The Sean McDowell Show - The 9 Blind Leaps of Atheism (Thaddeus Williams)

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

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It's fascinating if you listen to the most watched atheists. Most of them, like Alex O'Connor would be a good example, would say fine-tuning to them is like a tier, like top-notch. This is a compelling argument. There's even footage of Richard Dawkins saying that when push comes to shove, fine-tuning is the argument that keeps them up at night. But the bottom line is, we are conscious thinking agents, and atheists often talk about reason and rationality. You can only have those things if consciousness exists. One of Craig's top arguments, William and Craig, is the inexplicable applicability of math. Why we can do science and it applies to the natural world.

Seems like a coincidence on atheism, but makes sense if there's design. We often hear that belief in God is rooted in blind faith. But is that really true? Our guest today, Biola University Theology professor, Thadice Williams, argues that atheism takes more blind leaps than theism. In fact, he argues there are at least nine blind leaps of atheism that we're going to explore today. Dad, thanks for coming on, man. Hey, brother. It's always a joy to be with you. Well, one question before we get into each of these nine is this. You wrote a book called revering God, and you said, some may say,

believing in God made everything. What a blind leap of faith. One way to test the validity of a belief is to assume it's falsed, to see if the alternative makes more or less sense of the world. So let's assume for the moment that there's no creator. Will we find our worldview more factual and offensible? Or will we face longer and longer leaps of blind faith? What are we doing here? Frame this conversation for us, if you will. Sure.

So oftentimes the way God debates play out is the assumption is, well, the the theist, they're making the positive claim God. exist. They shoulder 100% of the evidential burden. And in a sense, sure, as Christian theists, there is a burden of evidence to shoulder that I think Christianity does an exceptionally well job of meeting those evidentiary and transcending those evidentiary standards. I think it's the most credible, rational, fact-based worldview going by far. But what rarely happened, Sean, is when I've seen people who claim to deconvert or deconstruct their faith or walk away or apostise or whatever we call it, they almost never apply the same level of scrutiny to their newfound non-theism, whatever shape that takes, whether it's agnosticism or hardcore atheism.

So there's just this assumption that, oh, I've stepped out of this worldview that had all these cracks into it. And now I'm in this sort of invincible atheism that is falsely assumed to be the rational default position. If I'm going to approach this with my mind and my reason and my science intact, of course, atheism. And so I'm framing it this way to push back on that and say, it's not, of course, of course atheism, there's actually huge leaps of faith required to deny God's existence. The minute the atheist opens his or her mouth to defend atheism, they're committing themselves to beliefs and rationality and free will and all kinds of stuff that I just don't think the atheist slash agnostic can sustain the burden of evidence required to reject

God's existence. So that's the way I'm framing it and the way I'm coming at it. Love it. We're going to get into each one of these nine. But the point is there's an assumption and even a lot of Christians believe this. Well, faith is blind. It's believing something without evidence. And you're saying, okay, wait a minute here. Even atheists assume certain things that their worldview cannot account for. These are leaps, arguably of faith. And I think as you're going to talk about blind faith. But let's get into each one of these. And last thing before we start, I want everybody to realize I've done a deep dive on every single one of these. We're not pretending to deal with all the objections here.

This is what you might call kind of a 30,000 foot view approach to these issues. And there's fair objections for each one of them that we haven't dealt with. We're not pretending that we have. But let's take a look at Blind Leap, number one, the universe. Go. So Jean-Paul Sartz, the great French existentialist, list had a brilliant insight when he said, all philosophy starts with the question, why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing? And you might think,

well, in a world of eight or nine billion people, there's got to be a long list of answers to that question, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, it turns out any answer we could possibly give why there's a universe at all is going to be some variation of four fundamental logical possibilities. Number one would be sort of more the Eastern, the Hindu perspective. There is no something. The universe is what Hinduism

would call Maya. It's an illusion. It's not really here. The quickest way to debunk that is to just ask the non-believer in a real universe to kindly hand you your wallet, to you could kick

them really hard in the shin. And when they wince an illusionary pain, why are you wincing an illusionary pain from an illusionary kick and your illusionary shin? I don't recommend that, Sean, as a way to embody the love of Christ and the first Peter three command to defend the faith with gentleness and respect. So maybe just, okay, we'll give me the illusory keys to your car. And you'll see that that first option is unlivable. So a second logical possibility is the something that, you know, universe has just always been. It has no beginning, therefore requires no beginner. And we could have a five-hour conversation about this. I'll keep it short and sweet. There's a good philosophical reason

that that view is impossible. If the universe had no beginning, there would be an infinite amount of moments that would have to transpire before right now, looking at my watcher 1115 on Monday, August 17th, if there was an infinite amount of moments that would have to transpire before now, we could never reach now. So that's a philosophical reason called the impossibility of traversing an infinite. On top of that, we could add scientific reasons like the universe heading towards heat death or a state of equilibrium, that if the universe has been here for eternity past, it would have had an infinite amount of time to hit equilibrium, and the universe would be dead, lifeless, and cold.

The fact that there's enough energy left in the universe to power my microphone, proves therefore the universe didn't have an indefinite past and stretches on eternally backwards. A third logical possibility, so we know it's not an illusion, we know it hasn't always been here. A third logical possibility is, well, maybe it had a beginning but no beginner. This was sort of the Lawrence Krauss option a few years ago that the universe could come from

nothing. But you read his work on this and others, and it's very clear by nothing, they don't mean no thing. They mean a quantum bathtub of quantum particles or energy or something. So the idea here that something could come from nothing is what David Hume, the famous agnostic, the Scottish agnostic said, ex nihilo nihil fit, from nothing comes nothing.

So we can cross that option off the table. Fourth and final logical possibility, the universe, the something came from someone. The universe had a beginning, and therefore a beginner, we might call this the Genesis 1-1 option, in the beginning God created. That's argument number one.

