Every Argument For Atheism

A new, fast-growing Christian YouTube channel, Redeemed Zuma, put out a video promisingly called "All Atheist Arguments Answered in 10 Minutes." Let's see how he does.

Atheists have a lot of arguments, but they never really think of anything new that the church hasn't had answers to for the past 2,000 years. So, let's answer them.

"Religion causes wars." Well, actually, only 7% of all human wars were caused by religion, and if you remove Islamic Wars, that number drops down to 3%. Right off the bat, this isn't really an argument for atheism, just for the idea that religion is harmful. Even if religion caused no wars at all, that's no actual evidence that any religion is true. Still, even if religion only causes 7% of wars, isn't it a problem that it causes any wars? The claim is not that religion causes all wars or even most wars, just that it sometimes causes wars. I mean, to use a crude example, as far as I'm aware, national socialism only ever caused one war, one out of the thousands that we have documented. But of course, even if the vast majority of wars were started for other reasons, it's still a problem that this caused a war at all. Not a perfect analogy, but you get what I'm saying. And it's worth asking, wherever there is a totally non-religious conflict, do you think that such a conflict would be calmed or exacerbated if we were to introduce religious conviction? Perhaps only the correct religion would make things better. That's fine, you can hold that position, but then even a believer can accept that many religions do often cause conflicts, or at least make them worse.

"A lot of evil has been done in the name of religion." This is true, but the most murderous people in human history have been atheists. This doesn't mean religion is true, it just means you can't use that as an argument against it. I just want to point out that whilst religious violence is motivated by religious beliefs, atheist violence is rarely motivated by atheism. It's at best permitted by someone's atheism, but then religious violence is also permitted by the person's religious beliefs, as well as being encouraged by them. But okay, on the Hitler thing. Look, I don't know what his religious views really were. Some say he was a Catholic, the religion he was baptized into and confirmed in. He did also write in Mein Kampf that, "In standing guard against the Jew, I am doing the handiwork of the Lord." Not a particularly atheist statement. But then Hitler was probably quite good at, well, lying. And perhaps the belief of some, even to this day, that he was a convicted theist is just a testament to the strength of his propagandic efforts. But if he was lying and didn't actually believe in God, then it's worth asking why he would think that lying about being religious would make his fascist campaign more successful. Whatever his own views personally were, he had every Nazi soldier wear belt buckles inscribed with the words "Gott mit uns" (God With Us). Clearly, even if he was personally an atheist, Hitler recognized that belief in a Creator God can give people the confidence to do all kinds of evil.

"If you were born somewhere else, you wouldn't be a Christian." Okay. And if you were born somewhere else, you wouldn't be an atheist. Everyone's beliefs are shaped by their context. Well, this just misses the point. Sure, all beliefs are shaped by their geography, but atheists don't claim that there's a God supervising the world who proactively wants everyone to believe in him. If such a god did exist, would we really expect him to reveal himself more strongly and reliably to say, Americans, than to Indonesians? It seems incredibly unlikely and unfair that your chances of being saved, of coming to know the true God, could be determined by where you happen to be born. If atheism is true, however, it's no surprise that where you're born shapes your religious beliefs, because that's what we think religious beliefs are: products of local mythology or political dominance. So, yeah, if I was born in Indonesia, I'd probably be a Muslim. But whilst that's exactly what we'd expect if there is no Universal God supervising everything and it's all just a product of local mythology, it's nothing like what we'd expect if there were a real Universal God. By the way, I call this the genetic fallacy fallacy.

"How do you know which religion is true?" Well, everyone, religious or not, has faith in a certain worldview. It's just that some worldviews are called religions and some are secular. But everyone has to ask the question of which worldview best explains the world. Nothing to add here. Yes, every worldview should be justified.

"There's no scientific proof that God exists." Well, by definition, science can only prove things inside the natural world, and by definition, God is something outside the natural world. So, science can neither prove nor disprove God. That's fine, if you want to say that science has nothing to say about God, but you've just undercut a great deal of natural theology. You're disagreeing with everybody who tries to prove God's existence with the fine-tuning argument, or the Big Bang, or the cosmological argument, irreducible complexity arguments about the genetic code, indeed, even the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus. These just automatically cannot work in establishing God's existence since material investigations can't bear on the supernatural.

