The Irrationality of Atheism

Apologia Studios

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What we're saying is you can't be faithful in this particular discussion where you say over here

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I'm going to be the apologist, I'm going to try to point him to some general deity and try to work my way up to Jesus, and then when they finally go, okay maybe there's a

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God, go great, let me now put the other hat on now, and now I'm the Christian and I'm going to tell you about the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the demands on your life, the call to repent, the call to believe.

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Those are very strange, like opposed things. We're saying that biblically, that apologetic methodology has to be wrapped up in the evangelistic call, they're one and the same, at least together as you're moving through this with the unbelievers.

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So in this case with Andre, we're trying to expose the borrowed capital, he's borrowing from Christianity to make sense of his world, we're trying to collapse the atheistic position, but notice how the gospel gets in, right, like why are you saying all these things to me?

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Well, your suppression of truth, your folly that you're living right now, making ethical appeals while you believe you're just an

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African ape in a meaningless cosmos, all that shows that you know the God that I'm talking about and that you're really at war with God, that's the problem, it's not light, evidence, none of those things, you're at war with God, repenting your sin and turn to Christ for salvation, so that's the whole goal.

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I don't want to have an argument with an unbeliever where they can even conclude that God exists and say, but guess what,

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I didn't need him to get there. I used my own autonomous reasoning to conclude that God exists, and I said, well, you didn't conclude the

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God that I believe in, because the God that I believe in is necessary for your reasoning, and that's what we try to expose, and we try to do it with love, but you know,

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I was listening, I was telling you, I was listening to this on my drive -in, and one thing people are familiar with doing these type of discussions, a lot of times

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I'll be listening and I'll be answering thinking of how I'm going to answer, and I wasn't listening so much to what you were saying, and I listened to it again on the drive -in, and we thought that it got really good after the show was over, but man, it was good before, because I was listening to the stuff you were saying to him, and we make a good team, it's almost like good cop, bad cop, but no, it was, you know,

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I really encourage people, maybe you could put a link to it or something, and the thing is, it's not because we don't say that we're particularly good at this, it was really blessed,

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I think, you know, that, and it's sad that Andre had to experience that, and we still pray for him, we hope that God saves him, but I really encourage people to go and listen to it, because I was listening to it, and just the things that you had said, man,

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I loved it. I think we make a good team. Yeah, we do, and I think it was a good opportunity to share, we could talk all day long about the apologetic methodology, and we could talk about the scriptures, and we could talk about the philosophy, and we could try to, you know, work things out, but for people to hear in one episode us describing biblical approach to reaching the unbeliever, and then actually having somebody who is not a schlub, he was sophisticated, he's a very intelligent man, and to have it actually work itself out in the same episode,

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I think was a tremendous gift. One of the worst things that I see on Facebook or something, when somebody's talking with a family member, and they say, man,

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I wish Cy was there, or I wish Jeff was there, you know, what I want people to do is hear something like this and say,

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I can do that, because a lot of times I'll go to a conference, and I'll say, you know, today I'm not going to teach you how to defend the existence of God, I'm going to teach you how to defend the fact that your parents exist, and they say, what are you talking about, that's crazy,

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I say, what do you need this crazy Canadian to teach me how to defend that my parents exist? I said, why would that be crazy? Because you know your parents, you know them better than I do, you don't need me to come here and teach you that your parents exist, what am

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I doing here teaching you how to defend the fact that God exists? So the problem isn't pre -submission, it's not evidence, it's relational, and if you know that God, you can talk about him, and not apologize for what the scripture says.

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Now we get, sure, more philosophical with some of these people, but everybody can do this. You should have no fear when you talk to an unbeliever, if you stick to the foundation of the truth of God's word.

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When the Bible says that the person who denies God is a fool, that's true. It is true.

