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Why this MIT Professor is Wrong About God · Paulogia

0:00
SPEAKER_08: This atheist MIT professor converts to Christianity after discovering this one thing.
0:06
SPEAKER_05: Smart person becomes Christian, therefore, Christianity isn't stupid.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Don't let MIT be dumb like me.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: MIT is dumb?
0:13
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm saying don't let MIT be dumb.
0:16
SPEAKER_08: So let's get into it, guys.
0:17
SPEAKER_08: Let's get into it, guys.
0:25
SPEAKER_05: Welcome to Pologia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians.
0:30
SPEAKER_05: When Shannon asked what video I was working on next, and I was slightly unenthusiastic about the candidates, she suggested I just quote, go randomly pick the first stupid thing that catches your eye.
0:41
SPEAKER_05: And so I did, and here we are.
0:43
SPEAKER_05: My YouTube front page served me this.
0:45
SPEAKER_05: Wait, an MIT professor just destroyed the biggest argument atheists use against Christianity, in all lowercase, because apparently that's what the kids want these days.
0:56
SPEAKER_05: And this is definitely intersectionally for me.
0:59
SPEAKER_05: There's an intellectual, Christian argumentation, atheist argumentation, plus I've interacted with his channel tangentially a few times, included in a few of my roundups, when lots of apologist channels react to the same piece of content.
1:12
SPEAKER_05: It's Elijah Zelki.
1:13
SPEAKER_05: Elijah is a Christian YouTuber, former children's pastor, and professional Jesus Changed My Life storyteller.
1:19
SPEAKER_05: After a difficult upbringing, as one of 12 kids, the loss of his father, and an abandoned dream of YouTube fame, he concluded that what he was really missing was Jesus.
1:30
SPEAKER_05: He now creates content aimed at persuading others to reach the same conclusion, often by treating a moving testimony as though it were an argument.
1:39
SPEAKER_08: So let's get into it, guys.
1:40
SPEAKER_08: Shout out to Daily Dose of Wisdom for putting this together.
1:42
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so Elijah is reacting to a video from Daily Dose of Wisdom, the brainchild of Brandon Maguire, a Christian apologist and content curator, whose channel has amassed nearly a million subscribers by serving up a steady diet of apologetics, clips, conversion testimonies, and conversations about God, science, and culture.
2:01
SPEAKER_08: Here we go.
2:01
SPEAKER_07: Can you tell me what scientism is?
2:03
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so forget Daily Dose of Wisdom, I guess, since he seems to have merely clipped a Lex Fridman podcast from five years ago.
2:11
SPEAKER_05: Fridman was an AI researcher from before AI was in the news and built one of the internet's most influential long-term interview shows with over 5 million YouTube subscribers.
2:22
SPEAKER_05: He's known for having brilliant, controversial, or occasionally unhinged guests asking them thoughtful questions in a soothing voice to see if they offer profound insights, speculative nonsense, or often both.
2:35
SPEAKER_05: The belief that science is all the real knowledge there with.
2:38
SPEAKER_05: Okay, well, now this is just getting ridiculous.
2:41
SPEAKER_05: This is clearly just character actor Brian Cranston, known for his roles in Breaking Bad and Malcolm in the Middle.
2:47
SPEAKER_05: That's right.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: Now, say my name.
2:53
SPEAKER_05: Playing a poorly written role of some kind of straw man MIT professor, like the shallow caricature played by Kevin Sorbo in God's Not Dead.
3:03
SPEAKER_09: Why do you hate God?
3:05
SPEAKER_09: Because he took everything away from me.
3:09
SPEAKER_03: Yes, I hate God.
3:12
SPEAKER_05: Look at this.
3:13
SPEAKER_05: You can't tell me that's not Brian Cranston.
3:16
SPEAKER_05: I can't prove that it is, but I'm guessing none of you can provide evidence that Cranston and this Ian Hutchinson have ever been in the same room together.
3:24
SPEAKER_05: Nice trilex, but I'm on to you.