Leap number one, the atheist has to take. Which of those three options are you going to say, the universe is an illusion, it's been here forever, or it came from nothing, if you're going to deny the beginner. One quick thing. I know people are going, wait a minute, there's A objections to God, like who made God, which of course I've dealt with elsewhere, and that's a logical fallacy, because you can ask who made something of things that can be made, but God, by definition, is not a makeable thing. like the laws of logic are not the kind of things you can make. I did a deep dive with Stephen Meyer because Roger Penrose,

one of the greatest scientists over the past half century, responded to one of my videos. And we did a deep dive walking through his model and essentially showing that there is no model that is able to escape the beginning of the universe that is physically possible or doesn't rely upon some input of mind or intelligence to maintain. it. And if people don't believe me, go watch that video. But our first leap is something from

nothing. Second blind leap is a fine-tuned universe. Go. Yeah, so fine-tuning, it's fascinating if you listen to the most watched atheists in the interwebs these days. Most of them, like Alex O'Connor would be a good example, would say fine-tuning to them. is like a tier, like top-notch, this is a compelling argument. Even before Alex O'Connor, one of the quote-unquote new atheists, Chris Hitchens, and there's even footage of Richard Dawkins saying that when push comes to shove, fine-tuning is the argument that sort of keeps them up at night. And it's a straightforward argument that the universe is tuned just,

right for the emergence of biology and the emergence of life. You can take a lot of levels of the fine-tuning. You could look at after the Big Bang, in which matter, energy, space, and time spring into being, the beginning that Genesis 1-1 is saying, the beginning had the beginner, the amount of variables that had to be dialed in so precisely just for the Big Bang to be a successfully expanding universe so that the matter energy ratios are just right so the universe doesn't instantly implode on itself, that those ratios have to be dialed in just so, so that it doesn't expand too quickly, you need to get no formation of, of stars. There's a long list. I remember learning this stuff when you and I were at Biola years ago.

And Hugh Ross, the great astronomer apologist, he had a list in his little book, creator in the cosmos that I think was 48 or 49 factors long, the hydrogen to nitrogen ratios in the atmosphere. The Earth's axial tilted 23 degrees. Our distance, from the sun, the elements on the periodic table that emerged through nuclear fusion in the core of a collapsing star, and it just went on and on and on. That list is in triple digits now. This was in the 2000s, early 2000s that Hugh Ross listed 48, 49. The anthropic principle, sometimes it's called the principle that on earth, life is just, fit for Anthropos, for the emergence of humankind.

So I'm not a scientist here. I don't pretend to be, so I point listeners to the scientists on this, most of whom, I think all of whom we've interviewed guys like Steve Meyer and Doug Axe and other colleague of ours at Biola have done brilliant, brilliant work on all this stuff. I actually interviewed Jay Richards, who's one of the leading defenders of fine-tuning. in May, and then we did a live stream where we took all the toughest questions. I tracked down the hardest questions I could find and ask Dr. Richards. So if you're not convinced, go back and at least

look at that and have him articulate that. But the thing to keep in mind is the first one is why is there something rather than nothing? The second one is why is this something arranged with an incredibly narrow window, so to speak, that allows the emergence and sustenance of life? And these are the constants and laws of physics, when they could have been different, seems to point towards something beyond matter itself, and to assume it is a blind leap of atheism. All right, blind leap number three, a planet fit for life. Yeah, planet fit for life. This is some of the stuff I was talking about with the anthropic principle. But let me back up a bit before Earth emerges. There's some fascinating science here that takes me right back to, I don't know about you, Sean, I'm terrible at math.

And so when I was a biola undergrad, I found the one math class, because you had to take a math class, that you didn't have to do any math in. It was called the nature of math. Yep. I loved it. You just got to think about math, not actually do it. And the professor, who I'm sure you know, Walt Stangle, is this world-class math. whiz and he showed up to class one day and turned his back to the students and started writing out this massive equation you know it was like e equals mc squared over seven times q to the and he was filling up these dry erase boards as the class just sat there in silence and after about 10 minutes

dr stangle turns around and he had these thick coke bottle glasses and you can see pouring out from under his glasses are tears. And I'm thinking, this dude's crying at math. He's crying at math. And I'm thinking, I've cried at math too, but for very different reasons than Walt Stangle. And he went on to explain to us that what he had just drawn up on the boards were the chemical equations for nuclear fusion as it occurred. Hey listeners, it's Kelly from Life audio. We know life gets busy, and sometimes it's easy for your faith to get pushed to the side. That's why we created the good word, a free weekly newsletter designed to give you a moment to slow down, be encouraged, and reconnect with what matters most, God's word. Inside, you'll find

devotionals, guided prayers, podcast recommendations, and other faith-filled content we think you'll love. No ads, no clutter. Just good content to help you stay rooted in God's word throughout your week. Sign up for the good word today at life audio.com forward slash the good word. That's life audio.com forward slash the good word. As it occurs in the core of a collapsing star, and he explained that in order to move down the periodic table from the light stuff like hydrogen and helium to move down into things like nickel and iron where biology becomes a reality. you have to have these kinds of equations dialed in with utter precision.

And then even if that happened, in the absence of a great capital C chemist or a great capital M mathematician, that doesn't do us any good if they're trapped in the core of a dying star. And so there's this, God has this ingenious idea of a supernova that blableness. all those heavy elements back into space so that they can form through gravity a new star, or in our case, a heavy planet. And so we are on a elementally rich planet, meaning we have the stuff of life, the stuff of biology, that moves us down the periodic table so that you and I can have physical bodies to even have this conversation right now. And you look at the evidence from that and we could easily fill 10 hours going through it.

And the Earth Fit for Life points to a supreme intelligence. I love this. The first one is why is there something rather than nothing? The second one is why is this something arranged in a way that allows the possibility of life? And then third is like, wait a minute. We find ourselves in a very narrow environment habitat, which enables life to third. and survive, and there's certain incredibly precise factors that have to take place for this. So you have to have a sun of a certain distance, of a certain size, of a certain age.

