What are the Beliefs of Atheism and Christianity

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

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Andrew Rappaport. Yes, I'm back in the seat after some time. As you can look behind me and see, there's actually books on the bookshelf.

It means I finally unpacked the books. After nine long months.

It's been a while. So, let me bring in our Dr. Silvestro. How are you doing this evening?

Great. How are you? Good, good. And I'm going to bring in Pastor Justin. Hello. All right.

So, let's start. We got Michael here. We wanted to jump right to him. We were going to have a discussion on masks, whether to wear them or not.

Why don't we hold that over because I don't know how long Michael has. So, I want to make sure we give him plenty of time.

So, for folks who may not have seen the description for this episode,

Michael is a Canadian, A, and he's got a podcast called

The Canadian Atheist. I know I used A in the wrong way. There's actually a proper way when you're supposed to say

A at the end. I'm sure I still have to apologize for it anyway.

You know, I was told by a Canadian how to spell Canada. Oh, really? A, B, A.

There you go. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, why don't, for folks who are not familiar with you, how about you introduce yourself first. You know, if you want, you reached out to me, actually for me to come on to your podcast and be on here.

And that was actually a long time ago, before I moved. So, I said,

I need time to unpack. But introduce yourself to folks. Yeah, again, thanks so much for having me.

So, my name is Michael. And a little over three and a half years or so ago,

I started a podcast with a dear friend of mine, Dean. It's his birthday today. Happy birthday, brother. And after this is all done,

I'm going to post a link to this on our podcast page. And for everybody who's listening,

I haven't been replaced by a doppelganger. But because I'm on a Christian channel, just like when we have

Christians on our show, I will, of course, be respectful and not be swearing like I normally do. So, yeah, it's actually me.

But, yeah, we love having Christians on and talking to Christians and doing little debate things.

We've done a bunch of debates on modern day debates with James, who's amazing. And, yeah,

I love talking about religion, Christianity in particular, because it's what I'm most familiar with, and discussing people's beliefs and see where the conversation goes.

So I submit myself to you for this evening.

Well, you had reached out. You saw my discussion. I wouldn't say it was a debate discussion with Schuyler Fiction that we had done on this channel.

Yeah, and it was great. I really enjoyed watching that. I'm a big fan of Schuyler. I think he's a great guy, and he has some great conversations.

And now he's got Dr. Josh with him, who's a real powerhouse, as far as being an expert in the ancient

Near East. It's great to see the stuff that they have. But it was interesting because I think the first time,

Andrew, I was exposed to you was actually through the Bible -thumbing wingnut, and Tim, and Matt Slick, and those guys.

And that was, I think, my first exposure to you a number of years ago. But it's interesting to see how you have evolved and now have your own thing going on.

And I've watched a number of the conversations that you've been involved with, and that's why

I reached out to you, was because I wanted to have some similar conversations like that. Debating is one thing, and debating can be fun.

Sometimes it's nice to pick a fight. But I find that more often it's more constructive to have discussions.

Yeah, I would agree. And so what we want to do, I gave you a choice of, hey, what would you want to talk about tonight?

And you wanted to talk about our beliefs as a good starting place. I think it is, yeah.

And so that good place to start is where our differences are. So I want to let you start off with your position.

What brought you to atheism? What it is that you believe? If you see a bunch of,

Anthony's trying to control, for those who are watching, we really shouldn't let

Anthony have controls. He's like putting up people's, just saying hi. He's smiling.

He's trying to lift a pastor. I'm not saying I did it, but it might be me. If the pastor shows up,

I'm going to give him props and say, hi, Pastor Chris, thank you for showing up. Yeah, so I see that it's just flashing because you're all just back and forth.

So this would be a good show to watch if you have ADD, because obviously

Justin and Anthony do. Oh, yeah, without a doubt.

So, Michael, go ahead. Why don't you start off with your position, what you believe? Great. Okay, so I was raised kind of a nominal

Christian. This will, I'm sure it'll make a few heads cock to the side.

My mom was Catholic and my dad was Lutheran, so have some fun with that. But I was raised kind of a nominal

Christian, kind of high holiday Catholic, and nothing was really pressed on me too much. I started asking a bunch of questions of my mom and dad, who both worked like crazy people to try to support five kids.

They were always busy, so my mom sent me off to church. And I went to church and kind of bought into it.

I believed it, or at least I think I did. And everything was fine until I guess

I hit my late teens, early 20s, started asking more questions, couldn't get some great answers to those questions, called myself agnostic for a bunch of years.

But the more I read, the more I studied, the less

I was able to reconcile the problems that I found.

And I guess it was about maybe 15 years or so ago. I'm 49 now.

So I guess it was probably my, I'd say my early, maybe more than 15 years ago, my early 30s when I kind of said, yeah,

I'm an atheist. And so that can be a contentious word. Even within the community, you'll find people arguing about that.

And it's infighting that kind of upsets me within our own community. You'll see people, lots of people who say, you know, atheism is just the lack of belief in a

God or gods. Depends what you look at. That's certainly what the dictionary says. If you look at it from a more philosophical perspective, then it says, you know, it's the belief that gods don't exist, which is the position that I take.

And I take that mostly with the Christian God, because I haven't, I can't honestly say that about all gods, because I haven't researched them all.

I've read the Quran. It's a painful book to try to read, especially in an English translation.

I've read some other holy books, studied with lots of different groups of people, people that I think a lot of your listeners would see as maybe not

Christians, like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. I've got some funny stories if anybody wants to hear some of those.

And yeah, so now I'm an atheist. I would also say that, and I said this in I think a message with you,

Andrew. I think that, I think there's a lot, I think there's some skirting within the atheist community.

I accept the fact that my lack of a belief, strong lack of belief in the

Christian God, does burden me with, I guess, place a burden of proof on me.

And I don't shirk that responsibility. I think I should, I think atheists who say, God doesn't exist or I don't believe in God, I think they should be able to give a reason for that, just the same way as 1

Peter 3 .15 says, that you should give a reason for the faith that's within you. So that's a little bit about me.

Helps if I unmute. So, yeah, I mean, obviously folks who know, or at least who

I'll give what I believe, when I think that Anthony and Justin are going to pretty much agree.

And if not, they're just wrong. We have to let him back onto this podcast.

Yeah, why do you let me back on my own show? So as a

Christian and, you know, Michael, you may not know as much of my background. You were raised, as you said, in a nominal

Christian family. I was raised in a Jewish home. I was raised to believe

Jesus Christ is Hitler's God. I did not, I was not looking for a savior. I wasn't looking for help.

I wasn't looking for anything. It was really, for me, it was an issue of mathematics.

It was a thing where someone was going through the prophecies of the scripture, and I was running calculations.

And what I was doing in my head was putting those things that would be coincidence versus self -fulfilling. Anything self -fulfilling

I'm going to ignore, because if it's something that someone can fulfill on their own, can make happen, then you could do that to make it seem like it's a prophecy.

So I was looking for things that were, in my mind, genuine prophecies that would be in the coincidence category.

And in that light, I ended up coming to the point of realizing that when you look at all of the prophecies that Christ fulfilled, it is beyond statistical impossibility that these occurred by coincidence.

It's just mathematically impossible, which is 10 to the 48th power, for those that want to know what that statistic is.

So I ended up believing in the New Testament, not necessarily Christ. Remember, I was raised believing

Jesus Christ is Hitler's God. I wasn't looking to be a follower of his. But mathematically,

I had to realize that this can't be by coincidence. So I then started to say, okay, what does the

New Testament believe? Really, the issue for me, and this would be true for all Christians, that we believe that Jesus Christ is

Almighty God, who came to earth as a man, died on a cross in the place of our sins.

And sins are basically a breaking of his law of anything going against the nature of God.

And so what I ended up realizing is that I always knew that I was a sinner.

That was not a struggle. I almost burned my house down twice. My mother put it out with a fire extinguisher the second time.

We called the fire department. So I got better at my sin. But the thing is that I didn't think

I needed a savior. I actually believed that being Jewish, I was God's chosen people. And I actually said

I was God's chosen people, as in like Flynn, I didn't think I needed to be right with God. I thought my birth gave me that right.

And so that's sort of how you're raised when you're Jewish. And so what

I needed or ended up seeing is that as I looked at the

New Testament, what it taught, that Jesus Christ not only died, but he rose from the dead three days later.

And that vindicates everything he said about himself, that he is God, that he has the ability to offer the forgiveness of sin, and that he did die in our place.

So many people try to deal with guilt of sin in so many different ways, whether it's drugs or alcohol or work or lots of different things.

And yet the thing we end up seeing is there's not the only way to have genuine forgiveness is in Christ.

We can mask things. So for me, it was more of a logical thing.

But what is it Christians believe? Well, put it simply, I would hold to two presuppositions that I believe everyone knows.

That everyone knows God exists and that he has spoken. And so we end up seeing that in Romans chapter one, that God has made his attributes and his power absolutely clear to all.

So no one is with that excuse. God is not going to judge any of us based on a knowledge we don't have.

He has given us a knowledge of him. He's given us a conscience so we know right from wrong. And we know that we're not right by his standard.

And so we need to be right in his standard. And he did that by dying on the cross for us.

