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The Lapsed Atheists: Deconstructing Their Way To Faith || SLP513 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: I am a lapsed atheist and proud of it.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: It would be fair to say that I'm a lapsed atheist.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Constantine Kibson is waking up to the fact that atheism doesn't deliver pure rationalism.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we're not just rational animals, maybe we are religious animals, and maybe therefore atheism doesn't fit us very well for navigating life in the 21st century, and it certainly doesn't give us an overarching story that gives us a meaningful sense of our place in the world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: And for that reason, he's starting to question the default atheism he grew up with, and he is a lapsed atheist.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone is constantly living by faith.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: No one is a rational individual navigating the world via logic and reason.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: None of us do that.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Daily life is a leap of faith.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard the phrase lapsed atheist?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't heard the phrase lapsed atheist until late last year when I heard it on the lips of Ayan Herssi Ali.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: In November of 2023, she wrote an article for Unheard in which she described why she is now a Christian.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of that article, she says, that is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the journey that Ayan Herssi Ali had been on, growing up within fundamentalist Islam, deconverting from Islam, and becoming an atheist, uh a celebrity atheist, one of the new atheists, really.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: But now she is a lapsed atheist.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: So no longer an apostate Muslim.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then she became the atheist.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now she's a lapsed atheist.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: What does she mean by being a lapsed atheist?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, she says, of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I discover a little more at church each Sunday, but I have recognized in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as we imagine her sliding herself into a pew on a Sunday morning, learning a little more about Christianity Sunday by Sunday, we should also imagine her husband sliding into a pew alongside her, Neil Ferguson.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: At the beginning of this year, Neil Ferguson went on to Jordan Peterson's podcast and described all sorts of socio-political movements, but at the end, he talked about why Winston Churchill was able to do the right thing, even though it meant uh career suicide.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And Jordan Peterson presses him on that.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why would that be the right thing if it leads to failure?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: What definition of right and wrong exists above the hurly burly of politics and success and failure on this merely political realm?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is there something above politics that says there's there's something that's right even if you fail?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that a religious truth claim?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Neil Ferguson clarifies where he's up to in his religious thinking.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a lapsed atheist, Jordan.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: I go to church every Sunday precisely because having been brought up an atheist, I came to realize in my career as an historian not only that atheism is a disastrous basis for a society, atheist societies have probably committed more violations of human rights than any others, uh, but also because I don't think it can be a basis for individual uh ethical decision making.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Churchill was a Christian, and I think it has to be understood as such.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I I am a lapsed atheist and proud of it.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And proud of it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Very interesting.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so he says for two reasons, he calls himself a lapsed atheist.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: One, there is the kind of the meta-issue of the failures of atheism, and failures at human rights have existed in the concrete, but I think also at the meta-ethical level, there is a failure of atheism to provide the grounding for human rights.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we are merely evolved apes, why do we have inviolable human rights?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: There is a tension right at the heart of a purely secular vision for human rights.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always saying secular, humanist, pick one.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we are just clever animals, why do we have inviolable human rights?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a human exceptionalism in the evolutionary scheme?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Surely not.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: At the meta-ethical level, atheism fails to deliver the kind of humanism that we all have come to expect and come to judge religions by, and so atheism fails at that kind of grander level.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: It also fails in the individual choices.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, no, Winston Churchill made certain choices because he was Christian and believed that there was right and wrong far above whether you succeed as a progenitor of your genes.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so he has deconstructed his atheism to some degree.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: He is a lapsed atheist and he's sliding himself into a pew next to Ayan Hersy Ali to learn a little more about Jesus Sunday by Sunday.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the second person that I was aware of that had been calling themselves a lapsed atheist.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: But then a third person has joined the lapsed atheist club, and uh just a couple of days ago, Constantine Kissing uh released this video called The Atheism Delusion.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: The Atheism Delusion.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: When asked about my religious views, I usually call myself an agnostic.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: But if I had to describe my views more accurately, it would be fair to say that I'm a lapsed atheist.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: Born in the mecca of non-belief that was Soviet Russia, my view of religious people as ignorant, obscurantist, and doctrinaire was only reinforced by watching my comedy heroes like George Carlin and Bill Hicks take big and legitimate swings at the disconnect between the teachings of religion and the behavior of the religious.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Hicks summed this incongruity up perfectly by recalling a story of three men approaching him after a gig in Alabama.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Funny Man, come here.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hey buddy, we're Christians.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: We don't like what you said.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I said, then forgive me.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I love Bill Hicks.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: I could, when I was a teenager, I could give you every line of that routine.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: I listened to his comedy uh stuff on repeat.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: I wore out the cassette tape in my Sony Walkman uh back in the 1900s as I listened to Bill Hicks, he was an absolute comedy hero of mine as well.