You actually have to have a certain galaxy, and then we have to be in a certain place in that galaxy at a certain time. You have to have carbon-based life. No other kind of life could exist with any complex complexity like human beings. We've got to have surrounding giants like Jupiter to protect us. We need a moon. We need an iron core. All of these things are necessary, but also happens to be the very place where there's human beings, that we have a clear atmosphere and other factors that we can make discoveries about the universe. I mean, if I went the top of a mountain in Hawaii and found a telescope at there, I'd never ask why did they place it there? Because you place observers in the place to make observations. And not only do we have a planet capable

of sustaining life like you described. It's the place in which we can make discoveries about the universe. Those are three blind leaps of atheism. We're going to circle back how arguably you and I think they point towards theism. But let's move to number four, blind leap of the origin of intricate life. Yeah, so this is a big one. Even if we're telling the origin story of humanity on atheism, atheists, or agnostic presuppositions.

Where do we get something from nothing? Where do we get a universe that's fine-tuned? Where do we get an earth fit for life? Even if in the conversation we just grant all that and say, let's just say there's a credible explanation. We just haven't found it yet. There's still the next leap, which is a massive one. The problem of abiogenesis is the,

a fancy 50 cent scientific term for it. A, that prefix means no, bio-life, genesis, beginning. No life beginning. How do you get life beginning from non-life? And if anybody tells you, oh, well, we've got that figured out, they're just lying to you. They're just lying to you. The sheer amount of complexity that goes into, even what we would mistakenly dub a simple, single-celled organism. There's nothing simple about a single-cell organism. And so as, let me say it this way, in Darwin's Day, they knew about cells, but in a very rudimentary way.

So they sort of assumed a cell is like a little bag of jello or something. It's just these little units of organic goo. And on that naive understanding, it's like, okay, well, this goo can arrange in such a way. You know, and so then you have the famous experiments of scientists trying to zap some replica of primordial goo to see if they could generate life from non-life. And those experiments, do you remember it was Stanley and Yuri or something like that? I think it was around 1953. Yeah, and all they could do is generate a couple amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, over 200 of which you need a line just so to have anything resembling a simple cell. And the researchers overlooked the basic fact that they had to be intelligent to create the experiment to zap the primordial goo in the first place.

that they ended up sort of sawing off the branch they were sitting on and inadvertently proving intelligence in the process. But even since the 50s, we have had the advent of biochemistry and microbiology. And so now, as science has advanced, this is not an example of we have a gap in our explanatory origin story of how we got here. let's just jam God into that gap, and then science comes along and slowly closes the gap until God is unemployed. This is precisely the opposite. The more science advances, the more we move from Darwin's cells are unsophisticated hunks of organic goo to microbiology

and biochemistry. We're peering into the cellular world, we see a whole microcosm of engineering brilliance, of elegance, of incredible designs and little machines and micro machines, all working in tandem to create life. And so this is an example where the more science, the more microbiology and the more biochemistry we do, the God gap isn't closing leaving God unemployed. that gap gets bigger and bigger and bigger showing that intelligence is indeed involved. Now, real quick, I want to say it again.

I'm not a scientist. I'm a trained theologian and philosopher. So I would point listeners to friends like Doug Axe and many of your interviews where you're talking to people that this is their lane and they are way more. I'll jump in here. I interviewed Doug in May and we walked through the origin of life and he talked about how there's no explanations now.

The problem is more deep than it was a decade, 20, 30 years ago. He also argued we're not talking about this year, the amount of information necessary, not for the origin of life, but from the origin of life to all the complex organisms is a greater leap than the origin of life. We're not even talking about this here. Friends, you can go back and watch that with Doug Axe, Cambridge trained, Berkeley,

one of the leading educational institutions in the world. And then we took tough questions live, the toughest ones people could come up with. Let's keep the train moving here. Blind leap number five would be consciousness. Oh, this one's so fun. This one, we could easily do a year course on this and still be scratching the surface. So let's just grant again, to be kind. Let's say atheism explains how you get some.

something from nothing, how you get a tailored universe by chance, how you're able to get a heavy universe from a light universe, move down the periodic table, how you get an earth fit for life, how you get life from non-life to begin with. If we just grant those four or five leaps, this next one, I'm fascinated by, and I think it's not just a singular leap. How do you get consciousness from non-conscious stuff, from organic, even if we grant there's, you can get sophisticated cells in organisms in the absence of God. It's a series of leaps to get from this hunk of let's call it maybe sophisticated steak, right? Sophisticated organic meat to the qualities of consciousness.

This would be things like choice-making power that we'll talk about a little more deeply here in a minute. This would be things like what philosophers of mind call intentionality. Intentionality is a fancy word for what I like to refer to as aboutness. Aboutness means my mind, my consciousness can be about things in a way that physical stuff can. So if I'm holding a physical book, this book can be here or not be here.

It's not thinking about anything. It's a concrete physical object with weight and mass and spatio-temporal properties. But our minds have this incredible capacity to be about things. So I can think about. Our listeners can think about, say, the red planet. right we can think about mars without the red planet instantiating or materializing in our brain matter giving us a splitting headache right um you can think about um a nuclear weapon without your head blowing up right so that that capacity of consciousness to be about things is a non-physical

property another just quick one here is um philosophers of mind draw a distinction between syntax which is the physical medium of communication. So right now in this moment, there's a lot of physical syntax happening, meaning my voice box is vibrating and a certain level of hurts, a certain frequency. It's feeding into a microphone, going through it's a very complex process

that eventually is making its way to your ears, which is now then uploaded and all of our listeners can hear right now as they're listening to my voice, the sound that those sound waves take, the shape that those sound waves take, that's all the physical stuff that goes into the message. That's what philosophers call syntax. But philosophers draw distinction between syntax and semantics. Semantic is the non-physical meaning that's being carried in and through the physical syntax. In other words, you can hear, our listeners can hear more

than just, you know, sound waves coming at them. Hopefully I don't sound like Charlie Brown's teacher just going to want, want, want, wah, wah. Hopefully they can discern something remotely intelligible that I'm saying. And so the point is that syntax, the physical medium, the non-physical semantic cannot be reduced to the physical syntax, Meaning, somebody listening on YouTube or something could translate this into Spanish. In real time, there's AI that can have me instantly start speaking German or whatever.