Well, this is fortuitous. Literally, as I was recording this video, Redeemed Zuma released a new video called "All Arguments for God Explained in 10 Minutes." Now, given that he's just said that science can never bear on the supernatural and can't prove or disprove God's existence, just take a listen to this: "Things in nature like the human cell or the ecosystem of the world are very complex and they work like a machine. Now, Darwinian evolution can explain why that is. But there's also things Darwinian evolution can't explain, like the four constants of the universe. There are physical constants like the gravitational constant and the electron charge, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force that are perfectly fine-tuned such that if they were even the slightest bit different, the entire universe would immediately collapse in on itself." Sounds pretty, I don't know, scientific, doesn't it? So it seems like when an atheist is arguing that science disproves God, "no, no, science and religion are totally separate, non-overlapping magisteria." But when it comes to proving God's existence, "hey, look at these finely tuned constants, isn't that amazing?"

"There's no evidence of anything supernatural." Well, that's just not accurate. There are medically documented cases of people with demonic possessions speaking in languages they don't know, for example, and people with near-death experiences getting information they never had access to.

"Okay, medically documented cases of people with demonic possession." Sounds awesome. I would love to take a look at that, you know, medical documentation. I get the feeling you're not going to provide any, are you? Fear not, we do have one source that was flashed on screen: a book by Richard Gallagher called "Demonic Foes." So, okay, I bought the book. I only skimmed through a couple of chapters, but I did also watch a few of Dr. Gallagher's interviews. In the book, he talks about some of his experiences with people he believes were demonically possessed, including a woman he calls Julia. Evidence for demonic possession consists principally in people like Julia having special powers. One night, Dr. Gallagher heard his normally peaceful cats screeching and fighting with each other, and the next day he meets a woman he calls Julia who says, "How do you like those cats?" Weird for sure, but not quite yet the medical documentation that we're seeking. So then, what other special powers did Julia have? Well, Dr. Gallagher writes in the Washington Post of how she knew things that she couldn't have known naturally, including exactly how his mother had died years ago. But also, get this, she could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. Okay, but how about this: Julia, during various exorcisms, was suddenly able to speak fluent Latin out of nowhere. We're not told what she said, of course, but it happened. And if you can believe it, in one ceremony, she actually levitated out of her chair, literally floating in the air for half an hour. Atheists cannot explain that one. But we don't have to take Dr. Gallagher's word for this. Oh no, actually, we can't, because he didn't see this himself. But we can just accept that the people who did see her levitate and told him about it were super trustworthy. We'll just have to take his word about somebody else's word. That's not to say that I can prove she wasn't possessed, or that Dr. Gallagher's priests were mistaken or lying, but this book, which is the only citation Redeemed Zuma provided, hardly fulfills my evidential expectations. But here's the thing: even if you could provide some kind of actual medical evidence for demonic possession, didn't you literally just say that science can never prove anything supernatural? Maybe you just think this wouldn't count as scientific evidence, but if there can't be any scientific documentation of demonic possession, then what kind of evidence are you talking about here? Anecdotes? Testimony? It's just not doing it for me.

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Back to the video. "The Bible has contradictions." Okay, you think you found an apparent contradiction that the church hasn't known about for 2,000 years. Every apparent contradiction can be explained by understanding just a little bit of theology. Every contradiction, all of them. Look, you're right, I wouldn't claim to have discovered some new contradiction that nobody has noticed before. I would just say that the proposed solutions to many of them seem to be, shall we say, theologically motivated. The one contradiction that you flashed on screen is probably the least troublesome contradiction that you could possibly have chosen. So how about, for instance:

1. Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus's lineage. Matthew says that Jacob is Joseph's father, whilst Luke says that Eli is Joseph's father. Some people claim that Luke is actually giving Mary's lineage, while Matthew is giving Joseph's. Eli is Mary's father. It's just recorded as Joseph's father because Joseph was Eli's son-in-law. Augustine's solution to this problem was to suggest that Joseph was actually adopted. So Jacob is his biological father, while Eli is his adopted father. And sure, these are both possible, but are they really the most natural interpretation of the text if you're not already motivated to harmonize the accounts? It's not impossible to reconcile them in this kind of way, but doesn't the need to do so at least slightly lower your credence in the text?

2. The date of Jesus's crucifixion. Was it after the Passover, as the synoptic gospels claim, or the eve of the Passover, as John's gospel claims? My friend and biblical scholar John Nelson just wrote an article on this contradiction. He's a Christian who used to think it could be reconciled but changed his mind. I'll link it down below. His new Substack, behindthegospel.com, is well worth subscribing to if you're into this kind of thing.

3. In John's gospel, after finding Jesus's tomb empty, Mary Magdalene runs to Simon Peter and John and says, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have put him." Strange thing for her to say if, as Matthew records, an angel appeared to Mary Magdalene at the tomb telling her exactly where Jesus had gone, and then Jesus himself appeared to her when she was on the way to the disciples. Why would she then have said to the disciples, "We do not know where they have taken them, Lord"?