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And Constantine Kisson is very careful to say that Bill Hicks and George Carlin were reacting against a certain kind of religion.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly growing up in Soviet Russia, Konstantin Kissin was rebelling against a certain kind of religion.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: But we're not in that place anymore.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: When you start to think about the belief structure of the West, we're not thinking about a very strong, dominant Christian culture that lives in kind of Bible belt America with white picket fences and kind of buttoned up and wagging the finger and thumping Bibles.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: When we think about the spiritual state of the West, we're thinking about all kinds of beliefs that can't be subjected to scientific analysis and yet grip people and ripple through society in all kinds of irrational ways.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Constantine Kisson is waking up to that and waking up to the fact that atheism doesn't deliver pure rationalism.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, maybe we're not just rational animals, maybe we are religious animals, and maybe therefore atheism doesn't fit us very well for navigating life in the 21st century, and it certainly doesn't give us an overarching story that gives us a meaningful sense of our place in the world, and for that reason he's starting to question the default atheism he grew up with, and he is a lapsed atheist.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, where does the term lapsed come from?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a phrase that's usually associated with lapsed Catholic.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a very strong sense in Catholic families and in Catholic countries that once a Catholic, always a Catholic, but you might be a lapsed Catholic.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: You might you might never have been to Mass in the last 45 years, but still you're a Catholic.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Catholic, I live, Catholic I die.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, it's kind of the default setting of someone who lives in a Catholic country, was born into a Catholic family.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And yet it's something you've sort of deconstructed from.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to talk to you about how there are three ways in which that's really helpful to apply to the atheism debate.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and one reason why it's not helpful.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, here are three ways it's helpful to call yourself a lapsed atheist.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, it tells you that we are all unbelievers.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a point that I made to Constantine when he came on the channel last year.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was talking about God, and I asked the question, you know, which God are we talking about?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't believe in God, the question then becomes, which God don't you believe in?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: He thought that was a good question.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody ever says to me they don't believe in God, my next question is, well, which God don't you believe in?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they end up describing some kind of distant individual high on power, low on personality.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: See?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Told you he thought it was a good question.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this puts us on to the fact that we're all unbelievers.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Oliver, I'm an unbeliever.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, Ricky Gervaise is right to say that I disbelieve in 2999 gods that are out there.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: You don't believe in 2999 gods, and I don't believe in just one more.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I disbelieve in materialism, right?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: I believe I I disbelieve in Thor and Osiris and the Aztec gods, and I disbelieve that we are simply matter in motion.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: I disbelieve that this is a godless universe.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think all of those are fairy tales, all of them.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm skeptical about all those things, and I plump for the Jesus thing.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, I I am a skeptic.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: No one is no one can be a thoroughgoing believer without doubting other things, and no one can be a thoroughgoing doubter without doubting on the basis of other beliefs.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: But we are all unbelievers.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's really helpful on the lapsed atheist side of things to think atheism is presenting itself as a totalizing worldview that orients you in the world.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I doubt that.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to doubt that we are simply matter in motion.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second thing to realize is that we are all believers.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: All of us make a wager on certain truths being there.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: We all step out into the world on the basis of something like universal human rights.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: We all wager on the fact of human equality.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: We we all kind of invest in the fact that other humans are valuable and just because you're rich doesn't make you more valuable than somebody else.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, those sorts of things are always in our calculation.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it might prove to be that I treat you like uh a human with dignity and worth, and you treat me like a mischievous ape, right?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that will be costly for me.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: I will make a sacrifice to believe in what I believe about humanity.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Forget about God in in this um scenario.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: If I simply believe certain things about human life, um it will mean a wager of faith, it will mean a sacrificial offering.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Daily life is a leap of faith.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that most of us, most of the time, are just navigating the world via reason and logic and evidence, and then every now and again a faith head does this weird thing and bel and believes in stuff, um, that is such a nuts idea.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: And what is happening, I believe, with your Jordan Petersons in the world, and what is happening with your Ion Hersy Ali's and with your Neil Fergusons and with your Constantine Kissens, is the understanding that the atheism we thought was the default worldview actually doesn't sustain meaningful existence.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to deconvert from it.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's good because we are all unbelievers, okay?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: We all navigate this world according to skepticism and doubt, and that's great.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to doubt the default story of the Enlightenment West, okay?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: We need to doubt that, and that's great.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: We need to lapse, we need to fall from, we need to deconstruct that kind of default atheism.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're all unbelievers, and we're also all believers.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we should never have bought into the split in the first place because we're whole people and we all have to navigate the world according to morality and values and faith that you cannot prove under laboratory conditions.