The Sean McDowell Show - How the Search for Truth Reveals God (with Neil Shenvi)

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Why should we seek truth? How does our search for truth reveal that God is real? In this video, I talk with Neil Shenvi (author of Why Believe) about a POWERFUL and yet rarely used argument for the existence of God. If you are not convinced, tell us why!READ: Why Believe? A Reasoned Approach to Christianity by Neil Shenvi (https://amzn.to/3lXKSnq)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/

How does the search for truth itself point to the existence of God? Well, there's nothing new under the sun. There is a theistic argument that has gotten surprisingly little attention, which my guest today Dr. Neal Shenvi is going to explain. He's the author of a recent book, Why Believe, which we're going to talk about. And there's a ton of apologetics in this book, Dr. Neil Shenby, but this section on truth caught my attention. It's one I've never talked about in this channel, is often not included in apologetic arguments. And I can't wait to unpack it. So thanks for coming

back to my show. Thank you, Sean. Well, let's just start where you start your book before we get to this argument is just, I think it'll help some of our viewers to hear your story and maybe your journey to becoming a Christian. Sure. So I grew up in a very loving and moral household, but it was not a Christian household. So I went to college. I was kind of spiritual, but not religious. I would have said I was a Christian, but only because I was American and here Christianity is like the way to believe in God. I believed in God. And so I think I'm a Christian, but didn't really know

anything about actual Christianity or actual Christian theology. And then so in college, I met my future wife, Christina. And then we began dating, which I warn people is not a great idea, because I was not a Christian at the time. And what we intended for evil, God intended for good. So we went out to graduate school together at UC Berkeley. And my concession was, because I really loved her, I was like, I'll start going to church with you. And so I went to a church there with her and I heard the gospel.

And then other things were happening in my life. For example, my senior year when I had met her, I was reading a lot of C.S. Lewis's credit letters. I'd gotten the book years before that from a book table for free run by crew. I just yanked it and I was like, this is great. No strings attached. But I couldn't put it down. I read it like 10 or 20 times. Wow. Yeah. No, before I was a Christian and it was just so meaningful to me. I thought this was incredible insight into the human, into my condition. And then at our church in Berkeley, so I knew my wife, I thought she was an incredible person and I had read C.S. Lewis and going

to church, I met Christians in the congregation who were smart. This is at UC Berkeley. So my quantum physics professor sang in the choir. And I met chemical engineering professors, grad students, who were committed followers of Christ. And that forced me to stop dismissing Christianity as intellectually deficient and it's for dumb people and it's for emotional people. I think this is competing intellectually

with a very rigorous environment and yet people were still Christians. And so I was forced to come to terms with it. And basically it came down to realizing I was not a Christian, number one, and that I needed forgiveness. And I think the biggest step for me was admitting that all of my carefully constructed philosophies and ways of thinking about this God that I basically invented were not true.

That I had to enter God's kingdom like a child and say, I don't know anything. I just need to be saved. And it may be being able to and saying I'm no better than these redneck conservative fundamentalists that I despise intellectually. God's like, no, that's got to go. That's not how you enter my kingdom. You enter by humbling yourself. And but that that that I said, no, you're right.

That if I'm going to follow this God that I don't know any that I have to be totally like a child I have to come to him and saying I need you to help me. I need forgiveness I need to be led and That was and so there are a lot of things that came after that moment of just saying God I'll follow you But I was you know brought into a great Bible study with guys who discipled me for four years. So that was very important for me. But that's, I think the essence of it was just coming to realize that I needed rescue.

I was not a good person. And that my intellect couldn't save me. That I needed to trust in God who was actually there and was speaking to me. Well, we're gonna jump into what is called the Transcendental Moral Argument. But did this argument at all play a role in your conversion or was this more downstream after you became a believer? Now, this is downstream.

I became a believer with sort of minimal apologetics and knowledge. I'd taken a course at Princeton where I went to undergraduate as a non-Christian about the origins of the New Testament. And it was a totally secular course. It uses Bart Ervin's textbook and Lynn Peggles and Jesus M&R's. It was very secular. But from that course taught by a non-Christian professor

and it was called the Faith Buster by Christians. Oh, interesting. Because it was all about examining the Testament and Jesus from a secular perspective. But from that course, I knew that Jesus was a real person and that his rough biography in the gospel is rough. He had disciples, he ministered to the poor. But that was true. I knew it was historical and that was taken for granted in my class.

But that was enough to say when I heard the gospel that Jesus died of fear. He's not just a moral teacher. He was more than that. He was a rescuer. That was enough to say, well, I can't dismiss that as a myth. I knew enough that even secular scholars realized, yes, he's a real person. But in terms of apologetics, I had very little grounding in it until I became a Christian. Well, let's jump into this argument that's in your book. I've been looking forward to this for a while because it's in very few apologetics books that I've seen.

And let me start with a phrase that you began this section in your book with. You said, one surprising area where atheism falters is in the search for truth. Now, let me be the skeptic and say, what, some of my atheist friends care deeply about truth. Right, so I'm not claiming they don't. In fact, I'm gonna argue later that atheists search for truth and their desire to know truth,

and Buddhists and Hindus and Christians, all of us innately desire to seek truth. I grant that. I'm asking which worldview or religion or ideology Buddhists and Hindus and Christians, all of us innately desire to seek truth. I grant that. I'm asking which worldview or religion or ideology can explain why that is an obligation of us that we have. So I'm not doubting that you as an atheist want the truth. In fact, I assume that.

You'll see in a second that if you say, no, I don't care about the truth, well, actually, I'm going to have a problem with the argument because you're denying one of my premises. But I actually think, no, I think it's a deep urge in all of us and that's part, and from my perspective, God's put that into us. We crave the truth and it's part of being made in God's image. Okay. So I was speaking, I can't remember how many years ago, and I was giving a whole talk on truth. And a student came up to me and said, you know, Dr. Mcdowell, you've been speaking about truth for like an hour. Why is truth even important? I said, well, do you want the true answer or the false answer? And he paused and looked at me and kind

of smirked and was like, I got it and just walked away. Now I said that I have to give Frank Beck with full credit for prepping me with that response. That was not original to me But he wanted to know why truth matters But what he didn't realize is in asking that question. He was already deeply committed to truth and Can't escape it. So it seems to me what you're saying Christian atheist all of us have this intrinsic sense that truth matters.