4. Jesus is sending out his disciples to teach. In Mark, he tells them, "Take nothing for the journey except a staff." In Luke, he tells them, "Take nothing for the journey, no staff." So, do they take a staff or not? In Barnabas Aar's essay "Staff or No Staff," he suggests that there are two types of staff that Jesus is talking about in either account. He points out that Augustine distinguished between a "real staff" in Matthew's gospel and a "metaphorical staff" in Mark's gospel. I mean, sure, if you absolutely need the accounts to harmonize, you can suggest all kinds of reasons for this apparent contradiction. But wouldn't it be easier to just say that, yeah, the accounts are different? Because look, who the hell cares about small contradictions? If these documents are truly historical accounts, we'd expect them to have minor differences, as people try to accurately remember events and remember them slightly differently. If two witnesses in a court case give a story that perfectly matches up in every single detail, that's actually cause for suspicion. It's evidence that they've made up the story and rehearsed it. So I don't see contradictions like this as a big problem. But you want to claim that there are no contradictions to be found at all, and I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that these kinds of explanations cut the mustard.

"The Gospels were anonymous." Anonymous doesn't mean we have no idea who wrote them. It just means the names of the authors aren't signed in the text itself. But we literally have writings from church fathers who knew the apostles and can verify that they indeed wrote the books named after them. Okay, the consensus of New Testament scholars seems to be that we don't have sufficient evidence for the traditional authorship of the Gospels. But what was it that you just said? "We literally have writings from church fathers who can verify the traditional authorship of the Gospels." You've shown a picture on screen of St. Ignatius of Antioch. Who, look, I don't know very much about, but I think you've basically just lied about him. We only know anything about him at all via his letters and tradition. Tradition which states he was a disciple of John, but with very patchy evidence. Some of Ignatius' followers wrote an account of his martyrdom that says he was a disciple of John. So, sure, maybe Ignatius knew John. But where the hell have you gotten this idea that Ignatius can verify John's authorship of the Fourth Gospel? Even in the letters Ignatius allegedly wrote to John, now recognized to be forgeries anyway, we don't have any clear endorsement from Ignatius of the idea that John wrote this gospel. It seems that Ignatius' Epistles were influenced by the theology of John's gospel, so he probably read it. But that's a far cry from making any commentary about its authorship. For the record, church patristics is really not my area. I don't know very much here, so don't look to me for advice on this. I actually reached out to one of my old theology tutors to see if he could help me figure out what I might be missing. But look, I might just be missing something here. I'm genuinely interested in seeing where Redeemed Zuma has gotten this evidence that Ignatius can confirm that John wrote the Fourth Gospel. So if you're watching this, RZ, RZ, let me know.

"The Gospels misquote Jesus." Now, it's true that a lot of secular scholars think the Gospels are a mix of real quotes from the historical Jesus and fake quotes added by the church. Wait, hold on. It's true that some secular scholars think this. What other kind of scholars do you want? Religiously motivated ones? Secular just means not affected by religion, which any scholar should be in regards to their scholarship, even if they're a Christian. Maybe you meant to say atheist instead of secular? I'm not sure. But I mean, imagine if I was making a video about climate change and I said something like, "Well, yeah, sure, some researchers who aren't funded by oil will say that climate change is real." That's kind of what it sounds like here. Now, it's true that a lot of secular scholars think the Gospels are a mix of real quotes from the historical Jesus and fake quotes added by the church. But none of them can agree on which quotes are legit and which are not. So we can dismiss their opinions because scholars can't agree on which quotes of Jesus are legitimate, we can throw out their skepticism. What? The whole argument is precisely that scholars can't agree on which quotes of Jesus are authentic. That's the whole problem. Do you really think that this lack of consensus about which quotes are authentic is a problem not with the quotes, but with the scholars? Come on.

Hey, here's a fun exercise. Try, without rewinding this video, to write down the exact contents of my previous sentence. I mean, pause the video, write down the last sentence I just said, word for word, and then compare it to what I actually said. I bet you can't remember it accurately, at least not perfectly. And yet, you heard me say it mere seconds ago. Now, consider that even the most conservative estimates place the authorship of the Gospels at least decades after Jesus's death, and yet we're supposed to believe that they never misquote Jesus.

