Truth Unites - The Question Atheism Struggles to Answer (It’s Not What You Think)

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Gavin Ortlund examines a key question raised in a debate between Douthat and Pinker, arguing that atheism struggles to provide a sufficient foundation for moral obligation and human rights without borrowing from theistic assumptions.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/

There's one question that I think atheism really struggles to answer well. It's a question you can bring up in just about any conversation you're in. It's a question that helps believers when you're having doubts or you're wondering what if I'm wrong or when God just feels very distant. Now, I'm going to say what that question is at the end of this video. We'll build to get there. I want to start with a fascinating point that Ross Douthit made to Stephen Pinker in a recent debate they had. If AI is able to achieve consciousness, Mr. Delfit, what then?

Didn't... Well, first of all, I'm curious if Dr. Pinker thinks that AI is already conscious since it... if you think that the intelligence of existing AI agents is an indication

that humans are not so impressive after all, or, you know, is it... Are AI is conscious right now? It beats the heck out of me. I'll link to that debate below. Check it out, fascinating debate.

But just remember that answer as we go. Now we're going to keep playing the tape. Ask yourself, is what Pinker says next, consistent with what he just said there. Okay. So should we... So we should be agnostic and not kill them, right?

Shouldn't turn it off, just to be safe? If there was, I would not attribute consciousness to the current generation of AIs. I'd feel no compunctions about pulling the plug. Who knows what would happen if we had a lieutenant commander data, something that was so convincingly human that it would engage our empathy and make it very difficult to deny consciousness to it. Personally, I don't think it would be conscious. Why not?

But I couldn't... The thing about consciousness in the sense of pure sentience, first-person subjective experience, is that by definition, you can't tell if anyone else has it, including, of course, other humans. That is, it's impossible to tell if any other human is conscious. Aren't you sawing off now the branch on which your entire philosophy rests?

You've spent the whole evening telling us it's self-evident We don't need Christianity. It's self-evident that we should care about the well-being and feelings and experiences of other human beings. And now you're telling me that you can't even tell if I have those feelings at all. This is what I mean by the self-undermining nature of the materialist project, right? The worldview doesn't fit together. You have pieces that don't fit. So remember that language from Ross. Pieces that don't fit. Okay, keep that in the back of your mind. We'll come back to that. I think Ross is tapping into an inconsistency here. or a sense of disjointedness in an atheistic worldview, or at least most expressions of atheism, put it like this. If you're not sure when AIs become conscious, why not err on the side of caution

and never terminate them unless you had to or something like that? Once that question came into view, Pinker seems to pull back a little bit in his answer, and he's saying, you know, personally, I don't think a lieutenant commander data would be conscious. And in the context of their discussion, he seems to be appealing to an intuition most of us have that human beings are special.

There's something valuable about human beings. But in the context of a strictly naturalistic view of atheism, like what Pinker espouses, it's unclear why that would be. Suppose an AI did become just as intelligent as us. You're not sure if it's conscious, but it betrays all the features of consciousness. Why wouldn't it merit just the same ethical obligations that human beings have? It's a fascinating question. Now, earlier in their discussion, Pinker grounded

are ethical obligations in something like the Golden Rule. We all seek life, health, and happiness, and if we claim them for ourselves, we cannot deny them to others. We have a capacity for reason, which can be amplified by education, science, and free inquiry. This gives us a common mission to apply science and knowledge to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing. We know this can make us better,

off because it has made us better off. We have doubled our lifespans, decimated poverty, and slashed the toll from crime, war, and accidents. No thanks to God, nor to an indifferent universe, but rather to human reason applied to human flourishing. Thank you. Let me put his opening words up on screen here. We all seek life, health, and happiness. Here's the logic. And if we claim them for ourselves, we cannot deny them to others. So this is an appeal to the golden rule, essentially, but the golden rule is a tool for determining what moral behavior should look like. It doesn't in itself explain why moral obligation exists in the first place. It's more of a moral guide than the moral foundation. The big question is, why should we treat

our neighbor as ourself? Why are you obligated to care about others life and health and happiness just because you care about your own. The step from I care about these things to, therefore, I'm obligated to treat others with sensitivity to those things is not self-explanatory. That's certainly not how the animal kingdom works. You know, if you have a chimpanzee community carrying out a violent raid against another chimpanzee community, you would need to say something more. Say there's a chimpanzee community on the north side of the river going over and slaughtering all the chimps on the south side of the river, and you wanted to say, well, you ought not to do that. You'd need to say something more than just the chimps on the south side of the river don't like that.

They don't want to be slaughtered. Well, of course they don't. That doesn't establish genuine moral obligation in and of itself. When we look at human civilization, we have the same need. You need some kind of foundation for moral obligation that goes beyond this generally helps society and something that can account for our particular obligation to human beings. Again, an advanced AI might also seek life, health, and happiness. Now, a theist has a metaphysical ground that explains in a satisfying way moral obligation.