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You know, we were at that conference together in Florida, and that one pastor talked about the direct Hebrew translation, where we read it as, the fool has said in his heart, there is no

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God, and now, I've never researched this myself, but he said that the best Hebrew translation is, the fool says in his heart, no

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God for me. And I thought, you know, that seems very appropriate, you know, that's what

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I say, Jesus Christ or absurdity, but people choose absurdity because they love their sin, and that's what this apologetic does.

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That's right. Well, I don't want to change the subject, but I'm just thinking like... Well, you got them, uh... I had one of those once, and I'm not saying that I know what snot tastes like,

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I'm not saying that, but I've had one of those once, and just that stuff going down your throat. Well, you don't just swallow them, you chew them.

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You chew them up, they're like gummy bears. Oh, you do. You just swallow them. He's like, why would anybody want to just choke these down?

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They're like gummy bears. Well, I'm just thinking like, real life, how does this apply in real life, practically?

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And you know, I always talk about abortion a lot here, and I'm just sitting here thinking how this directly applies to the fight against abortion, right?

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Because you have the majority of the pro -life movement being

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Catholic, essentially, not attacking abortion with the gospel, you know?

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And so, and this is probably fresh in my mind, because I've been preparing for Australia, and I'm talking about this a little bit, but ultimately, that's how we approach even the fight against abortion, is with presuppositionalism, because we're standing on God's word, and it has to be with the gospel, right?

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It has to be with a reason to repent, and it has to be with an understanding of morality and logic, and if you don't have those, you're not going to win the fight.

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Yeah, but one way I look at it too, is think of what will happen if you win the argument. If you win the argument that it's a baby.

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That's why I never argue science at the clinics. I'm not saying I'm opposed to it, but I think of that conversation that John Piper had with that abortion doctor.

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I don't know if you heard about that. He had a list of 10 different things to prove to this abortion doctor that what he was doing was killing a human being, and he goes and he has lunch with this fellow, and John Piper is in the first one, and the guy stops him, and he says, oh,

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I know they're humans. Oh yeah, they know, yeah. You know, so what I say is, even if you save a life, which

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I think is fantastic, but if they're not saved, you're just prolonging the inevitable. You know, they need to be saved, and that's the same with winning an argument.

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You can win an argument evidentially, but they're still the judge. So I think that when we have these arguments, we show that God is necessary for everything.

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One thing that I do when I'm at the campus, I say, your problem is that you hate God. And they say, no,

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I don't hate God. I'm just, you know, I don't really think there's anything out there. No, the problem is, no, I really don't think so.

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I say, well, you're at this beautiful campus here. Now, imagine that there's people here whose parents paid for them to be here, and imagine they go home for spring break, beautiful mansion, you know, their parents are wealthy, and they're waiting for them at the front door, and you walk in the front door, and the person looks at their parents and says, who are you?

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I know that I have parents, but I don't think you're them. You know what? I'm in a good mood today.

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You can spend the night here, but if you're here in the morning, I'm calling the cops. Now what would the parents think to that? Why does our son hate us all of a sudden?

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I say, how much worse is that to the God who's giving you the very next breath, who's giving the next beat of your heart, and you're saying, there might be something out there.

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It's exponentially worse when you do that to the God who has given you life, and you say, oh, there might be something. That is a hatred towards God, even though you don't feel it's hatred.

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It is. Right. And God is gracious and merciful, and the amazing thing is that he is so patient with all of us, and that even in these moments where you have unbelievers, atheists, railing against God, people denying his very existence after God just fed them and caused them to breathe and a heart to breathe.

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He's sustaining them in that moment, and they're like, no God, no God. He's still gracious, and he's still merciful to everybody, every moment.

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It's like Van Til's example of their argument against the existence of air. Breathing it all the while.

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Yes. That's right. A few more thoughts here. In response to that,

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I think that, of course, the two of you are continually bringing up the knowledge claims.

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However, I shouldn't have to regularly reassert that I am making assumptions that I perceive this reality.