3:27
SPEAKER_06: In our society as a whole, particularly in the West today, we have grown so reliant on science that we tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things.
3:39
SPEAKER_06: Scientism, in my view, is a terrible intellectual error.
3:42
SPEAKER_05: Alright, if we're just gonna go ahead and ignore the Brian Cranston elephant in the room, the claim is this is an MIT plasma physicist with expertise in fusion energy.
3:52
SPEAKER_05: He's also a Christian apologist who uses academic credibility to reassure Christians that modern science poses no serious threat to traditional faith.
4:01
SPEAKER_05: Much of his public work focuses on attacking the boogeyman of scientism.
4:06
SPEAKER_06: So when they say things like, there's no evidence to support Christianity, what they are really focusing on is to say Christianity isn't proved, or the evidence for Christianity is not science.
4:19
SPEAKER_06: Okay, science doesn't prove it.
4:21
SPEAKER_08: The following is a conversation with the That is so true.
4:24
SPEAKER_08: That's why atheism is dying, though.
4:26
SPEAKER_05: Help me out here, Elijah.
4:27
SPEAKER_05: By what metric would you say atheism is dying?
4:30
SPEAKER_05: If you mean religiously unaffiliated, the people Pew Research calls the nuns, that group has been climbing for two decades.
4:37
SPEAKER_05: 16% of Americans in 2007, 29% today.
4:42
SPEAKER_05: PRRI ran their own independent survey and landed in almost the same place.
4:46
SPEAKER_05: 21% unaffiliated in 2013, 28% in 2025.
4:51
SPEAKER_05: That's one of the biggest religious categories in the entire country.
4:54
SPEAKER_05: If you mean people who will actually raise their hand and say, I'm an atheist, not just I don't go to church anymore, few's most recent religious landscape study, put that number at about 5%, with another 6% agnostic.
5:08
SPEAKER_05: Smaller slice, sure, but not shrinking.
5:11
SPEAKER_05: Yes, the growth of these unaffiliated has slowed down, possibly flattened out.
5:17
SPEAKER_05: If you want to say slowing growth is the same as dying, you'd better buckle up, Elijah, because that makes the case far stronger that Christianity is dying.
5:27
SPEAKER_05: In 2007, about 78% of American adults called themselves Christians.
5:32
SPEAKER_05: By Pugh's 2023 to 2024 religious landscape study, that number was down to 62%.
5:40
SPEAKER_05: That's a loss of about a fifth of its entire share of the population in less than 20 years.
5:46
SPEAKER_05: Denomination after denomination has watched attendance and membership shrink for decades.
5:52
SPEAKER_05: And it's worse the younger you go.
5:53
SPEAKER_05: Older Americans still identify as Christian at high rates, younger adults, way less.
5:59
SPEAKER_05: And as a former Christian, let's talk about switching.
6:02
SPEAKER_05: According to Pugh, a big chunk of people raised Christian don't identify as Christian anymore as adults.
6:08
SPEAKER_05: Way fewer people raised outside of Christianity ever convert in.
6:12
SPEAKER_05: According to Pugh, there are six former Christians for every single convert to Christianity in the United States.
6:19
SPEAKER_05: That's why Christians are so passionate about breeding the next generation.
6:24
SPEAKER_05: That's their only growth strategy.
6:25
SPEAKER_05: They lose in the marketplace of ideas.
6:27
SPEAKER_05: Perhaps Elijah has been unwittingly influenced by the Quiet Revival, a 2024 report from the Bible Society that seemingly blew up everywhere, claiming this massive Christian comeback among young people in England and Wales.
6:40
SPEAKER_05: It got headlines worldwide because it claimed monthly church attendance had jumped.
6:46
SPEAKER_05: Attendance among 18 to 24 year olds had quadrupled, and Gen Z was apparently out here leading some surprise Christian revival.
6:53
SPEAKER_05: Christian commentators ran with it hard.
6:56
SPEAKER_05: But a few months ago, in March 2026, the underlying survey data got pulled.
