Debating Atheists & Agnostics

Introduction to The Academy and Presuppositional Apologetics

How the gospel influences all of life and culture, and the role that we have to play in applying foundational Christian thinking to every area of life. This is The Academy. I am Eli Ayala of Revealed Apologetics, and I will be bringing a six-part series on presuppositional apologetics.

What is this called, The Apology Academy?

It's just called The Academy. Okay.

Opening Banter and Show Intros

What's up, everybody? My name is Pastor Jeff Durbin, and you're watching Collision Today. Today, I'm going to be interacting with an atheist on TikTok.

So here we go.

Unsupervised and unhinged.

Welcome back to Cultist of the Aftermath.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to another episode of Ask Me Anything. You are watching Apologia Radio's After Show exclusively for all access.

If the authorities didn't want us involved in the public square, they ought not to have crucified Jesus in the public square.

Use humanistic principles. Well, I would say the same idea. I would say that.

Same answer.

I would say, what's the problem with stardust. Bumping into stardust? In the cosmic picture?

None.

There's no problem. In the cosmic picture, it won't matter.

No, Mr. President. You are not protecting reproductive freedom. You are authorizing the destruction of freedom for one million little human beings every.

Year.

I'm sorry, my friends, but I am tired of seeing Jesus presented as a weak beggar. He is a powerful savior, and the gospel is not a suggestion, it is a command.

Reverend Mulder, don't you sympathize with that?

I sympathize with every single human heart wishing to know the one true and living God, but I believe there's only one way that that can happen through Jesus Christ, and the gospel is about repenting of sin, not celebrating it.

For the spiritual abyss, you have not experienced this before.

There you go. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. Psalm 14 .1. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. Great, great verse. Great passage of scripture. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Apologia Radio.

You can get more at ApologiaStudios .com, A-P-O-L-O-G-I-A-Studios .com. Go there, sign up and partner with us in ministry. All access, you get a ton of stuff. All the past radio shows, episodes, podcasts, theologians, cultish, Apologia Radio provoked, all of it's there.

You also partner with us in ministry. We're going to be doing a debate review today about a recent debate we had at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, with Pastor James, Dr. James White, myself, Dr. Dean Chatterjee, and Jared Anderson.

Do ethics depend upon God? And all of our All Access partners in ministry, you guys do this ministry with us. You made that debate possible. You made it to where people could see that. I was actually coming out of the grocery store just the other day.

Someone walked up to me and said they had just watched that, and it totally transformed their life, strengthened their faith. And so thank you to all of our All Access partners. You made that possible.

So sign up for All Access. When you do, you get the after shows that are coming. You get the Academy. You get Collision, all the extra content. Ask Me Anything, once a month, private stream just for our ministry partners.

When we get together, you guys can get questions in to me. I talk back with you guys, and that's going to go also for theologians as well. So that's what's taking place at Apologia All Access. New website, revamped.

New content that's there already. New stuff coming every single week that's just for our partners in ministry that help us to make this ministry possible. Another example, just dropped a video yesterday of us doing some evangelism and outreach.

Downtown Salt Lake City, in a public space, Jehovah's Witnesses. That content you guys made possible. Changing people's lives, equipping people, encouraging people to get out and do evangelism. The stuff that's coming over the next week with the team that was out here locally.

The team that was out in Salt Lake City at the temple. Lots of stuff coming. Appreciate all of you guys very, very much. And that's Luke DeBear.

What is up?

That is Zach Conover. He's Director of Communications at End Abortion Now. Don't forget, guys, continue to pray for End Abortion Now. We've had bills of equal protection go across the entire country. About 15 states, bills of equal protection, abolition taking place across the country.

Some of those bills are still in, some still waiting to be heard. God just blessed us tremendously. Thousands of lives have been saved just because people like you partner with us in this ministry. So go to EndAbortionNow .com to partner with us in ministry.

Sign up with your church, because abortion is not abolished. It's not over. And you could be out with the church, saving lives, as we have over 900 churches that were equipped and trained by us to go and be a part of the work of the mission of the gospel in conflict with the issue of abortion.

We're grateful to God for all that He's done. And, oh, by the way, we had to reschedule. Just want to give a heads up. If you guys missed it and you were planning on coming, we had to reschedule the event.