We assume we have a moral obligation to know at least certain truths and follow these truths. Which worldview accounts for that obligation? Is that a fair way of putting the heart of what you're getting after in this argument? That's exactly right. So we do have this innate desire to know the truth. Now I'm stepping back and asking, okay, if you grant that that desire is there, how is it justified? What world you can rationally explain why you have that desire and why it's a good

and a right desire for you to have? Okay, so from a Christian perspective, atheists don't believe in God, but we'd say they live in God's world. So we would expect them to know and care about truth as well as people from all religions, but that desire is more at home in atheistic worldview. Okay, now, sorry, go ahead. Well, not just the desire, but also the obligation. So even if I meet someone who says,

well, I don't desire the truth, I'd say, yeah, but you're still obligated to seek it. In the same way, if I meet someone who says, I don I don't desire the truth, I'd say, yeah, but you're still obligated to seek it. In the same way, if I meet someone who says, I don't care about murdering people, I say, okay, that's fine, you don't desire it, but you ought to not murder people. It's an objective obligation you have. Got it, okay, very good.

Now, we're gonna come back to some of the premises and I'm gonna try to push back and poke holes in it a little bit. But as a whole, maybe just frame for us what you mean by the transcendental moral argument. push back and poke holes in it a little bit, but as a whole, maybe just frame for us what you mean by the transcendental moral argument. Right. So my claim is that we all as human beings have a moral obligation to seek the truth.

Not every truth. I don't have to know how many rocks are in my garden, odd or even number. It doesn't matter. No one. But when it comes to certain truths, especially truths about the big questions in life, like does God exist? What is his will for me and for my life? Those truths, like does God exist? Does he have a will for me? Does he have a purpose for my life? That I'm obligated to seek to know those truths. And if I say no, no thank you I'd rather not worry about those big truths and I'm actually doing something

wrong. I'm violating my moral obligations. So and and I'm that's what I claim that we have the obligation and then that if we have that obligation it must be part of or it's best explained by a Christian view of reality in a way that so you could, I have the obligation, but it comes from somewhere other than the God of the Bible or a truth-loving God. Maybe it comes from nature. Well, I'm going to, I argue that no, the best explanation for the existence of the obligation which you have is that the kind of God that we see in the Bible who loves the truth, who commands you to seek it, that's the kind of God who must exist to explain your obligation

Okay, so this distinction is helpful to say that we don't have the obligation to seek every truth if there's just one truth That we are morally obligated to seek then your argument goes through just like with intelligent design You have to argue everything is designed if there's one thing that's designed or if there's one miracle everything is designed. If there's one thing that's designed or if there's one miracle then the argument ideally goes through. So that's really helpful. Maybe compare and contrast for us. Again you call this the transcendental moral argument. How is this similar and or different from just the classical moral argument itself? So the moral argument says that if God does not exist, then objective morality doesn't exist.

Objective moral facts don't exist. And then premise two is, well, objective moral facts do exist. Some things are right, some are wrong, some are good, some are evil. And the conclusion logically follows that God does exist. That's a standard moral argument. And there are various ways that people explored to avoid that as an atheist, right? You could avoid it by saying, well,

I can ground morality in something other than God, premise one, or premise two. They could deny that and say, no, actually, I don't think right and wrong or good or evil exist than I have premise two, but it's all dealing with, good and evil and right or wrong. The transcendental moral argument deals with a particular kind of obligation we have, which is truth seeking.

We're not even asking about things like is murder wrong, is adultery wrong, is lying wrong. There are other moral claims. I'm dealing with one claim in particular, which is what about seeking the truth? Is that, is thou shalt seek the truth, is that true? Do we have an obligation to seek the truth, is that, is, thou shalt seek the truth, is that true? Do we have an obligation to seek the truth? Again, not any truth, but certain truths about, I'd say, obviously God's existence. Does God exist? Does He have a will for me? Does He have a purpose, is there a purpose for my life? Those, that, those kind of truths are obligatory

to seek. So I want you to state this as simply as you can. I realize something's lost in this, but sometimes I'll say the beginning of the universe is best explained by a beginner. The fine tuning of the universe points towards a fine tuner. The existence of a moral law points towards a moral law giver. What would be the simplest way to state this argument? Something like our obligation to seek the truth points to, you could say, a truth-seeking obligator. Maybe I just say a truth-loving God. Because not any God will do.

So I could say, well, what about a universal spirit? Well, maybe the universal spirit doesn't care whether you seek the truth. There's some versions of God, like a deistic kind of God who just wound the universe up like a clock at the beginning and let it go. It's unclear whether he'll ground true morality, number one, but also just number two, truth seeking. Maybe it doesn't care whether you do your own thing, seek your own truth. But no, the God of the Bible, and you can see this throughout the Bible,

commands us to seek truth, to love wisdom more than we love treasure and gold and rubies. Conversely, the Bible condemns those who reject God as those who fail to love the truth. It's like the highest form of condemnation is you rejected the truth. You hated the truth and you ran from it. So it's very clear in the God of the Bible if he exists is the kind of God Who would obligate us to seek to know the truth about him? Okay, so the existence of moral obligations to seek truth Points towards a truth telling God who has given us these moral obligations Maybe that's a simple kind of way to put it now