"Jesus never claimed to be God." Yes, he did. He didn't say, "I am God, worship me," but he showed that he was God in many places in all four Gospels by doing things that only God can do. It's true that he didn't walk around before his resurrection claiming to be God because he wanted people to figure it out themselves. That's why he kept saying, "Who do you say that I am?" However, after his resurrection, people figured out that he was God, and Jesus congratulated them. That's why he kept saying, "Who do you say I am?" Doesn't he say that just like once more? Subtle hyperbole, perhaps. Anyway, did Jesus claim to be God? I have a whole podcast about this with Bart Ehrman. It's a really interesting one. If you don't mind a bit of self-promo, but the long and short of it is that Jesus definitely seems to claim to be God in John's Gospel, but maybe not so much in the Synoptics. But you've just put some examples on the screen from the Synoptic Gospels, so let's take a look at one of them. You've identified forgiving sins as something that only God can do. I wouldn't be so sure. Take a look at John 20:21 onwards. Jesus is speaking here to his disciples after the resurrection. Again, Jesus said, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." And with that, he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven." So the apostles had the power to forgive sins. This is clearly the Gospel showing that the apostles are all God, right? Because forgiving sins is something that only God can do. Obviously not. Maybe you'll say something, something like, "Well, they could forgive sins because Jesus gave them that power." But it's still Jesus's power, really. But take notice, Jesus said to them, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." So if Jesus sending the disciples to forgive sins doesn't make them gods, then the Father sending Jesus to forgive sins doesn't make him God either. I could go on for ages about this, but watch my podcast with Bart instead.

"The later one of the Gospels was written, the more divine it makes Jesus seem." So we can extrapolate that Jesus was originally a human figure who got made more divine over time. All right, maybe some Gospels emphasize Jesus's divinity more than others. But what about Paul's letters? That fully confess the divinity of Jesus and were also written before any of the Gospels. So that breaks your pattern. Yeah, sure, if the claim is about whether the authors of the Gospels thought Jesus was divine, I have no problem saying that the earliest Gospel, Mark, seems to imply that Jesus is God from the very first chapter. The more interesting point, however, however, is not that later Gospels make Jesus more divine, but that they provide more evidence for his divinity. As time goes on, the earliest copies of Mark contain no post-resurrection appearances. Matthew and Luke contain some post-resurrection appearances, and John then contains even more. So the later the source, the more records of these kinds of appearances, which, after all, are the principal proof of Jesus's resurrection, which in turn is the principal proof of his divinity. Now, sure, Paul still upsets this pattern, writing that 500 people saw the Risen Christ. But this is in a different category of evidence. The Gospels are, according to you at least, eyewitness accounts of a physically resurrected man. Paul, however, tells us of a vision that he had of a bright light, never meeting a fleshy Jesus himself. And as for the 500 that he talks about, this is Paul telling us that he's heard that some other unnamed people saw the Risen Jesus. That's not to say it didn't happen, just that it can't be considered on the same level as the allegedly eyewitness accounts provided by the Gospels, which do get more and more detailed and fanciful the later they were written.

"The Bible supports slavery." No, it doesn't. Just because there's slavery in the Bible doesn't mean the Bible supports it. There are some Old Testament verses that could be interpreted as condoning slavery. But Jesus himself said that the Old Testament made accommodations to people's sinful state. "Some Old Testament verses could be interpreted as condoning slavery." Seriously? There's just no way that anybody who reads the Hebrew Bible can seriously defend this. This is the most untenable position in the entire video, if you ask me. Once again, I have a whole podcast about this, this time with Joshua Bowen. It's over an hour and a half of detailed descriptions of exactly how the Bible supports slavery. But just to take some examples: "Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished." That is probably by death if the slave dies as a direct result. But then not to be punished with death if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property. "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves." I suppose this could be interpreted as the Old Testament endorsing slavery. "You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life. But you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly." Sure, maybe this could be interpreted as the Old Testament endorsing slavery. But of course, the New Testament does away with all of this. In the Old Testament, God, despite completely prohibiting all kinds of practices, including imaginary crimes like witchcraft, obviously couldn't abolish slavery for whatever reason. But the New Testament solved this problem with verses such as 1 Peter 2:18: "Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh." Oh, okay. Now, Peter does say that this is because it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering, implying that it's unjust for slave owners to be cruel to their slaves, which is great. But it does still say that they should submit nonetheless, and certainly seems to at least accept the practice of slavery in general. Paul in Ephesians also legitimizes the practice of slavery: "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ." Again, Paul does then go on to say that masters should also treat their slaves in the same respectful way, since the father doesn't favor the master over the slave, which is great and progressive for the time, perhaps. But it still recognizes the earthly practice of slavery and doesn't take the opportunity to condemn the practice in principle. Now, for what it's worth, maybe the kind of slavery described here, where masters are good to their slaves and perhaps good for their slaves, is nowhere near as bad as the kind of slavery that comes to mind from, say, American history. Maybe this kind of slavery is actually perfectly moral. But to say that the Bible didn't condone and legitimize it at all is simply untrue. Some people like to point to a verse in Galatians where Paul writes that "in Christ there is neither slave nor free," but he's clearly talking here about the relevance of either status to salvation, not the existence of the practice on Earth. I mean, in the very next words, he says, "nor is there male and female," but I never see Christians using this verse to justify biblically motivated gender abolitionism. And also, slave owners in the American South had slave Bibles for their slaves to read, but it omitted a lot of the real Bible. So if the Bible actually did support slavery, this wouldn't have been necessary.

