about. We're not talking about general theism. As Christians, we are talking.

About the God of Scripture. Amen. In fact, one of the things I'll do in light of what you just said is I'll be talking to an atheist or atheist in a group chat room, wherever it is I go, and I'll talk about God generically.

And I say, look, I don't defend God generically. I defend the Christian Trinitarian God, and I will agree with you that all other gods are invalid and not worth discussing, or we just dismiss them. There's only one we're going to be discussing, the Christian Trinitarian God.

And this is significant because in Trinitarianism, we have a solution set to all kinds of other issues. Maybe you and I can get into that sometime and discuss that nature, because we talk about particulars and universals, the is of identity, is of predication.

We can talk about other issues that relate to this kind of stuff that a lot of people are just not aware of.

But maybe for another time. All right, let's keep going. So I'm sorry that the title isn't a hundred percent accurate. It's just really hard to put all of those caveats into a workable title. So with all of that out of the way, let's get to it.

Why God Communicates Through Language and Scripture

Why did God communicate through literature? This one goes to anyone who thinks any piece of literature is the word of a tri-omni-god. Literature, by its very nature, demands interpretation. Intelligent people can read the same passage with the same good intentions and still come away with very different interpretations.

Okay, I've got to jump in. What he doesn't seem to.

Understand so far, having seen all of this, I don't know if he gets into the issue of hermeneutical principles and interpretative principles, because that's one of the things we've got to deal with. Any kind of a literature can be understood if we understand its context.

One of the things I'll do with atheists when they say, you know, the Bible's written, it could be interpreted different ways, what I immediately start doing with them is, whatever they say, I start interpreting it the way I want it to be interpreted.

If they make any statement about the tri-omni-god can't exist, I'll say, no, I don't think I'm that handsome. Why? And what I'll do is I'll start saying whatever it is way off topic from what they're saying.

And I say, look, if you say it's just a matter of wild interpretations and you can't really know what the truth is, then how do you recognize or how do you justify that you can actually communicate with me?

Are you saying the Christian God is not able to communicate sufficiently to his people? It's a ridiculous claim and it doesn't have any merit to it. Right, and.

When I first heard this, I was like, well, what's wrong with language? I mean, if you have a problem with literature, then would you prefer that God communicated audibly? Well, if he's communicating with words, whether it's written or spoken, you're always going to have the risk of misinterpretation.

And that's not the function of the un-clarity of language. That's due to the individual. Isn't that right? I mean, you could misinterpret written words. You could misinterpret spoken words. But even with that reality, Matt, it doesn't logically follow that language is not a sufficient mechanism to convey truth.

Because the He's doing that right now. Well, that's true. And the fact that, how was I going to put this, that when we use words, okay, unless you're assuming a sort of linguistic agnosticism in terms of which language can't convey meaning, all right, once you go that route, you now refuted yourself on the one hand.

If you say, well, wait a minute, well, we could understand some things, then you're admitting that there are standards of interpreting words in which it's possible to know what someone is saying. And so you refute yourself that way.

So I don't think it's a problem at all to say that God communicated through, I'm not even going to use literature, he has, but language. I think language is a sufficient mechanism. And I think that should be a starting point for us, Matt.

I think that should be a presupposition. I presuppose as an essential feature of my worldview that God has used language as a sufficient mechanism to convey truth. If a person wants to challenge that, I would be interested in seeing how they would do.

That without refuting themselves. Yeah, and then we have the subjectivity of what meaning we can have assigned to varying sentences and varying contexts and things like that, which implies then if he's going to say that this is a problem there, why is it not a problem with himself?

So I see an inconsistency there, which is often the case with atheists. Ready? Mm-hmm.

...of its meaning. We're flawed beings with abilities of perception limited to the subjective alone. Communication through literature always leads to varying understandings of that literature. If God authored a piece of literature, then that means that literature has an intended meaning, but that humans are bound to interpret it in differing ways, many of them missing the intended meaning.

But.

They do that because of their sin that they have within themselves, that they are not in tune with what God is saying. So the reason that this is occurring, actually, his criticism is a support of the entrance of sin into the world according to Scripture that clouds the mind, which is called the noetic effect of sin.