So all the physical syntax changes, what doesn't change is the non-physical semantic. Therefore, meaning can't be reduced to the medium, semantic can't be reduced to syntax. So there's a feature of consciousness that is irreducible. and that's on a theistic foundation. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning, you have meaning. You have a god of meaning who speaks meaning into his cosmos. On the atheist origin story of who we are and how we got here,

you don't start with any speaking being. You start with a collision of unthinking atoms. And so the leap here is how do you get, aboutness or intentionality from physical arrangements of particles. How do you get semantics from different arrangements of physical syntax? And that's two of about 11 features of consciousness. Each one is a leap under itself that the atheist must take. And by the way, it's back to the first point you raised from SART is how do we get something

from nothing? If you have matter, there's something novel emerging consciousness and thinking and reflecting and acting, which cannot be reduced down to the physical matter of the body. Thoughts are not physical. Sensations and pain might be experienced through the body, but cannot be reduced to the body. Now, in case people watching this, and they're saying, you guys are given five leagues of atheism. These are Christians talking here. Let me just pause for a second.

You were with me, Thaddeus, in Vegas. I had a debate with Michael Shermer, one of leading skeptics in the world today, about consciousness. We'll link to it below. He gives his explanation for the origin of consciousness. And I won't go into it here, but needless to say, I'm completely unconvinced by it. And thus, the vast majority of skeptics that are out there on any side, philosophers of mind will concede. There's no explanation for the origin of consciousness. And Schumer kind of concedes that.

He just says, here's a way we should start thinking about it. But the bottom line is we are conscious thinking agent. and atheists often talk about reason and rationality, well, you can only have those things if consciousness exists, but you said last point we'll move on. If God is a conscious agent, we have a natural explanation that we would be thinking conscious beings.

Now, the second argument I made with Schumer that people can watch and go, you know, analyze somebody pushing back, leads us to our blind leap number six, which is free will. Yeah, so think of it this way, let's go with the mainstream version of atheism, which tends to embrace some form of nature is all that exists, some version of metaphysical naturalism,

sometimes it's called physicalism, and I'm sure a few commenters out there might say, oh, well, you know, you're straw manning, because Buddhists can be atheists, sure. What I'm describing here is mainstream Western atheism, which tends to be committed to nature and its processes tell the whole story. Or Carl Sagan's, the cosmos, the physical world, is all there is, ever was or ever will be. Now, let's grant that.

Physical universe is all there is. Well, how does physical stuff, how does matter, energy, space, time behave? It tends to behave what they thought 250 years ago during the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, breaking out through Europe. You have guys like Denise Diderot, Pierre Laplace, Laplace, Le Métrie, a little later in the history of atheism. This is one of the classes I taught at a secular college for nine years before I came to Biola was history of atheism. And there's fascinating things happening in the 18th end of the 19th century, where Newton has just explained gravity in the cosmos in a way that is essentially a gigantic clock with cogs in it and every

cog is spinning in time so that you get this great cosmic machine that's determined it's a well-oiled machine but newton refused to include man as just a cog in that machine because he believed that we have choice-making power and we can't be reduced to physical processes. Well, Denise Diderot comes along in LaMaitry and the way Jacques Monad put it in the 20th century, he said the cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine. So they just took Newton to that next level and swallowed up man in that deterministic view. And so if everything is physically determined, if human beings are merely physical beings, it follows that freedom itself, as an illusion. And you'll hear that from atheists

until before he passed away, Daniel Dennett, one of the new atheists, now the not so new atheist movement. You hear Sam Harris take the view that free will is an illusion. Even Alex O'Connor has recently gone on record as a determinist. And on that view, let's bring it down to earth. Maybe this conversations a bit in the clouds for folks. Think of the last person you said, I love you too and meant it. On this view, on option one for the atheist origin story of who we are and how we got here,

all that's going on there is a predetermined sequence of brain chemistry plus your natural environment that sets off this required response where you open your mouth, almost like a chatty Kathy doll. back in the 50s, you know, they had those creepy little dolls, you pull the string, and out comes the pre-programmed, I love you, I love you, right? So that's that version of atheism, the materialist sort that says, we're just material and it's all determined, doesn't seem like there's a ray of hope there for meaningful choice-making power, much less love or anything like that.

Well, there seemed to be, in the early 20th century, a little glimmer of hope for the atheist. with Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty in the advent of quantum discoveries and seeing that, wow, at the subatomic level of the physical world, things don't seem machine-like. There's none of this rigid determinism. There's not even predictability. Things seem to behave willy-nilly. Epicurus back at the BC's said the atoms falling in the void swerve. and everybody thought, what does that even mean? That's ridiculous.

Well, in the 20th and 21st century, we found out, oh, maybe Epicurus was onto something. The atoms swerve. There's a swerviness, a willy-nilliness, a randomness, and arbitrariness to subatomic particles. Now, some atheist said, yes, we finally have room in an atheist cosmos to squeeze meaningful choice-making power. Well, it didn't take too long for philosophers to realize that this doesn't do us any better. Like if now picture that person you said, I love you to, sure, maybe there wasn't a deterministic chain reaction in your brain that forced you like a chatty Kathy doll with its string pull to say, I love you. Maybe instead on the quantum indeterminacy model somewhere invisible to the naked eye, a subatomic particle, a cork or something in your amygdala, swerve to the left rather than to the right,

which set off a chain reaction at the macro level, so you open your mouth and blurt out, I love you. Quantum indeterminacy doesn't salvage freedom or love or creativity or any of the rest. And so the atheist now has a burden of proof. If they're going to freely reject God's existence and not be determined or random them in doing so, they need to be able to account for some version of choice-making power. And by the way, when it comes to quantum mechanics like you're talking about, there are indetermined and deterministic models that seem to both account for the phenomena.

And it hasn't even been landed yet which theory about this is true. So it's not going to get them out of the problem you're talking about. But I want to make sure people don't miss this. We're talking about certain things that we all take for granted. A, that there's a universe. B, that it's fine-tuned for life. C, we live in a habitable planet where all these factors have come together. There's the origin of life.