Well, the fact that the so-called slave Bible could exist at all is a problem. This text isn't framed so much as a censored Bible with bits taken out, but rather a collection of select texts from the Bible, just like how you might have a collection of Bible verses for use in overcoming grief or something that omits a great deal of chapters. This was a Bible created for the express purpose of reading to slaves in the West Indies. But why would you be able to use any of a Bible, which I'm told doesn't condone slavery, to, you know, promote and maintain slavery? The parts that aren't in the slave Bible include the Exodus story, the Psalms, and Revelation, which certainly contain themes of freedom, particularly in the Exodus, of course. But these omissions do not in any way count against the fact that elsewhere in the Bible there are much more specific verses that definitely condone and legislate slavery.

"Christianity supported slavery." Well, sure, some Christians did. But all human civilizations have had slavery. Christian civilization was the first one to abolish it on moral grounds. Sure, many societies condone slavery throughout history. But you claim that your tradition is the correct one, with access to the will of the God of the universe. Yes, Aristotle condoned slavery, but his "Politics" is not thought to be a divinely authored text. Why did it take so long, literally over a thousand years, for Christian society to abolish slavery if it was so obviously against God's will the whole time? The fact that you're against slavery is due to Christian influence. Also, most organizations fighting modern-day slavery are Christian. Okay, to say that I today am against slavery due to exclusively Christian influence is laughable. I know this whole "Western ethics are all secretly Christian" idea is popular at the moment, but you show me exactly where in your Bible I can find justification for abolishing slavery. I will show you just as many examples, and probably more, of it justifying the exact opposite, and doing so much more specifically. Yes, Christians today may condemn slavery, but if we turned back the clock, got in a time machine, and went and visited Europe in a time before abolition, and we tried to abolish slavery, where is the first place that the locals would turn, and plausibly so, to defend it as an institution?

"God killed tons of people in the Bible." Well, it's actually way more than that. God numbers everyone's days. He's the Giver of Life, so he can take it, especially if people sin. It's a hell of a response to the problem of natural evil. Why does God allow millions of people to die in earthquakes or tsunamis, or indeed kill them himself on purpose? Because he can. He has the right to kill you, so why not? There isn't much I can say to challenge this. Maybe this is just God's right. I don't know.

"Atheist countries are more prosperous." Yes, it's true that northern European countries are very prosperous and very secular. But correlation doesn't equal causation. It's not like atheism causes prosperity; it's that prosperity causes atheism, because when people have comfortable lives, they don't feel a need to depend on God. But why are these particular countries so prosperous in the first place? They may be secular now, but they're rooted in generations and generations of Protestant Christianity. If you want an example of a country that's atheist and not rooted in Christianity, look at communist China. Yeah, I don't much like this kind of argument. For a start, I don't even really know how you can measure a nation's prosperity without presupposing a bunch of worldview assumptions. I suppose it's also impossible to say how much a country's prior religion is relevant to its current religion and prosperity level. I mean, sure, communist China grew out of a non-Christian society, but communist Russia grew out of an Orthodox Christian society. But anyway, even if religious societies are more prosperous, this only tells us that belief in God is socially beneficial, not that God actually exists. Still, something atheists bring up all the time, of course, so I completely understand why it's worth including this. But just bear that in mind.

"There's 4,000 gods that people believe in, and you're atheist to 3,999 of them." I just go one God further. Okay, this isn't the gotcha that you think it is, because the question of whether some sort of God exists is fundamentally different from the question of which religion is right about God. Yeah, I agree with this. It's a bad argument. If it is an argument, I do find that it's a useful tool for helping people to understand what it's like to not believe in God, but it certainly doesn't function as an actual argument against any God.

"If God created everything, then who created God?" Well, God is defined as the uncaused causer. Everyone knows there needs to be a first cause at the beginning of the chain of all events in the universe, and it makes a lot more sense for that first cause to be a personal God who caused things for a reason rather than some random impersonal force. Yeah, everybody knows that, right? Sure, first cause arguments are powerful and interesting. I've already discussed them ad nauseam, but briefly, I suppose I'd agree that if they are successful in establishing a first cause, it wouldn't really make sense to ask what caused that cause. Giving it attributes of traditional theism, however, is of course a separate question.

