Truth Unites - Atheism is Devastating and Unlivable

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Gavin Ortlund addresses some of the practical challenges involved in embracing atheism, particularly concerning questions of meaning and death. Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

I've done a lot of videos arguing against atheism at an intellectual level, like this one on the fine-tuning argument, or I did this video that's sort of an animated video. Thank you, Ryan, my friend, for helping on the problem of divine hiddenness. I'm really proud of that one, despite it not getting as many views. He did a great job on that. Or I've done on the what caused God objection to the cosmological argument. I've done these two videos on the moral argument saying, let's not give up on that one yet, even though it's not popular right now. Or on my favorite argument of all, the argument for God from eternal truths, I just find that one the most interesting. But I've never really addressed what I think is the biggest problem for atheism. From my vantage point, it's not an intellectual challenge.

It's the existential reality that it's not livable and that it leads to despair. Now, that's a strong claim. I know people will disagree with that. I don't mean to say that as an insult to atheists or just to provoke atheist viewers. I love many atheists. I just don't love atheism. and I think a lot of people don't really take in the full implications of an atheistic worldview. I do think it is devastating.

Let me explain that in this video focusing on two issues. What does atheism mean for meaning and what does it mean for death? These are the two big questions of life. Meaning, what are we doing here? Death, what happens when it's over? Those are the most important questions we can ask. So let's ask what does atheism mean for those big questions. Now there's a lot we can't get into in this video.

There's many different forms of atheism and some admittedly raise these challenges more acutely than others. There's also some responses in the academic literature. I'm not going to be engaging here. I just want to lay out the main issue as I see it, sort of introducing people to this. And if you stay to the end, I'll share when it hit me in my own life from reading Dostoevsky's book, the Brothers Karamazov, which we will quote. Okay, let's start with this question. What does atheism mean for the meaning of life? and of course we're not the first people to ask this question.

So we want to consider history and how others have thought about this. We'd be foolish not to consider how others who have preceded us have wrestled with this question. And probably the biggest effort to locate meaning in a world without God is represented by atheistic existentialist philosophy. Existentialism is a philosophical movement. Of course, not all existentialists are. It's a broad movement. but I say atheistic existentialism, I think this set of theories and instincts in philosophy captures the emotions of atheism, what it feels like to make this tilt or adjustment

to life without God, which has happened so much in the modern era. You could sum it up with this core intuition from Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous slogan, Existence Proceeds Essence. Again, I know in the academic literature, this is a very important. sometimes not favored as a way to get into it, but at the popular level, it gets us into the question. This little slogan helps us. It's a good starting point. Essentially, it means that life has no model or blueprint. Okay, there's no ultimate plan. There's no essence. We simply are, or that's existence. So we are free to construct our own meaning and purpose. Put it like this. There is nothing that the

world, or you or I, are supposed to be. We simply are. Now, if that doesn't feel terrifying yet from introducing it like that, I think it probably will as we go. Sartra saw this as the result of atheism. That's why I call this the emotions of atheism. He said existentialism is nothing else, but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. To explain why, he appealed to this famous slogan from the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, from whom we will be drawing a lot in this video, that if God did not exist, everything would be permitted. We're going to come back to that statement a couple of times in this video and see if that, number one, is that even in Dostayevsky? Yes, it is. Number two, is that a fair statement.

So, you know, my general view from the cheap seats looking at things is that it seems like in the 21st century atheists have moved away from the mentality of Asartra or other existentialists, from Nietzsche and other, you know, that statement from Dostoevsky, that all these earlier philosophers have appealed to, and they've got a much more buoyant, optimistic form of atheism. And the big question is, well, did they just get beyond this silly version of atheism? Or was that the more honest one? The new atheists and the old atheists, you know, Sam Harris and Friedrich Nietzsche, who's the more consistent atheist?