7:01
SPEAKER_05: UGov, the polling company behind it, came out and admitted the survey was loaded with fraudulent respondents, and that the anti-fraud checks that should have caught that just weren't applied properly.
7:12
SPEAKER_05: The Bible study pulled the report and flat out said it could no longer be treated as a reliable picture of religion in Britain.
7:19
SPEAKER_05: If you've recently heard somebody say that Gen Z is flooding back in a church, or Christianity is booming among young people, or the secularization story has collapsed, there's a really good chance they got that, directly or indirectly, from the quiet revival.
7:34
SPEAKER_05: And once the survey behind it got pulled, that argument lost its best piece of statistical ammunition.
7:40
SPEAKER_08: It doesn't solve the problem.
7:45
SPEAKER_08: Atheism literally just says that there's a problem, but there's no solution.
7:51
SPEAKER_05: What problem are you talking about?
7:53
SPEAKER_05: If you mean the so-called problem of sin, well no atheist would agree to that, because sin is the gap between our behavior and God's requirements.
8:01
SPEAKER_05: And if there's no God, then there are no requirements of God and no gap to be crossed.
8:06
SPEAKER_05: If you mean the problem that we're all gonna die, then yes, there is no solution.
8:11
SPEAKER_05: But again, the problem is that you don't like the idea of dying.
8:15
SPEAKER_05: Not that dying itself is an actual problem.
8:17
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes in life, we face things we don't like that we can't change.
8:22
SPEAKER_05: In fact, facing these things is an important part about being a mentally and emotionally healthy adult.
8:28
SPEAKER_05: Preferring a comforting lie over an uncomfortable truth is nothing to be proud of.
8:34
SPEAKER_05: It is an inferior coping mechanism that ignores rather confronts problems.
8:39
SPEAKER_08: That's it.
8:40
SPEAKER_08: We're gonna die.
8:41
SPEAKER_08: Your life is meaningless.
8:43
SPEAKER_05: The idea that only infinite things have meaning is a very strange metric for meaning.
8:48
SPEAKER_05: Does a meal have no value if you need another?
8:51
SPEAKER_05: Does a movie have no value because the credits roll and the lights come up?
8:54
SPEAKER_05: Did a friendship have no value if they move away and you lose touch?
8:58
SPEAKER_05: This is a ridiculous way of thinking.
9:00
SPEAKER_05: Here in the real world, the more scarce something is, the more valuable it is.
9:06
SPEAKER_05: Low supply creates extra meaning.
9:08
SPEAKER_05: In an infinite life, no individual day has meaning or purpose.
9:13
SPEAKER_05: No individual year or decade has purpose.
9:16
SPEAKER_05: Life is valuable because it ends, not because it extends for eternity.
9:21
SPEAKER_07: A nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT.
9:25
SPEAKER_07: Important contributions in plasma physics, including the magnetic confinement of plasmas, seeking to enable fusion reactions, which happens to be the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production.
9:38
SPEAKER_05: Huge caveat here.
9:39
SPEAKER_05: Expertise does not automatically transfer between domains.
9:43
SPEAKER_05: Ian Hutchinson's achievement in plasma physics may be real and impressive, but being an expert on magnetic confinement fusion does not make someone an expert on theology, biblical studies, philosophy of religion, cognitive science, ancient history, or the psychology of belief.
9:59
SPEAKER_05: This is sometimes called the Halo effect.
10:01
SPEAKER_05: When someone demonstrates exceptional competence in one area, we instinctively assume they are more likely to be correct in unrelated areas as well.
10:10
SPEAKER_05: But history is full of brilliant scientists who held eccentric, mistaken, or contradictory views outside their fields of expertise.
10:19
SPEAKER_05: The question is not whether Ian Hutchinson is intelligent.
10:22
SPEAKER_05: He obviously is.
10:23
SPEAKER_05: But the question is whether his accomplishments in plasma physics provide any special reason to think his conclusions about God are more likely to be correct.