"Science disproves God." Well, actually, the church invented modern science. All the founders of the Scientific Revolution deeply believed in God, and medieval theologians laid the groundwork for modern science by seeing the world was governed by an intelligent creator. That means we can understand the world with our intelligence, and studying God led to studying the world because the world is God's creation. I've talked about this before too. Sure, the founding fathers of science were religious. But who wasn't back then? And even if they weren't religious, we never know about it, since even expressing unorthodox cosmology, let alone atheism, was enough to get Galileo put under house arrest in Tuscany for the rest of his life. But more importantly, suppose for a second that it were the case that science completely disproves religion. I'm obviously not saying that it does, but if it did, then of course the founding fathers of science would have been religious because they hadn't yet invented the scientific method that would go on to disprove religion. It's like saying, "Isn't it interesting that the Wright brothers, who invented the airplane that supposedly went on to produce the Boeing 747 jet, didn't themselves own a Boeing 747 jet? Doesn't that tell us something?" And look, it may be true that early scientists were inspired by their theism. You say that the church invented modern science, a dubious claim perhaps, but I'll just grant it. If so, so what? Just because science originated with religious thinkers, that doesn't make it possible for science to have gone on to then undermine religion. Protestantism grew out of Catholicism, for example. That doesn't mean that it can't undermine it.

"God is just used to fill in the gaps of things that science can't explain yet." Well, actually, God is the reason for everything, even things that science can explain. It's not one or the other. It's not like everything's explained by either science or God. And the more science can explain, the less God can explain. Really, science can explain almost everything, but God is still behind it all, because science explains the how, and God explains the why. I agree that this is how a theist should respond to the "God of the gaps" objection. Even if something is explained by science, the whole scientific enterprise as a whole, and the existence of scientific laws at all, might still rely on a divine cause. Still, I think we're in agreement here that scientific explanations and divine agency can coexist peacefully.

"If God is good, why can't he destroy all evil?" Well, he eventually will. "Why can't he do it now?" Because he'd have to destroy you. Okay, I totally get the Christian idea that human beings are corrupted and evil. Of course, all of us constantly fall short, even of our own moral standards. Fine. So destroying evil requires destroying us. But you've just said that God will one day destroy all evil. He just can't do it now because that would mean destroying humans. But what will change so that one day he can destroy evil without destroying humans? And why can't that happen now? As far as I was aware, the thing that allows human beings to escape being justly destroyed for their sin is the sacrifice of Jesus, which happened a good couple of thousand years ago now. So what is God waiting for to destroy evil? Perhaps you're talking about the second coming of Christ, Judgment Day. But then what changes about the world between now and then that God is suddenly able to destroy evil without destroying humans?

"Why does God let bad things happen?" Because we deserve it. Well, look, I appreciate how blunt this is. I was expecting some kind of theodicy: evil exists because it's soul-building, or because of free will, or because of heavenly compensation. But no, we just deserve it. Well, fine. But I just want to bring that home for a minute. This week, about five children in the UK alone will die from cancer. The most common type of cancer in children is leukemia. I know you wouldn't say this to their face, Redeemed Zuma, but when a parent asks, "Why on earth has this happened to their child?" you think that the, in fact, correct response is, "Well, they deserve it." Look, I can't disprove that they do deserve it. Maybe humanity is just so corrupted by original sin or whatever that we do deserve pediatric cancer. But even if we do, why does some people get what they deserve and not others? It's not just that people suffer at all, in other words, but that they do so seemingly randomly and arbitrarily, sometimes by accident of birth or genetics. Lucky for the rest of us, I guess.

"Well, animals don't sin, so why do they suffer?" Well, the Bible says all things will be restored. So if God is good, we can assume that they will be compensated, right? So animals will be compensated in the afterlife because they don't deserve to suffer. But those children who died of cancer shouldn't be compensated? Of course, you know, the ones who do deserve it. Luckily, Jesus paid the price for those kids, and they'll get to inherit eternal life anyway, even though they deserve to be destroyed. But for some reason, that sacrifice only gets rid of the punishment they deserve in the invisible next life, not in this one. In this one, they get cancer, you know, because they deserve it. Animals suffer in this world too, for some reason that you haven't even attempted to explain. But that's also fine, because God will pay them off, probably.