You're supposed to be flying out tomorrow.

Yeah.

In Arkansas. We've got a bill in Arkansas. And so we're going to have a pastor's meeting in Arkansas. We've got to reschedule that. We're going to try to do it bigger and better later on this year. Zach, you know more details about that than me right now.

They will let us know in terms of a final time to expect, but it will be later this year.

Okay.

All right. So what's up, everybody? Did you guys check out the debate we had? I hope you guys got a chance to see that. It's an Apologia Studios recent feed on YouTube. A debate, again, we had at the University of Utah against one guy who calls himself a devout atheist, another guy who calls himself a devout agnostic.

Both identify as humanists. Both accept the Darwinian model of origins and the ontology and metaphysics that come with that. And so we're going to do a debate review today. It's a long debate. I think it's about two hours long.

So like 20-minute opening statements from each side. There's some rebuttals that are like five minutes each. Then, which I really loved, is 20 minutes each side cross-examination. That's where the debate actually takes place.

Now, of course, the opening statements are always very, very important. You're setting down the foundations. You're setting down the foundation of what you are supposed to aim at with your opponent's foundation and what they're supposed to be interacting with in your opening statement.

Unfortunately, that didn't take place from the other side towards us very well, I think, at the debate.

It's rare that it does.

It is rare. So yeah, just with debates, you're supposed to have opening statement and in the debate, the opposing side is supposed to interact with and refute your opening. That didn't happen. Dr. Dean Chatterjee just sort of went off.

I've actually it was interesting to be sitting there on the stage. I've listened to hours and hours and hours of Chatterjee and Anderson either in podcasts or in other public debates or discussion or in lectures and talks.

So when Chatterjee went up and did his opening, I had already heard all that stuff before. It's sort of a canned speech that he gives. So I don't really think that they came really prepared for the debate.

They didn't.

Just because, like I said, Chatterjee's was a canned lecture thing that he does very often. So I'd heard that, and I mentioned in my rebuttal, he's not even in the debate yet because the debate's about is the Christian God the foundation for ethics?

And he's talking about the existence of God and proving the existence of some God.

Is he the younger or the older of the gentlemen?

Chatterjee's the older guy. And so at any rate, we wanted to do a debate review today, talk through some stuff that took place at the debate, and that's what we're going to do today. So hopefully it's a benefit to you, a blessing to you.

We obviously in a time like this have opportunity to stop, to add more, to engage a bit more. Debates tend to be very, very quick. Obviously you're on a time crunch, and so there's a lot of things that you would like to say that you have to sort of go, well, I don't really have time to say that, so I won't say that, won't say that.

Lots more could have been said in the debate, but again, you're just constrained by time. So today we're not. We can do whatever we want. So that's what we're going to do. So I hope this is a benefit to you guys, and the goal of this and the debate review is really to try to prepare you and to equip you.

I want to just go on the record. I've said this to these guys. I think I even said it today. I was surprised, to be honest with you, when we got the invitation to do this debate two years ago, it got shut down because of COVID, and then obviously got the opportunity to do it this year.

I was surprised to see, you know, atheists confidently walk into a debate about ethics. I think, you know, it makes sense to me that they would have sort of like the courage to walk into a debate over the existence of God, because there's just a broad bunch of categories that you could just start going at, and it can be scattergun.

And a lot of guys might feel confident going into a debate like that from the atheistic perspective, but in the question of ethics, the question of, say, morality, that, to me, is one of the most glaring, obvious deficiencies and bankruptcies of the unbelieving worldview.

So to walk into a debate with two Christian ministers of the gospel and try to defend the idea that their perspective or their worldview can provide any meaningful foundation to ethics is surprising to me.

It takes a lot of courage. And I said it in my opening. I said, you know, our opponents are very brave tonight. I think they're very brave walking into a debate with their worldview in a debate like this.

Ethics. And I made the point that they don't have the capital to spend with you tonight, right? Their worldview capital, it's empty. They don't have the capital to spend on your emotions that they're going to draw on tonight.

If they talk about violence being bad, if they talk about harm done to others, they have no capital to purchase the emotion from you, right? Like, you've got them, they're there, and we shouldn't just do arguments based upon emotion, but some arguments based upon emotion are valid, are wrapped around emotion, are valid when they're really centered on core issues of justice, right?