We couldn't be talking if we hadn't first come to live. But then there's also consciousness. All these things are part of the world that we see and we experience. And yet atheism cannot adequately explain any of them in our opinion and our research and our argumentation. Add free will on top of that. Why? Because you and I believe there's mind first and this mind God brought matter into existence. But an atheist worldview, either there's nothing or there's matter, and then everything came from that. So how does matter acting and reacting together create consciousness and the capacity to choose and act rather than be acted upon?

this is again something from nothing. So the atheist can say, A, there's free will, but we don't have an explanation how that's the case, and that's really where Michael Shermer goes. Or B, there's no free will, but you lose love and you lose everything we believe that makes us qualitatively different from the physical universe.

That comes at a cost that is arguably too high. Three more, my friend. Blind leap number seven, aughts. Outs, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, ought is just a term for moral value. How to get moral values in a universe that's just reducible to material facts. And so, um, I love that, you know, C.S. Lewis starts his famous mere Christianity

with a version of the moral argument. But when I was teaching atheists at a second. college here in Orange County. I taught at Settelback College and their Emeritus Institute for almost a decade. Most of my students were atheists. I had to be very careful to not get fired by being too blatant about my faith. And so I had to sort of come up with teaching strategies that protected my paycheck for my family. And so one of those, what I would, I would use atheists to debunk atheists. atheism. And so on this question of aughts or moral values, I had a few go-to atheists, you know, Fred Nietzsche, you know, famously argues in the gay science, in, let's see, I have a bunch of

his books on my shelf right there. He, in Thus Spake Dherastra, he makes the argument that in the absence of God, if God is dead, then, All of the moral attributes that we rested on his existence, those die with him. And so Nietzsche here is writing to the modern man and saying, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If we're going to slay God or bury the notion of God six feet under, you can't go along living by Christian theistic morality. as if altruism is still a good thing and as if justice and human rights still exist. And so he's got pretty harsh words for fellow atheists to say, in the absence of God, you lose all moral categories,

which is why he calls us to be the ubermunch, the overman, who you might picture is like Superman flying over, transcending what he called the heron moral, the herd morality, the slave morality of do good unto others and tell the truth and don't take stuff that isn't yours. He spat on that traditional morality. And so I would use an atheist like Nietzsche. I could use an atheist like Jean-Paul Sart. Jean-Paul Sart has a book on my shelf here called Existentialism and Human Emotion. And in Existentialism and Human Emotion, he builds a brilliant.

case. So it's not that the atheist has to answer me or you or C.S. Lewis. He has to answer his fellow atheist. Why is Nietzsche wrong that if God's dead, so is the moral system that rests on his existence. If God is non-existent, then the atheist has to answer Jean-Paul Sart, who says there can be no objective meaning or morality because he says, quote, we're on a plane. of existence where there are only men. And he goes through and he even calls out his fellow French atheists and says, there's this silly school of thought, I'm paraphrasing, this silly school of thought that thought you could ditch God with the least possible consequence, that you could just go along championing human rights and kindness. And he says that is, quote, an idle dream. He says,

we existentialists acknowledge that if there's no God, all things are permissible. And so there's another atheist. And finally, just quickly, there's an underrated atheist philosophy I think is brilliant on these questions. We can link his article in the show notes. But his name is Arthur Leff, L-E-F-F. And Arthur Leff wrote an article for Duke Law Review years ago.

And you can find it online. Typically, the article is titled something like Says Who. S-E-Z- Says Who. and is taunt all through the article is if you're going to say there's no God, and then you're going to make any moral position whatsoever, whether it's a pro-life or pro-choice position, whether it's a socialist or a capitalist position, whether it's a viewpoint on slavery, any moral claim can be met with the retort, says who, and in the absence of God, left brilliantly as an atheist argues there's just no good answer to that question in the absence of God. The atheist has two responses. One, just concede that morality is subjective, and that leads you to a relativistic ethic. I recently interviewed Bart Ehrman on his new book, and we kind of went back and forth, and he takes that route.

So you can see us debate and discuss that route. The other is to say there's subjective right and wrong without God and ground it somewhere else. I had Michael Sherron. It was a year or two ago. We spent about two hours going back and forth on that. So we have had conversations and debates and dialogues on all these issues. But I'm with Dostoevsky. If there is no God, all is permissible. It is a leap to right and wrong. And we can add on top of this. I only have an obligation to you, by the way, if you have intrinsic value and worth. and we all seem to believe that.

That's another leap that we're not even talking about here that we could circle back to. All right. Two more blind leaps of atheists and Thaddeus. All right. Blind leap number eight. Rationality. Go. Rationality.

So think of the laws of logic. There's traditionally, you know, the law of identity. A equals A. There's the law of non-contradiction. A is not not A. there's the law of transcivity that if A equals B and B equals C, that A equals C. Now, the fascinating thing about the laws of logic is they are true in every possible universe, right? There's a school of analytic philosophy that deals with possible universes, modal logic, things like that.

There is no possible universe in which the law of identity or the law of non-contradiction do not hold. They're universals. And so the question is, on atheism, do you believe in the laws of logic? That they're real. Are you a realist about these laws? And it seems like if they say yes, then there's this leap of, hope me understand atheist friend. Which configuration of elements on the periodic table?

Which evolutionary moment in history spawned the law of non-auching. contradiction into being. Is it like two parts helium, four parts, boron, eight parts, carbon? Like what, where is the law of non-contradiction? If it's

physical, is it in Paris? Is it by the Eiffel Tower? Is it on the Biola campus? Is it in my office in Talbot East 318? Where is the law of non-contradiction? And you see there are just nonsense questions because the laws of law although they're real, lack physical properties.

They have what we could, in a deep sense call, there's something supernatural about them. There's something transcendent about the laws of logic themselves. And so there's a whole school of apologetics that you find coming out of guys like Greg Bonson and Cornelius Van Til, Rush Duny and contemporary. presuppositionalists like what's his name Jeff Durbin and a lot of this argument focuses on the laws of logic and says in the absence of God you have no reason to reason you can't just help yourself it sort of mirrors the last argument you can't just live off borrowed capital of morality from Christianity and pretend you're not stealing from a different worldview in the same sense the pre-suppositionalist Cornelius Van Til and Bonson and folks like that will argue that right out of the gate, the atheist can't start using laws of logic, which they have to, the minute they utter a coherent

sentence, unless they can give, based on their presupposition, some kind of justification or warrant for believing that the laws of logic exists. As Christians, John 1-1, in the beginning was the word. And you know, as well as, I do the Greek word here. N. R.K. Gen. Lagos. The Lagos, where we get our word logic from.