I know some people immediately are thinking okay, wait a minute and we haven't gotten into the particulars of this yet. It seems that there's other theistic gods, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, that could fit within this as well. Is that true? Like how far does this argument get us towards the Christian God? So it would I agree it would not get you to It would not be able to differentiate between say the God of Judaism and the God of Christianity the God of Islam Like the moral argument like the kalam cosmological argument. It's it's got to be part of a larger argument for Christianity Broadly, right? So it would have to be coupled with a larger argument for Christianity broadly. So it'd have to be coupled with things like the trilemma, the resurrection, which I do

in my book. This is only one section of a chapter on other arguments. When you put them all together, I think you really begin narrowing down your options. This is just one argument for, I would argue you get a truth loving God, but you could exclude things like the force in Star Wars, like this kind of vague spiritual thing. Well, no, it's more concrete than that. It's the kind of God who commands, makes certain commands, which include seeking the truth. Yeah, I even argue that some sort of new age deities that kind of do your own thing, find your own truth, it's like what we're talking about here. We're talking about the truth about spirituality, which you're commanded

to seek, which again, I don't hear that a lot from New Age circles saying, ah, you know, they kind of say truth is what you make of it. You create your own truth. It's not the kind of truth they're talking about. Would it rule out deism in terms of God who created us and left? Yeah, I think so. In the same way that deism, if you don't know how to define it, if you're gonna rule out a God who issues other commands like thou shalt not murder,

then you're also ruling out the idea that we're obligated to seek the truth. We have a God that just kind of like, almost like a just super, really powerful, super being that just made stuff and then left. Is not good, is not a personal being who issues commands. And yeah, this would not... If this argument goes through, then it would rule out that God too.

Okay. So I'm trying... Because this is philosophical, I'm trying to be really careful how we approach this. So people understand what we're saying, what we're not saying. One more question before we get to the premises itself. You compare to contrast this with a moral argument. What about the argument from reason? How is this similar and or different from what's typically called the argument from reason? Yes, there are many different arguments from reason. I think the most common, most, I'm most familiar with is C.S. Lewis's argument,

basically arguing that if we are merely particle, our brains are just composed of particles and matter, then our reasoning is just basically a physical process. And so it's not really, you can't reason through an argument because all you're talking about when you're talking about reasoning through an argument is, you know, electricity going through the circuits of my brain, it's a physical process. But physical processes, he argues, are not true or false, they just happen. And so that would point to us being more than just sort of complicated machines. There has to be some other kind of process going on that's just not purely material. And so I don't think it's necessarily well, the way Lewis, when he, when I've read it, was not mainly Amy cites at God exists, but at the point of we're more than just

machines, we're more than just material stuff. And then I think people have argued though, that okay, if we're not just stuff, there's somehow also we have a mind that's not identical to our brains, that is identical to the physical stuff in our heads, then what worldview accounts for that? And I guess you could say, well, look, if God is like a mind, he's more like a mind than anything else, and he has reason, he is wise, and he created us in his image, well, that explains why reason is something more than just the material. And that would be the argument for reason. But again, there's no, and again, how I formulated that argument, there's no sense in which, say, reasoning rightly is an obligation we have. That would be the difference. There's no moral component. Yeah. So what I'm again, it's crucial that I'm saying if you say to me, I don't want to seek the truth

Then I'm saying I don't just say oh, I what do I say? I say that's actually you are failing to meet your obligations. You are being doing actually wrong If I say I want to go play video games you leave your leave the truth to one side I know you can't do that as a human, you are obligated to do certain things like love your neighbor as yourself, you're obligated to do no harm, but you're obligated to seek the truth. It's one of the core or moral obligations. That's what argument turns on. Okay, good. Let's unpack these premises and then I want to push back on each one a little bit and see how you might respond to a skeptical rejoinder. Give us the two premises and conclusion. So it actually, the premises I set them up like the moral argument, but you're going

to hear a little bit of difference. Okay. The premise would be, if a truth-loving God does not exist, then truth is not intrinsically good and truth-seeking is not morally obligatory. So that's a big chunk there, but let me say it again. If the truth loving God does not exist, then truth seeking is not intrinsically good and truth seeking is not morally obligatory. From us one.

Okay. From us two is, but truth is intrinsically good and truth seeking is morally obligatory. Therefore, conclusion, a truth loving God does exist. So it's very parallel to the moral argument. The way I phrased it there is there are two components that truth is intrinsically good and that truth seeking is morally obligatory. But really you only need either one of those to work. You can focus on the one about truth seeking just to make it shorter, but the argument's the same. and that truth-seeking is morally obligatory. But really, you only need either one of those to work. You can focus on the one about truth-seeking, just to make it shorter, with the arguments to say.

So there's no doubt, as far as I can see, that this is a valid or sound argument. The question is, is each premise true? So what the skeptics are going to have to do is show that one or both of them are not true. And if they do so, then it doesn't follow that the god you're talking about would be the best explanation for intrinsic good

of truth seeking and our moral obligation to do so. OK, so let's take these premises one in kind. Premise number one. Seems like you could push back and ask the question, why is a truth-loving God necessary for truth-seeking to be intrinsically good and morally obligatory? Why do we need God to ground those two things? So the first part is if you can rely on all of the old moral argument arguments for premise one to ground moral obligation. In other words, if moral obligations, things that we ought to do, if they are commands, they must come from a command issuer.

This is all the standard moral argument stuff. So you can refer to all of those and you can quote atheists like J.L. Mackey saying that moral obligations, you ought to do this, you should do that. All of those statements, they sound immediately like commands from an authority. That's what it strikes us as. You know what it means for an authority figure to say, thou shalt clean thy room, or you must do this? Well, at a cosmic level, the only authority could issue those kinds of commands would be a divine figure. And Mackey, who's an atheist, admits that. So all of those arguments would carry over and say, okay, to have these moral obligations,

you have to have this kind of divine lawgiver who's issuing these commands. Then for the intrinsic goodness of truth, I simply point out that the way around premise one of the normal moral argument is usually, the one you kind of most, is some form of utilitarianism. The idea that, well, no, I don't need God to ground morality or moral obligation. I can appeal to human flourishing. Human flourishing, that's what's good. Seeking human flourishing. Like human flourishing, that's what's good. Seeking human flourishing, it's good, it's obligatory. It's all I need, I don't need a God. Now, of course you can respond as a Christian,

well, no, why is human flourishing good? We're just molecules in motion. Why should we care about whether we live or die? Again, you could use the arguments, but what's interesting is this particular transcendental moral argument offers you a different response. What you can point out is this. Who is to say that human flourishing is optimized by truth seeking or by the intrinsic goodness of truth? In fact, which you can show

very easily in many cases, is that truth seeking and truth do not align with human flourishing. They're actually enemies. A simple example, and actually I read after a while, I realized that Jerry Coyne himself, who's an atheist professor of biology, you should go, but Jerry Coyne himself realizes that truth seeking and flourishing do not always align. Example that he gives is imagine that your grandmother is dying and she's a Christian or believes in God.