Like, for example, if I mention the kidnapping and rape and mutilation of a little girl, I know it's horrible to talk about these things, but that's the world we live in. If I mention that and I say, that is wicked and evil, I am drawing on your emotions.

I'm trying to. Because I'm trying to actually tap into the image of God and the understanding of justice that is innate in you. And those emotions are appropriate in that moment. But see, I have the capital as a Christian to spend on your emotions to purchase them from you.

To say, give me those emotions, let me draw them out. I made the point that they're brave walking into this debate about ethics because anything that they appeal to is going to be ultimately meaningless because they don't believe in any absolute morality, no meaning in life, none of those things.

And so I check out the opening statement. James did about eight and a half minutes. I did the rest of the 20, and I tried to lay some solid epistemological foundations for the debate. Foundations, by the way, that neither Jared or Dean engaged with.

I really don't feel like these men came prepared to engage with us. I think that from their perspective, they're sophisticated, they're erudite, and they've been in this world of humanist ethics for a long period of time, Chatterjee has published, he's edited some books on ethics from the humanist perspective, all that stuff.

So this is their game, and I feel like they came into it thinking that they were already ready, and they clearly weren't because they didn't even really provide any meaningful justification or warrant for their position, and they didn't engage with us in any meaningful way.

I feel like they were on their heels the entire time, which I'm fine with. I'm not bothered by it. But I don't want to take down their skills. I feel like this debate just produced what is obvious. The unbelieving perspective is completely bankrupt, and I think the debate showed that.

I think it did. So hopefully it's a blessing to you guys to watch us review it today.

It's a much different question for the topic, does God exist? Versus without the Christian God, can you account for any ethical standard? And that's why I think it's two birds with one stone. If I can demonstrate that apart from God, there's no such thing as valuing the dignity and worth of another person, then by necessity, God must exist for there to be any meaning for the question.

And that comes up in the discussion. Pastor James brings that up.

You guys ready to go?

Ready.

Yeah, I was just going to say, I think my favorite part, I don't know if we're going to get to it or not, but just to emphasize the point you're making, when he made the claim about the founding fathers being agnostic, when I look over and you're like.

That was giddy.

Oh, that church and state one.

But then you're like, do you know where that came from? And he's just like, nope, please tell me. And I was just like, you shouldn't make claims like that if you don't even know where they came from.

I think that's the key issue here is that we are a generation of soundbites. If you can get the most popular soundbite, not that there's anything wrong necessarily. You can have Christian soundbites, but those soundbites are actually rooted in something and can be explained.

The problem with the modern era, I think, is that it's a soundbite era and community that's devoted to the soundbites. This is a really pithy slogan, or this is a good soundbite, and there's nothing behind it.

So we educate people today based upon soundbites. This is what you're supposed to believe. Memorize this. Here's a good soundbite. Memorize this. But they don't really understand anything about what they're saying.

So that comes up here when we talk about separation of church and state.

It's also funny. I think we've grown up in the cultural water, not knowing that we're wet. So we say things like religious freedom. Well, it's like, how did we get that? That only rises out of a Christian framework, to having the freedom to believe something.

Otherwise, you have a pagan view, which is coercion. So that common ground that you love so much, that religious freedom, thank a Christian for that.

Yeah, you can thank a Christian for that. Exactly.

Okay.

Humanism, Religious Freedom, and the Debate’s Core Question

So for those of you guys just jumping in, before I hit play here, this is Dr. James White, myself versus Dr. Dean Chatterjee and Jared Anderson. And just to get a fix on sort of where these guys are at, again, Dean Chatterjee announces and is proud of the fact that he is a devout atheist.

Jared Anderson announced in the debate that he is a devout agnostic. Both of them consider themselves humanists, which is to say that for them, humans are at the center of all questions.

Yeah, man is the measure of all things.

Man is the measure. Man is the reference point. So just keep that in mind. Here is a debate between two sides. One side says that God has revealed himself clearly in history through his prophets and apostles, through nature itself, and ultimately in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

God has given his revelation. It is public. It is not hidden. It is unavoidable. And God himself is the standard, the transcendent standard and reference point for all questions about knowledge, wisdom, ethics, science, logic, truth, beauty, goodness, you name it.