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we're all unbelievers, we're all believers.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: The third great benefit of talking about lapsed atheists is that it levels the playing field, it shows us that there is enough skepticism to go around for everybody.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: In recent years, deconstruction has been a phrase that the church has been very aware of.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly in the last ten years, there have been a lot of stories of people deconstructing their faith, and on Twitter you'll get the hashtag Exvangelical and hashtag empty the pews.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly, after the MeToo scandal, there was also a church to scandal, and quite rightly, people were shining a light on the institutional failures of Christianity and just the church failures of Christianity and the evangelical industrial complex that has ground so many people in the gears and spat them out the other side, and people have deconstructed their faith.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't Christians who invented the phrase deconstruction, and it wasn't ex-Christians who invented the phrase deconstruction, it was Jacques Derrida back in the 60s talking about deconstruction and the phenomenon of losing faith in the institutions and losing faith in the pole stars that we had believed in and guided our lives by.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Deconstruction is about getting rid of all such commitments, not simply to church and the Bible, but to every truth claim that you might have held dear and every institution that you might have once trusted.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a universal acid that burns through everything, science included, right?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: The true deconstructionist movement is to doubt everything, including every grand meta-narrative, including the new atheism, right?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Deconstruction is not simply a Christian problem.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Deconstruction as a phrase began as a a description of what we all must do in society today, said Jacques Derrida.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so no wonder it shows up among Christians.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: What I love about the phrase a lapsed atheist is it applies the deconstruction narrative not simply to the church, because it doesn't simply belong in church.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we should examine the foundations of all our beliefs.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: We should examine whether what we trust is worthy of our trust, and we should do that not simply of church, but we should do that of the science, right?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: The science, capital T, capital S.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: But trust in everything, including the science, has been eroding.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And eroding somewhat catastrophically.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: We don't believe the science, true.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: We also don't believe the government, we don't believe the media, we don't believe the military, we don't believe the church, sure, but we don't believe the atheists either.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And this really levels the playing field.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Back in October of 2023, Recover Time has helped us to launch that.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And in the last six months, we've had 5,000 people sign up to do 321 at 321course.com.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: And about 150 churches have been running 321 in person.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been updating the material, people have been giving us their great feedback.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've been trying to make this as good a resource as we can possibly make it.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the new thing that we're so excited about is it's an apple.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you can go to your Apple store, you can go to your Android store, and it's on there.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a simple design, and we feel like this is just seeds that you can put in your pocket, and all of a sudden you can share your faith in a way that really makes sense in a digital age.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't checked in a 321, I would urge you to go to 321course.com and let's be praying for the thousands of people who are online there, the hundreds of people who are doing it today, and the dozens of churches that are making use of this gospel resource.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Bless you.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: We are at the point of saying, yes, some of the church abuse scandals have been utterly egregious, but where are we going to turn?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: The universal asset of skepticism, the universal asset of deconstruction has burnt through everything, including the church.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, church abuse is the worst.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's worst when it happens within a Christian environment.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: We should be a place of safety.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: We should be a place where power is used to serve and not to dominate.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: We should be a place where bodies are treated like temples, where sex is treated as sacred, where children are not to be exploited but to be raised up in the way they should go.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Everything within Christianity should be abuse resistant, and yet, and yet horrendous abuse has happened in the church and in the name of Jesus, and that is foul.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: But where do you turn at that point?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you then turn to?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Where is the safe society?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Where is the safe place?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do we trust schools?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's abuse scandals in schools, there's abuse scandals in scouts, there's abuse scandals in the media, there's abuse scandals in the government.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you turn?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you turn?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a real leveling of the playing field.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: And whereas 20 years ago the the story was the Boston Globe breaking the Archdiocese of Boston's sexual abuse scandal, and it was a Catholic problem, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and then we recognize no, it's not just a Catholic problem.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Protestants have have enough abuses to to make us all weep forever.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: But then it's not just the Catholics and it's not just the Protestants, it's the BBC and Jimmy Savile, it's it's government sex abuse scandals, it's school sex abuse scandals, it's it's every it's endemic, and maybe it's maybe this isn't a Christian problem, maybe this is a human problem, and maybe we need to start reclaiming the language of sin and evil and hell.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe this this leveling, this deconstruction of everything is serving us because we're we're finally recognizing it's not just that the church is unworthy of our trust.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's the humans are unworthy of our trust.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: And now what?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And now what?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now how do we build?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So th those are three things that I think lapsed atheist as a label really help us with.