And she asks you, if you're an atheist, well, wait a minute, I hear that God doesn't exist. Is that true? Is that what you're telling me? Because the only thing giving me joy and peace and happiness right now is my trust in God who loves me, belief that I'll be with my husband and my little children who died. That's what's carrying me through this terrible time on

my deathbed. So tell me, Mr. Atheist grandson, is it true that God doesn't exist? And Coyne says, of course you should lie to her. He says, there's no question because all you're going to do is make her miserable on her deathbed. There's no upside to lying to her. Now, so the point here is he has to admit if human flourishing is your ultimate grounding for morality and for obligation and goodness, that is, he would say moral of human flourishing is intrinsically good while truth is merely instrumentally good, meaning it's good if it gets you to flourishing, it's good. If it does not get you to human flourishing, it's not good. In fact, it's wicked.

The way I illustrate it in the book is I say, if human flourishing is your ultimate good, then is smooth jazz music, is that good? And the answer is it depends. If you like smooth jazz, then, and smooth jazz will make you flourish, then smooth jazz is good. What if you loathe smooth jazz? Well, then smooth jazz is evil because it's reducing, it's subtracting from your flourishing.

So you've made smooth jazz an instrumental good, not an intrinsic good. The intrinsic is what's inherently good. And my point is, what you do with truth-seeking if you're utilitarian is it becomes an instrumental good. It's good if it can get you to certain things. Maybe it'll get you to cure world hunger and cure diseases and get you to colonize distant stars. And then truth-seeking is good. But when truth-seeking conflicts with human foraging, it's got to go. And what's even worse is you're like, well, okay,

wait, maybe your grandmother is on your deathbed. That's unique situation. But what about generally? Well, here's the problem. What if we just empirically discover that most human beings and societies just can't deal with an atheistic universe? I mean, plenty of atheists in the past were tortured, right? People like Sartre and sometimes Camus and all the other atheists would often, and what's his name? Bertrand Russell. Oh, they, Right, they embraced the idea that a universe without God is meaningless and hopeless and miserable. And they often reflected that in how they lived their life. They were tortured.

Well, what if, psychologically, it's just a fact that most human beings are unhappy. If they were sure that God didn't exist, they would be sad. They would not flourish. Maybe a study could measure it psychologically. Well, if that were the case, then atheists would have to hide the truth of atheism from as many people as possible lest they reduce human flourishing. So, what's even worse than that is that, so actually I'll get into that in the second part, but the point is if you appeal to human flourishing, which 90% of atheists I've met do that, when they want to prove that good and evil exist, what's all about

flourishing and happiness, Sam Harris does this, if you appeal to that to ground these truths, this moral obligation, then you can't explain why you shouldn't promote religious lies if they are conducive to human happiness. So they gotcha. Okay, so I want to make sure I'm tracking with you here. If we can see that human flourishing is an objective good, then what happens is not grounding the value of truth telling as an absolute. Actually there are times where we should not tell the truth for human flourishing if we grant that we ought to care about and have a moral obligation

to carry out human flourishing. But with that said you're arguing that atheism cannot ground even human flourishing being an objective good because that is a moral duty in the universe and it's hard to see where that comes from apart from God. So it sounds like the heart of your concern is atheism can't ground the objective commitment to human flourishing which would potentially in principle enable them to ground truth-telling as a moral obligation but it turns out it doesn't actually even if we grant it to them ground in that fashion. So in one sense you're saying Dan if you do Dan if you don't from an atheist perspective

Trying to count for moral obligation and the intrinsic goodness of truth-telling Yeah, it's a double whammy essentially be sick basically Let's say that you're you're presenting the moral argument and the atheist is able to successfully argue that he can ground good and bad and right and wrong in human flourishing. Let's say he is able to do that or he's convinced he can do that. Well then even if you grant him that, for the sake of argument, I'll grant that you can ground the moral obligations and right and wrong, good and evil in human flourishing. I'll grant you that as an atheist. You still can't ground the goodness of truth and truth seeking because sometimes truth

and truth seeking don't align with flourishing. And it's not, not only is it, you know, you'll have to lie to people about whether God exists to make them happy, but more than that, if you yourself, we'll get this later too probably, but you have to hide truths from yourself if you're worried they might detract from your flourishing or from flourishing in general. So the example that I use in the book is, if I am happy, I am happy as a Christian,

and objectively, I look at my life, it's made me a better person. I am more loving, I am a better husband. I give more, subjectively, the measure of like how much I give away in terms of money, time, emotion. Christianity has improved my flourishing. And I think objectively,

it's enabled me to help others to be happy too. If an atheist comes to me and says, you ought to believe the truth of atheism, I say ought. I should, why? Because right now it seems to me like I, Christianity is making me flourish and it's helping me to help other people flourish as well. So what grounds your ought?