Knowledge is impossible apart from the Christian God. We weren't arguing for a general form of theism like a lot of Christian apologists do. We were arguing specifically that it is the triune God of Scripture that's the foundation of any meaningful appeal to ethics.

He is the justification for ethics at all. And then on the other side, you've got two men that believe that human beings are at the center. They are both humanists, and while they have some degree of difference between them in some points, it would ultimately be negligible because for them, human beings evolved through purposeless time and chance, acting on matter in a universe that doesn't care about them.

There is no ultimate meaning, no ultimate purpose. That's where they're at, and this is the cross-examination section. Gentlemen, it's a great honor to be here with you,.

And I honor you both,.

And thank you so much for being here with us and doing this. If I could ask you this question to respond to the quote that I had in my opening statement from Dr. Will Provine, the professor of biological sciences at Cornell.

He says that because of his views of modern evolutionary biology, it tells us loud and clear, and these are Darwin's views, that there are no gods, no purposeful forces of any kind, no life after death.

When I die, I'm absolutely certain that I'm going to be all completely dead. That's just all. That's going to be the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans either.

Could you respond to Dr. Will Provine, given your worldview? All right, just pause there for a second, because I can't do this better. I can't do this better than Dr. Will Provine himself. Now, that quote that I got from Provine has been said almost verbatim in a number of different contexts by Dr. Will Provine.

He is now dead. He's now a creationist, but that was a famous quote from Provine. He stood by that, and the reason I appreciate that quote so much, and I use it so often with atheists, is because it's this moment of hope within the atheist framework that atheists will have the integrity to say the consequences of what their system gives to you.

That's why I love this quote from Provine, because here's Provine having a real moment of integrity, and this is from the film Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed. It's actually, I think it's free now. I think it's free.

At least I'm finding it on YouTube for free in a couple places. Phenomenal movie. If you haven't seen it, you really should take a look at Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.

Show it to your kids.

If you've got teenagers in school, homeschooled, show this to your kids. It is fantastic. One of the things that I like the most, and I'll just say this quickly. I don't want to take too much time on this, but right before this section with Provine is this maybe 10 minutes or so on the consequences of Darwinianism and the Darwinian model and worldview in Nazi Germany, showing the devotion that Hitler had in his regime to the Darwinian model.

It's powerful. It's really powerful, and a lot of people aren't aware of that worldview foundation in Nazi Germany, and it's really something you've got to see. It's not outlandish. It's not trumped up.

It's not caricature. It's the real deal, and that happens right before this moment with Provine, and like I said, nobody could say it better than Provine says it himself. It is really eerie. It really is dark.

Here we go.

No gods, no life after death, no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no human free will are all deeply connected to an evolutionary perspective. You're here today, and you're gone tomorrow, and that's all there is to it.

Dr. Will Provine, professor of the history of biology at Cornell University, gave us another disturbing glimpse into where Darwinism can lead.

Oh, I was a Christian, but I never heard anything about evolution because it was illegal to teach it in Tennessee.

Dr. Provine's first biology professor changed all that.

He started talking about evolution as if it had no design in it whatsoever, and I came up to him, and I said, you've left out the most important part, and he said, if you feel the same way at the end of one quarter, I want you to stand up in front of the students in this class and tell them this deep lack in evolution, and I read that book so carefully, and I could find no sign of there being any design whatsoever in evolution, and I immediately began to doubt the existence of the deity.

But it starts by giving up an active deity, then it gives up the hope that there's any life after death. When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily, and you give up the hope that there's an imminent morality, and finally, there's no human free will.

If you believe in evolution, you can't hope for there being any free will. There's no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in human life. We live, we die, and we're gone. We're absolutely gone when we die.

Don't you feel hopeful after that? The ironic thing is I think he would say that there's deep meaning in that statement.

Yeah.

A whole little monologue.

Well, if you watch the audience Q &A at the end of our debate in Utah, somebody asked the question about suicide, and I say in my one minute or whatever I had to respond to that that I can't think of a better worldview to give somebody to drive them to suicide than the Darwinian model.

Either suicide or genocide.

Exactly.