And so with that, what we need to do is to repent. It means to turn from trusting ourself as a good person or to trust my good works, or in my case, to trust my

Judaism and to trust what Christ did on the cross as a payment of sin. So that would be what

I would hold to. I know that Anthony and Justin would hold pretty much the same.

So let me ask you some questions, Michael, with what you said. Just before you do that, I saw a little comment pop up on the screen there that Melissa said, a lot of atheists come out of Catholicism.

So my mom was Catholic. I wasn't raised Catholic, just as a point of correction. Oh, okay. Actually, so what

I would say is in all the evangelism I do, especially on college campuses, the vast majority of people that call themselves agnostic or atheist either grew up in what they would call a

Christian home or a Catholic home. So we do make the distinction. We would not say Catholics or Christians.

So in your case, you kind of grew up with both. You grew up with a Catholic mom, you said, and a

Christian Lutheran dad. And that was very consistent with what we typically see. Yeah, but I just want to make a distinction that I wasn't actually raised

Catholic. Out of curiosity, were you raised with any religious background?

Yeah, like I said, kind of nominal Christian, you know, kind of, you know, high holiday stuff, things like that.

But again, like to reiterate, my parents both basically killed themselves. Not killed them, literally killed themselves working and, you know, trying to raise, take care of five kids.

Right. It was when I started asking the questions, my mom kind of sent me off to church.

And I ended up going to, I started off at the Salvation Army. And then

I ended up at a Presbyterian church because it was closer to home. And that's kind of where I stayed. So, all right.

So it was kind of interesting. You say the high holy days, which that's a Jewish term.

Like holiday, you know, like Christmas and Easter. But yeah, that's kind of interesting.

But so what were some of the questions that you had that you said in your testimony there?

You said you just couldn't get answers to. What were some of those questions that you had?

Well, I mean, it started with, it started mostly with reading the Bible. I have read it more than once.

Some portions more than others. But like you've probably heard before from other atheists, it was hard for me to get at a

Genesis without cocking my head to the side and say, this doesn't make any sense. I couldn't reconcile it with what

I was learning at school, you know, from a science perspective.

And I'm not a scientist in any way. There's one thing I don't talk about online is what I do for a living.

What do you do for a living? What is it you do for a living? And how much do you make? And then what's your bank account number?

My formal education is in social work. But that's not what I do for a living. I'm a public servant.

Yeah. There's reasons that some people don't share what they do for a living, you know, when they're, yeah.

Especially in the cancel culture. Maybe you don't have that in Canada. Oh, no. Oh, no. Yeah. Well, it's less prevalent in Canada.

But with social media, it's everywhere. And so, anyway, you asked me a question, you know, what

I had a hard time reconciling. And it was mostly the things that I was learning in school were the things that I would read in the

Bible. And, you know, I'd ask my parents about it. And, you know, they did their best, you know, to try to guide me.

And mostly, my mom ended up just sending me back to church to ask those questions.

And it ended up coming down a lot to, you know, you have to have faith, you have to have faith, stuff like that. And I eventually got to the point where I could no longer, yeah, where basically

I could no longer reconcile the things that I read in the Bible that did not make sense with what

I was learning. And that was about it. Okay. So it sounds like you're saying science became your authority, right?

Because given the two, you're saying it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't make sense.

It seems you're comparing it. I'm just asking for clarification. It sounds like you're saying that it doesn't make sense what you were learning in school in science class compared to what the

Bible says. Not just in science, but I mean, in just in things that we could, and now

I'm kind of expanding on that to where I am now. The things that the Bible says that we just know just aren't possible.

Like the firmament, right? Like it's just like the firmament's not possible.

I understand the firmament. Your authority is the

Bible, right? I get that. But there was never such a thing as a firmament.

How are you defining a firmament? Just so I understand. Crystalline dome that the Bible says separated the waters above from the waters below it.

Okay. Well, there's no crystalline dome. The Bible says there was.

Separating the waters below from the waters above. Right. Where were the waters above it?

Well, we see that now, don't we? No, we don't. Okay. Have you ever seen an ocean?

Well, sure. Yeah. I've seen clouds. Yes. What are they made of? Well, they're made of vapor.

I mean, again, I'm not a scientist. Yeah. Water molecules. Yeah. Are you suggesting that that's what the

Bible meant? Well, you can say that's part of it. I mean, you're asking a question based upon what it would have been like pre -flood geology.

Basically, you're talking about pre -fall, pre -flood geology, the way that God created everything when he first created the whole entire world.

And he ordered it. And there was no sin. There was no fall or corruption. And you're asking about the firmament and separation.

I mean, look, there are people that agree, that say that there was a, if you want to say, bubble around the earth.

And they try to say there's a water bubble. You said crystalline.

I mean, there's people that say that all over the place. And the thing is, you're dealing with a one sentence that we don't know about because we weren't there.

This is pre -flood geology, pre -flood creationism, and what

God did in his creative work before the flood.

And you're asking for anyone to be able to give an exact definition. What I can tell you is what the scripture says.

And what I can say is, you're saying that it's impossible. It can't happen.

It can't. There's no way. It's impossible. My argument with that would be you're dealing with the God that created everything in the universe in six 24 -hour days.

He created everything perfectly. And then we're trying to come back from our perspective today to say, see, he couldn't have done that.

And then we're saying, well, science says, science says. Sure. I mean, if you want to look out into the space and look at all the quasars and all the different stars and look at all the structure, there are many things that science says is happening now that couldn't possibly happen.

Let me do this, Justin. And this may be something,

Michael. There used to be a theory called the canopy theory that many Christians would hold to.

It has been proven mathematically that that can't work. And that may be what you are thinking when you're saying that, you know, affirm it.

Because there were some people that used to put forth this hypothesis that there was a canopy of water vapor that covered the earth in a greenhouse type case.

And, you know, I'm going to let Anthony, you've studied this one a little bit more than I have with the canopy theory, what's wrong with it, and what are the views that people would hold.

And so this may actually answer some of the questions that you did have. Now, see, this is a hard question to answer, right?

Because the reality is what Justin just said is the thing we have to understand. We are living in a post -flood world.

The world was different. So while scientific law would have been the same before after, what wouldn't be the same is the conditions of the earth and conditions of the entire universe before flood to after flood.

So trying to reconstruct this is a very difficult thing. Number two, there has been a lot of bad teaching out there about canopy theory.

And it would take me an hour to go through all the different types that are out there. It's really not so important.

As much as it is what does the word say, if you're – so starting with the Bible, the separate of the firmament above to the firmament below, this is literally water above and water below.

Exactly. And we don't know exactly the entire context of it. So we have theories.

We have theories that the pre -flood world was very rich in oxygen compared to today, which is why we would have seen life be able to last longer than it does today, especially in the humans.

But there's a whole host of things we can think about. Here's the thing. And this is kind of where I want to go in terms of our direction.

If we're going to talk a little bit about science here. We would come at this, Michael, from the perspective that there is one eyewitness.

Because if we're trying to construct something that happened in the past, something historical, this is evolution from an atheist perspective or creation for ours.

To be fair, I don't think it's fair to say atheism is evolution.

While it probably is fair to say that most people, like 93 percent of the National Academy of Science, affirm the theory of evolution, it's probably not fair to say atheistic evolutionist because atheism is an answer to a single question.

Yeah, I get it. The problem, though, is that when we understand atheism, we have to look at origins.

And the only option in origins has to be evolution, Big Bang, to some degree.

I mean, that's the only option. The Big Bang says nothing about evolution. Evolution only happens when life is already there.

Yeah. Nothing about the Big Bang. So here's the problem. In the discussion last week with the other guy, and we wish we could have brought

John, but we had the show for him last week for the first hour or so.

This is the issue. Scientists do always want to start with a single cell. There's a reason for that because the idea of non -life turning into life goes against all scientific law, scientific law that they know exists.

They don't want to acknowledge that. They don't want to acknowledge origins. But the problem is that for them to believe in evolution, they have to have a starting point.

They can't just say, well, there's a cell, and then all of a sudden we can look at the possibilities of evolution from there.

No, we have to account for that cell all the way from its beginning to the material beginning of the universe as well as the entire chain reaction of events that would have occurred from how that material got there in the beginning.

Whatever bang supposedly happened, all of the billions of years that would have occurred for the Earth to finally form, and then for the parts to come together, and then for the cell to come about.

We're missing half the history according to evolutionists. But before we get off into that, there's something

I want to make abundantly clear for all of us here. A lot of people hold science in high regard.

And look, I'm a dentist by trade. I was a math and chemistry double major in school. I took quantum. I took all kinds of great stuff in terms of classes.

I love science. Here's the problem. We have learned about opioids.

I'm assuming you've taken opioids before, right? You got sick. You got hurt. And you may have taken some Vicodin, some

Percocet at some point. Hadra? Yeah, actually, I did take. I took. I did have exactly what you said.

I had an injury. And I was prescribed Percocet. And I took one. And I was like seeing flying horses.

I took one, and I'm like, yeah, I'll stick with Tylenol. Yeah, some people do. Some people do.

Flying horse. Well, I remember that. But so I bring this up because if you look at the scientific literature, you will read all about the science on how opioids work.

And so you'll see something called a mu receptor. And it'll talk. You'll have pages and pages and pages about mu receptors.

And then you start to dig into the research. Guess what you find? You have no clue what a mu receptor is.