In fact, I should actually say, you know, I'm gonna close my ears and just hide from these claims that atheism is true because I don't want to attract from the ultimate good, which is human flourishing. So the weird thing is that the atheist, in order to compel you to seek the truth, has to assume the truth is something that we ought to seek. Why think that? That's a good question. Now, what's's interesting is Christians we could actually say speaking the truth, even if it costs you something leads to human flourishing Because we are better off not just caring for our physical bodies through a lie

But becoming the kind of people that value truth Regardless of what happens to us. So there might be a different view of human flourishing, but nonetheless, within Christianity, it carries with it an obligation and a duty to find truth. So that's not in conflict with this argument, but it would be within an atheistic worldview. Yeah, I mean, as a Christian, absolutely, I want to know the truth because God commands it, right? And then same way, I'd actually say that when it comes to, if say a Muslim came to me and says,

you ought to embrace the truth of Islam, I would say that's actually as a Christian who believes that truth seeking is obligatory, I want to know exactly who God is. If I'm following the wrong God, I want to know, but assumes that we're working for the same God, I want to know. But it assumes that we're working for the same God commands us to seek the truth framework. But what you can't do is you can't come to me as an atheist who has no grounding for that claim, then

urge me to accept that claim. Why should I? Again, why should? The operative word is should. Why am I obligated to? From within an atheistic worldview. From within your worldview, yeah. Or a naturalistic worldview. Again, Muslims could do that. Muslims could say, well, Allah commands you to seek the truth. And I'd say, okay, let's like at least from within a theistic framework that makes sense.

It makes no sense for an atheist to say in face of all of the evidence that I am happy, to argue that you ought to risk your happiness for the sake of what? Of seeking the abstract principle that you ought to seek the truth, which you can't explain. Okay, so again, premise number one is that if a truth-loving God does not exist, then truth is not intrinsically good and truth-seeking is not morally obligatory. So the skeptic is going to have to come up with a way that there can be truth that is intrinsically good and Truth-seeking is morally obligatory without there being a God in a way that recognizes the intrinsic Goodness of truth not the instrumental goodness of truth, right?

Let's move to premise number two So I'll read premise number two and then push back a little bit and see what you think So perhaps number two now says truth is intrinsically good and truth-seeking is morally obligatory so the first one is kind of premise of one is making a connection between the existence of a truth-loving God and Our moral obligations that there's a necessary connection. Now we're saying, yeah, actually truth is intrinsically good and truth-seeking is morally obligatory.

So my question would be, how do we know truth is intrinsically good and seeking truth itself is morally obligatory? Defend that claim, premise number two. All right. The easiest way to show that that claim is true is to simply point out that at At this point in the conversation like you did with your student They've already bought that premise if they're talking to you about how do I know Christianity is true? They're already sold on that why would even? If you're in the middle of my book, I'm like you're on chapter like six right now If you didn't believe that truth-seeking were were intrinsically good or worth doing

You wouldn't be reading this book about why Christianity is true like it wouldn't even cross your mind you you reading like a comic book or something or doing something else with your time because but the fact that you are willing to Read this book and wanting to know whether Christianity is true. It shows you that at least implicitly You're endorsing me this premise another way to do it is that, you know, the whole free thought movement, one of the attractive features of skepticism and free thought and being a free thinker and then even the new atheists, they really seem to want the truth. And their big beef with religion was not that I don't like it. It was always primarily, at least ostensibly,

that it's false. But again, if they don't think that truth It was always primarily, at least ostensibly, that it's false. But again, if they don't think that truth seeking is really a big deal, then why even a new atheist? They're presenting themselves as we care about the truth. Great, you're granting from us too. And if they say to friends, well, that's just a hobby of mine, that I would just answer, then why should I care? Right?

If someone comes to me and says, you really ought to play hockey. And I say, why? And they're like, well, it's a hobby of mine. I'm like, I don't care if it's a hobby of yours. In the same way, if someone comes to you and says, you ought to seek the truth, they can either say, well, no, it's obligatory. And I'm like, I'm listening. I'm listening now because you're saying it's an obligation that all of us have universally.

Okay. But if they turn around and say, well, it's just a hobby of mine, my subjective preference. Well, I don't care about your preferences. It's great. You have your preferences. I have mine. I have my favorite brand of mayonnaise. You have your favorite brand of mayonnaise, but that's not, doesn't have any purchase on me. But so my point is in many ways, they routinely affirm it. Everybody does. You can't, no one consistently just despises the truth and tosses it aside. We all want to know the truth, at least at some deep level.

And I would say as a Christian, it's because God put a conscience in us. We, Paul says in Romans one and two, that we know right and wrong and good and evil. Some level, we suppress it in unrighteousness. But one of those things that we, what does Paul say? We suppress the what? The truth in unrighteousness. And one of the truths we suppress is that truth is good. We ought to seek it. And so you do meets occasionally. Occasionally you'll meet people that are just, all I want to do is have a good time.

I literally don't want to know if I'm living a lie. That does happen occasionally. But again, what's fortunate is that, A, that's pulling it against their conscience. They can't fail to realize that's inconsistent. And then number two, if you're talking to an atheist, they're often the first people to tell you, no, I want to know what's true and false. Um, it can, it's pretty hard to consti be consistent and deny that truth is good. And the last thing I'll say is too, it's like, if imagine atheist comes to a Christian and says, you should believe atheism. And I say, hold up timeout. Will it make me a better dancer?

What, will I earn more money at work? Will I have a, you know, what, why, you know, what make me have a longer vacation? And they're like, what? Well, before I know whether or not this is true, I want to know what's in it for me. And the atheist will just look at you like you're crazy. And like, well, it's just true. You ought to want to know what's true. Yes. Bingo. If I responded to you by demanding what I get out of the truth, you'd immediately start haranguing me, rightly so, but you're assuming then that truth is worth seeking intrinsically. It's intrinsically good. So there you go again, you're showing me that you know deep inside that truth-seeking is obligatory, that truth is intrinsically good.