And there are too many people and cults and various religious systems and even atheistic ones who go to the Word of God and then use varying prejudices and their faulty presuppositions to deny what the Word of God clearly says.

Now, granted, there are some areas of Scripture which are difficult to understand, and it takes practice, interpretation, and skill, but that's the nature of God's Word. Furthermore, would he be saying that and implying that God must communicate in such a base level without any levels of meaning, that God just has to communicate like a recipe book?

Well, that wouldn't be the case. And if he doesn't like the idea that God communicates via literature instead of just word of mouth, which can change, which can be lost, then he'd be saying, well, why didn't God write it down?

Okay, so he writes it down, and it's sufficiently communicated to us that we can understand what it means. Now, I would just suggest if this atheist, another atheist listening to this, want to have Bible studies with me, or maybe Eli too, we can go through how to interpret Scripture, and I can tell you what it actually means.

I'd be open to do that.

And it just simply doesn't follow, too, that the existence of multiple interpretations doesn't logically follow that, therefore, someone can't have the correct interpretation, nor does it follow that someone can't be justified in the particular interpretation that they're asserting.

It's just a complete non-sequitur from a logical perspective. It's kind of like giving, you know, if I were to give my students a math test and, you know, they gave me different answers to, you know, what is 2 plus 2, and I look at the answers, I'm like, oh, well, I guess we can't know what 2 plus 2 is because there are different answers.

I mean, it just doesn't follow. That's a fallacy on the one hand, and on the other hand, it shouldn't lead you to atheism, right? I mean, it doesn't follow at all.

Yeah, it should lead you to study. So, what does it mean, and how does it work? Yeah, it's simple, but some of us study a lot more than others. That is true. Yeah, that's right. Here we go.

At first glance, this seems to only reveal a flaw in human nature, but upon deeper consideration, it reveals flaws in any authoring tri-omni-gods. As I'm sure you know, countless sects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism exist varying wildly in practice, often due to differing interpretations.

Well, Abhi, stop right there. How does that show a weakness in God? What if God used language in his all-knowing nature, knowing that it is a sufficient mechanism to convey truth, and that man will distort his works because of it?

I think we're losing you a little bit. I mean, why can't that be an option? I mean, why? Okay.

Oh, can you hear me now? Yeah, back up 10 seconds, or 20 seconds.

Yeah, I'm saying, why does this reveal a weakness in the creator? What if the all-knowing creator chose language as a sufficient mechanism to convey truth, and that he knew that people would distort his words, not because his words are unclear, but because men suppress the truth and unrighteousness?

I mean, why can't that be an option? I mean, it just doesn't follow that it's a weakness in God.

That's right. And also, it could be a strength of God and a purposely designed method of God to have people twist the word of God and deny the word of God on their own, according to their own freedom, their own wills, so that the judgment of God upon them is just, because they've seen his word, they deny his word, and then they say, look, all these different things can happen because of that word.

See how insufficient, God, you are in the creation of your word? This could be one of the means that God has ordained in the world to separate the sheep from the goats, because Jesus says in John 10, 27, my sheep hear my voice and they follow after me and I give eternal life to them and they shall never perish.

And so those who are not the sheep don't get the word, so they're going to be criticizing and saying, it's God's fault. And that's what happens. It's like Adam saying to God, well, it's the woman you gave me.

So instead of holding responsibility for your own actions, lack of ability to understand something, and just say, look, it's God's fault because he can't do this, and then say, this is why he can't exist, or it's a difficult question, just shows in my opinion, that it's not a very deep thinking process, and it's a moral problem, and you haven't really considered what some of the other options.

Might be for it. That's just my opinion. Right. Now, there are a couple of things, too. If God spoke to us, that could be misinterpreted and people would complain, why didn't he write it down? When God writes to us, that could be misinterpreted and people complain, why did he have to write it down?

If God implants the knowledge within us, such that we know it, then people complain, well, that destroys our free will. I mean, God loses no matter what because the issue is not God per se. It is that people don't want to believe the words of God.

Instead of saying, the woman you gave me, the word you gave me. Right. I don't know this particular individual, but I'm thinking of someone like Matt Dillahunty, for example, whose standard of skepticism, if God did it some other way via a miracle, I don't know the level of skepticism this person has, but that wouldn't even be enough for Matt.