10:32
SPEAKER_05: Unless a direct connection can be shown, the answer is no.
10:35
SPEAKER_05: Smart people disagree about God.
10:37
SPEAKER_05: The existence of a smart Christian is no more evidence for Christianity than the existence of a smart atheist is evidence for atheism.
10:44
SPEAKER_05: What matters is the quality of the argument, not the IQ of the person making it.
10:49
SPEAKER_07: Is it possible for somebody to be an atheist and avoid uh slipping into scientism?
10:57
SPEAKER_08: Slipping into scientism?
10:59
SPEAKER_08: What is this?
11:00
SPEAKER_05: Does Elijah just blind react to videos?
11:02
SPEAKER_05: Does he do no research on what he's talking about?
11:05
SPEAKER_05: To be fair, I didn't investigate that deeply into Elijah's process here.
11:09
SPEAKER_05: So maybe I'm guilty of the same thing.
11:11
SPEAKER_05: But what I did watch makes me think this is all just happening to Elijah in real time.
11:17
SPEAKER_05: But I can't confirm.
11:18
SPEAKER_06: So I think there were certain attractive things.
11:20
SPEAKER_06: If you go to a university like Cambridge, you know, you're surrounded by Western culture, you know, from about the 15th century onwards, and that saturated with Christian art and architecture and so forth.
11:36
SPEAKER_06: And so it's hard not to recognize that Christianity is in fact the foundation of Western society and Western culture, Western civilization.
11:47
SPEAKER_05: So I I mean maybe I was in that sense favorably.
11:50
SPEAKER_05: The question of whether Christianity is true and whether Christianity is useful are entirely separate questions.
11:56
SPEAKER_05: Looking retrospectively, there can be endless debate about whether Christianity's historical influence was on balance, positive or negative, and to what extent positive developments owe anything uniquely to Christianity, as opposed to simply emerging within a culture that happened to be Christian.
12:12
SPEAKER_05: Personally, I see little evidence that Christianity made unique contributions that could not have arisen through other historical pathways.
12:20
SPEAKER_05: But we can't rerun history as a controlled experiment with different variables, so such claims are ultimately impossible to verify.
12:27
SPEAKER_05: In any case, none of this bears on the truth of Christianity.
12:31
SPEAKER_05: A belief can be beneficial and false, a belief can be harmful and true.
12:35
SPEAKER_08: Isn't that crazy how pretty much every famous college was started as a Christian college for pastors to go learn and become studied?
12:44
SPEAKER_05: Nearly every famous university in Europe or America was founded by Christians.
12:48
SPEAKER_05: For the same reason, nearly every famous mosque in the Ottoman Empire was founded by Muslims, and nearly every famous temple in medieval India was founded by Hindus.
12:59
SPEAKER_05: Dominant cultures tend to build the major institutions of their particular societies.
13:04
SPEAKER_06: But I became convinced really of two things.
13:07
SPEAKER_06: One is that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is actually rather good.
13:14
SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's not a proof, it's not kind of some kind of scientific demonstration or mathematical demonstration, but it's actually extremely good.
13:22
SPEAKER_05: Sadly, we will never learn in this interview what Ian means that the evidence is good.
13:26
SPEAKER_05: The evidence for Jesus' resurrection rests on the hearsay claims of people who weren't there decades after the fact in documents that clearly prioritize theology and evangelism over historicity.
13:39
SPEAKER_05: I wouldn't call that extremely good, and I feel sad for him that he thinks so.
13:44
SPEAKER_06: It's not scientific evidence by and large, it's historical evidence.
13:47
SPEAKER_06: Historical evidence, yeah.
13:48
SPEAKER_05: It's historical in nature, in that it is making claims about the past.
13:52
SPEAKER_05: But within any category of evidence, there is a spectrum of quality.
13:56
SPEAKER_05: The resurrection evidence is not the strong kind.
14:00
SPEAKER_05: Again, sadly, he will not elaborate, so we can't dig more deeply into what he's thinking.