What's the more consistent outlook? That's what we're getting into you. I know the contemporary people don't like it, but I think the old atheists were more consistent. That's what we're going to be getting into here. Now, Sartre talks about this. He says, you know, starting in the 1880s, French philosophers who were atheists, developed a secular morality, disposing of God, but maintaining kind of traditional moral values that, and basically saying you can just leave off God and keep the same basic moral vision. And Sartre rejected that, saying, without God, there is no objective value for goodness that exists outside. side of us, to which we must correspond in any meaningful sense. Therefore, the existentialist finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility

of finding values in an intelligible heaven. This might seem like a drastic conclusion, and we'll register some objections to it, but just looking at the face of it, it kind of makes sense. If there's no creator who assigned the world a meaning, where else would it come from? It's hard to see where you'd get a plan for the world without someone doing the planning, you know. So you can see why people would experience the loss of God to be devastating like this. Think of a simple metaphor. So I like doing puzzles with my kids. Puzzles are fun because they have a meaning.

The pieces are meant to fit together. Someone built a puzzle by constructing a picture and then chopping it up into pieces, putting the pieces in a box, putting a picture, the picture on the cover of the box. And now you can, you know, you're working on the puzzle and you can sort of gradually discover a coherent meaning piece by piece. Puzzles have a meaning because they have a creator like that. But imagine if you're doing a puzzle and there's no picture on the box, there's no guiding image, there's no intended outcome. And as you start to do it, none of the pieces actually fit. You have to try to jam them together. It's up to you to figure out

what picture do you make out of these puzzles and how do you force them to fit together. That is what Sartra is saying human life is like. Existence comes first. There is no divine plan. or human nature to conform to, we're just hurled into the world and we have the burden of inventing our own meaning. That is what he sees as the logical follow-through and sort of the emotional implication of atheism, and I'm curious if it disturbs you as much as it disturbs me. I mean, just, you know, really think this through. Your relationships, your goals, your suffering, the deepest things, the most important things in your life, they don't have any kind of coherent unity. There's no overarching plan or design. It's just puzzle pieces that don't fit, and you've got to

sort of invent your own meaning as you go. For me, I experience that as devastating. Now, some people will say, but that's not what atheism means. Well, let's keep going and see how others have teased this out. Here's another existentialist philosopher, my personal favorite, Albert Camus, another French thinker. He used the word absurd to describe the human condition without God. And essentially what he's saying is, this is a technical term, absurdity in his philosophy. And essentially what he's saying is the human heart and reality are mismatched. They're like two puzzle pieces that don't fit. So the human heart longs for meaning, but we live in a world that has no meaning, ultimately.

We long for coherence against a backdrop of randomness. We thirst for life and happiness, but death and extinction is inevitable. Basically, the fundamental longings of the human heart don't actually correspond to anything outside of us. And the important point to see here is that life is not just absurd for Camus because it's painful or they're suffering or something like that. Suffering you can deal with. By the way, I've discovered this is true. You can deal with suffering if it means something. Young men, for example.

It's amazing what you can go through, but you need a mean. something to organize your life. I think the reason a lot of young men and young women as well struggle with depression is they don't have meaning. It's not that life is hard. It's that there's nothing transcendent to organize it. And this is what Camus is saying. He's saying life is absurd, not because it's hard, but because it's just unintelligible. It doesn't mean anything. One image that he uses that's quite vivid in his book, the myth of Sisyphus, is you're on a journey, but you didn't have a starting point and there's no destination at all. Think of it as you're wandering, but there's no garden of Eden behind you or no and no promised land before you, it's just wandering. I'll put up on the screen this passage and you can see how he's using this image. Reality itself is a stranger. And he even says we're strangers to ourselves. It's quite provocative. Now, the key to see with Camus is it's not just the loss of meaning here. It's also our sense of helplessness in the inevitability of death. Death is absolutely inescapable. And therefore, whatever you accomplish in this life, it won't have any permanent ongoing consequence. Eventually,

your life and any consequence from your life will just run out. And all human civilization will fade away eventually. You just wait around long enough. And therefore, there's no lasting results from the entire human story, ultimately. And for many people in the modern world, these two challenges, the loss of meaning and the inevitability of death, raise this question of, is life even worth living to begin with? If you really think it through, again, I think the challenge. here is really facing it. Because as Pascal observed, we use diversions, so we don't have to deal with these ultimate questions. But if you really slow down to think it through, why is life worth living if it has no ultimate meaning or lasting consequence? The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy

described being haunted by this question even to the point of suicide. And I'll put up this passage on the screen. You can read it through if you want to read it. He's talking about himself around the age of 50 getting to this point. And the question I put emboldened here at the very end is quite simple and poignant. Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? And that might seem morbid, but if you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. If life is truly meaningless, then why is it even worth embracing in the first place? And that question, the same question of, is life worth living. The question of suicide is what Camus is wrestling with. The very first sentence of the myth of Sisyphus says there's really one philosophical issue, and that's whether to commit suicide.