I even heard him say once that he can't be epistemically certain that he exists. How do you give evidence to someone who thinks that they could be wrong about their own existence? I mean, you see what I'm saying?

It doesn't matter what God does. I mean, if you set up a system in terms of which God is excluded from the outset, we're really not getting anywhere. I'm not saying that's what he's doing, but many skeptics do.

Do that. Right. Well, in that case, we need to examine the basic assumptions in their worldview and see if they can justify them. If they can't, then we can put them in the right direction.

All right, here we go. This inarguably leads to suffering. War between various sects entirely aside, I'll give an example. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the Bible forbids the ingestion of any blood, including life-saving blood transfusions.

If they're right, that means that they're obeying God's will and won't be punished for violating it. Jehovah's Witnesses altered the Bible. Charles.

Taze Russell started that cult. Even Christianity says it's a cult. It denies the basis of the faith. He didn't like the idea of hell, eternal torment, and things like that. The Jehovah's Witness organization has severely altered the word of God to make it fit what he wants.

I'm surprised he'd bring up the Jehovah's Witnesses as though they're actually Christians. He doesn't.

Understand the Christian faith. Now, he would probably say to you, well, that's your interpretation. I think the assumption is, well, if the Jehovah's Witness has an interpretation and they think it's right, then they're following God.

Yes, they would be following God if their interpretation is correct, but what is he missing? He's assuming that they can't be demonstrated to be wrong. Because words have meaning, we can go and we can take them to the mat on the text, but he doesn't think the text can have meaning, which is not a problem of the text.

It's a problem.

Of his view of the text. Amen. Good stuff. The majority of Christians who aren't JWs are further separated from God or even punished for not understanding the text. If JWs have themselves misunderstood the Bible, though, most Christians are just fine, while the JW's misunderstanding of God's word has them dying preventable deaths.

There are countless contradictory interpretations.

People don't die simply for misinterpreting a text. This is kind of like saying, what happens to people who live in the deepest, darkest jungle? They go to hell for nothing more than simply being ignorant of Jesus.

No, people go to hell because of their sin, and it is a sin to sinfully misinterpret and twist God's word. Those who are under the teaching of deceivers, who are never saved, are not punished because of their misinterpretation.

They were never Christians to begin with, and so they're punished for their sins. People are still sinners, whether they're deceived or not, right? And that's what they're punished for. It's not simply for.

Misinterpreting words in a page. Right. You know, I just thought of something. I'd like to see some of these videos going after specifically the Christian God. Now, one of the things I've found out among many atheists is they don't understand Christian theology.

They think they do, and they just start attacking. Well, if they're going to start attacking a generic God, a one-person God, a binitarian God, a polytheistic, panentheistic, whatever it might be, then, well, they're not tackling the Christian faith.

So I'm hoping we can find some atheists who have specific issues with specific Christian stuff and to see if they know what they're teaching. One of the things I've been doing over the past year or two on Discord and Clubhouse and other venues, I'll talk to atheists, and I'll say, you know, I try to be polite.

I'm honestly trying to be polite. I say, look, I appreciate that you can pretty much get the Christian faith right in some areas, but there's a lot of areas you're not aware of, particularly in this topic.

If you're willing, I'd like to sit with you or over the phone, whatever, here, and we could just talk. I'll teach you what we really believe. Not a single atheist has ever taken me up on it. Not one has ever said, okay, let's see what you really teach.

And this is significant because when I discuss Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses or Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, I want to know what their position is. And if someone says, Matt, you don't understand our position, I take it very seriously.

Well, okay, then what is your position? I stop what I'm doing. Please tell me what it is. I'm open. I don't see the atheists having that same kind of openness. They basically say they understand what the issues really are.

They're not going to be corrected. They're not going to grow. They're not going to learn. They're just going to proclaim. And I don't know if this guy's like that. He seems like a nice guy, but I've noticed that a great deal, that that seems to be one of the problems that occurs.

He does seem like a nice guy. I did, I did see a video with him where he interacted with, um, Sean McDowell, who either he came on his show or he was invited on and they had a very respectful discussion.