We honestly have no clue how an opioid even works. You know, our body makes opioids thousands of times more potent than anything we can get from a drugstore.

And we don't know how it works. This is the case with nearly all of our medications.

Science, while I love science, it explains so very little.

Most of it is what we as fallible human beings have had to kind of put into the missing pieces.

And so I bring this up because there is a whole host of things that are missing in our understanding of how a simple drug we take makes pain go away.

We all acknowledge it makes pain go away. No problems with that. It works. It works for me. But we don't know how it works.

And so this is my whole point about science is even if we grant you a grant evolution to start with a single cell, all we have is billions of bones, complex organisms all over the earth.

And that's it. And we have scientists who have attempted to literally fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle of which it is way more than 99 .999

% of what we would need to know to be able to verify evolution. That's a huge problem.

So when we're talking about science, I just want to make sure, like, for our listeners, we understand what science does and what its severe limitations are.

Before you answer, Michael, let me just ask you a question. It is more of a technical thing. We're getting some feedback, and I don't know if it's because you don't have headphones on.

I don't know if we are. If maybe if not, who's ever not speaking should probably mute.

Just so when when I know when Anthony was talking, we were getting it earlier just when someone was when two people were talking.

But I know that I saw in the chat some other people had heard some cutting out. So if you have headphones that you could put in our earbuds, that'd be good.

If not, we'll just we'll just try to mute when we're not. I can grab them if need be.

Otherwise, I will meet when I'm not speaking. Yeah. OK, go for it. So I have to go ahead and answer Anthony. And then I had some follow up question.

OK, so you said a lot there. And I want to go back a little bit because it's it.

So it's really interesting. So, again, atheism. I want to restate atheism in answer to a single question.

You talked about the Big Bang there and then you talked about evolution. And it's and it's really important that we get a distinction between those things.

So so the Big Bang, which is a term that gets tossed at a lot from what I've read, it's actually more we're talking about the the inflation of space time.

Sean Carroll, who's a physicist, has actually hypothesized now that the universe may not have actually had a quote unquote beginning, that it may have always been around.

And part of the hypothesis is we know that supermassive gravity can affect space time so much so that one one second can equal infinity when t equals zero.

So we don't actually but but we're still learning about all that stuff. And again, I'm not a scientist. I only play one on TV.

So I just want to be clear about that. When we're talking about evolution, though, you you you you kind of tossed an evolution going from a single cell to all these other things to the start of it, which is different, which is a biogenesis.

And you said something a minute ago that I want to commend you for.

You said you were talking with me. You said, we don't know. I don't know. And there's. And I think that that's sometimes that's the most honest thing we can say that we don't know something.

And so how did how did chemistry become biology? I don't think we know.

I certainly don't know how chemistry became biology. My lack of intelligence in that area or the ability to explain it to you is it certainly isn't evidence for creation.

It's just evidence of my lack of understanding. But there's nothing wrong with with not knowing the answer to a question.

You said, well, you know, where did all this stuff come from? And what I find really interesting, and I don't necessarily want this to become too argumentative, but you think you think that there's this thing that's always been there that just poofed it into existence.

So so and I find this a lot when I speak to Christians. So what do you think? Everything just popped into existence. I'm like, well, so do you.

And that's not and I'm not trying to do a two quote or anything like that, but I'm saying you you are just as guilty of saying, you know, there's this there's this thing that's there and it made everything.

Versus me saying, I don't know how I don't know how it got there, but but now it is. And when you talk before about things that, you know, science and evolution doesn't know the answers to.

Well, no, we don't. But we certainly know more than we certainly know more than we did in 1859 when when

On the Origin of Species was was published. And we're finding out now that there are more questions, but we know we know more than we did.

But because there's so much more to know, we know more. We know less about more. But our knowledge is growing.

And in order for I think what what you said to be really be a thing we have, it's because it's not just biology, right?

We have biology, chemistry, geology, all these are the different disciplines, all converging on the same conclusion.

Contrary to your beliefs. So let's work through this for a bit.

And yeah, I'm not surprised that you see things contrary to our beliefs, because we've had, you know, since Dewey, a whole lot of people that are basically saying the

Christian belief can't be taught. You know, you were mentioning how many scientists accept evolution.

Well, if you believe in creationism, it's hard to get a job in the scientific field, unless you're working for a

Christian organization. So, you know, so but let's work with what you had said with the creation universe.

There's really only three points. What I'd like to just correct you just on one thing there, not to correct, but to offer as a point of contention to it.

There are lots of believers who have pretty high profile jobs in science, like Francis Collins, like an absolutely brilliant man.

Yeah. And I'm happy to believe, you know, the same thing you do. Yeah.

But the point being is that, you know, it's there. There is a bias that is out there.

And so you cannot we can't ignore the fact that if there's a bias, that that's going to affect that.

But we can break this down scientifically and logically to answer the question. There's three possibilities.

Let's start with what you brought up that the universe might have always existed. Well, the first law of thermodynamics, which is it's not a theory, it's a law, didn't proves that that can't be true.

The matter and energy would have had a beginning. OK, this is something that Einstein was able to prove out.

So the universe could not have always existed. And this is the reason for the idea of a

Big Bang, a singularity that had so much so much energy that it exploded. And that explains the expansion of the universe.

So the universe always existing first law of thermodynamics would would prove that's not the case.

Well, the second would be, could the universe have created itself? And that then we go to logic that would violate the laws of logic.

Because the universe would have to first exist to be able to create itself.

And so it cannot be its own generation. It needed the last option.

The only option left, someone or something created the universe. You're right, Michael, when you say that we would say that the universe popped into existence.

That is true. The difference is we have the only one that is based in science and and logic.

Sorry, I'm sorry. Finish off. So when we say this, it's it's not there's many that try to pit like, well, you have to believe in science or the

Bible. And that's not the case. That's that's not true. You can believe in both.

But your authority, the only authority is got to be the because when we look at the creation of universe, there is only one scientific record for it.

Right. That's science. We do science. You have to be able to observe. You have to be able to create.

You know, so you have a scenario. You have to create the experiment. You have to observe it.

Right. You document it. Well, that's what we have in Genesis. We have the creation of the universe.

It was observed by the creator of the universe. It was documented by the creator of the universe.

That's the only scientific record that we can have for it, because it's the only one that of someone that was there.

Anything else that we do is philosophy. It's not science. OK, so go ahead and you want to respond.

It's interesting. So when you're talking about the universe can come from from nothing, that's certainly not my idea.

I would if you if you don't agree with that, then I would suggest you take it up with physicists like John Carroll.

There's also have you read? I know he's kind of a hot button issue right now for other reasons.

But whatever he's done certainly doesn't delegitimize his science. But there's a little guy named Lawrence Krauss who wrote a book, a universe from nothing.

Why do you insult his height? A little guy. Because I've because I've stood next to him at the 80th rally four years ago.

Yeah, I think he's about your height, Anthony. You wouldn't call him a little guy, but I would shoulder in the pictures.

He's yeah, I've I've I've met him. He's been on the podcast. We've sat and had lunch together. And he he admits that his title of nothing is very much tongue in cheek.

We don't have an example of nothing. We have no idea what nothing even is. And so it's actually because we do know what nothing is.

Well, no, if you have an actual demonstration of nothing, you're going to be famous really fast.

Nothing. Nothing is what what rocks dream of. Well, well, that's an interesting point.

But I mean, that doesn't even nothing. Nothing like consciousness.

Yeah. Nothing is nothing. It's not something. And that's that's the thing. When you read Richard Dawkins, you know, he was trying to make the case for gravity as what is, you know, in its role in the creation universe.

And, you know, when he would say that nothing isn't nothing, it's actually something. Well, then it's not.

Dawkins, when it comes to cosmology, he's a biologist. I wouldn't listen to Richard Dawkins cosmology.

He's a biologist. Richard Dawkins is a biologist. Well, actually, Richard Dawkins is a zoologist.

But Stephen Hawking's is a physicist. Yeah. Well, your

Lawrence Krauss actually debated and argued about nothing being something. And in one of his discussions, he actually talked about the very fact that nothing is something.

He did say that. Yeah, he did. Well, so. So, I mean, a minute ago, you said that all the sciences have converged together and now you're trying to separate them out.

And I'm not trying to attack. Trust me, I'm not. No, it's fine. You're trying to you're trying to converge the sciences in a moment and then now now separate them out, saying, well, this one

I wouldn't trust in that one. So what I said was his title, a universe from nothing.

He said, what is nothing? I mean, the nothing nothing is the absolute void of anything.

It's the nothingness. There is there is nothing means no thing. There is not not concept, not thought, not not energy, not mass, not matter.

There is no thing inside of this vast nothing. And the problem with it is, is, you know, at the very beginning of this, you said that you started from a point of creation.

You had a problem with Genesis. You have a problem with the point of creation. Now you have two choices and you've went to the other choice and the atheistic choice.

And I think what Anthony was trying to explain is the atheistic choice is no God. Therefore, something outside of God had to have been the creator.

And whether you say Big Bang or whatever you want to call it, your argument has to be not just anti theism, because,

I mean, admit it. We're now past the point of I just don't believe or know if God exists to there is no

God. You know, there is no gods. I mean, that's what you said. We've tossed a couple different things in there.

OK, I do. I do sometimes identify as an anti theist, but I'll get to that in a second. That's fine.