Okay. Now, he rejects that option. And he says, instead he calls for a kind of noble revolt in which we refuse to lapse into nihilism. The universe around us is silent and uncaring. He has one passage where he talks about opening yourself to the gentle indifference of the world. Think of a surgeon operating on you, and he just does not care. robot. He does not care. Okay, that's the world around. But Camus says, we can choose to embrace the struggle of life nonetheless, and he finds his inspiration in this Greek character, or this character

from Greek mythology, I should say, Sisyphus. Some of you will have heard of this story. Sisyphus was bound to roll a boulder up a hill repeatedly and then have it fall down before it gets to the top each time. And he sees Sisyphus as a model. I won't read you this passage, which is at the very, this is how the whole book ends, but he basically says that this is enough, and this is our journey, and it's okay, we can embrace this, and he even concludes the whole book by saying, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Now, after the bleak picture that he's painted throughout the book, this final paragraph is surprisingly positive. I would encourage everyone watching this, if you're interested in these things, read through the myth of Sisyphus. It's very, it's easy to

read. It's very well written. It has a wonderful literary quality to it. It's quite provocative. and pungent. But when you get to this passage at the very end, it is a little jarring, because he has Sisyphus here concluding that all is well, he's struggling up the mountain in happiness, and you say, wait a second, hold on, is that really right? I mean, here's the thought experiment. Imagine that you're Sisyphus, and you're rolling the boulder up the mountain. You're halfway there, okay? It takes enormous energy to move this boulder up the mountain. You stole so far to go, Finally, you're near the top, you're exhausted, and then the horrible moment comes where at the last moment, the boulder lurches out of your grasp, slips away, picks up speed as it hurdles back down

the mountain, okay? And you're looking at a go, and the thought dawns on you, how long do I look before I go and start over again? When I get to the bottom, how long do I rest before I start over again? And then this dreadful thought, I'll never get out of this situation, this, is it, I'm going to be doing this over and over and over and over. And Camus is saying, that's life. That is life without God.

That is life in this absurd condition where we are divorced from our setting, where we long for that, which just isn't there. And it's just hard for me to see how Sisyphus can be happy in that circumstance. Camus says that he can embrace the universe as neither sterile nor futile. That's part of that last quote I just put up. okay, I don't understand that. Futility seems to be the whole point of the very story. That's like why we have this story in our mythology as an image of futility.

And that's not futile. To roll the stone up over and over again for all eternity without ever getting to your destination, than what would be futile. And it's hard for me to accept that someone can sincerely think of Sisyphus as happy. So these are some images from the French existentialists that are representative of one strand of atheism. Now, I've mentioned that that's just one strand of atheism. Most atheists today don't think like that. And so we can ask, is that too bleak? You know, why can't we just sort of banish that way of thinking to the philosophy classroom if you take an existentialism class? And as I did,

I'll never forget it. 2004, University of Georgia, I'll never forget reading the myth of sycifice outside Peabody Hall on North Campus there and what an experience it was. I almost wish I could go back to my former self and warn him of what he was about to get into because that book affected me as I'll share my journal entry about it in a minute. So, but why can't we just banish this way of thinking to the philosophy classroom? And what I want to suggest is the challenges involved in the loss of God are not so easy to toss to the side. As Western civilization has grown more secular, these existentialist questions about meaning have not gone away. In some ways, you might say they've metastasized. One of my academic interests is the relation of early modernity to late

modernity. And basically, some of these ideas that you'll read in the 19th century and 20th century can seem really distant, but then when you think about it, you start to see threads connecting. And you realize a lot of this is still baked into the 21st century in our culture today. They're just not as visible. And this is one of the themes in academic literature on existentialism is that it has a kind of reverberating relevance to the late modern world, even though it starts in the early modern world. I put up a quote that's an example of that. If you're not following all of that, that's fine. The point for now is to simply say, I don't think the questions that Sartra and Camus were wrestling with are so easy to toss to the side. Take, for example, the description