"How do you know that God isn't evil?" Well, because evil is not a thing the way good is. Just like cold is just a lack of heat, and dark is just a lack of light. Evil is just a lack of good. And for good to be objective, it needs to come from God. So a God who is objectively evil is logically impossible. Yeah, sure, if you think that evil is just a privation of good, then I guess there can't exist a maximally evil being. I suppose I'm just unconvinced by that analysis of what good and evil are. But maybe you're convinced of it. I know that it's a popular view. One reason it strikes me as unintuitive is because if I imagine two possible worlds: one in which nothing at all exists, and one in which a bunch of suffering exists. If evil is just a privation of good, then since they both contain no good, we'd have to say that they're about as bad as each other. That might not be correct under this view, I don't know, but it just doesn't seem like a good way to capture what we think is evil about suffering. But anyway, I'm an ethical emotivist, so of course I'm going to understand these terms differently to you.

"Can God make a rock he can't lift?" Well, you're just asking if God can contradict himself. Like, can God lie, or can God change, or can God make another God? And the answer to all those things is no. God being all-powerful means he can do anything to things outside himself. It doesn't mean that he can do anything to himself or that he can contradict himself. Yeah, I think I agree with this explanation. If omnipotence just means the ability to do all logically possible things, then God can be omnipotent even if he can't create a rock too heavy for him to lift. Or, as a friend of mine puts it, "Yes, God can do all things, but logical contradictions aren't things. They literally have no reference, even conceptually." Still, I think that there are other, better paradoxes. Take this one about omniscience: Does God know all true propositions? Most theists would say yes. But if so, that would mean that whenever he knows a proposition P, he must also then know the true proposition "God knows that P." But this creates a new true proposition. It's true that God knows that God knows that P. But this creates a new true proposition, and so on to infinity. So if God knows all true propositions, he must know an actually infinite number of things. Many philosophers think that actual infinites are impossible, and so this causes a problem. Okay, we can respond to this by saying that God doesn't think in terms of true propositions, but rather in a single, undivided intuition. There might be other responses too. But at any rate, I think a much more interesting paradox than the stone so heavy he can't lift thing.

"Why did God let evil exist at all?" So he could be glorified in defeating it. Triumph over evil is a greater good than evil having just never existed. I'm not convinced by this. The way that I've put it before is like this: Martin Luther King is widely considered to be a good man. Why? Because he overcame the evils of racism. Are we glad to find ourselves in a world with racism so that we can have the good of overcoming it? Wouldn't you rather do without the racism and without the need to overcome it? Triumph over evil is only good in so far as it overcomes something evil. Without the evil to start with, the desire to create it just to overcome it seems really strange. It's like saying that we should be very glad of the existence of cancer because without it we wouldn't have the good of cancer research and chemotherapy. These things are undoubtedly good, and they couldn't exist were it not for cancer. Would we invent the latter to permit the glory of the former? It sounds to me like you're saying this is what God does.

"Religion is just wishful thinking." Well, if that were true, then the Bible wouldn't be all about how much we all suck. Well, not if nature's right, for a start. Think about this: for a great many people throughout history, who nature calls the slave class, they've been simply unable to avoid being weak, servile, and submissive. This is just their position in life, and there's no hope of changing it. The so-called slave morality concept imagines that to deal with this sorry state, people began to turn their helpless condition into a virtue and began to take the things that they desired but couldn't get, like strength and dominance and wealth, etc., and condemned them as evil. And this is a kind of wishful thinking. I mean, imagine that you're poor and oppressed, and there's no hope of changing your condition. What would wishful thinking look like? Sure, you could just wish to become rich tomorrow, but that's not going to happen. So this wouldn't be an effective strategy to help you feel better. However, if instead you develop a worldview that trains you to wish to be poor, to wish to be servile and submissive, and teaches you to no longer want wealth and strength, that these things are immoral, well, this is a much more effective strategy of getting what you want. You change your wants. "I don't even need riches in life because my riches await me in heaven." This is the kind of wishful thinking that might be involved in Christianity. The same goes for what Redeemed Zuma is talking about here: our fallen state more generally, that we all suck, as he puts it. Sure, we all do immoral things all the time, and so it's consoling to think that is recognized by God and that all will be made right and forgiven again. I'm not saying that this is the case, that it's all wishful thinking, but this rebuttal that wishful thinking can't look like this, I think, is wrong.

"Psychology explains why you believe in God." Well, so what? If God is real, we should expect to be some psychological or social benefit to believing in him. Again, more or less agree with this.