So so like I said, Lawrence Krauss, when in his title, a universe from nothing, he told me, he said, he said,

I named it that way. Pretty much tongue in cheek. He said, you can take a point in space and you can zero in on a point in space with a telescope where where there where there is nothing, where there are no stars, stuff like that.

I said, there's all kinds of stuff there. Then that's not nothing. OK, exactly. And that's what he said.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But again, I don't know. That's not what he's talking about. Let him finish, because.

OK, but but what I'm saying is, is that is that when it comes to that kind of stuff,

I leave it to the scientists to argue these types of points, because that's not what I am.

I look at you. I look at the different arguments. And then what you guys said was, do you try to apply?

You know, does this make sense to you? And I try to apply it from my perspective and say, well, does it make sense to me?

But you are applying logic. The other thing that you said was, is that I start from this no God perspective. No, I didn't.

I didn't start. I didn't even get to a no God perspective. I have become convinced that that a

God does not exist. If you have the capacity to convince me that a God exists, I will have no choice but to accept it because I will have become convinced.

I reached this out of a you know, I don't accept sin because I think that's just made up.

You know, I didn't just decide, oh, I don't like this stuff. So I'm going to I'm going to turn away from it.

It is not something that I have. Presently.

In the in the light of everything else that's available, have the capacity to believe. But I am open to being convinced.

OK, so so here's the thing. You say you're open to being convinced. Do you think you have an evidence problem or a spiritual problem?

I don't. What do you mean by spirit? Well, the immaterial part of you.

I don't think there's an immaterial part of me. OK, so you don't believe in the immaterial.

No, I said I don't think there's an immaterial part of me. So I believe that everything that I am.

So everything that is Michael will cease to be when this carcass dies.

OK, so I'm just going to ask a couple of questions just for clarity. I understand. So you believe that we are purely chemical reactions.

Would that be fair? Purely chemical. Do I believe I'm a chemical reaction?

We're because we're made up of chemicals. We're only physical. And therefore, there's there's no immaterial part of us.

We do what we do because we're we're a bag of chemicals, right? It's the chemicals reacting within us.

I agree with that. OK, I'm going to go a little bit off tangent for a bit just to understand.

So do you do you believe do you accept people who are transgender? In other words, someone is born, say, biologically male and they they identify, though, as a female.

Do I what do you what do you mean by do I accept it? Do I think that it's a that it's a possibility? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm certainly no one to judge them. Identify how you want. I don't I don't care how you identify. OK, so here's the thing.

If we're a bag of chemical reactions, we are going to react to our chemicals. If someone is born biologically male, their chemicals are male.

They're going to act male. They're going to think male. They're going to be male. How could they identify as anything other than male without an immaterial part of them that is working contrary to the biology of their maleness?

That right there is something that has to be outside of just chemical reactions because they're identifying different than their biology.

OK, so. Again, the bit that I do know,

I'm not going to try to pass myself off as an expert, but so I have male and female hormones running through my body.

I just have a dominance of male hormones. You know, and it's the same with all of us.

If we look at if we look at anatomy, right, male testicles are just ovaries that grow outside the body.

You know, I have as a male, I have mammary glands like these are just biological facts.

And so sometimes nature doesn't get it right. OK, so you said they're biological facts.

Do you accept you have mammary glands? Well, I'm going to I'm going to challenge you to show me that, as you said, testicles are ovaries just outside.

You can look it up in the book Grey's Anatomy. Look, it's pretty simple.

They're not because ovaries produce eggs, testicles produce sperm. They're not the same. They may have started from from from the same clump of cells.

And they evolve differently. Not evolved. They were pre -programmed to to make themselves into different things.

And that's and see, this is the issue that Andrew was just getting to a few moments ago, is is this issue of immaterial versus the material.

So you live in a materialistic worldview, right? You believe that you're nothing more than just the the random chance process of random chemical reactions over billions of years.

Right. I mean, that's that's essentially who you are. That's a that's a that's a pretty big oversimplification.

But OK, for the sake of argument. How is it any more complex than that?

I mean, you've got laws of chemistry, laws of physics and random chemical reactions that started in pond scum or dirt came up.

The first cell comes about and then since then you have more random chemical reactions doing nothing but obeying laws of chemistry and physics.

Right. I mean, how much more is it to that? I said

I said I'll grant you for the sake of argument. What's your point? OK, so so my point is, is this is that if you just hear it as a bag of random chemical reactions.

Right. Nothing but a lot of chemistry and physics. Are you controlling your conversation right now?

Are you talking with us? Yeah, I'm not a solipsist.

I accept that there are external minds and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, and I would agree we're having a real conversation.

You are having real thoughts, logical thoughts in your mind. You're processing thoughts. What you're about to say and you say it.

And here's the problem is that's all immaterial stuff that doesn't result from a materialistic view.

It can't be accounted for in a materialistic world view. But it gets even better. Is this issue information?

Information requires intelligence to produce it and to interpret it.

And so when we look at and it would take a while to unpack all of this.

The reason why that clump of cells either became testicles or became ovaries is because of the information that was programmed into cells.

And because of other information in other cells that was preprogrammed, different hormones caused that clump of cells to either form into ovaries or form into testicles.

This is the way biological systems work. But it is all based off of this immaterial information that had been put there by somebody who is far superior to that cell.

That is somebody who has the ability to program and has the ability to have knowledge to begin with in order for all of that to come about.

So how did you determine that whatever cause. Whenever it comes to this.

I love Kalam. I love the Kalam argument. It is a lot of fun. Because I have no problem granting it.

Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Life began to exist.

Universe life had to have a cause. I grant it all. How did you determine that cause wasn't natural?

So let me put it this way. It would be impossible for it to be natural.

Because it created nature. So it has to be. Whatever caused it has to be by definition outside of nature.

Exactly. Okay. So let's work through this slowly then.

You have a beginning of nature right? Of the natural world. Everything that exists is natural.

Regardless of its state. We don't know. So if we take it back as far as we can go.

We eventually. We arrive. We arrive at a point where we say. Something happened.

What happened? I don't know. You insert God. I stay personally with I don't know.

No. That's the claim that needs to be backed up. Well here's the thing.

You actually don't. You actually insert science. You claim we have a science. A God of the gaps.

But you have a science of the gaps. Every time you're trying to shove science in to answer things.

But then you back away when science doesn't have the answers. But what I'm trying to deal with is. What we know is the natural world.

If it had a beginning. Right? The natural world has a beginning. If it had a beginning.

So if it had a beginning. As you said you were willing to grant. Then it had a creator.

That has to by definition. Be outside of nature. If nature had the beginning.

If nature was created by something. Whatever created it by definition. Has to be outside of it.

And that's what I don't grant. Okay. So you believe. That something can create itself.

No what I said was I don't know. Okay. So let me ask this. Can something create itself?

I will actually. We know that. I was reading something about this. Not too long ago.

A guy I'm sure you're familiar with. He went to this thing called the phylogeny explorer project. And he was talking about.

The RNA world hypothesis. And how RNA actually. Has the capacity to.

Spontaneously generate. So where there was. Where there wasn't RNA. Now there is

RNA. And this is just something I read very recently. So. I wouldn't hold that up as gospel.

But that's one example. Okay. Logically. It's impossible.

Because for something to create itself. It has to first exist.

So where did God come from? God always existed. He didn't have a beginning. I'm sorry.

That's classic special pleading. Everything needs a creator. Except this one thing.

No. It's not special pleading. Nature needs a creator. But God always existed.

Let's be clear with our terms. God is not nature. He didn't have a beginning.

So he didn't need a cause. Explain how that's not special pleading. Because. You're arguing it's special pleading.

Because you're saying that God is within nature. No. It's a violation of the law of identity.

Okay. You first have to define God properly. You can't say that everything in nature has a beginning.

Therefore God had a beginning. Because God is not nature. He's not in the natural world.

Actually within Kalam I didn't say that. I said everything that begins to exist has a cause. That's what I said. Did God have a beginning?

No. I don't think that it exists. But what I'm saying is that because of the complexity all this other stuff it had to have a creator.

It couldn't come from nothing. And then you're saying here's this God that has just always been.

That is special pleading. Now I understand that you use that you're going to define it differently.

And I from my perspective you have to define it differently. Because it has to fit within what you already accept.

Because you hold the Bible as your ultimate authority, you have to start with that. No actually you have it backwards.

You're the one giving the different definition. Because you're the one I would say has to do that because it's the only way you can say it's special pleading.

The God that we're speaking of, the God that you claim doesn't exist. Is the

God that is self existent. And has not had a beginning. That is clear in the scriptures.

God never had a beginning and he doesn't have an end. He is eternal. And therefore as you gave the definition for the

Kalam argument, everything that had a beginning God's not included in that because he didn't have a beginning.

So it's not me trying to fit something in. It's me using the proper definitions.

If you can show in scripture where God says he had a beginning that would be different.

But the scripture is quite clear in many passages that he was from everlasting to everlasting.

That he had no beginning. And it's hard because and I don't

I want to preface what I'm about to say by saying

I don't mean any disrespect in what I'm about to say. But there could not be a less reliable book than the

Bible. Because the same book that says from everlasting to everlasting also says stuff like a donkey spoke.

And people walked around a wall and blew horns at it and it fell over.