14:05
SPEAKER_06: Aaron Powell So that was one thing.
14:07
SPEAKER_06: And the other thing that came to me when I was uh at Cambridge, it became clear that Christianity ultimately is not, you know, some kind of moral theory or philosophy or something like that.
14:21
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Powell Christianity may not be merely a moral philosophy, but it certainly spends an awful lot of time telling people what they ought and ought not do.
14:29
SPEAKER_05: If that's not at least partially a moral philosophy, it's hard to imagine what would qualify.
14:34
SPEAKER_06: It is, or at least, or at least it claims to be, a personal relationship with God, which is made possible, you know, by um what Jesus did and on the cross and and his life and his teaching, and and it's a personal call to a relationship with God.
14:50
SPEAKER_06: And that had I'd never really thought of it in those terms when I was, you know, when I was younger, and that that that thought became attractive to me.
14:59
SPEAKER_05: First, I envy the secular bubble Ian grew up in, where he would have been insulated from the relentless evangelical cliche that Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship.
15:11
SPEAKER_05: If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I could afford gas at its current prices.
15:16
SPEAKER_05: Second, notice the order of events being described here.
15:19
SPEAKER_05: Ian doesn't say that he encountered compelling evidence that Christianity was true and later found it attractive.
15:25
SPEAKER_05: The attractiveness came first.
15:27
SPEAKER_05: A god who knows me personally, loves me personally, has a purpose for my life, and wants a relationship with me is certainly an appealing idea.
15:37
SPEAKER_05: It appeals for a desire for meaning, significance, belonging, and cosmic importance.
15:43
SPEAKER_05: But the psychological appeal of a proposition is not evidence for its truth.
15:48
SPEAKER_05: If anything, awareness of that appeal gives us reason to be cautious.
15:52
SPEAKER_05: Human beings are remarkably good at convincing themselves that comforting ideas are true.
15:57
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I think most people find the person of Christ and his teachings, you know, compelling in certain in a certain sense.
16:05
SPEAKER_05: In a certain sense, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
16:09
SPEAKER_02: So what I told you was true from a certain point of view.
16:13
SPEAKER_05: A certain point of view?
16:15
SPEAKER_05: Many people do find some of Jesus' teachings compelling.
16:19
SPEAKER_05: Love your enemies, forgive those who wrong you, care for the marginalized.
16:23
SPEAKER_05: These ideas have obvious appeal, but that's only part of the story.
16:26
SPEAKER_05: Jesus of the Gospels also speaks repeatedly about eternal punishment.
16:30
SPEAKER_05: He tells followers to hate father and mother by comparison of their devotion to him.
16:35
SPEAKER_05: He warns that he came to set family members against each other.
16:39
SPEAKER_05: He demands absolute allegiance and presents unbelief as carrying eternal consequences.
16:45
SPEAKER_05: The golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you is probably his greatest hit.
16:50
SPEAKER_05: But that was presented by others long before him and independently established in all major worldviews.
16:58
SPEAKER_05: No Jesus required.
17:00
SPEAKER_07: What do you mean by personal?
17:01
SPEAKER_07: Do you mean personal for for you, like a relationship like it's a meditative, like you specifically, you Ian, have a connection uh with God.
17:11
SPEAKER_07: Uh and and then the other side you say personal with the actual body, the person of Jesus Christ.
17:18
SPEAKER_07: So all of those things, what do you mean by personal connection and why that was meaningful?
17:22
SPEAKER_06: Well, Chr so as a right for the stupid question.
17:25
SPEAKER_06: No, it's okay, no problem.
17:27
SPEAKER_06: As a Christian, I believe.
17:28
SPEAKER_08: He's like, yeah, that was stupid, but no problem.
17:30
SPEAKER_08: No, Jesus is a relational God.
17:33
SPEAKER_08: The Christian God is a relational God.
17:36
SPEAKER_08: He created you to have a relationship with the Father.
17:38
SPEAKER_08: And when you don't have that, that's what's missing in your life.