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You shouldn't have to? I shouldn't have to. Who made that rule? Who made that law? You shouldn't. Is there an obligation?

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This is precisely my concern. Within this conversation, I have already established that the atheistic worldview depends on assumptions that things exist.

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It depends on assumptions that our senses aren't lying to us. Is lying okay? What if your senses were lying?

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Did you catch it? Did you see it? Did you see it all there? We're challenging the unbeliever on all these claims he's making, and he says, you know,

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I've got to trust that my senses aren't lying to me. And the Christian goes, yeah, because that would be bad. And you go, wait, hold everything for a moment now.

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This is an atheist who doesn't believe that lying ultimately has any meaning at all.

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It's not like a law out there in the universe, like, that's an absolute. I mean, it might make people uncomfortable, but there's no law against lying.

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And so when the atheist is concerned that his senses may be lying to him, he doesn't want that, he's borrowing capital from the

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Christian worldview. In the Christian worldview, God cannot lie. Lying is an absolute immoral thing.

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You shall not lie. That's a commandment from God, a reflection of his own character. So the

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Christian listens to the unbeliever in this moment, and the unbeliever's going, man, I really hope my senses aren't lying to me.

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And the Christian goes, yeah, that'd be bad. Let's work through those senses. And it's like, wait a second, this person is arguing against the triune

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God of the universe. And he's talking about senses lying to him. So when you hear Sinai going, hey, pump the brakes for just a second.

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You just said lying as though it were some problem. Right. Now it is for me, but I want to know how it is for you.

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Why are you worried about that? You're an atheist. And then the atheist goes, well, I grant as an atheist,

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I got to have certain assumptions. For what? Otherwise the world wouldn't work. Ah, ding, ding, ding, ding.

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That's right. That's the world you're living in because you're living in God's world, not some made up world that blew up out of nothing.

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And as the random result of evolutionary processes didn't have in mind. What did we establish in that discussion too? What are assumptions?

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They're faith claims. Yeah. So the unbeliever is just establishing that his worldview is based on faith.

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And one thing that I said in that discussion with him, it's not only based on faith, it's based on blind faith because they don't have revelation from an all knowing, all wise

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God as we do. And he admitted that according to our worldview, yes, we can have certainty. He kept trying to track back on that.

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Then he said, well, I can have it from, you know, logical laws, you know, the condition of the, I said, well, fine. If you want to retract your claim that you can have certainty, show how you can have it that way.

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Well, I really can't. It's not really my position and it's a mess. It is a mess. That's the folly of the unbelieving position.

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But what I'm pointing out here is that I've had to continuously reassert these assumptions when

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I'm making my statements because my statements are continuously being challenged. But the reason you have to keep reasserting them is because you keep denying them with the things that you say.

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Right. That's what we're pointing out to you is that you're telling us about your worldview, but then we ask you to justify these claims.

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You can't do it and you won't do it. But we need to understand that my worldview is within the context of the assumptions.

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Did you get it? Please tell me you got it. Please tell me you caught it because that's so, so, so important.

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Here's an unbeliever who gets to the point through the discussion, he gets whittled all the way down to the point where he goes, granted, my position is based upon certain presuppositions, right?

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And I'm carrying those presuppositions into this conversation throughout life. And I grant that these are atheistic assumptions and I can do nothing without them.

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Now, what we're doing is going, right, because everybody does that. For the Christian, we are saying our presupposition, our starting assumptions are based upon the revelation of God, who

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God is. He's a central reference point, his character, his law, his word, all those things. The unbeliever goes, when he's honest, although he doesn't have to be, he goes, well, mine are atheistic assumptions.

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We go, great. Let's let those assumptions collide. And let's see who is acting consistently with their assumptions.

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Let's see whose assumptions and presuppositions can make sense of this conversation we're having and the world that we live in.

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And what we kept doing with Andre, we kept pointing out to him, you aren't even trying to even justify your assumptions.