And all and a dead Jew came back to life. So I understand that you hold it as your ultimate authority.

And I cannot do that because of the claims that it makes.

Here's the thing. Let's look at this. You're the reason you have difficulty with that is because you ignore the supernatural.

Which you ignore the immaterial part of us. You ignore the things that are

I mean you argue that there's not an immaterial part of us. But if there's no immaterial part of you then you have no ability to reason.

You can't explain laws of logic. You can't explain truth, knowledge. All these things are immaterial. Okay? Because here we are having a logical conversation.

And all of those things are not evidently true. You can claim that all these things exist.

But do you have the capacity to demonstrate the supernatural exists? Okay so I want folks to know what you did.

I talked about the immaterial and you went to the supernatural. Do you have the capacity to demonstrate that?

There are several things that cannot be. So let's look at the laws of logic.

Okay? The laws of logic. How are they if there's no immaterial part of us how do we know the laws of logic?

Well the laws of logic are descriptive. They describe reality. They're not descriptive.

So how do they come about? Oh I don't know. I personally don't know.

I think we discovered them. And maybe that's the wrong word to use.

I think we maybe discovered.

Maybe it's the right word. I'm certainly not mastered in philosophy. I feel like I'm stumbling over things.

The laws of logic describe the world around us. How they came about I don't know.

For folks who may be listening, watching let's understand we're trying not to have a three -on -one ganging on.

We do have three hosts here. I think we're trying to be fair with you and make sure you have opportunities to speak and express yourself.

I don't feel I'm being treated unfairly at all. There's a little leave studio button here. I can just leave if I felt that.

I honestly don't feel that way. But I want folks to know that you're

I believe being honest and people need to be fair with each other. You're saying, you know,

I don't think anyone should jump on you if you and you're trying to word things. Well, I don't know if I don't want you because you're trying to be precise and I recognize that and I appreciate that.

I think there's a lot of people that might want to jump on you if you're not exactly precise in something in an area you haven't studied.

And so I think that we part of the show, Michael, you may not

I know you came in twice and you're not a regular viewer or listener and what we try to do is we try to teach the apologetics.

We want to train people on how to go about having discussions like this. I'm pointing things out so people who are watching would also pick up that you know what, there's times that you have to even if someone says something that's not technically correct, don't harp on it if it's not an area of expertise.

So when we look at the laws of logic and you're saying we discovered them, so you would say they existed before humans?

And that's why I stopped myself when I said discovered because I'm not 100 % sure.

Like I said, you know, something is what it is, you know, law of identity.

It describes reality. So I think it's most fair to say

I don't know where they came from. They may be human derived. Okay. So I'll give you an argument on why they would not be able to be human derived.

You and I both agree there was a time before human beings, right? You might think millions of years or billions of years,

I would say days. But we both agree there was a time before humans. Fair enough? Before Before there was a human mind.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. There's a long time before homo sapiens. Okay. So could before there was a human being, could the universe have existed and not existed in the same way at the same time?

Now this is the second law of logic. Okay. It's the law of non -contradiction. You can't have A and not

A at the same time in the same way. Could the universe have existed and not existed in the same manner at the same time before human beings?

I don't think so, no. Okay. So then therefore, that law couldn't have been created by human beings.

It existed before there were human beings, didn't it? Sure, but it would have also described how things are, right?

Because the universe couldn't have existed and non -existed at the same time. It's also descriptive of reality.

Okay. So the laws of logic are something that are not a chemical reaction.

They are true, right? You mean universally true in all times, all places, stuff like that?

To the best of my knowledge, yeah. Okay. So I would end up saying that these are things that are immaterial.

Now, let me... Actually, hang on. Let me correct that right there because I remember something that I read. Because I think there are times when that's actually not the case.

Because, for example, I remember reading about electrons. The fact that electrons actually exist in two places at the same time.

I think you mean quartz. Maybe, yeah. You might be right. So I'm not 100 % sure, but I accept it for the sake of discussion.

And even with that, this gets into... Einstein had big issues with this, but the whole idea of when we get to subatomic, it appears, and that's how

I'm going to word it, it appears that we can have a quartz that disappears and then reappears somewhere else.

But it is more likely that we don't have the technology yet to be able to examine this to know what's actually happening.

And that's why we have to say we don't know what happened. But it's assumed it's the appearance that it disappears and reappears.

Is it the same... Is it the exact same object? Or did it go out of existence and a new one popped into existence?

Or did it move so fast that we can't see it because we don't have technology that could show it? So those are things that we don't know enough about yet.

And, you know, when, you know, you have things that we don't, we examine, we don't know, to then make conclusions, well, this can happen,

I would say that would be not a very rational decision. If we say we don't know, but we could take what we don't know and know what it isn't.

Or know what it is. You can't, if you don't know whether it's actually popping out of existence and popping into existence, how could you say that, yes, you can have contradictions, based on that.

And that becomes the issue, I'm familiar with the argument, but we have to be careful not to say, well, just because I don't know something,

I know, because this is going to be something I'm going to get to maybe later with you, the question I had is how could you know that the

Christian God doesn't exist? So I'm going to end up asking that one later, because I want to make sure I get to that, because it was something you said in the beginning of the show, and it's one of the two questions

I really wanted to ask. But, you know, as we work through these things, we have an ability to reason, we have morality, we have truth, we have knowledge, all these things are immaterial.

I would say they can't come about other than from an immaterial source. Now, the only option

I believe that you'd have would be to say that all of these things are products of our brain, of the chemicals in our brain, things like this.

Well, Dijon, you touched there just on morality, you said these things are immaterial. And morality is, at least in my opinion, is evidently an emergent property that we developed.

I go back and forth, a lot of people say, are you a subjectivist or an objectivist? I think that there are

I think, sorry, morality is a whole, a big ball of wax, I don't want to get into that.

But anyway, sorry you were saying. No, there's, but the thing is, I mean, maybe you've done this in school, have you ever take the experiment where you're going to take baking soda and you add vinegar to it?

Yeah, it's fun. And what is that? What's the reaction? Is that morally right or wrong?

I would say that's amoral. Okay, it doesn't produce morals, right? I don't think so.

And that's the thing, chemical reactions can't produce morality, would be the argument.

I think that's, again, a big oversimplification. Because I think when you talk about morality,

I don't necessarily want to get down this road, because I definitely want to answer the question with the Christian God. As an emergent property,

I think the first thing you have to do is you have to establish a goal. And for me, it's well -being.

The greatest possible reduction of harm and suffering and the involuntary imposition on conscious creatures.

And at the same time, the promotion of flourishing. And those are complex.

That's much more complex than mixing baking soda and vinegar. But they're still the result of chemical reactions within our brains.

So how would you define that chemical reaction? If I could ask this question real quick, how would you define and know what that chemical reaction is if it's merely the product of the working of material in your mind reacting to the stimulus that you see outside of you?

How could you know whether or not your reactions are accurate or true? Well, like I said, first of all, it's not just my reactions.

And again, this is going to be drawing on a lot of things that I accept that you won't accept.

But as Homo sapiens, as we as animals evolved and became more sedentary and less nomadic and started to group together as individuals and realized that the herds of animals, they end up coming back to the same place every year.

We don't have to follow them around all the time anymore. And we started grouping together in communities.

Then it's not just one person's chemical reactions. It's how they interact with other people.

And then they have to establish a basis of this well -being. And then it emerges from that.

So it's not just... And I don't want to be too accusatory, but I think it's a little bit of an oversimplification trying to say, well, if it's just this,

I don't think that's necessarily fair. Well, here's the thing. You just gave a scenario for morals.

There was all assumption. It's all assumption that humans, as we gathered together and we saw animals were coming around the same, they gather and they build morals.

The reality is what we end up seeing is when you try to argue for human flourishing, who gets to define what human flourishing is?

Because Adolf Hitler defined human flourishing as advancing the evolution by killing off anyone that was less human and creating a superior race of human beings.

And that would be better for the human race. That was human flourishing in his definition.

Was he wrong? Yeah, because sometimes we get it wrong. But you see, when human flourishing is the...

Whenever you try to do morality without an absolute universal standard, you can't argue for human flourishing or any morality, because morality requires an absolute universal standard.

If well -being is your standard, if well -being is your standard, then the elimination of an entire populace of people based on their race goes against well -being.

For who? Yeah. For who? People in general. No, not for Adolf Hitler and his friends.

It was fine for them. I said for people in general. If we start from well -being and the promotion of flourishing, the reduction of harm, and things like that, then we can say, and I would go as far as to say, from an objective standard, that the extermination of those people was wrong, because it decreased their well -being.

And I can get that without a God. But it increased the well -being of the others who were still alive. Sometimes people get it wrong.

So is abortion wrong? It depends on the context. We're jumping on a bunch of different rabbit holes here.

I'm not trying to rabbit hole. It's a bunch of different topics. I meant to say rabbit holes are wrong.

It's a bunch of different topics. My personal thought is, and I know this is going to probably produce turmoil in your live chat.

I am pro -life. I believe that life is precious. What's that,

Anthony? I didn't hear what you said. Somebody just asked about abortion. Don Jacks just said he should be pro -life then.

Like literally a minute ago. Well, you're being consistent in that point. So thank you very much. I believe life is precious and life should be protected.

Now, here's the turmoil part. My pro -life stance is only trumped by my pro -choice stance.