The Christian universe starts. Before the universe starts, there's already logic in the very being of God. About 20 years ago, I was speaking to a skeptical atheist group at Berkeley making this argument. And one of the responses from a student was, something effect of, wait a minute, you're saying we can't trust the mind. he said science actually shows that we can't trust the mind and I said so science is a discipline that relies upon reason and rationality and trusting the mind proves that we can't trust it you can only come to that conclusion if you first start by trusting it now that's not meant to say I'm not saying that as like a gotcha moment but the point here is that there's certain assumptions that we bring

to the table that are leaps within atheism. So, of course, atheists can be moral, but objective right and wrong, that is not something atheism itself can explain. That's the point that we're arguing here. And of course, Darwin said the horrid out. We're arguing, but that atheists argue. That's a huge point. I think that's really fair.

Yep. So on the moral argument, you don't need, say, C.S. Lewis. or even Dostoevsky. Again, you can use Arthur Leff, you can use Jean-Belsart. No, that's great. The same applies here. On rationality,

you don't need a JP Morland, one of the world's leading philosophers of mind and a mentor and dear friend of you and I. As much as we love JP, you could prove that atheism can account for mental properties and rationality and laws of logic, using atheist philosophers of mind.

So some names here that our audience should have on their radar. Paul and Patricia Churchland out of UCSD. I wrote a book called Matter and Consciousness that argues minds can exist in an atheist universe. Yegwan Kim, who recently passed away, but he was out of Brown University. Kim wrote a brilliant short book that's on my shelf right there called Mind in a Physical World, where he argues that in the absence of God, there's no foundation for mental properties. So there's a couple names to show, again, this isn't two Christian apologists taking cheap jabs at atheism when no atheist in the room. We're pointing you to the atheists who are making the arguments probably better than either of us could.

And of course, Darwin himself, whether atheists are agnostic, I don't really fully know the answer to that, but talked about how the horrid doubt always arises, whether the conviction of man's mind, which has evolved from the lower animals, is it all trustworthy? When anyone trusts a conviction is a monkey's mind. If our brains resulted through a blind material, undesigned process, why and how can we trust it? Now, we're going to keep moving,

but both CS Lewis and Alvin Planska have really developed this kind of arguments. And ourselves, and atheists included, we often say that this is a kind of leap. All right, the last blind leap number nine is beauty. Oh, man. Oh, this is so good. So let's start before we even get to atheism here. Sometimes in these conversations, it's helpful to just share scripture and let scripture speak on its own merits, its own internal power, thanks to the spirit who inspired it. So our Old Testament, the Torah, opens in the beginning God created. So the first introduction God makes to us in Scripture, the first attribute that's featured there, is its creativity.

The first verb in the first sentence on the first page of the Bible is created. And then what do we see follow after Genesis 1-1? God is speaking things into being, the heavens and the earth. He's separating the waters above from the waters below. He's creating clouds and oceans. He's separating oceans from dry land and creating the first beaches, right? He's filling the land with chameleons and flamingos and German shepherds. He's filling the sea with blue whales and Mandarin fish.

He's speaking toucans and hummingbirds into existence. He starts speaking vegetation like coffee beans. Praise the Lord. He's speaking cocoa beans, wherever we get chocolate from. Praise the Lord. He's speaking watermelon. He's speaking strawberries into existence. And what does the Genesis author say at the end of every creation day?

He says, it's good. That's sort of the chorus of the creation account. It's good, it's good, it's good. God saw it was good. Now, in Hebrew here, the term is three letters transliterated. It's Tov or Tov is sometimes how it's pronounced. And one scholar has done a lot of. work on this is he was at Taylor University. I forget where he's at now, but James Spiegel did a

brilliant article years ago, where he argues that Tov in a creation account is not making a moral claim. God is not saying it's good that strawberries and coffee beans exist. He's not saying it's morally good that flamingos and beta fish are swimming around. No, he's saying it's beautiful. God is making an aesthetic declaration. He's saying a universe with watermelons, man, that's good, that's beautiful. He's looking at sunsets. He's looking at Saturn's rings. He's looking at all this beauty.

And he's saying, behold, it's beautiful. So this is God the artist. And so what that means on a Christian story of our origins is, when a few years ago, a couple decades ago now, when the Hubble telescope started relaying pictures back to Earth of the Helix Nebula or the Eagle Nebula or the Orion Nebula, and humanity first set eyes on these towering pillars of glowing space dust, what was, regardless of your skin tone, your culture, your education level, your age, or anything, when we saw those pictures of from the Hubble telescope, and by we, I mean, humanity, the response was something like Tov.

That's beautiful. I didn't hear anybody be like, oh, that's ugly. Look at all that stupid space dust. Right. Now with the James Webb telescope, we're getting even higher, high definition photos from deep space. And we've seen the Orion Nebula and far more glorious pink and fuchsia detail. than we ever did before. And again, what's the response?

Tov, I think this is an appeal we can make to the atheist. Like, what is an experience in life? Maybe it's a song that moves you. Maybe it's a location, a sunset spot. Maybe it's a mountain you've hiked to. Maybe it's a vista you get from a certain mountain view. Maybe it's a starry night. Maybe it's a certain beach.

maybe there's a movie that moves you. Maybe there's a food that is just so savory and satisfying to you. Dear atheist friends, do you believe which of these two options? That you're just fabricating beauty, you're projecting aesthetic qualities into a void? Or do you believe instead of fabricating, you're actually finding beauty? you're discovering it, which means that Orion and Helix and Eagle Nebulas, they were beautiful before the Hubble telescope ever left our atmosphere, because God was declaring Tov over his universe. If we all went blind tomorrow, guess what? Peacocks would still be beautiful. If we all went blind tomorrow, the Orion, the sunset would still be beautiful.