So he seems like a person who argues in good faith, but nevertheless, I mean, his arguments are, they're baked. There's a fallacies baked into that everything he's saying. Um, but nevertheless, we can continue.

Yeah.

Out there, many leading to the kind of unnecessary suffering I mentioned.

How does he know what's unnecessary suffering? That's always something. How do you know what's unnecessary? What standard do they have? I wish they say what is and is not necessary suffering.

You can't know if it's necessary, if it's unnecessary, unless you know the kind of the unseen behind the scene factors, right? Within the Christian world, because we believe in a God who's ordained everything that comes to pass, there's no such thing as unnecessary suffering or purposeless suffering within a world in which God is sovereign.

Everything has a purpose, whether we know what that purpose is or not. So he's just assuming kind of a generic God that doesn't have the features of creating a world in which suffering is never purposeless.

Or unnecessary. That's another thing is because what appears to be doing so many atheists do is they just lump all gods onto one basic God idea and then attack that. And I've specifically requested atheists to learn Christian theology and interact with Christian theology, not these abstract concepts.

And you kind of mentioned that at the beginning, but let's get going here.

If God authored or inspired such a text, he either couldn't do any better, didn't know the suffering he would cause, or didn't care if suffering resulted.

Or he had a sovereign plan with it exactly the way it is to bring to bear those who would rest his scriptures to their own destruction, because they, in their sinfulness, are resisting him. That's another option.

Why does he include that in there?

Right. Well, because he doesn't have to, because he's not critiquing Christianity. He's critiquing the, as pastor Doug Wilson said, a fuzzy benevolence in the sky. We don't really, it's the Abrahamic gods.

I mean, whatever that means, right?

Yeah. It's a lot of times that I'll do with atheists like him. I'm not saying one of these kind, I'm not trying to be derogatory, but what I'll do is I say, can you give me more specifics on this God that you're proposing here that you're attacking?

And there's a lot of questions that I can ask about the nature of God, his work attributes, coherence, eternality, capacity, and things like this. They don't seem to really have thought these things through.

And I tell them you need to know these things if you're going to be dealing with this kind of questions. And you go public, you're going to be cross-examined. Are you able to deal with these kinds of issues?

And I ask them again, do you want to learn what the Christian perspective is? So you can try and attack that and then we can deal with that, but they never take it up, pick me up on them.

All right. Couldn't do better communicating in a medium immune to misinterpretation than he is an omnipotent. What is that? What is that medium? If he is that God couldn't use a.

Medium that, that couldn't, uh, that doesn't suffer from misinterpretation. What is that medium other than removing all means of freedom and just forcing you to understand what he means?

Oh, CNN. Yeah. Yeah. CNN is perfectly clear and, uh, truthful and accurate all the time. Neither is Fox folks. All right. Yeah. What is that medium? Is he offering another thing? A lot of notice, a lot of atheists like to do is ask questions, but they don't really want to face the and they think their questions are really good questions when I'm not necessarily, and they don't seem to, um, know how to respond to potential difficulties with their own issues.

That means to me, they haven't thought these things through very much.

He would cause he's not omniscient. If he didn't care, if suffering resulted, he's not omnibenevolent any way you cut it. You can't consider the author of such a text to be anything close to a tri-omnigod.

Of course, there's a reasonable explanation for the flawed nature of sacred texts. Maybe they were just written by human inspiration alone, and no God was ever involved. Shouldn't you worship? Wait a minute.

Then how would you.

Account for the prophecies in the old Testament? For example, out of Daniel chapter 9, 24 to 27, where the prophecy is that, uh, after 69 weeks and seven weeks that the Messiah will come in to Jerusalem and from the issuing of the decree of, of, uh, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the walls of Jerusalem, which occurred in March 14th, 445 BC, which is 173 ,880 days later is when Jesus came in.

How does this work? It's just non-inspired people.

Well, we don't know when Daniel was written, of course.

Oh yeah, that's right.

We don't know. It could be interpreted in so many ways, you know.

That's right. And also blue sleeps faster than Wednesday.

That's right.

Cruelest God imaginable. This is for fans of Pascal's wager, which is a pragmatic, not evidential argument for belief in God over disbelief. Just for review, the argument goes, if God doesn't exist, a believer suffers only a finite loss in death.