That is that bodily autonomy, it is my opinion that bodily autonomy has to win out.

I think that the use of just to kind of lump the whole abortion thing into one piece of pie.

Anyone who would use abortion as a form of birth control, I think that's a point.

I think that's disgusting. However, there are situations where and one of the analogies

I've used, because I've talked to lots of people about this. People say, well, you know, incest and rape is only about 1%. And that's fine.

I think it was Ben Shapiro who said, okay, fine, we'll give you the 1%, but we'll make the rest illegal. But, you know, let's say you have two consenting adults, right, and they decide to get together and the man wears a condom and the woman's on the pill, but the condom breaks and somehow the woman gets pregnant.

That's pretty unlikely, but let's say it happens. Neither one of them wanted to have a child.

Okay? I think that that woman should have the freedom to make that choice, and I don't think that anyone other than her and her healthcare professional should have any say.

Okay. Let me ask this, because I want to see consistency of this. Do you believe there should be a limit on age for alcohol, cigarettes?

Should people be allowed to kill themselves? I'm sorry.

Are you saying that because alcohol and cigarettes contribute to death? Is that what you mean? Do you believe that we should have laws preventing people from a certain age to be able to smoke cigarettes, to be able to drink alcohol, either one of those, and then a separate one, do you believe that there should be laws preventing people from killing themselves?

Okay. As someone whose mother died from lung cancer and who has never smoked a day in his life,

I've never even had a cigarette in my mouth. I would be okay with smoking being completely illegal.

That wouldn't bother me at all. Should there be a regulation? Yes, and there is, in fact, in Canada. People get around it, but they've got some pretty good safeguards in place.

Yes, there should absolutely be restrictions. As far as alcohol, yes, there should absolutely be restrictions on alcohol because of all the addictions possibilities and lots of other things.

Should people have the right to end their own life? I think that that's a really tricky topic.

I personally think that if someone has the right to live, I think they also have the right to not live.

Now, having said that, and being married to someone who has a career in the mental health field,

I think there's a ton of caveats that have to be put in place. I think that for someone who perhaps has stage 4 cancer or something like that, with my mother, not to put too much of a personal spin on it, but my mother, when she was diagnosed with cancer, it was stage 4, and she chose to forego any type of treatment.

She was done. That was for different reasons. My father had already died, and she had lost the will to live.

That's a little bit different story. She chose. She actively chose to not have treatment.

I'm not 100 % sure what I want to say. I would put that in a little bit of a different category because she didn't give herself cancer.

I want to point out an inconsistency, though, that you have, because you say that when it comes to abortion, someone should have complete and utter autonomy over their life, even though they're killing another human being.

There should be an absolute age restriction on their own autonomy to drink or smoke cigarettes.

You're killing a potential human being. Almost 25 % of all recognized pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion.

Sam Harris, God is the most prolific abortionist of all. Except for the fact that there are many that die in the womb.

It's amazing how Sam Harris wants to blame God for that and not credit God for anything else.

It shows that his real issue is he hates God. The thing, though, is that I wanted to point out, you're not consistent with that argument.

The thing that we end up seeing is, yes, it is a life. It is different DNA. It can have a different gender.

I want to be clear. The termination of a pregnancy, you cannot reasonably argue that it is not the termination of a life.

I would never argue that. It is absolutely the termination of a life.

But if you look at it from the case of bodily autonomy, it is not the ending of an autonomous life.

For example, I also think that there should be limits on abortion. I don't think that you should be able to just willy -nilly decide whatever period, pick a period of time into a pregnancy and say, yeah,

I've decided I don't want this. I don't think that would happen anyway. There should not be restrictions.

If we're talking about, like I said before, about a broken condom or something like that, then a day after pill or, oops,

I missed my cycle, turns out I'm actually three weeks, four weeks, whatever it is, pregnant. That's a potential human life, but it is certainly not an autonomous life.

I think there's a distinction that has to be made there. Go ahead, Justin. I'm sorry.

One thing I was going to ask on this, I just want to say that what I'm hearing is that you're not speaking and thinking in a subjective mindset.

When you're talking objectively, you're using an objective standard. You're trying to say this is an objective standard.

The problem that I'm seeing here is you're not using the chemical standard.

Here's what I mean by this. You've said multiple times that you don't believe in the supernatural or that you don't believe in the concept of that which is outside of the natural realm, that we are random chance chemical reactions.

If your mind is making subjective statements and your mind is trying to determine the good or the bad or this or that, you are foregoing this random chance chemical reactions and you're superseding that.

There are many psychologists and many great thinkers who have said this is where the atheistic argument or the evolutionary argument breaks down because you have to think outside of your own chemical reaction standard.

Let me see if I can make it clear for you. If you have a vat of baking soda and you took one piece of that baking soda out or one little teaspoon of baking soda out and you put vinegar on top of it and it fizzed up and blew up, if it blew up and reacted, do you think the rest of the baking soda would have an opinion about it?

No. You're having opinions about what baking soda should do. You see what

I'm saying? You're having opinions and subjective thoughts about what baking soda should do with more baking soda.

I'm coming from your perspective on the random chance chemical reactions of a mind that is not under the will and submission of an all authoritative

God. The first question I'll ask you is, is either baking soda or vinegar conscious?

They would be as conscious as... I think it's a fair question. Hold on a second.

Consciousness is immaterial. Exactly. When you say it's a conscience, when you're arguing that, you've just given up your worldview.

That's what I'm saying. You're saying conscious from the definition is to be with knowledge.

The mind is what the brain does. I said clearly that once this physical brain dies, everything that's me will be gone.

That doesn't mean that consciousness doesn't exist. The hard problem of consciousness is something that no one has actually solved.

I don't believe that's ever been solved. There's a difference between... I think there's this oversimplification of...

You keep saying that, Michael. All I'll say is that I'm pretty sure that it...

I think it's probably fair to say that I stated as my opinion.

Yes, there is a degree of subjectivity to it. What I'm trying to point out is that a chemical reaction can't have an opinion about another chemical reaction.

Do you have opinions? I'm not just a chemical reaction. I have a conscience that was given to me by God.

That's your presupposition. No, that's the scripture. The scripture tells me that. It would also be science because here's what you're doing and what everyone has to do with your position is to say, we're talking about consciousness.

We don't know where it comes from. We just don't know. No, it can't come from God. Well, how do you know that?

How could you know that it can't come from a source when you say you don't know where it comes from but then you want to employ it?

The issue in the discussion is if you're going to argue for consciousness and materialism, you have to prove that the conscious is material and you can't do that.

Why? Because it's impossible because it's immaterial. You cannot use science, which is the study of the material world, to prove the immaterial and that's what you'd have to do with a conscience and that's why it's impossible.

What I said was that the mind is what the brain does and I'll ask and answer the question that I asked

Justin. I guess ask it. Do you come to conclusions?

Absolutely. Does your brain produce chemical reactions? Well, sure.

Then chemical reactions can produce conclusions. My feet produce smelly odors out of my feet but that doesn't mean that my feet are thinking.

But there's a logical fallacy there. Yes, I agree. Go ahead. Because you're taking two separate things and then saying that they're synonymous.

That's not what I'm doing at all. My brain comes to conclusions. My brain has chemical reactions in it.

It might have reached down to, oh, it's just a chemical reaction. I understand.

You've said a few times based on my worldview. I understand that based on your worldview, that's where you have to go because it has to be.

I also want to say that when I say that there can't be a

God, while I'm convinced that Christian God does not exist, I would never say that it can't exist.

But from my perspective and from what I've seen, read, researched, talked to other people and things like that, it doesn't evidently exist because if it evidently existed, then

Romans 1 .20 would be right and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Romans 1 .20.

I'm not afraid of doing the right thing at all. But I'm not going to do the right thing unless I know it's the right thing.

I know your book says I know, but the book also says that an axe had floated.

Okay, well you're using the false dichotomy there. There's a couple things I do want to get to.

You've read the Bible a couple times, and some more. I read it all the time.

I have it on my phone. I read it all the time. Okay. What I see, because this is really the first time we're ever really talking.

We've had a couple of email exchanges. Have you read from authors and people that are defending

Christianity, or have you read, as you've clearly named many people that would be attacking

Christianity, have you read both sides, or have you only read the one? I try to read both sides.

I think it's important to try to educate yourself on both sides. I'm off. I just recently, actually at the recommendation of Josh Bowen, who

I mentioned before, just picked up, I haven't read it yet, it's just over there, Paul Copan's book on and also listed the stuff by William Lane Craig.

I interact with at least as many as I do non -believers.

It's actually probably more on the believer side, because I don't want,

I'm not interested at all in being in an echo chamber. Well, that's good. The reason

I asked it, you made a statement earlier, and I know we're going back a ways, and we only have half an hour, but you said that the

Bible is, and I'm forgetting the exact way you worded it, so if you remember it, and you can correct me if not, we just accept, but you basically imply that the

Bible is not a reliable source. At all. Yeah. It's an interesting time for me to get into why the question you wanted to ask me about why

I believe actually God doesn't exist. I want to get to that, but I just want to explain one thing to you, and that is that the

Bible is more reliable than any ancient document that we have. We have more copies, we have the earliest copies, we have supporting evidence outside of the

Bible. We don't have that with Julius Caesar, and yet no one questions, you know,

Julius Caesar. So, when you make statements like that, for me, someone who has studied this, textual criticism and things like that, you know, you've been trying very hard to, when you say things, you preface that you don't want to be insulting, and I don't want to be insulting with this.