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it it really points to the fact that yeah, we're all unbelievers.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we're all believers.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we've leveled the playing field.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's enough skepticism to go around and to indict everybody.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: But then, here's my problem with the lapsed atheist label, if it is just left at the level of being a lapsed atheist.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's just a negative conception, isn't it?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: To be a lapsed Catholic is to feel like Catholicism is the default and you sort of fall from that.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um Is it the case that atheism is the default and we just we just fall from atheism?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: We certainly need to deconstruct atheism because it makes some bonkers claims about the world.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it it is a ridiculous thing to to see the universe as godless when we've had everything has come from nothing, order has come from chaos, life has come from non-life, minds have come from mindless matter, we are judging all things according to some higher standard of goodness and truth and beauty, and the Christian church itself has kind of erupted from nowhere on the basis of this crucified guide.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's been all these sorts of miraculous kind of life from the dead miracles that we're all living within.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And even as you condemn Christianity, you've got to assume all six of those miracles in order to be a naturalist.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really how so much of naturalism, so much of atheism proceeds.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: It just assumes its supernatural claims right at the outset and doesn't blink.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it keeps going and and it just assumes everything's come from nothing, orders come from chaos, life has come from non-life, minds have come from mindless matter.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: There is an objective realm of m morals and goodness and truth and beauty above us, and and that the Christian church just kind of emerged from the the death of Jesus, you know.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Out of out of Godforsaken execution has come world domination.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and all of these are life from the dead miracles that you just, as an atheist, assume, and every critique you make of the Christian church is founded on all six of those miracles.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: But you just you just claim that that those are all natural and you don't blink.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: That seems to be the tactic.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Constantine Kisson and Neil Ferguson and Ian Hersey Ali and Jordan Peterson are saying, I doubt that.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm falling from that, I'm deconstructing that.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: But what I don't want to say is that atheism is the default, because it's not the default.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: We we don't have rational people who can assess things like Christianity without assuming six miracles already.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Atheism cannot be the default.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: It cannot be the default, right?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if atheism, which is kind of a negative term already, is kind of denied, we we we just got a denial of a denial.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a denial of a denial doesn't return you to something positive.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: What will return you to something positive?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've mentioned a number of people who use the phrase lapsed atheist.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I did a little internet search to figure out who first said lapsed atheist, and I discovered that it wasn't Aion Hersy Ali.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder whether she got it from the person who I think might have been the originator of the phrase.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's Professor Alistair McGrath, who is the professor of science and religion at Oxford University.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he's been using the phrase for at least ten years.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And here he is in a sermon describing himself as a lapsed atheist, but I think he gives us a positive vision for where we can go from there.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: What was it that brought me to faith in Christ?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_04: And what I think might be learnt from this.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes on to describe how he used to have a very scientific worldview, in which he thought that the cosmos is all there is, was, and ever shall be, and that the only questions that are worth asking and that can be answered with any certainty were scientific questions.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: He has lapsed from that, even though he is an eminent scientist in his own right.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, he sees that there is something that Christianity gives that goes above and beyond that scientific worldview.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: McGraw, who is a great C.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis scholar, quotes C.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis at this point to describe the kind of atheist that he was.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_04: I think deep down I was worried.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_04: And when I read C.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: S.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: Lewis's autobiography, Surprised by Joy, many years later, he used a phrase to describe his own atheist phase.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: He talked about a glib and shallow rationalism.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_04: That's a very good phrase.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: It describes perfectly what I believed at that time and was discovering to be, how shall I put it, existentially unsatisfactory.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_04: It did not help you deal with big questions of meaning and value.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_04: It did not help you cope with suffering.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_04: The suffering, tough.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_04: Get on with it.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_04: Were there deeper answers that I had somehow missed?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_04: So I went up to Oxford to study science in more detail.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I decided I really had to sort this mess out.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_04: I need to think through what I believed on, God and stuff like that.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_04: And so I spent the first couple of months at Oxford doing exactly that.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_04: I think there were two things that really happened to me.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_04: One was I began to realize that atheism was much less intellectually rigorous than I had thought.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_04: I just naively assumed that any thinking person is an atheist.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_04: End of discussion.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_04: But as I began to look at in more detail and talk to people who were not atheists, I began to realize there were a lot of unanswered questions that really opened up much more interesting possibilities.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_04: I also began to realize that atheism was a faith.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_04: That may surprise you, but you know, as a Christian, I believe that there is a God, but I can't absolutely prove it.