17:41
SPEAKER_05: Ah, yes, the famous God-shaped hole in your life.
17:44
SPEAKER_05: If someone is depressed, isolated, unemployed, and directionless, and then joins a running club that provides friends, structure, exercise, goals, encouragement, and a sense of identity, and their life dramatically improves, we wouldn't immediately conclude that they had a running club-shaped hole in their soul.
18:02
SPEAKER_05: We'd recognize that the club delivered several known psychological benefits.
18:07
SPEAKER_05: The whole is often diagnosed as God-shaped only after God has been chosen as the explanation for why the person feels better.
18:15
SPEAKER_06: Jesus, through his acts, has reconciled me with God, me a sinner, me someone full of of sins, of of failings, of ways in which I don't live up to even my own ideals, let alone the ideals of a holy God, um, have been reconciled to the creator of everything.
18:37
SPEAKER_05: If I believe that a perfectly holy creator existed, that I had offended him, that my eternal destiny depended on reconciliation, and that Jesus made that reconciliation possible, then yes, being reconciled to God would be an enormously significant and emotionally powerful idea.
18:53
SPEAKER_05: But for someone who's unconvinced that any such being exists, the emotional force largely disappears.
19:00
SPEAKER_05: The excitement depends entirely on the prior acceptance of the underlying claims, which again leads me to wonder exactly what Ian believed before he became a Christian.
19:10
SPEAKER_05: But that is unexplored.
19:11
SPEAKER_06: And and so Christians, myself included, believe that prayer is, in a certain sense, a connection with God.
19:20
SPEAKER_06: And there are times when I have felt, you know, that God spoke to me.
19:25
SPEAKER_06: I don't mean necessarily orally in words, but showed me things or enlightened me or inspired me in ways that I attribute to him.
19:36
SPEAKER_05: I appreciate Ian's wording here.
19:38
SPEAKER_05: Many people would simply say, God spoke to me.
19:40
SPEAKER_05: Ian instead says that he attributes these experiences to God.
19:44
SPEAKER_05: That's an important distinction, because the experience itself and the explanation for the experience are not the same thing.
19:51
SPEAKER_05: People routinely report moments of insight, inspiration, conviction, clarity, transcendence, awe, and sudden understanding.
19:58
SPEAKER_05: The question is not whether such experiences occur.
20:01
SPEAKER_05: The question is how we determine their source.
20:04
SPEAKER_05: Why should we conclude that a particular feeling of enlightenment came from God rather than from ordinary psychological processes?
20:10
SPEAKER_05: Why not intuition, subconscious pattern recognition, emotional processing, meditation, expectation, memory, culture, or any of the many ways that human minds generate insight?
20:23
SPEAKER_05: If I were interviewing Ian, that would be my question.
20:26
SPEAKER_05: Not whether the experience happened, but why he attributed to God rather than to one of the many alternate explanations available.
20:34
SPEAKER_06: So I see it as a two-way relationship in a certain sense.
20:39
SPEAKER_06: Of course, it's a very uh asymmetrical relationship, but nevertheless, Christians think that it's a two-way it's a two-way street.
20:46
SPEAKER_06: We're not just talking into the air when we say we are going to pray for someone.
20:52
SPEAKER_05: Asymmetrical is quite an understatement.
20:54
SPEAKER_05: As a believer, I also understood prayer as part of a two-way relationship.
20:58
SPEAKER_05: Looking back, I now see no reason to conclude that anyone was participating in those conversations besides me.
21:05
SPEAKER_05: Looking at it dispassionately, it's difficult to see how one distinguishes divine communication from the ordinary workings of one's own mind.
21:13
SPEAKER_05: The challenge is explaining how he knows they originate from an external mind rather than his own internal cognitive processes.
21:19
SPEAKER_05: Ian might ask himself, what would look different if God were not participating in this conversation?
21:24
SPEAKER_07: In this two-way communication, is there a way that you could try to describe on a podcast that what is God what is God like uh in your view?
21:33
SPEAKER_07: If you try to describe, is it a force?