Go ahead. It gives me the air of thinking that you really haven't studied the issue, but you've come to absolute conclusions.

Because if you've done even the smallest amount of study, you realize that it is more reliable than any other ancient book that we have by mountains, by miles of evidence.

So, I challenge you to look at that some more. I'm hoping that this is not the only time we end up talking.

I sure hope not. So, let me get to the question I did want to get to earlier, and that was, you made a statement that you know that the

Christian God does not exist. I'm convinced the Christian God does not exist. How are you convinced that only the

Christian God? Right. So, like I said before, and just to be clear, I doubt very seriously that any creator

God exists. I've not researched, and I guess it may be fair to say that the

Jewish God as well, because at least about the Old Testament, it's the same thing anyway. I've read through portions of the

Koran, I've read portions of the Bhagavad Gita, and stuff like that, but I haven't, but I'm still working on that.

So, I don't want to say, oh yeah, I know for sure, or I'm convinced of those other things. But my argument, or at least my personal argument is for why

I'm personally convinced the Christian God doesn't exist, is three things. One, the

Bible's wrong. Demonstrably, factually incorrect on too many things to be taken seriously.

And it's just littered with just falsehoods. Just absolute falsehoods.

The second is that the

God of the Bible seems to be contradictory. One of the big contradictories, and I know this can be a hot -button topic, and it's a big one, and that's the problem of evil.

It seems to me, and again, I'm only talking about me personally, it seems to me that if we look at, like 1

John 4 says that God is love. Okay? 1

Corinthians describes love as kind and patient, etc. And yet we see, we read about the things that this

God apparently does in the Bible. And purely from my perspective,

I'm sure if we get onto it, we can't say, well, you know, you can't imagine what it might be like to be this kind of God. But I couldn't do the things that this

God apparently did without seemingly batting an eye.

And the last one is the convergence of evidence when it comes to evolution.

Evolution is an absolute fact of population genetics. It is cross -confirmed by multiple disciplines.

And what I say to that typically is if you've got the stones to take down evolution, don't bother trying to tell me because there is unbelievable world, damn near overnight, worldwide fame and more fortune you could ever spend in your life for someone who can take down what is arguably the most well -established theory in all of science.

And for those reasons, I'm convinced and it kind of all flows back to the Bible because the

Bible talks about, you know, the story like creation of the animals and stuff like that and it just flies in the face of what we of what we, the royal we, can demonstrate is just not true.

I'm convinced that Christian God does not exist. KT says what I was thinking. You're not

God. You're not omniscient and you're not perfectly holy. You know, you say evolution is an absolute fact and yet it's scientifically impossible.

It's a bait and switch. You have special evolution that nobody, nobody disagrees with and that is used as proof for general evolution and it's a bait and switch and that's all evolutionists have.

When we speak of special evolution, we're talking speciation, we're talking of a loss of information in DNA.

For general evolution to be true, you have to have a gain of information in the

DNA and have it both be beneficial and reproductive. You know how many things the secular scientists have found that is a mutation, which is the gaining of information that's both reproducible and beneficial?

Zero. Like I said, just submit, just like, don't like... No, it's, you know why peer review doesn't work?

Because when it comes from a creationist, the peer automatically rejects it. That has happened over and over and over again.

They won't accept any peer review document, to peer review a document from Christians because their starting point is absolutely that evolution is a fact.

You can't question it. Once you question it, it gets rejected. You yourself are an example of it.

You said you will reject anything that doesn't support, bring no evidence to you, because you don't want to hear it.

You can bring all this evidence, and actually the conversation you had last week was really decent.

There's a part of me that's glad I didn't get pulled into that conversation, because between you and...

Anthony and Michael. Hey, Anthony. You guys from a scientific perspective, way smarter than me.

So I would have sounded really silly trying to talk at that level. But it's, you know, the hard part is what you're suggesting is this kind of worldwide, centuries -old conspiracy.

We're not... First, it's scientists. Scientists were Christians. Yeah, they were, but the thing is, keep in mind, exactly as the

Bible said they would do. They worshiped man over the creator.

That's what you see in evolution. The Bible actually predicted these things. We're not surprised by it.

The fact that people hate God, we're not surprised by that. The fact that people want to come up with a way that they cannot be accountable to God, to have an explanation of how the world came about without having

God in the picture, so they could feel that when they die, they just go into nothingness.

You know, and you're saying it with, you know, the Bible isn't true. And yet your starting point is you have to realize that you're saying the

Bible's not true because it either doesn't make sense to you, or it doesn't fit with the non -supernatural worldview that you want to accept.

Even though, no matter what you do, you can't explain the universe outside of the supernatural because something had to create the natural world.

My inability to explain it isn't evidence for your

God. But you're saying your inability to explain it, and yet you make absolute statements.

You make absolute statements based on ignorance. That's the thing I'm trying to point out to you.

I want you to see what you're doing. I understand. When you start from...

Everybody has axioms. I believe everybody has axioms, at least to a certain extent.

If you start with God is real and the Bible is true, then everything within the

Bible is easily reconciled. But if you start with, let's just look at it and apply it to what we can know and what we can show, that's where.

The Bible says stars will fall from the sky. That was written by somebody who didn't know what a star was.

Hold on. Now stop right there because here's the thing... Doesn't the Bible say stars will fall from the sky?

And what does it mean? It's giving a couple different references.

One of the hermeneutic references I've heard is that it's talking about angels.

And then another one of the references that I read was actually meaning that during the tribulation that stars will actually fall from the sky.

So I'm not sure which one you're referring to. It depends on the context because there are some that refer to angels as stars.

Okay. The point being is the Bible was not written as a scientific textbook.

Let me ask you a question. But it makes scientific claims. Have you ever seen the sunrise?

Well, that's a figure of speech. Ah. So you recognize that we have figures of speech.

But yet you want to take a figure of speech and say no, it has to be a literal thing when it comes to the

Bible. See, the problem isn't that the Bible is wrong. The problem is that you don't know how to interpret. In an axe head float?

In an axe head float. Yeah, God creates everything out of nothing can make an axe head float.

So that's, again, it's like when it's something that, you know, when it fits the figure of speech.

It's not when it fits the figure of speech. If you read that text with the axe head, it is very clearly being explained that this is a supernatural thing.

It is not trying to say this is a figure of speech. I don't accept that as possible because there's no reason to accept it as possible.

Why would you accept your evolutionary standpoint as the starting point as possible when the laws of thermodynamics would state that what the evolution evolutionary standpoint is must be impossible.

You can't include the laws of thermodynamics because the laws of thermodynamics are only...

And Earth is evidently not a closed system. If you used,

Justin, if you're referring to the beginning of the universe, yes, that could apply. But it can't be...

The law of thermodynamics doesn't apply to evolution. It could apply to the creation of the

Big Bang. But on that I have to agree with Michael. But if you apply, if you say to the universe, then yeah.

But... And I know we've got about five minutes because we have something we want to do toward the tail end of this show.

You guys have been incredibly generous. We appreciate the conversation. You're welcome to come back anytime.

This is a live show. Anyone can come in anytime. I know people... Anthony was trying to ask people to come in and ask questions via any of us.

And by the way, I'll give a programming note. If anyone who watches this and you're watching it on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, just understand that some of us here that host this understand how to use technology and Anthony doesn't.

So if you see him answering questions on Facebook that you're going, what in the world is he answering?

It's because he doesn't know how to click that little button at the bottom with the arrow that says All and change it to just the platform of who's ever asking questions.

So he's constantly answering questions on Facebook to people that have no idea what the question was.

I'm just trying to minimize my clicks. I know how to do it. I don't want to go down any more rabbit holes getting ready to wrap up.

What I'd like to say is that thank you so much for having me. You're incredibly generous with your time.

I appreciate everything that you say. Hopefully I wasn't offensive to anyone. I would like to not only come back, but give an open invitation to not only any of you, but also to any of your listeners who want to come on.

I love having conversations like this. Would you mind me just giving out my email address and stuff like that?

Yeah, go ahead. It's just thecaatrodgers .com and you can find me on Facebook.

My name is spelled like it shows up there. M -I -C -H -E -A -L -S -C -U -A -R -T Reach out to me that way.

Love to have the conversations. For anyone who is a Christian, if you ever want to come on,

I'll do the same thing to you. We've had Kent Hovind on, we've had Jenta, Saiten Burgenkate's been on, lots of different Christians.

We'll offer you the same platform absolutely 50 -50 and we'll be respectful. There'll be no profanity and stuff like that, which is a big deal for me.

But there'll be no profanity whatsoever out of respect for you and your beliefs if you decide to engage with us.

One of the things I wanted to say for people who don't listen to your podcast and haven't engaged with it, this is the type of dialogue we would prefer.

You're saying, you come on, you know, okay, I'm going to be respectful, I'm not going to use profanity,

I'm not going to do things because there are plenty of people, and this is true on both sides, you have plenty of people that try to force you're going to listen to my profanity because I don't have to, you know, that's disrespectful.

It's not a good way to try to make an argument. And so I just want to point out to folks that this is the way we should be conducting discussions.