And the difference is how do you distinguish between one or the other?

Right.

And so I wasn't being facetious. I was being serious. Listen to what Provine just said there. You talk about driving somebody to a place of despair and death. I mean, let Provine preach to you. Let him whisper into your ear while you're sleeping at night.

Goodness gracious. Listen to how that sounds, just hopeless, meaningless. There is no imminent morality, no present morality. Nothing is real and present. Nothing we have to hold to. There's no transcendent anything in the evolutionary model.

That's what I was pointing out to Jared and Dean. And so this is their response. And so I felt like it's one thing for me to say it in cross-examination.

To give the quote.

It's another thing to let Provine give it to you. A hundred proof.

Yeah, I agree with the beginning of that. I do personally believe that when we die, our consciousness most likely does not persist. I would comment on the ultimate versus greater, because I think that's very, very important.

It is true that questions of meaning are not objective or absolute, and that is an amazing, wonderful thing.

I'm sorry. Questions of meaning are not ultimate or absolute, and that's wonderful. In other words, so everything I'm going to say to you after this is meaningless drivel.

Isn't that great?

Isn't it great that not even anything I'm about to give to you has any meaning whatsoever? Isn't that wonderful? Did you catch it? It's like Dr. Cornelius Van Til, who if you don't know, you need to get to know.

Dr. Cornelius Van Til used to say to his students, let the unbeliever talk and let him keep talking, and ultimately he's going to hang himself. And that was, and I love and respect Jared, but that was Jared hanging himself.

There's nothing absolute about what I'm going to say, no real meaning, and isn't that lovely? Isn't that lovely?

Is he a professing naturalistic materialist?

That's what I was going to say.

He's talking about consciousness and all these immaterial aspects of human nature, and so I'm wondering how he holds those two things together.

So I'll give you a quote. This is something he said often. He says, there is absolutely.

Oh, so discard what he just told us.

Yeah, he said there is absolutely nothing supernatural. That's what Jared says. That's what he stands on. There is absolutely, apparently there are absolutes. There is absolutely nothing supernatural.

Supernatural, if you break down the etymology of the word, huper, and it's above or more than, and like we are more than conquerors, huper nike. That's where we get the word super, huper.

Okay, okay.

We are more than conquerors, nike, the goddess nike, who's the god of conquering, goddess of conquering. So huper.

Getting a little exegesis in here too today.

So there is nothing supernatural. That is to say there's nothing outside of or above the natural. So yes, Anderson is a materialist, naturalistic materialist. He would believe that there's nothing supernatural, nothing transcendent.

But yeah, he makes a ton of appeals to consciousness and to immaterial things that just can't actually exist in that kind of framework.

I would love for him to define it. You know, what is consciousness? And then based on his answer, try to take the legs off.

Brain gas.

Yeah.

Brain gas.

I bet they would even have different answers on that,.

How they would define it. Well, it's interesting because you guys might have noted that Provine says, and I probably confuse a lot of people, especially Christian categories when Christians are thinking of free will or thinking about a debate between say like Calvinism and Arminianism.

But when an atheist is talking about no free will, what they mean is that you are subject to your biology and DNA and biochemical responses.

In other words, you're not actually making choices.

You can't help being and doing what you're doing.

You're dancing to your DNA.

Dancing out your DNA. And that's what Dawkins says. You're dancing out your DNA. You are just happening. And you are the subject to the biochemical responses that are happening in your cranium. And that's just the way things are.

It's fixed. And that's what Provine was referring to with no free will for humans either is you are just the subject to your biochemical responses happening in your brain. You can't help it.

And that is supposed to be the basis for you ought to act or not act this way.

I would say he wouldn't feel that way if someone stole his car.

Provine would not.

For sure.

And even with Jared, I was going to say I would like him to define even what wonderful is.

Yeah. Yeah.

And we'll keep going because he's going to bury himself more.

Because again, that means that each of us is able to determine what is meaningful to us and what is important to us.

Does he really believe that? Each of us is able to determine what's meaningful to us and important to us. So try that with the rapist. Try it with the pedophile.

Try it.

Try it with them. You can't say that each of us is able to determine what is meaningful for us, right? And then when the murderer comes along or the thief or the rapist comes along and says, well, what's meaningful to me is to violate other human beings.