21:37
SPEAKER_07: Um, is it a a set is it uh for you int intellectually, is it a set of metaphors that you use to reason about the world?
21:46
SPEAKER_07: Is it is it is it kind of a computer that does some computation that's the infinitely powerful computer?
21:52
SPEAKER_07: Uh or is it uh like Santa Claus, a guy with a with a beard on the cloud?
21:56
SPEAKER_07: Like uh, I don't mean um I don't mean would God Actually is.
22:00
SPEAKER_07: I mean, in your limited cognitive capacity as a human, what do you actually uh what do you find helpful for thinking of what God actually looks like?
22:09
SPEAKER_07: What is God?
22:10
SPEAKER_06: Aaron Powell Well, let me start by saying none of the above, okay?
22:14
SPEAKER_06: I mean, clearly God in the Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, etc., um, it it is is not any of those things because all of those things you just mentioned are phenomena or or entities in the created world.
22:31
SPEAKER_06: And the most fundamental thing about monotheism, as you know, Abraham and Moses and so forth handed it down, is that God is not an entity within the creation, within the universe, that God is the creator of it all.
22:48
SPEAKER_05: Lex may have accidentally stumbled into a deeper question than he realizes.
22:52
SPEAKER_05: He's essentially asking, what mental model do you use when you think about God?
22:58
SPEAKER_05: Ian's answer is that none of Lex's proposed models are correct.
23:01
SPEAKER_05: Because God is not a created thing and therefore cannot be compared to created things.
23:06
SPEAKER_05: Fair enough.
23:08
SPEAKER_05: But if God is so unlike anything we know that every analogy must ultimately fail, how do we know that our descriptions of God are meaningfully accurate rather than merely poetic?
23:20
SPEAKER_05: At what point does God is beyond comparison begin to undermine our ability to say anything substantive about God at all?
23:28
SPEAKER_05: And that's exactly and that's such an important distinction.
23:31
SPEAKER_08: When people try to disprove God, when people try to argue with you that there is no God, they're not even arguing against the God that you actually believe in because they think that it's still something that is created and is confined to this earth.
23:44
SPEAKER_08: But no, God is the creator of space, time, and matter.
23:47
SPEAKER_08: He's outside of it all.
23:49
SPEAKER_05: Elijah doesn't really add anything new here.
23:51
SPEAKER_05: He's mostly restating Ian's point that God is not a being within the universe, but the creator of the universe itself.
23:57
SPEAKER_05: I can't comment on the arguments of the non-believers that he personally interacts with, but many atheist arguments I see are directed specifically at the classical theist conception of God, the very conception Ian is describing.
24:10
SPEAKER_05: The problem of evil, divine hiddenness, omniscience, omnipotence, and timelessness are all critiques aimed at a creator who exists beyond space, time, and matter.
24:20
SPEAKER_05: Rejecting the sky daddy caricature doesn't suddenly make the more sophisticated objections disappear.
24:26
SPEAKER_06: First two chapters of Genesis is really about.
24:29
SPEAKER_06: It's not about telling us, you know, how God created the world, it's about telling us and telling the early Hebrews that God created the world.
24:39
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
24:39
SPEAKER_06: And that therefore he is not, you know, simply an entity within it.
24:42
SPEAKER_05: This is a common move among scientifically literate believers.
24:46
SPEAKER_05: Once the scientific problems in Genesis become impossible to ignore, the text is reinterpreted as teaching theology rather than science.
24:54
SPEAKER_05: We're told Genesis isn't telling us how God created the world, but merely that God created the world.
25:00
SPEAKER_05: Perhaps, but that doesn't really solve the problem.
25:02
SPEAKER_05: An all-knowing God wanted both how the universe actually formed and what future generations would eventually discover could easily have communicated the same theological point without describing a creation sequence that seems to conflict with reality.
25:18
SPEAKER_05: God could have conveyed that he was the creator of all things, without placing plants before the sun or birds before the land animals from which they evolved.