We feel very strongly about our positions, both Michael does and the three of us do, and yet we can have a cordial discussion, we can understand our differences, and we can discuss those things.

Absolutely, and there have been Christians that I've that Dean and I, my podcast partner, and I have engaged with that have been really really good, like Sai, who doesn't have a great reputation on the internet, but he's local, he's a

Canadian, he only lives about, well actually he's moving to Texas, but when he came on the podcast we were going to go on the non -sequitur the debunked non -sequitur show but he sent me a message, he said you're local, you're only about two hours from me.

He said, I do all these things on the internet, he said if we're going to do this, either you're coming to me or I'm coming to you.

So he sat three feet from where I am right now and we had a conversation and it was great you know, and we wholeheartedly disagreed.

It was a great conversation. And yes, I'm in firm agreement with you

Andrew, that these are the types of discussions that we should be having and yeah,

I think that's enough said for that. Yeah, I mean I think the reason people have the view of Sai that they do is because they don't know him personally, they don't get to know him.

And when people sit there and they'll make accusations or claims like that and someone who likes to,

I have people that try to contact me on Facebook Messenger and it's like I will never answer a

Facebook Messenger so you can stop. And then every device rings, sorry about that.

No worries. Yeah, so I see you Justin, you're going to try.

Justin's trying to call me right now. I'm trying to feed him to it. Yeah. Yeah, how to shut that off.

We have to pick, Michael. So yeah. Okay, hi

Anthony. Here, let's see. Nope, he hung up. He hung up.

He's like a child. So Michael, I do have one question. Let me just finish up with what

I was saying with Sai because just so I can finish the point is when someone starts attacking him he's going to take a strong stance and a lot of people take that and him standing up firm as if he's being rude.

I think what it is is he's very offended by the way people are speaking.

Okay. And so that is so I think you saw a different thing and to answer

Donnie's thing real quick I'm guessing Donnie's saying what's wrong with profanity saying like as far as morally.

I'm going to argue Michael's case for him and I'll see if I'm right but I don't think Michael would think there's anything wrong with profanity.

He's being respectful to the audience. He's being respectful to us.

And I want to say thank you for that. Me too. Absolutely.

So do you hate God? No more than I hate

Darth Vader. That's fair. I'm just trying to get an idea of where you're coming from through all this stuff.

I guess the trouble that I'm having in listening to all this is number one you haven't established and I'm trying to be really fair here but you haven't established how the immaterial can cover the material.

So we've spent almost two hours on a podcast of you thinking through thoughts and using language, using information, speaking and you can't account for it in your worldview whatsoever.

I mean that's a major problem. I would love to have you back on for us to talk through this more. But even more importantly is this issue.

For you to come to a position of deciding between God and science, because that's essentially what you've done.

You've said that you trust science, you believe in science and you don't believe in what the Bible says.

You've come to judgments based off of your own fallible human understanding on things.

I could be wrong. Yeah. And that's the issue right?

So you could be wrong. Sure. I would not do that.

And then I would have a side call me and say, dude, what are you doing? No, you'd have me calling you out right here.

Yeah. But you say very firmly about you've come to a decision

God doesn't exist. I'm convinced. You're convinced. What does convinced mean then?

Is this a firm statement or is this I think so, but I could be swung the other way.

I'm an atheist. I'm not a diagnostic. I am convinced that the Christian God does not exist. And the caveat that I add to that is and it's not faith, whoever said that.

Because there's a difference between faith and trust regardless of what the Bible says. But anyway,

I am convinced with a caveat that I could be wrong. So you have a confidence.

Even if, and I know the whole confide. The difference is even if and I forget who said this.

Even if God exists, the Bible, oh, it was

Aaron Roth. Even if God exists, evolution is still a fact and the Bible is still man -made mythology.

Yeah, but by fact is that could you be wrong? I think

I could be wrong. Yeah, I think I could be wrong. I'm sorry? Do you think scientists could be wrong?

Scientists? Yes. Yeah, right? I mean, they could all be wrong. All of them, you're pushing it there.

Individual scientists could be wrong, but the overwhelming, again, you're going back to this whole, it could be wrong, but there's this convergence.

It's not half a dozen people in one discipline. It's thousands of people from multiple disciplines.

Right, and so just because thousands of people from multiple disciplines say something, it automatically makes it 100 % fact that cannot be ever disproven.

No, it could be disproven. Darwin said this in his own book. After he published his book, he was asked, what would it take to prove your theory wrong?

And he famously said, fossilized rabbits in the Cambrian. The theory of evolution could be disproven very easily.

And if it ever was, I would have no problem walking away from it. But I guess this is my point.

What I'm trying to figure out is with the language that you're using, and as I've sat back most of this time, and Andrew and Justin have done most of the talking, is you're using very strong language at times, which seems to be very certain type language, and then you kind of back off of it as we're asking more questions.

Because when somebody says a fact, in the world of science, a fact is something that absolutely happens always.

We would look at scientific laws. Those would be in the realm of being facts.

And I know there's a caveat to it. A law is not exactly a fact, but in terms of certainty, that's what we would have to view it as.

Because of the law of gravity,

I know that I can drop my phone, and every single time I drop it, it's going to call

Andrew. Or call Andrew, right. It's going to do that every time. Okay, I can call that a fact.

But you're saying that evolution is a fact on one hand, yet on the other hand, you're saying, it is possible you're wrong.

It's possible the evolutionists are wrong. What I'm saying is that I could be wrong in how

I'm interpreting it, and there could be errors in it. Again, it would be painfully easy, ridiculously painfully easy, for the

God that you think exists to demonstrate it's all wrong.

Absolutely. I agree with you on that. He could just judge the whole world in righteousness at this very second, and he could absolutely prove that you're wrong and every person that professes there is no

God, that they are 100 % wrong. But his kind grace, he hasn't done it yet. No, actually, but he already has.

You have all the evidence, and this is why I said, you don't have an evidence problem.

You have a spiritual problem. And we're going to end up, so let me wrap it up with this, and we can come back and discuss this more another time, and Anthony may you and Anthony can have one, and then you and Justin if you want.

But the thing that, and I think Anthony pointed this out as well, and I said it earlier, what really comes across, you may not even recognize this,

Michael, but what comes across is, over and over and over again, you say, you don't know, whenever pressed,

I don't know, I'm not an expert, but then you make absolute claims. You make strong, convicted claims based on ignorance, and that's, you know, that right there would be something that should concern you.

And we can come back and discuss it, but you know, stick around, don't, you know, we can continue the discussion on another show.

But what I do want to do is, and I'm just going to remove you guys just for a little bit here, and I want to talk about Kofi.

For folks who don't know, this is someone who is a blogger with Striving for Eternity.

Kofi and his family that you can see there, they are out in Oregon, or Oregon, I forget how

I'm supposed to properly pronounce it, anyway. But basically, there's been some wildfires.

Kofi has, I spoke to him last night, that basically what ended up happening was they recognized the fires were getting close, he figured he'd pick up some important documents and, you know, things that they really needed.

They went out to a hotel, they've discovered while they were at the hotel, the fire did come through their area, his house is completely gone.

Their whole street is completely gone. There is a GoFundMe that someone created to make it easier. I put a

Bitly link there for you, so that you can go directly there with shorter things.

It's bit .ly bit .ly slash Kofi Fund, and the second

F, the F in fund is capitalized. So if you go exactly as you see there, bit .ly

slash Kofi K -O -F -I capital F -U -N -D

K -O -F -I K -O -F -I

K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I

K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I K -O -F -I

And if you can, you can find it also on my Facebook, on my Twitter, I think I've posted this everywhere.

But if you could help him out, they're trying to raise quite a bit of money to be able to pay for expenses.

He is someone who's preaching every week. For those of us who are pastors, who preach on a regular basis, he has lost his entire library.

That is devastating. That is... As someone

Someone who had a library that was in boxes for nine months now, I finally got them out. It's hard for a preacher to be without his books.

Well, he has none now. He's going to end up having to start all over with that, and he's got to rebuild a house.

It's going to be probably about a year before they can really recover from this. So if you guys can help out in any way, we'd appreciate that.

He is a dear brother, like I said, and we just wanted to mention that.

So with that, I'm just going to close out the show and instead bring the other guys on. Anthony and I were talking about doing something about whether you should wear a mask or not.

Maybe we'll do that next week. We'll see who comes in, what not. If any of you guys do have questions, please come in.

Please, you know, this is what the show is about, is to answer questions or not.

So I did get a message sent to me, why do I look like I'm in the dark, turn lights on?

Well, the reality is the room that I have as my office only has an outlet back behind that bookcase right here, and so I have no lights here.

End of the month, I'll have an electrician that's coming in to put in some lights. So I've done whatever I could with these little hockey puck things.

So yeah, it's not ideal, but it is the best that I can do for right now. But that is the show for tonight.

I hope this was helpful for you folks. I hope that you've learned a lot. I hope that it was encouraging.

And most of all, those of us who are regular watchers here, those of us that are regular hosts here,

I'll encourage all of you to be praying for Michael. Pray for his soul. I know he doesn't believe

God exists, but we all know that he does. And we want to be praying that God would bring him to repentance and to a knowledge of himself and so that he would come back as a believer.

That is my prayer. I hope that you guys are praying the same. So until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.