One of the illustrations I often use is take a beach ball and push it under water and its nature is going to pop up. So when people say certain things like there is no right and wrong, they're not going to live that way and they're going to condemn a politician, they're going to condemn certain moral position. And then my job is to say the beach ball has popped up. Wait a minute Even you who say there is no moral obligation are now making moral condemnations It seems to me this is where there's overlap with the moral argument that CS Lewis points out in mere Christianity Where he says something in effect of when you know you say to somebody you have a moral obligation like you shouldn't lie

effect of when you know you say to somebody you have a moral obligation like you shouldn't lie Nobody's like I'm not playing the moral obligation game that doesn't apply to me. They say that's not fair. That's not right because it's so deeply embedded within us It seems like in this premise when you say how do we when I push back and say how do you know that truth is? Intrinsically good and seeking truth is more obligatory? Your point is we just know it. We directly know it. Like I guess Wim Lane Craig would say if somebody needs an argument that torturing innocent kids for fun is wrong, if they ask you why, you don't need an argument.

That person needs a therapist because they're not seeing things as it is. Any argument for that premise is Weaker than the premise itself, right? So to even try to prove how we know truth is intrinsically good and seeking truth is morally obligatory is Almost less powerful than the obvious thing We just deeply all know and our lives in some fashion reflect it, right? Yeah Okay, good. That's a quickest response. You've ever given me man making sure okay. All right. So premise number one. There's a connection between The existence of God a truth loving God and truth seeking being intrinsically good and morally obligatory

truth seeking being intrinsically good and morally obligatory. Premise number two we know truth is intrinsically good and seeking truth is morally obligatory. Now one challenge might be you said many atheists might go the route of human flourishing being good. What about evolution? Couldn't a skeptic say look we've been wired towards uh through the process of evolution to value truth. If we didn't value truth at least to a degree, we couldn't survive. So could you give an evolutionary explanation for the moral obligation to seek truth?

Well, yeah, there are several arguments that I could give. One is that evolution would not orient us towards truth. It would orient us towards survival. And the funny thing is that you'll find atheists like Daniel Dennett arguing that the reason we have religion is because religious beliefs were beneficial to the survival of humans. So he's arguing, he literally is arguing

that religion exists because we're not wired to truth, we're wired to something else which is survival and because religion and any other things help us survive, that's why we have them. But wait a minute, you can't argue that and then turn around and say, oh we have truth-seeking desires because of evolution. No! You can't argue both sides of that argument. Either we were oriented towards truth or oriented to survival, which is why we have false beliefs like you think we have in religion. But more than that, I just say, look, let's just, I mean, CS Lewis does this too.

He's like, let's just grant for the sake of argument that evolution wired us to, in this case, to seek the truth. Like we're just wired to feel that way about truth. Like we're wired to feel a certain way about babies and puppies and rainbows. We're just wired to have this desire to seek the truth. But here's the thing. Why do you not try to debunk that feeling in yourself when it's inconvenient? I actually make this argument about morality as well in my book, but I just point out that we have certain intuitions and cognitive deficits sometimes when it comes to things that are just wired

into us, for example, people in general, all people but many people have an innate fear of heights. We just, they're wired into us. I'm not super fond of height, I'm not terrified of them. I just don't like heights a lot. People are afraid of the dark sometimes. Right, wired into you. And evolutionary biologists will give explanations of, well, why is that? Why is it beneficial? Why did it increase reproductive fitness in our ancestors? Whatever. But there are these, we all recognize that we have certain cognitive biases

and intuitions that are just there. But here's the thing, when we realize that these tendencies are illusions, right, when we say, well, you know, I'm not really gonna fall off that cliff, I'm fine. I have a rope right here. Well, and when those illusions are impairing our happiness, then we go to therapy, we work against them. So if I am, example, if I'm terrified of spiders, it's kind of, people are terrified of spiders.

It's part of what some people experience. But when they realize I can't go out of doors because I'm so terrified of spiders, then they work to undermine that illusion. They're like, it's not rational. I'm gonna go to therapy. I'm going to talk through it. I'm gonna, and they're actual very successful

cognitive behavioral therapies to enable you to abandon your illusory fear of spiders. It's not rational. Here's the question. Since we agreed and we showed that sometimes truth seeking conflicts with your happiness and you think it's just an illusion, then why not work to undermine it? Why not constantly remind yourself that there's no need for you to seek truth and every day wake up and say, today I'm going to try to believe a lie. Like in Alice in Wonderland, the white queen says, I believe

five impossible things for breakfast. Well, look, I think we kind of realize that we have the ability to fool ourselves if we try hard enough. We all have this capacity for rationalization, for avoiding. So I'm saying if you are enlightened and you know that truth-seeking is just this vestigial evolutionary spandrel, then root it out. You should try your hardest to get to a psychological state where you can just ignore the truth and be happy. And the same way we can do the same thing with morality too. If you think morality is just this leftover, by-product of evolution,

well, just work really hard to eviscerate and eradicate your moral intuitions. But no one does that. You don't have people walking around telling you that you ought to like get rid of this visceral evolutionary moral sense or this truth-seeking. Get rid of that, it's an illusion. Just go be happy. Well, why not? Why not? And the answer is, because we know, we know it's not,

it's our touchstone to reality. We were made to seek the truth and we don't want to get rid of that sense because we feel inhuman. If you really met a person who just truly had no moral moralities, no intuition at all, and no desire to seek the truth and only one of their own happiness, they'd be a monster. But why do you think that? They're living a completely liberated life now, right? But you'd say they're not. I'd say I agree,

because they're not living in light of reality which is God's reality. You know, I think about an evolutionary explanation for this. It seems that at best evolution could explain why we have certain instincts to tell the truth because all things considered, truth telling is going to be more conducive to survival not perfectly but more conducive to it But what it can tell us is that we ought to follow those Instincts and that's the very thing that has to be explained to offer a sufficient naturalistic evolutionary explanation a sufficient naturalistic evolutionary explanation to counter this argument.

So I think that's the heart of where it may fall short. Is ultimately in fact it would just be a subjective explanation, not an objective explanation for moral truth seeking within itself. It would explained why you have this, like you said, instinct but it wouldn't explain why you ought to follow it. There you go. Okay, good. So I know there's more than this. I haven't read all the literature in this. I assume there's some literature. It's not in the apologetics book. I can't think of one book by Ronald Nash years ago dealt with the argument from truth. And what's crazy, Neal, is I had written in my phone, I write down blog ideas, and I had written down making the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic truth.