Here's how Ross puts it. It's good to believe that you should love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is made in the image of the creator of the cosmos. And it's good for human beings to believe that human life itself has a sense. special and particular value, particularly in a moment when digital technology and artificial intelligence threatened to make many human lives feel almost obsolete. So this is the old idea of creation in the image of God. We just take this for granted today, I find, in the modern West.

This idea is implicit in so much of our moral reasoning, but sometimes we don't even notice it. So take, for example, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence and this amazing statement that were created equal and endowed by our creator with certain rights. Now, if you stop and really think about this sentence, it's an amazingly theological statement. This is said to be self-evident, and yet this was not self-evident to most human cultures, that everyone has those rights. Tom Holland makes this case in Dominion, his wonderful and famous book, but I think he's right that we just take that for granted in the modern West, but that was an idea, and I've argued for this in other videos,

That's an idea that it has a particular history, and the Judeo-Christian tradition has shaped that to a large degree. If you stop and think about this, it's an amazing thing to say that we're endowed by our creator with rights. The verb endow means to provide with or to give. You might think of a wealthy benefactor endowing a university with funding or property. So to be endowed with rights by God, I mean, it's an amazing sentence. You almost makes you think of like, you know, the finger of God reaching down and touching. someone and saying, I give you rights or something like that. You can agree with that theological statement or you can disagree with that, but it's implicit in our culture, and it's certainly fair to ask,

if you lose the endower, can you keep the thing endowed? If you lose the creator, can you keep the rights? If your father gives you lunch money every day and you go to school one day and your father's out of town, he's not there to give you the lunch money, you're going to make extra provisions, you're going to ask your mom for lunch money or you're going to, you know, pack a lunch or something like that. If you lose the endower, can you still buy lunch or are you going to go hungry in the same way?

If you put a strike through the word created in the Declaration of Independence, can you keep the word equal? If you put a strike through the word endowed, can you keep the word rights? Maybe, but you need to provide an alternative explanation for that or else you might be kind of implicitly borrowing from a theistic worldview without even realizing it. And this is something Ross points out.

What happens in Dr. Pinker's argument is that as an heir of Jewish and Christian civilization, he imports as this kind of commonsensical position, metaphysical propositions, about the existence of these human rights that no one has ever seen of or heard of. He cannot show me a human right under a microscope. So note that word air there. He's saying the humanitarian values that pinker champions are a kind of air to Christian metaphysics, particularly a Christian view of human beings. And this makes sense logically because of this connection between an endower and the thing endowed. And historically, I think a good case can be made for

Christian influence in our moral instincts on this point. I talk about that in my video about slavery in the Bible. And if you want a fuller case about this logical connection between God and human rights, I do that. I know that's unpopular today. I know many people don't believe in that. I've argued for that in these videos up with two examples up on the screen, and all this will be linked below in the video description. You can check it out.

But Stephen Pinker doesn't accept that there's a connection between God and human rights. Studies have shown that more religious people are more likely to donate blood, give to charity. Where does morality, like a duty to help a stranger, care for the vulnerable, moderation? Fidelity. Where does that come from without religion? Are you kidding? Can you not think of a single reason why it's good to give blood other than that God will punish you if you don't or your preacher told you to? But here, Pinker is reducing religious motivation to fear of punishment or desire for reward in the future. The deeper motivation that applies right now in the present is what is that human being to whom I give blood or give blood or give you? charity or serve in some way or another. You either believe that person is made in the image of God

and therefore endowed with certain rights, or you don't believe that. And if you don't believe that, it's hard to maintain a genuine, robust moral obligation. And so that leads to the question that I think atheism struggles to answer, and it's this, can human beings really live off of this worldview. For society, can atheism provide a moral framework that is robust enough to endure over time amidst the changing winds of human culture? And individually, can atheism provide a vision of moral obligation that is robust enough to follow even when it cuts against your personal interests? What is it out there in the depths of reality that makes the golden rule a golden rule and not just a golden ideal or a golden vision that we should like to come to pass.

Where does that authoritative dimension to moral obligation actually come from? Atheism doesn't have a ready apparent mechanism to explain that. Christianity does, as do other forms of theism. Christianity says, and this is so beautiful and so thrilling to think of, when we come back to it, we say, wow, you know, this has changed all of human history and it'll make the difference in your life as well. Christianity says human beings have intrinsic value because they are made in the image of God and the finger pointing that I showed from that famous painting, that happens. Every human soul is given dignity from God. That gives you a metaphysical grounds for moral obligation. It also gives you moral hope because the same God who gives us those, that moral dignity, those moral rights,

doesn't just do that and then step out of human history. He's also actively at work. And one day we'll bring good to triumph over evil, which is thrilling. So what I'm trying to get into here, moral obligation is one little window into a larger world. And on other points, I would ask the same question is, can you really live off of atheism? When you think it through, front to finish, can you really base your life on that? And what I'm proposing in my book, why Christianity makes sense, is that Christianity makes a lot of sense of of these things that we have a deep intuition and awareness of in our hearts,

like the special value of human beings, but it also is thrilling and wonderful. It makes emotional sense, and it provides a sense of beauty and a sense of hope and dignity along the way. I'll put a link to my book in the video description as well. Thanks for watching everybody.