of secular modernity by the noted sociologist Charles Taylor. He's describing the modern world, and he talks about the imminent frame. If you know Charles Taylor, you've probably heard of this idea. Basically, we are sliced off from contact with transcendent reality, and therefore there is a resulting kind of barrenness and disenchantment to the modern world. And at the root of this is what Taylor calls the specter of meaninglessness, which he described. as a view of life that is empty, it cannot inspire commitment, it offers nothing really worthwhile, and cannot answer the craving for goals, which we dedicate ourselves to. That word craving makes me think of the absurd there. Now, the important point for Taylor is that he is not describing one

particular philosophy. He's describing modern Western society as a whole. This sense of barrenness is just baked into the landscape around us. Now, most of us don't consciously think like that, But I think when we slow down to attend to the emotions involved in the question of meaning, most of us can relate to this topic quite vividly. I think a lot of the despair, a lot of the depression and anxiety of the modern world does relate to these ultimate questions. Sharing personally, I remember the first time this collided with me. I'm reading Camus. I just mentioned this.

I'm reading the myth of Cicephas, and it was like it lit my imagination on fire. I didn't agree with him, but I was wrestling with. what if he's right but more difficult, how will I know if he's right? And I'll never forget just the sheer anguish that it leaves you in to wrestle with these ultimate questions. When I did in my journal in the computer lab, I wrote, the only thing worse than the utter pain of life is its utter randomness. We are hurled into consciousness and struggle without any explanations or answers to accompany them. Life is like a test we are forced to take, the answers to which are impossible for us to know. The blanks with which we fill in the questions of

life are at best guesses and usually merely unexamined prejudices. Life is like a battle. We are forced to fight, but the objective of which is unclear to us. We are hurled into the contest, but unsure of what is required of us. We sense that we must strive, but we are unsure to what end we strive or by what means. The great dilemma of life is not its failure or pain, but its uncertainty and chaos. I wonder if anybody out there watching this video can relate to that. If you ever felt those questions, That's part of the struggle that these existentialists put upon us is just how do you know for sure and the anguish of uncertainty. Now everybody's going to ask these questions at some point or another. Like I said earlier, Pascal observed that we often use diversions to distract ourselves from them, but sooner or later they will pop up.

Sometimes the reality of death will come up. Our culture is very skilled at hiding death, but we cannot hide it forever. Eventually, the question of death will come up. Someone we love. someone close to us will die, or we will face our own impending death. We'll get the terrible news from the doctor or something like this, and we've got to ask these ultimate questions. But another pattern I've observed with young men especially is that the traditional midlife crisis seems to be hitting earlier for some people. And I think a lot of young men right now and young women as well are just

wrestling just right out of the bat with these questions in their 20s, especially in their 30s, as you progress in your career. And this big question lands, what is this? all four. I will say, I think it's sometimes in the success of life that this question boils up even more than in failure. But to finish off here, is it really so bad without God? This is where we have to reckon with this, and we can't explore this fully in this video, but lots of people reject belief in God and still feel that life is meaningful on some level. Certainly in the contemporary philosophical literature, it's just extremely common to reject this link between God and meaning that someone like Sartre or Camus is positing. And granted, this is too

complicated to fully vet, but let me say a few comments for why I think this sense of angst that Sartra and Camus are feeling is not irrational, but it's actually a good question. When people try to locate an objective meaning apart from God, it often ends up being rather thin. At the end of the day, it simply matters whether there is an afterlife that promises moral restoration and moral reckoning or whether there isn't. That's either there or it isn't, and a lot is at stake. While it's true that there's lots of different accounts from contemporary atheistic philosophers that affirm an objective meaning to life, it's unclear how satisfying these really are. One philosopher has used the label religious non-theism as a category for some of these

options, and this gets at kind of the paradoxical nature of this idea, that life can still have a religious-like awe and transcendence and richness that we all crave, even apart from any God or gods. And it's intriguing to think about this, but, you know, it's this old idea that's sometimes a question that isn't answered in a satisfying way. Even if it keeps being dismissed, we'll just keep coming back at you. And the question here is, what is there to ground such an ultimate meaning and a religious sense of awe without God. This particular article goes through four challenges that have to be overcome, and to my mind, he's correct in showing that God is an essential part of what provides a sense of transcendence and significance to human life.