It's a blog I wanted to write. It has been sitting there forever. I saw your book. I was like, finally somebody developed this. So I'm curious in writing your book, Why Believe, why do you think this argument hasn't gotten more traction? You know, I honestly don't know. My book has a lot of the standard arguments that you see in literature and in books and articles

and I hear in talks. But this one, like I said, I couldn't tell you where I've, if I've ever heard this argument before. I think I talked to a philosopher and I shared it with him. It came up with this like 10, 15 years ago, I think. I forget how. I got a blog or something. I was interacting with an atheist and I forget, it's Tom Gilson's blog, if you know Tom. But that was when it just hit me. But I honestly can't remember ever running across this argument anywhere else.

And I've read a fair bit of apologetic stuff. I don't know why it's understudied. I ran it by a philosopher that I know and he said, oh yeah, it's like epistemological norms. I was like, oh yeah. But he sort of knew that there was a term like that, but he didn't really ever use it as an argument. So I don't know.

Tell me. I don't know. But I think it deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. I think someone could do a doctoral dissertation on this, write a book on this, develop full lectures on this. And I know there's going to be some skeptical pushbacks that would need to be dealt with as well. We've really laid out in 45 minutes

what this argument is, roughly. But I'd love to see it get more traction. I think there's something intuitive about it when people get it. So just clarify for me, if this argument goes through, what it shows? Because sometimes I think about basic arguments. I'll say, for example, if some of the basic arguments

of intelligent design go through, we have a mind that is powerful, maybe spaceless, timeless, intelligent. That'd be the origin of the universe information For example like DNA might not get us to a timeless being of course But you collectively put these things together you get a smart powerful mind, but it doesn't tell us anything about our obligations to this mind The moral argument then shifts and says no not only is there a mind that's out there we this is a god that is moral in its his or her character you know in so far as the argument goes

and we have duties to be moral right would you say this just adds and of course to get to the christian god or another god another God Muslims would say yeah We agree with you, but it's the Quran and Muhammad that is this God who's spoken Mormons would give special revelation Jews and Christians you go into that in that book But does this just add another component that says it's not only a mind. It's a moral mind But it's a God who wired us and wants us to seek after truth. Is that kind of what this adds in the big picture? Yeah, I think it's a main thing it adds to the conclusion. I think it's also easier to defend because

you don't have to defend like what is it. It's like I said, it's harder to deny that truth-seeking is good because why are you even having the argument if you deny that? But it does get you to a truth-loving God. Not just a generic spirit of some kind, but a God who commands you to seek the truth about him. I think it is very consonant with what the Bible constantly says about the goodness of truth seeking. It's really, really important. Again, I keep going back to the passage where it says, it can condemn no one any further

than saying they hated the truth. That's like the ultimate criticism in the Bible that people that reject God hated the truth or are suppressed in unrighteousness. So I think that, again, that picture of that kind of God is the one we see in the Bible. Maybe not, I just don't know. You'd have to ask other people in religions,

does your God value truth that highly? And I just don't know. Oh, that's an interesting connection for somebody to develop. So one of the objections that cosmology is so bad and I can't believe people make it is they'll say well this doesn't get us to the Christian God or the resurrection and I say it's not supposed to. It just shows there's a mind of certain characteristics and challenges naturalism. So somebody said well your

argument Neil doesn't get us the Christian God, your answer would be? Well, it's not supposed to. Right. It's actually in the book, it's part of this chapter on God and Revelation. And what I argue is that it's like a puzzle. I forget where I got it. I thought J. Werner Wallace used the illustration too, but I use it, I think, independently. But all these arguments are like pieces in a puzzle. And you're trying to put them together. And the question is not, can I jam any two pieces together and get them to fit up with a hammer?

Yeah, sure you can. You're going to break the pieces. But the question is, of all these puzzle pieces, you put them together, what's the most natural picture you get? Is the most natural picture you get one one that shows an atheistic naturalistic universe or a Christian worldview. And I argue that all these various arguments, if you put them together, you get a picture of the universe of reality, of moral reality of human beings that fits the best with a Christian, specifically Christian worldview.

And I also talk about things like the trilemma and the Resurrection and other chapters. But yeah, it is part of a larger argument. So what would a naturalist have to do to overturn this argument in particular? Right, so they have to go for one of the premises, right? So they could either argue that they can explain on naturalism why truth-seeking is intrinsically good and morally obligatory. And I guess I think it's a tall order because every time I hear an atheist reject premise one of the moral argument, it's via some form of natural, sorry, utilitarianism,

or almost every time. There's some very rare exceptions from philosophers. But on the street, you'll just hear, well, people being happy and flourishing, that's what's ultimately good. or almost every time. There's some very rare exceptions from philosophers. But on the street, you'll just hear, well, people being happy and flourishing, that's what's ultimately good. But that can't answer our question then, because truth and happiness don't always go together in this life. In a Christian view, they go together in eternity. But even for Christians, in this life, obeying the truth can cost you tremendously. But Christians can say there's more to the universe than this life, which is why it's worth even giving up your life

in pursuit of the truth and in holding of the truth. That's premise one. And to die of premise two, again, you'd have to basically put out the eyes of your reason and just say, I'm going to... You have to basically say, I'm just going to live to be happy and ignore the truth. I have to believe that the person who should most reject that claim is the atheist, is the free thinker.

If you're a free thinker, you've built your identity on being like, I'm going to seek the truth. It might be miserable. It's going to overturn all this religious dogma. It's going to upset my parents, but I'm all about the truth. You can't turn around then and say it, no, I reject that. Truth is not a big deal. I'm just going to not seek the truth. I keep saying that, go back to this. The other thing the argument does is for Christians, when Christians go through periods of doubt, every Christian goes through periods of

doubt, or most Christians do. When they go through periods of doubt and they come to a pastor or an apologist and say, well, why should I believe that Christianity is true? I've written a whole book called, I Believe. So there are answers. I want to talk to them about Jesus. I'm talking about the resurrection and all these arguments. But one thing we can say as Christians, when a doubting Christian comes to you and says, why should I believe that Christianity is true, you can ask them, why do you care?

