Bad Atheist Arguments | Rapp Report Daily Wrap-up 0011 | Striving for Eternity

Welcome to The Rapid Pull, daily edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of striving for eternity.

The Problem of Evil and the Nature of Good and Evil

This week as we wrap up our dailies, what we wanted to address this week is some of the really bad arguments that atheists make. And from time to time we want to go over some of these different arguments, go through them, discuss them.

And we really wanted to address the two main ones that we end up hearing most often. And that is, one, the problem of evil, which is really a problem for the atheists, not the Christian, because we have a way of explaining good and evil chemical reactions.

You can't do that just by chemical reactions. So we're going to address the fact of good and evil, one of their major arguments, and the other one is, they bring up all the time, is we can't trust the Bible.

The Bible's been edited. Bible's been changed. We have the telephone game where the Bible was written in the 300s. We have all kinds of arguments, and we are going to see this week, as we wrap this up, that the arguments they make are really, really bad.

In fact, the fact that they have to call themselves smart in all of their blogs is because, well, no one else would think so by seeing what they say. So the reality is, is that they may be very intelligent people, but when it comes to this, you end up seeing that they have a blindness to their own religious views.

And yes, atheism is a religion, but in a dictionary definition, they have a views of the origins of life. So with this, as we wrap this up, I want to encourage you to get my book, What Do We Believe, at whatdowebelievebook .com, and we're going to help give you a foundation to understand some of the things that we're going to be discussing in this week's wrap-up.

So I hope you enjoy.

Here we go.

This week we're going to deal with really bad atheist arguments. I know, the atheists say that they're really smart, which right off the bat should tell you something. The only ones that refer to atheism as smart and intelligent are the, well, atheists.

That's right.

When you have to have websites calling yourself smart, that's what they name their atheist blogs, and they argue that they have reason, and they're the ones that are the thinking ones and people of reason.

And yet, if you think about that, if we are nothing more than chemical reactions, and nothing more than that, we are the products of random chance and chemical reactions, then things like reason don't make any sense.

I mean, if I take vinegar and baking soda and I mix them together, I don't get an ability to reason. I get, well, a mess on the table when you take a whole box of baking soda and a whole jar of vinegar.

Trust me, I did it. Mom's not happy with that. But the reality is, it doesn't produce things like morality or an ability to reason. No, you need something different. Animals can think, but they don't reason.

They don't sit there and have court systems and 401ks and things like that.

Why?

Because they're not like us. They don't have an ability to reason. It is a God-given ability to reason. This is why in Psalms it says, the fool says in his heart, there is no God, because to claim that there is no God requires an ability to reason, and to reason, you first have to have a God that gave you that ability.

So you're using your God-given ability to deny the God that gave you an ability to reason. Not smart. One of the more common atheist arguments that we often hear is going to be that there cannot be a God because there's evil in the world.

The argument goes like this. They say that if God is all-powerful and all-good, then he cannot allow evil in the world. As we look and examine that argument, there's a couple problems. First off, well, you can't define what good is, let alone evil, if there is no God.

So the fact that they argue for a goodness and something that would be evil requires a standard, an absolute standard, that they can judge good and evil by. If we're just the products of chemical reactions, just evolutionary chance, then all they can argue is that morality is something that we choose to do, and it's purely subjective.

It's not outside of the person, and it's not absolute. Therefore, you can't say that what one person calls evil is evil for another person, because now it's subjective. They'll try to appeal to the society, but then you can't say what Hitler did was wrong because that society said it was okay.

The reality is, they know there is an absolute standard of morality, though they suppress that in unrighteousness, and that's what we want to appeal to in arguments like this. We want to appeal, first and foremost, to the fact that they can't even argue that there's something good and evil, it's just chemical reactions.

So they're first appealing to our worldview to deny our worldview. Now, I want to address what we started with yesterday because there's another way to address this issue when atheists say that there cannot be a God in this world because there is evil in the world.

Yesterday, we saw that the fact that there's evil first requires good, and good requires.

God.

It requires an absolute standard of morality. However, we want to look at this another way. Are these things mutually exclusive? Could God be good and yet do things that the world would see as evil, or more importantly, could God be all good and all-knowing and create a world where he allows evil to exist?

You see, any parent knows that when they're doing good to their child, their child often thinks it's evil and is upset and angry because they're not getting their way. And I'm sorry, but many atheists are still children in their thinking because they still act this way like a spoiled child that thinks that God should submit to them, not them submit to God.

He's the authority. But the other thing is, is it mutually exclusive for God to be good and yet allow for evil? Well, no. He can allow for it even though he has other purposes that he has planned. There are times even as parents that we may allow our children to get into some small bit of trouble so that they would learn a lesson for something greater.

Now, the reality is, sometimes children want to rebel, and even a good parent will allow a child to suffer a more severe consequence rather than protecting their child. But in the case where it's an all-holy, infinite holy God, that justice is eternal hell.

Why the Telephone Game Does Not Describe Bible Transmission

Another argument that atheists make all the time, and it comes about in different ways, but basically what they're going to say is that the Bible has been edited, the Bible's been changed, something dealing with the fact that you cannot trust the Bible, that it's not reliable.

And most often what they're going to argue is that the Bible came about like the telephone.

Game.

In other words, I tell one person something audibly, they hear it, maybe they mishear a word, they try to repeat a long sentence, they repeat it to someone else who repeats it to someone else, and so on and so on, and by the time you get to the end, it's very different than it started out.

Now often when people play the telephone game, they purposely forget things, but even if they're trying not to, the reality is the way we got our Bible is not the telephone.

Game.

In fact, the way we got the Bible is someone wrote it down, then someone copied it. Now that's different than audible, because when they're copying it, they have something they can compare against. And when you have many, many, many copies, you have many, many, many comparisons that could be made.

Do slight variances or changes occur as people are copying? Yes, they do. That happens. The question is, does that mean that the message of the Bible cannot be understood? Does it mean that there's doctrines that we see in the Bible that are wrong, as many of the atheists try to argue?

Well, that's something we're going to look at tomorrow, and it is one of the more important issues that we need to understand. And if you want more detail, I encourage you to get my book, What Do We Believe, at whatdowebelievebook .com, and read chapter two on the reliability of our Bible, because it comes up all the time.

Textual Criticism, Manuscripts, and the Reliability of Scripture

The question that almost always comes up when dealing with atheists is something dealing with the reliability of the Scriptures. And the sad thing is, most of these people who make the claims that we can't trust the Bible don't know anything about what's called textual criticism, which is how we examine these edits or variances that occur in some of these copies.

Now, they will get their arguments from someone that is very learned and very astute, Bart Ehrman, but the problem is, Bart Ehrman writes for the masses, and there he makes conclusions that no scholar would accept.

When he writes the scholarly work, he's pretty good. But the reality is, is that when we look at the manuscripts, we have 7 ,000 to 8 ,000 copies of the New Testament manuscripts in different portions.

Several hundred copies since before Nicaea, by the way, which is important because people think the Bible was written in Nicaea, in 300, but the reality is, we have copies before that date. Therefore, we have Bibles that were written before the Council of Nicaea.

We have so many copies that what we can do is compare them to one another, because it isn't a telephone game. They were written down. And when we compare these things, even Bart Ehrman, who attacks Christianity very much, even he had to say in the first printing of his paperback edition of his book, stated that there is not one single biblical doctrine that is affected by any of the variances and copying errors that we have in these different manuscripts.

So what we do know is the Bible hasn't changed in its meaning. If you want to get more on this, get my book What Do We Believe at whatdowebelievebook .com and read chapter two about this.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.