So there's an objective beauty in a universe that was began by an artist that we meet in the very first pages, the very first sentence of scripture. And so here I would just kick it to the atheist and just say it's sort of great coquel strategy of put a rock in their shoe. They might in the moment say, well, it's all subjective. It's all a projection into the void. But the next time that sunset knocks them on their butt, the next time they, they see a seagull riding the waves. Any time now that they're affronted by beauty, there's going to be that rock in their shoes saying,

hey, I see all this art. I wonder if there is an artist after all. I love the way you frame this. Is beauty something that we read into nature or something that we discover? Because physical things can be arranged in a beautiful fashion, like a painting, but beauty goes beyond matter,

like a poem or a, or a song. These are immaterial things that have beauty. Well, we all act as if certain things have beauty within themselves. We act as if a rainbow is beautiful. We act as if a waterfall is beautiful. We act as if a galaxy and the nebula in themselves are beautiful. And what's crazy is we find beauty in the depths of the ocean

and in the depths of the galaxy. which have no relevance for evolution on our small, insignificant, tiny planet. That's the challenge. And let me wrap it up by saying this, and I've one or two landing questions for you. One of the things we're asking people to wrestle with is what do you deeply believe? Well, for example, one explanation for the universe is that the universe is Maya. It's an illusion.

None of us live as if that's the case. consciousness. Some atheists to explain it within atheism have denied consciousness, but even denying it takes place within consciousness. We all know we're conscience. We know that we make choices, and then we're not operated on externally by forces, but there's the self that acts. We know that we can trust reason, at least insofar as it goes, it's a useful tool. We know this right and wrong, and we know that beauty is in the world. In fact, not only if somebody doesn't recognize a beautiful galaxy, we actually correct people.

If they go, that's ugly, we'd be like, what's wrong with you? The problem is you are not seeing the beauty, and we all live that way. So our argument here, which isn't really us, for most of these, you've pointed towards atheists saying this themselves, that these are all things we take for granted, but atheism cannot explain any of these adequately.

Now, I have a few that I wrote down as I was thinking about this, but can you think of any, like just list them off quickly? Any other things? We're not going into detail here that you consider further blind leaps of atheism. Sure. So, one, this just piggybacks

on the last point on beauty. There's a quote, I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. A lot of apologists love Twilight Zone and Sherlock Holmes. That's almost universally true. And Sherlock Holmes, rarely in any of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories or mysteries,

has Sherlock make a theological point. It's very rare, but I found one example that answers your question. This is from the Naval Treaty is the name of this particular adventure or mystery. And this is such a good argument for God. It comes from the lips of Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction, where Holmes grabs a rose, and he says, what a lovely thing a rose is. Our highest assurance of the goodness of provenance seems to me to rest in the flowers. Other things are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose, I love this language, this rose is an extra.

Its smell and its color are an embellish. of life, not a condition of it. And here's this conclusion. It's only goodness, which gives extras. It's only goodness with the capital G that can give these extras. And that to me is one of the most compelling arguments for God, because we're surrounded by extras, by things that, like, I don't deserve the breeze blowing in my window right now. I don't deserve the hummingbird that's whizzing around outside my window. I don't deserve the beautiful Magnolia tree for three feet away from me. Like all those undeserved extras point to the goodness with a capital G. And that means we are literally surrounded by, we are immersed in arguments for good God's

existence more times a day than we can count. So I find that compelling. Very, very quickly, I think the argument from awe that a field of positive psychology is finding that people don't want to be awestruck, they need to be awestruck. And so you get over 50,000 people a year making the inconvenient trek to Nepal to try to climb Everest. Now you have 1.5 million a year going to Yosemite, 2.5 million going to Niagara Falls. We go to huge blockbuster movies like Christopher Nolan's recent Odyssey, which is this huge, you know, visual spectacle. Or I took my son, yesterday to see the new Spider-Man movie. I know you're a huge Spidey fan. We don't just want to be awestruck. We need to be awestruck. And I think that makes really good sense if we are created for

awe, which is, by the way, the most frequent command in all of scriptures to fear the Lord. And it's a Hebrew term, Yara, which means to revere, to be awestruck at. So there's a handful of arguments I find compelling. That's awesome. I thought of a few other leaps. That is explaining away the person and identity and evidence surrounding Jesus and the worldwide impact this carpenter would have who had no government military position in obscure area realm of the Roman Empire near death experiences. This phenomena that leads to a transformation of people's lives. And I recently had an expert on Randy Kay, 140 carefully vetted and confirmed near-death experiences. Gary Hobbermoss would say there's over 500 evidential ones.

One of Craig's top arguments, William and Craig, is the inexplicable applicability of math, meaning these laws that you talked about, why we can do science, and it applies to the natural world. Seems like a coincidence on atheism, but makes sense if there's design, stories of miracles that people have. I mean, there's so many things we haven't even talked about. Now, of course, atheists wouldn't believe in those.

But there's a lot of people who look at it. I'm saying, wait a minute. These things seem to be a part of the world in which we live. They need an adequate explanation. All right. So last question for you. We're not going to walk through here,

but we would walk through how we believe each one of these not only is a blind leap of atheism, but actually points towards design. For example, if the universe exists and had a beginning, that points towards it began or out. of the universe. We know minds can fine-tune things. We know if God is a conscious agent and God is free, it makes sense he'd make conscious agents who are free. If God is the basis, God is holy, God is just, it would make sense that he would make beans with moral commands. If God is the logos,

it would make sense that we've been made with minds to understand reason. And finally, Taste and see that the Lord is good. God is good and God is beautiful in his character. It makes sense that we would yearn for beauty and awe, like you said. What would your last thing be to somebody goes, okay, you don't understand the history of the trajectory of thought. These things that we believed couldn't be explained by God. As science progresses, we've explained them. So what would you do for somebody who holds out with that approach? Yeah, well, let me give two kind of.

a quick preliminary points and then get to the meat of the question. So I had a professor at Biola, one of the world's experts. He still teaches, I think, a summer class on the theology of C.S. Louis. And that is Dr. Jerry Root. Do you know Jerry? I don't know him well, but have followed him for a long time. Okay. So Jerry was invited to Oxford to give a C.S. Lewis lecture.

and before his lecture he's sitting around surrounded by all these you know academic elite you know they're a very erudite company these oxford dons and somebody looks at jerry root at this dinner and very condescendingly asked uh talk to root they tell me you're a christian like pray tell why you would believe in christianity he thought about it for a minute and he answered in one sentence. He said, you know, I think when it comes down to it, I realize just how much grace I need. I realize just how much grace I need. And like, how does the atheist respond to that? Like, no, uh, like, no, you don't. Or maybe you do, but I don't.