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_04: When I was an atheist, I believed there was no God, but I couldn't absolutely prove that either.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_04: What happened during my time at Oxford is I swapped one faith for another.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_04: I left behind my atheism, the belief there is no God, and embraced Christianity.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_04: Now, why did I do that?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_04: I think there are two main reasons that stand out in my mind.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_04: One of them was the realization that I had misjudged Christianity.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: I had, in effect, based my understanding of Christianity on some conversations with friends, on some articles I read in newspaper, and I began to realize these just were not reliable.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_04: That I had rejected a caricature, a pastiche rather than the real thing.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_04: And I began to feel very intellectually uneasy about that.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_04: I'd rejected something on the base of a less than adequate engagement.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_04: But secondly, as I talked with Christian friends and began to read books by some Christians, I began to realize that Christianity offered me a big picture, a way of thinking that brought together my faith and my science.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_04: And also me.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't need to say, right, there's faith, it's a napping in my mind, there's science, it's a napping in my mind, and they don't ever connect up with each other.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: Christianity gives you a coherent worldview.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sure you've taken snapshots on holidays, you know, and you're looking over a beautiful view, and there's a nice snapshot of a river, there's a lovely snapshot of a village, and then it's a mountain peak.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: And then somebody else who's got a rather better camera than you, in effect, takes a panoramic shot, which captures the whole landscape.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_04: And you can see how your bits fit in, but the overall picture was bigger than the bits you had appreciated.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_04: And secondly, you can see how those snapshots fitted in to the bigger picture.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_04: And that theme of the coherency of Christianity really is of major importance.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_04: I discovered that, and I was pleased to see later that C.S.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_04: Lewis discovered it long before me.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_04: I'm going to give you a quote, if I may, from one of his best lectures.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's called, Is Theology Poetry?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_04: If you want to know the answer, you have to read it, but it all depends on what you mean by poetry, what you mean by theology.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_04: But here is its final concluding sentence.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_04: I believe in Christianity, as I believe that the sun has risen.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_04: Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_04: And what Lewis is offering us is a vision of Christianity as something that makes sense, that discloses coherence.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's like the sun rising on a landscape which is happening outside the windows as you can see.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_04: It burns off the mist you can see further than's otherwise the case.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_04: And what Lewis is saying is that Christianity makes sense.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_04: It makes sense of who you are.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_04: It makes sense of what's wrong with you.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_04: And even more wonderfully, it says we can do something about this and get started all over again.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's the coherency, there's the weaving back together of fact and faith, there's the panoramic vision.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that quote from C.S.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, I'm always thinking about it.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, every time I open a video on this channel, I'm basically quoting C.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: I say, we see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: And C.S.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis said, uh, Christianity is not just something you see, it's something that by it you see everything else.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I really urge Neil Ferguson and Ion Hersy Ali and Constantine Kisson and and uh Jordan Peterson to take the path that Professor Alistair McGrath has taken, which is to doubt your doubts, right?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Doubt the atheistic world worldview, lapse from that, but also see that perhaps Christianity is not what you thought that it was.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: Return to the scriptures, see Jesus again, and in him you will see a figure who is big enough to unite heaven and earth, big enough to unite fact and value, big enough to to re-weave the world.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because actually the split only happened because we disconnected ourselves from him in the first place.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's really worth looking again at him.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Lapsed atheism is a great first step.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: It recognizes that we're all unbelievers, that we're all believers.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: It levels the playing field because there's enough skepticism to go around for everybody.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: But you can't simply remain at lapsed atheism because that is just to deny a negative in itself.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: And simply denying a negative does not give you the positive.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: What gives you the positive?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: It is Jesus.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm very interested to know whether Ion Hersey Ali got the lapsed atheist phrase from Alistair McGrath.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's good to know that people have trod this path before, and you can find the coherence that you're looking for.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can find the meaning, the purpose, and the significance, you can find the grand panoramic vision in Jesus.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to discover life according to Jesus, we've got a great course that you can do.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's 321course.com.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Go there now, start an account, it'll take you seconds to get in there, and you can start to see who Jesus is, why he came, what it means to follow him.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: You start to see his vision, his panoramic vision for God, his panoramic vision for the world, his panoramic vision for you.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you might just start to not only re-weave the world together, you might find yourself being put back together as you find faith in him.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: That'll do us for now.
• 30:58
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• 30:59
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• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: And why don't you subscribe so that we can see you on the next video.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: Until then.