Well, you've already told him that he's allowed to do that. Each of us can decide what's meaningful to us. Some people think it's meaningful to engage in the slaughter of other human beings. Are you going to stop them?

Because you're not in charge of them. I mean, they are one of those people that's able to determine for themselves what's meaningful. Correct, Jared? It's just an absolute mess. The unbelieving worldview is utter foolishness.

That's why I started the show today with Psalm 14. One, the fool says in his heart there is no God. Foolishness in scripture is not merely a description of somebody's intellectual state, although it does refer to that as well.

You can be foolish intellectually. God doesn't behave in that way. God is not the author of confusion. God is a God of order. His mind is consistent. God cannot lie. He cannot engage in logical contradiction.

But the fool engages in logical contradictions. They revel in foolishness and intellectual suicide. And so, yeah, foolishness in scripture is, of course, a description of somebody's mental capacities, but it goes beyond that.

It's deeper than that. Foolishness is a moral indictment. Foolishness is a sin. And so these men cannot hold their worldview together. They cannot live consistently with their position. They've got one foot consistently in their hatred towards God and their unbelieving worldview and their rebellion, and one foot reaching constantly back over towards their Christian worldview to gather capital that doesn't belong to them.

And so the fool says in his heart, there is no God. And you could break down almost every sentence of the unbeliever in a debate like this and just write a book about it. It doesn't work.

And how does that philosophy, everyone doing what's right in their own eyes, basically, it's essentially a self-serving philosophy. How do you build any meaningful, cohesive society upon that premise?

Because even as an unbeliever, you'd have to aspire to the reality that it's good that people help each other. It's good to look out for your fellow man. It's good to create a society that works together and sacrifices.

But again, without the biblical worldview, you don't have a basis for a society where people sacrifice themselves for the good of others.

Because your ontology doesn't work with it. Your doctrine of being, the nature of human beings, is that they're descendants of bacteria. There's no moral ought above any descendants of bacteria to do anything good for one another.

Because guess what? There's no value inherent in them.

Except what you create for yourself.

Except what you create for yourself, which is ultimately arbitrary in itself. It's a meaningless thing. So that's what I say. I think in my rebuttal, I say, you talk about grieving. He talked about being a humanist chaplain, grieving over people dying.

And I said, people don't shed tears over rocks that tumble off a cliff and shatter. But what's the difference? Rocks got here the same way we did. Unguided, purposeless forces, time and chance acting on matter.

We're just a different kind of accident of evolution. We're not shedding tears over the other things that just shatter, break, and disappear into dust. And why do we cry over humans? Because you know that human beings have value and dignity.

You know it, instinctively, because you're in the image of God. But your worldview doesn't comport with what you're saying.

It comes up later in the debate, too. I think you guys hammer this home that there's a creational distinction between mankind and every other created thing, whereas the atheist perspective possesses no such distinction.

There's no distinction.

There's just an equilibrium of we're all just existing in the sea of chaos. There's no hierarchical distinction.

Yeah. Anything?

Good. Here we go.

Honor the fact that for many here, Christ and the Bible are guidelines for meaning and purpose and ethics. I celebrate that. You need to use the Bible very carefully. But that is not the case for everyone.

The important thing that makes it greater than us individually to answer some of the questions as far as aren't there just billions of points of view? Well, yes, there are billions of points of view. But again, we are all part of the conversation.

Really? Do you really believe that, Mr. Anderson? Do you believe that there's billions of different viewpoints and that we're all part of the conversation and each one has an equally valid place at the table?

So do you act like that with the rapist, the murderer, the thieves? Do you do that? Do you say that they have a valid place at that table in the conversation, that they're all just part of this conversation?

I don't think so. I don't think that the rapist belongs to the table. If we're going to have ethical conversations, conversations about what is right, what is wrong, true, beautiful, lovely, all that, the rapist doesn't have a seat.

Neither does the pedophile. Neither does the liar. Neither does the thief. They don't belong at the table. See the difference between the Christian worldview? No, they're not part of the conversation.

Why?

Because there's a transcendent law and standard that's been revealed to us in humanity. And so they don't belong at the table. How do we know? Because we know the character of God. It's been revealed through nature.