But if he does exist, a believer enjoys an infinite gain in heaven. Meanwhile, if a person does not,.

I have some thoughts here, Matt, and this critique, and I guess we'll listen to the rest. I actually find myself agreeing with the atheist here, though not for different reasons than one might think. I think from a biblical perspective, we shouldn't argue as though the Bible might be false, or as if people are in a neutral state of ignorance regarding God.

So the Bible teaches us that all people inherently know that God exists. He's made himself known. He's made himself evident. Watch this, and this is in the NASB translation. He's made himself evident, not to them, but within them.

Romans 1, 19 through 21. Because that which is known about God is plain to them, because God made it evident within them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen and being understood through what has been made.

And the key phrase there is evident within them. And that's derived from the Greek, the phaneiron estin en autois. Phaneiron means evident or manifest, and autois literally in them. That's the in them, which is actually a refutation of many classical apologists who use Romans 1 to assert that it is teaching natural theology.

Romans 1 is not teaching natural theology. It's teaching natural revelation. Natural theology is what we do. We reason about God based upon what we observe. Natural revelation is what God does, and God reveals himself within them.

And so all that to say, if the Bible teaches that all men have a knowledge of God such that they are unapologetus, literally without an apologetic, then we shouldn't be using arguments like Pascal's wager.

We don't know if God exists, but he's the best bet, right? You see, I think the very use of that argument opens you up to the sorts of criticisms that he's going to use. That is the danger of arguing for an ambiguous, fuzzy benevolence in the sky.

And when you use arguments like Pascal's wager, you leave yourself wide open to be criticized rightly, I think. Those are my thoughts.

Good. Good thoughts. Well said. See, we're already half hour into this. We're a third through,.

So let's move along. And they're right. They stand to gain just finite luxuries on earth. But if they're wrong, they stand to suffer infinitely in hell. Therefore, a rational.

Person would seek to believe... What's that? You don't have the image up on the screen.

Oh, that's right. I'm sorry. Thank you. They're just looking at our beautiful faces.

Obviously, there's a false dichotomy here between the existence of a very specific God and the non-existence of God. But let's explore the logic of this argument and see where it leads. Within the reasoning of this argument, the objectives of belief and worship are to gain pleasure and avoid pain.

The argument... What was that? He says, I guess the purpose of that argument is.

To avoid pain and to experience pleasure or something like that. I guess we want to go to heaven and experience pleasure. We'd want to avoid pain and not go to hell.

Well, it's not a bad motive, but I liked how he seems to be privileged to know a universal standard of what people ought to do and why they ought to do it. That's interesting. Let's see if.

We can review that. This argument, the objectives of belief and worship are to gain pleasure and.

Avoid pain. No, that's not it. That's not what the Christian perspective is. He's not representing our faith. It's to bring glory to God and to enjoy him forever. The argument is purely an evaluation.

Of risk considering, well, rather arbitrarily chosen supernatural factors. There is a way to.

Make this argument more powerful and pragmatic. It's not arbitrary because he is assuming that the God concept and multiple God concepts are equally non-evidential. In other words, there's no evidence at all that can give you more warrant in believing one concept of God or another.

It's like, well, it could be any God, right? It doesn't matter. There's no evidence for it. It's arbitrary. Well, no. If someone thinks there is powerful evidence for the existence of a specific God, they might be more warranted in affirming that.

But then again, you get back to the biblical consistency. Do people need evidence for God if they already know that God exists? They know that God exists and there's evidence for God, and part of that evidence is that they can't avoid him.

That's powerful evidence. I'm reminded of a debate between Greg Bonson and Edward Tabash. Greg Bonson and Edward Tabash, during the Q &A, someone says extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

What is your extraordinary proof for your God? And Greg Bonson bites the bullet. He says, that's very good. I agree. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And here is my extraordinary proof that when you reject the Christian worldview, you lose the foundation for any proof whatsoever.

That's powerful evidence. That's transcendental evidence to which the atheist will respond, well, that's not real evidence because they want the microscope to put God in a test tube kind of evidence. But nevertheless, you know, I debated him.