And there's lots of ways that you can see this. One is the notion of love. Many modern people want to think that love has a kind of transcendence significance. We sing songs about love. Our movies highlight the goodness and transcendence of love. But if you stop and think about it, in most of the atheistic options, again, there's different kinds of atheism. Love is reductively explained as the product of our evolutionary history, feelings of love developed because they helped our animal ancestors survive. Any sense of larger significance is an illusion and an accident.

It doesn't have any objective reference outside of our biology, and it might have never come to be if we had evolved differently. And if you think that through, it's pretty devastating. And then you start to realize, again, not in every form of atheism, but in the more rigorous ones especially, in a de-supernaturalized world, something similar is true for our entire humanity. For example, our sense of justice. This also is a product of our evolutionary psychology. we feel that evil should be punished and good should be rewarded. That's one of the deepest intuitions in our heart. But again, it's just a product of evolution.

There's nothing outside of our biology that that corresponds to. It might have been different. We might have evolved such that that sense would never have come to be in the first place. That's one of the challenges for explaining an objected morality in atheism is these evolutionary debunking arguments. They're kind of tricky. But, you know, again, lots of people resist this, and I appreciate that, but I would just say the most clear-eyed treatments of this do seem to admit, this is a real challenge. I mentioned Nietzsche several times. I'll give you one of his passages because his metaphors are so good. He basically is saying the death of God, which is the loss of God in Western civilization, is like wiping away the entire horizon and unchaining the earth from the sun and turning out the lights and straying into an infinite nothing and so on and so forth.

You say, why did he feel that way? You know, he's onto something there. I'll return to this in Dostoevsky in a minute, but even in contemporary writers, you know, Yavall Harari wrote these best-selling books about human history. And in there, he says human rights are a fiction, just like God and heaven. He's got the same link in his thinking. God and human rights, they stand or fall together. Maybe the most provocative thing I've read on this is an older article, 1979 by Arthur Leff,

in the Duke Law Journal, and it talks about the grand says who problem. And his thesis is that a God-grounded system has no analogs. Either God exists or he does not, but if he does not, no one else can take his place. I remember reading through Lawrence Krause's book, A Universe from Nothing, at the very end of the book, he pauses to consider what his proposal, namely a universe that creates that is made from nothing, and therefore there's no creator behind it. And he's saying, what does this mean for the meaning of life? And the image he lands upon is Sisyphus. Quote, I've always been attracted to the myth of Sisyphus and have likened the scientific effort at times to his eternal task pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have it fall back each time.

As Camus imagined Sisyphus was smiling, and so should we. Again, the instinct makes sense that if you have a universe from nothing without any creator, it's going to be like a puzzle that doesn't have a blueprint and you're not ever going to reach your destination. In my book, I treat all this more and I give a kind of more thorough treatment of the old atheists and the new atheists and why I think basically the old atheists were thinking more consistently with their presuppositions. There's more to work through in all of this to chase that all out. You can read that book. But hopefully at least we've raised the challenge here for people to wrestle with. Can you really live with the implications of loss of God and a consequence of that, the loss of the afterlife. I submit that truly thinking that

through is devastating. And it's something very few of us can face. And basically nobody really thinks Sisyphus is happy. At the end of the day, we know that it matters, whether love and justice are an illusion. We are interested in what happens after we die. We care about meaning. Let me conclude this video by sharing when this landed upon me. Oh, how I remember this. 2010, reading through Dostoevsky's famous novel, the Brothers Karamatsov. Now, this is where you get the statement. If God did not exist, all things are permitted. You'll often hear that cited. Nietzsche cited it, Sartra cited it. It's a huge influence upon these philosophers. And the exploration of that sentiment can be regarded as one of the great themes of the book. Sometimes people say it's not even in the

book. I counted when I went through and something like that is there about a dozen times. It's definitely in the book, the sense of an anarchy that's unleashed by the non-existence of God. This is a great theme of the book. Dostoevsky even wrote a letter to a friend saying that the book is basically about the existence of God. You can see that on the screen. But let me just give an example of when this hit me. There's an important passage in this novel, amazing novel, if you can find the time to read it. And in this passage, a character named Dimitri is giving a speech to Alyosha, and he's referencing earlier comments. And he says, but what will become of men then?