"Spiritual experiences can be explained by brain chemicals." Well, romantic experiences can also be explained by brain chemicals, but that doesn't mean your wife isn't real. So spiritual experiences being explained by brain chemicals doesn't mean that God isn't real. Again, I agree, because any experience of the brain, whether natural or not in origin, will be describable in terms of brain chemicals. But a better argument is not about what's happening in the brain, but rather what caused the activity in the brain. Sure, love just being chemicals in my brain doesn't prove that my wife doesn't exist. But if no experience that I've ever had of my wife was caused by something in the natural world, would you think that my wife must be some supernatural entity that my brain is intercepting? Or would you think that maybe she doesn't exist and that my brain has invented her?

"Well, drug trips show that spiritual experiences are from the brain." Well, people who have had both drug trips and near-death experiences say that they're completely different categories of feeling. Sure, but people who take LSD and DMT will tell you that they're totally different experiences too. The point about drugs is just that the brain can sometimes experience inexplicable and ineffable things without necessarily indicating the involvement of anything beyond the materials of the brain.

"The story of Jesus was copied from the story of Horus or some other ancient character." Okay, dude, that's a Reddit atheist-level myth. Even atheist scholars know that that's silly. Agreed.

"Faith is the opposite of logic and reason." No, it's not. Faith just means trust. Anytime you eat food, you're having faith that it's not poisoned, even if you can't scientifically prove it. If you're married, you have faith that your wife loves you, even if you can't scientifically prove that. And if you tried to scientifically prove it, she'd probably get very mad at you because it would mean you didn't trust her. Yeah, but the thing is, I either have sufficient reason to trust something or I don't. With food, for example, if I'm served a meal at a restaurant, sure, I trust that it's not going to poison me. But I know that my country has strict food laws, and that the restaurant has a huge interest in protecting my safety, and that poisonings are rare. But if I travel abroad to some places, for example, I won't trust the tap water. And with the wife example, I get what you're saying. But imagine if I gave my wife no evidence that I loved her, like nothing at all, and then when she said she was questioning the marriage, I just said, "You've got to have faith, baby." I think I'd be getting divorced.

"Evolution proves God didn't create the world." Well, not necessarily. God often works through natural processes in the Bible, and for all of church history, there have been prominent Christian theologians who have had a more metaphorical interpretation of Genesis, even well over a thousand years before Darwin existed. Of course, this is true, but I don't know anyone who claims that evolution proves God didn't make the world, except outside of the strict context, I suppose, of arguing with a biblical literalist. But then you've just implied that you agree that evolution disproves the biblical literalist interpretation.

"Christianity only spread because of military conquest." Well, eventually they did do military conquest, but for the first 300 years of Christianity, it was illegal, and it took over the Roman Empire despite that, because of how popular it became. Again, I'm happy to broadly agree. At least early Christianity was not some kind of violent conquest.

"Constantine invented what we now know of as Christianity." Again, Reddit atheist-level myth. Atheists can do better than that. Listen to an actual scholar. I suppose Redeemed Zuma is just throwing out a few of the less tenable arguments at the end here in case people support them. Again, yeah, I don't think that Constantine invented modern Christianity.

"If Christianity is true, why are there so many denominations of it?" Well, yeah, there are a lot of denominations, but the things they agree on are a lot more significant than the things they disagree on. You know, people often say this about different religions altogether. I hear them say things like, "You know, all religions really just agree on the main stuff." I think they often underestimate just how different they are. But sure, the existence of denominations is not incompatible with the truth of Christianity. However, I do wonder why God allows so many honest truth-seekers to go wrong, to get the wrong interpretation of his words, especially in places where a person's denomination is predictable based on their parents' or community's denomination. But that just takes us back to the Divine Hiddenness argument from earlier.

"There's no evidence for Jesus outside the Bible." Well, that's not true. There is the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote about Jesus, and he's one of the reasons why even secular scholars know Jesus historically existed. Yes, there are indeed non-biblical sources that point to Jesus's existence. However, it is worth noticing something about the passage from Josephus that you've just put on screen. Josephus certainly removes doubt about the existence of Jesus, but the authenticity of a fair bit of this particular passage is under dispute by scholars, principally because Josephus, a Jew, refers here to Jesus as the Messiah or Christ, and says that he rose from the dead, and that he may not have been just a man. Strange things for a Jew to say. And thus, some believe that these passages are later Christian additions. If, however, Josephus did write these words, then they clearly weren't enough even to convince him of Jesus's divinity, since he remained Jewish, and so it probably shouldn't convince us either. But on the point of Jesus's mere existence, yes, I agree. I think we can believe it.

"You really think God made billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each of them just to have a personal relationship with you?" Yes, that's sweet, of course, but sounds a little, I don't know, wishful. Let me know what you think. Ian Alex Okon. Subscribe if you want. I'll see you in the next one.