Like, there's just something to that kind of argument where we can go through cosmology and teleology and microbiology and consciousness and flowers. philosophy of mind. And I think those arguments are valuable. They have their place. But on the human level to just be able to tell people, hey, here's really good news. Jesus has grace. He has saving grace. He can forgive you of your sins. He can take up residence in your soul by his Holy Spirit. He can instill and infuse you with life and meaning and hope. Sometimes as apologists, we make it a little too complicated for ourselves and for the person we're sharing Jesus with where it's like,

I learned these 80 arguments. Let me get through all of them before I get to Jesus. Of course. Sometimes getting to the gospel cuts through the static. So that's a first sort of preliminary point. A second one is probably my nearest and dearest argument for God is the breath in my lungs. I did an episode of my show, The Shed and Beam. maybe you can link it down in the show notes,

but how God saved me from Mormonism and suicide. I was raised Mormon. When my parents left, I became suicidally depressed around age 14 and in a pit of utter nihilism and despair. Like the breath in my lungs, the fact that Jesus saved me is every breath and every heartbeat is another argument,

not just for a beginner or a designer or a moral lawgiver, but a gracious God who saved a schlub like me. So to the argument, is this just Williams McDowler, you guys just doing this God of the Gaps thing? Eventually, science will plug up all these gaps, leaving your God permanently unemployed, an outdated hypothesis. It's an important objection, and I think it's important here to do. into the actual arguments, and I'll make it quick, to see that these are not like historic

god gaps that were closed. Rather, these gaps keep growing, demanding even more of a transcendent or divine or supreme intelligence to explain the phenomena, the more we learned about the phenomena. So I hinted at an example earlier. In Darwin's Day, oh, there's cells, an unsophisticated bag of organic jello, basically. And then science, more science gets done, microbiology. It comes around in the 20th century in biochemistry. And it's like, whoa, there's way more explaining that needs to happen here, because this is remarkably sophisticated. You mentioned Doug Axe. He has done so much work on, like you said, information and information theory. And where do you get the new genetic information to explain the diversity of species? Here's no.

example of the more science has done, the bigger the God gaps become. Let's, let me close with this thought on the God of the Gaps. Consciousness has, we talked about maybe four or five features of it. There's several more. This is not an area where the more science or philosophy is done, the more, it seems like God is being nudged off stage. precisely the opposite. The more philosophy of mind that's done, we come to see that material causes have material effects.

There's every, put it this way, you put a beaker of mercury above a bunsen burner. Physical cause, physical effect, that thing's going to boil around 582 degrees, something like that. We have a physical, cause, physical effect. What the atheists would have us believe here it would seem is that physical cause could have a non-physical effect, that you could have the precise arrangement of brain chemistry, and poof, the laws of logic sprout into being.

So non-physical effect from a physical cause defies every single experiment being done in every laboratory in the world all day, every day. physical causes have physical effects. Every time, every experiment that reinforces that just goes to show that this gap keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger for the atheist having to explain how all of these non-physical realities, like choice-making power, like semantics, like aboutness or intentionality, like the laws of logic, like aesthetics, like moral categories and aughts. the gap just keeps growing and growing and growing. And final, final thought is I think here there's also a confusion on the atheist part between causes. You know, Aristotle distinguishes between a material cause. That's what something's made of. That's different from the efficient cause, which is who is arranging this stuff,

which is different from the formal cause, the shape the material cause takes. And all that's different from the final cause, what that thing is for. And so I built my son a go-kart the other day. There's the metal. That's the material cause. There's the formal cause, the shape the metal takes with the wheels. There's the efficient cause, me, the guy putting it together. And there's the final cause for my son to have a good time riding his new go-kart.

And so the atheist commonly makes the mistake of, well, if we understand more about the material cause, therefore we don't need an efficient cause and we don't need a final cause. And I think that's just a basic philosophical blunder that I hear atheists make all the time. And no amount of material causal explanations could alleviate the need for a efficient cause, who's the designer, and a teleological cause. What is it designed for? And by the way, a reminder, so many of these discoveries. were not from Christians saying,

hey, let's go prove Genesis chapter 1. No, the science started pointed towards the universe having a beginning, and it was resisted. Even some of the fine-tuning was discovered by an agnostic, maybe even atheist scientist who was surprised by this. It didn't fit his worldview. So this isn't a big agenda from Christians pushing this forward. It actually comes as a surprise from people who discovered this about the universe.

And the further we've gone, I think the argument is that we see more. of these fingerprints. I'm going to invite people to check out your book Reflecting the Sun. I endorsed an earlier version of this. And you talk about philosophy, science, art, psychology. This is really a broad book about what it means to worship and follow Jesus. So if there's any atheists, like, okay, I've been challenged a little bit. What would it look like to live this out? First, read the gospel, John, second, check out, reflecting the sun by Thaddex Williams. or Christians who are like, okay, I want to live out this faith. What does it look like?

Your book is excellent, heartily endorsed it. People watch and come think about studying with us at Biola, Talba School of Theology. You and I both taught there. I went to Biola and Talbot together back in the 90s, early 2000s. Make sure you hit subscribe. Let us know what you think about this episode. This is a little different than some of the typical episodes that we did. If you're an atheist, you're not convinced.

I'm not looking for a fight, but I'd love to know, honestly, if you have thoughts and reflections, here's where I agree, here's where I disagree, here's my take, write it in, and I will take a look at the comments. Dad, thanks for coming on. This is fun. Hey, man, I appreciate you. I'll see you soon. You got it.

Has fear stolen your peace? I'm Jennifer Slattery, lead host of the Faith Over Fear Podcast, helping you fight your fears and grow your faith. Subscribe at life audio.com.