I asked him, without God and immortal life. All things are lawful then. They can do what they like. So there's a statement. Just a bit later, he extends this claim. And listen to how he puts it. It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me.

What if he doesn't exist? What if Radican's right? that it's an idea made up by man, that if he doesn't exist, man is the chief of the earth of the universe. Magnificent. Only how is he going to be good without God? That's the question. I always come back to that. For whom is man going to love then?

To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing the hymn? Radican laughs. Radican says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a sniveling idiot can maintain that. I can't understand it. Think of Arthur left's article saying, no one can take his place. It does seem a little naive to think you're going to remove what's at the base

of Western civilization and our developed sense of morality and just keep the superstructure and there'll be no changes. But what's interesting here is the emotional expression of this in this novel, but then the way it's borne out. And so I'm not adding onto my argument here with Dostoevsky. I'm kind of layering on the implications because here's what happens in the book. Basically, at the logical level and at the level of argument, theism is rejected in the book. The character Ivan, who represents rationalism, gives arguments based upon the problem of evil that are not answered. Those arguments have to do with the suffering of children, and they're so vividly expressed that you think, surely, this is Dostoevsky's own view. After all, Dostoevsky's writing of this book was interrupted by the death

of his own three-year-old son named Alyosha. Aliocha is the name of the hero of the book. So you think, sure, you know, when Yvonne in the book is going on about the problem of evil, you think, surely this is what Dostoevsky believes because there's no logical answer to it. But I kept reading and eventually it occurred to me that though there's no answer to it, the events of the plot undermine his words. Because Yvonne's words become the basis without giving too much of a spoiler for a horrific event that happens. And when Yvon realizes that he has a mental breakdown. And so it seems that the rejection of Ivan's nihilism and skepticism comes not through an argument, but through the narrative.

I will never forget finishing this book. I was living in Washington, D.C. on Capitol Hill. I finished the book. It was an emotional experience to read this because it's so long, of course, too. You get to the end. You finally finish it. You persevere through it. I went back home to my little studio apartment there on Capitol Hill. I sat down at the desk and I just sat there. And I just sat in silence for a while. It was one of the most calm. I wasn't sad or happy. It was just calm, reflective. And then I wrote this single sentence on the back cover of my copy of the book, however difficult faith in God may be, when faced with the terrible reality of suffering in the world, its only alternative is an unlivable despair. That's what that book helped me feel and experience and see more deeply, because there's no counterargument in the book to the problem of evil, and yet it just doesn't work. Rejecting God,

only compounds and makes everything worse. And the hero of the story is Alyosha and his simple faith and God and charity toward others. So at least worth asking this question, what if there's more? What if there is an afterlife? What if there is an objective meaning? What if the puzzle pieces do have a design? This is, of course, what I believe is a Christian. I think that there's a creator who has made the world and sort of imbued it with this inherent meaning.

And I think that the resurrection of Christ means that actually there's also a transcendent hope that one day everything sad will come on true. And the more I look down the road at these two options, when I do apologetics, I got to be honest. I think in some respects the most powerful way to do apologetics and explain the Christian story, I mean, we want to give arguments that it's true, but just seeing what's at stake, seeing the difference with respect to beauty and goodness, sometimes that's all that you need to show people to help them understand.

This is not livable. I can't work with this. It takes the deepest intuitions of the human heart about love and justice and so many other things and drains them of vitality. And the attempts to push back against that and keep them just where they were with God seem very thin and contrived. If you want more on why theism is such a happy view, check on my video on heaven. You can see the thumbnail on screen. That might give you an alternative corresponding to the more dismal feel of this video. Hey, thanks for watching this video.

Let me know what you think. I hope this is helpful to people as we think about if you struggle with these questions or as we think about sharing the gospel with others. If you want to support Truth Unites, check out on the website. I also have a monthly newsletter that goes out you can sign up for. You can stay connected with other things. Please pray for the book I'm currently writing on all these themes called Why Christianity Makes Sense. Thanks for watching everybody.