Just go ahead and be happy. And they're like, no, no, no, no. Let the color drain from their faces. Let them get a little nervous and just be like, you know, I'm a Christian because I just am happy. I think you should just seek whatever is happy and seek your truth. Don't worry. No, just go ahead and keep believing. Keep going to church. Keep giving your money because what matters in the end is that you're happy,

not whether it's true. And you'll get flustered and kind of panicky. And they say, wait, stop, time out. I was joking. Question, why did you react that way? Why do you feel so strongly that you want Christianity to be true? And they just say, I just want to build my life on the truth. Exactly, exactly. You deep down inside know that truth-seeking matters and you want to know not comforting lies, you want to know the truth. That's a pointer to God, the God of the Bible. And it's again, an atheist comes to a Christian and starts saying, well, there are all these problems with the religion. Just ask them, on what grounds should I care if atheism is true? If Christianity is true, then I should care about truth.

But if atheism is true, like you say, why should I care whether my religion is false? You're assuming that. I want you to give me some reasons. So again, I think it's very important practically because Christians can realize even their doubts, their desire to know the truth is actually pointing them back to Christianity, not away from it. So in many ways, this is a presuppositional argument that can be utilized. Actually, it was an atheist professor friend of mine wanted to know why the Bible allowed slavery and we went out to coffee and I sat down and said I'm happy to talk about Exodus 21, but first I need to know how there's objective moral values and duties within atheism and where human value comes from that on your worldview there should be any concern about how we treat human beings. We talked two hours wonderful conversation. we never got to Exodus 21. This is the same kind of thing you're saying when

somebody demands you to give an explanation, justify your beliefs, you're saying okay time out. If there is no God, why does it matter that I'm logically consistent? Where does this obligation to seek truth come from? Because it seems to me when we say humans should seek truth, that implies some design and some purpose about how humans are meant to act and not act. But how do you get there if there's not a designer and a purpose giver within a naturalistic worldview? That's the heart of it. So if some naturalists respond, and I suspect some will, maybe you and I will come back on and interact with those or maybe we'll just push it off and let some

apologists jump in and engage this conversation. But I would love to see more conversation about this apologetic question. It hasn't gotten near enough coverage. Now before we wrap up, Neil, you gave me the privilege of endorsing your book. It's a great book. Tell us just briefly what makes Why Believe unique because there's a lot of apologetics books out there today. Right. I mean, I think I pitched it to Crossway, the publisher, as a reason for God for STEM majors. So I love Keller's Reason for God. I think it's a great apologetics book.

But I think mine is more evidence driven. It's very intentionally about is Christianity true? Is it nice? Is it good? Does it make you happy? I want to focus on, well, is it true? Does it ultimately matters. The other thing I'd say is that I wanted to write a book that Christian college students could hand to their professors.

So there are a lot of great books out there. I enjoy Lee Strobel's case for Christ, but I would feel uncomfortable giving it to a professor at a university. I worked at Yale and Duke. And, you know, I had people that were at the highest levels intellectually and academically. And I love talking to them, but some books just, these come across, even if they're good books,

they come across as too casual. Whereas I think my book has a sort of intellectual heft. Like I interact with a philosopher, a lot of, I interact heavily with atheists, not just the new atheists, both atheist philosophers, biblical scholars. And so yeah, it's like a lot of footnotes, not end notes, footnotes. You can dive in for deep more information.

So I think it's a book that I wanted Christian field to hand to anybody and feel like I'm not gonna be sort of a little bit embarrassed. It's too simplistic. And then finally, it's very gospel centered. The arguments are not towards a generic God. There are four big arguments in the book and they're all oriented towards Christianity being true. And the final section in the book is all about why the gospel itself, the good news that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead to rescue us. That's actually an argument for Christianity being true. And I unpack that in three chapters. But again, the whole book is oriented

towards not just this generic theism, but towards the Christianity and the gospel. And I think it's Keller's reason for God is very good about that too But I wanted to write a book that's not just engaging people intellectually but pointing them to Salvation in Christ. So that's another I think hopefully not distinctive, but it's an emphasis of the book So unlike case for Christ, which you said maybe you wouldn't give to a professor This is more intellectually sophisticated. Is that also how you feel about more than a carpenter? I'm kidding You don't have to answer that on the spot. Oh look at you I'm kidding. You don't have to say anything, but here's the deal. I will say it's accessible though, too Like my kids I think my oldest son is read excerpts from it

He's 13 and he can handle it. So it's not inaccessible to everybody, but it's it's definitely written to It's not inaccessible to everybody, but it's definitely written to be something you could hand to people who are very sophisticated and highly educated and not feel a kind of like hesitation. Right, but it's kind of an introductory book because you cover so much ground, but it's sophisticated. And when you hand it to a professor, you can say, hey, here's by a guy who went to Princeton and got his doctorate in Berkeley.

That carries some weight with it if they're willing to read. I think it's a great book. I love the stories that you put into it. There's a logical flow. As an apologetic professor, I mean, I read everything. I can get my hands on apologetics. And there were, including this chapter we talked about today on truth, there are a number of points I stopped and was like,

hey, that's a really interesting point. So I suggest it for Christians to go deeper, but also as an evangelistic tool. It's called Why Believe? Pick it up. Link is below in the notes and while you're at it make sure you hit subscribe. We've got a lot more interviews like this coming up and if you want to study apologetics in depth come join me at Biola University. We have the top rated fully distance apologetics program. We'd love to equip you to become an ambassador who loves God with his mind and equips Christians and engages non-Christians effectively. Neil, you're awesome.

Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Sean.