25:26
SPEAKER_05: The question isn't whether Genesis was intended as a science textbook.
25:30
SPEAKER_05: The question is why a divinely inspired account would contain only what looks so much like the same cosmological assumptions of the ancient people who wrote it.
25:40
SPEAKER_06: On the other hand, you know, our finite minds have a pretty hard time encompassing that.
25:47
SPEAKER_06: So you so one has to therefore work in terms of metaphors and images and and so forth.
25:53
SPEAKER_05: Again, if our understanding of God necessarily depends on metaphors and images, how do we know which descriptions are actually tracking reality and which are merely human projections?
26:04
SPEAKER_05: After all, Christians describe God as a father, a king, a judge, a shepherd, a lover, friend, creator, and countless other things.
26:13
SPEAKER_05: These are all human concepts borrowed from our experience of the world.
26:17
SPEAKER_05: If God ultimately transcends all such categories, what confidence can we have that these descriptions are telling us something meaningful about God rather than simply telling us something about ourselves?
26:30
SPEAKER_06: I think we would know very little about who God is if we if it was simply uh if we were simply left to our own devices.
26:39
SPEAKER_06: You know, if if we were just, you know, here you are, you're in the universe, try to figure out who m who made it.
26:45
SPEAKER_05: Now it's Ian accidentally making stronger points than he realizes.
26:48
SPEAKER_05: If all we had was the natural world, how much would we actually know about the character of its creator?
26:53
SPEAKER_05: We would see beauty, certainly, but we would also see disease, parasites, natural disasters, extinction, and billions of years of suffering long before humans ever appeared.
27:05
SPEAKER_05: We would see a universe that appears remarkably unconcerned with the fate of individual living things.
27:11
SPEAKER_05: Would such observations lead us to conclude that the creator became incarnate, cares what day we worship on, has opinions about who we sleep with, or inspired a particular collection of ancient texts?
27:22
SPEAKER_05: It seems unlikely.
27:23
SPEAKER_05: If anything, nature appears frustratingly ambiguous.
27:27
SPEAKER_05: To any extent it points to a power, it does not seem to point uniquely or clearly toward the God of Christianity.
27:34
SPEAKER_06: Christians think uh that God has actually helped us along a lot by revealing himself.
27:41
SPEAKER_06: And and we say that he's revealed himself supremely in the person of Jesus Christ.
27:48
SPEAKER_06: Um, and so you know, when Jesus says to his disciples, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, um, then that is in a certain sense a watchword for answering this question for Christians.
28:00
SPEAKER_05: Ian has correctly identified that nature doesn't tell us much about God, which is why every religion seems to want to fill in the revelation gap, be it Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, Buddhism, or the Greek mythologies.
28:14
SPEAKER_05: We understand the revelation gap, but what is not on offer is a reason to say that the Christian revelation is any more accurate than any other competing revelation claim.
28:24
SPEAKER_08: When people say, why doesn't God just reveal himself then?
28:28
SPEAKER_08: It's like divine hiddenness.
28:31
SPEAKER_08: No, he did reveal himself in the name and the person Jesus Christ.
28:35
SPEAKER_05: By this, Elijah reveals that he doesn't really understand the divine hiddenness objection.
28:40
SPEAKER_05: The argument is not that God has failed to provide any alleged revelation.
28:45
SPEAKER_05: Everyone in this conversation knows about Jesus.
28:47
SPEAKER_05: The question is whether the revelation is sufficiently clear and compelling for the purpose it supposedly serves.
28:54
SPEAKER_05: Many non-believers are not resisting God.
28:57
SPEAKER_05: They are simply unconvinced.
28:58
SPEAKER_05: They've examined the claims, considered the evidence, and concluded that the case is inadequate.
29:04
SPEAKER_05: If a loving God desires a relationship with every person, why is the evidence so ambiguous that sincere and thoughtful people can spend decades searching and still remain unconvinced?
29:16
SPEAKER_05: The divine hiddenness objection is that God has not provided the bare minimum requirement of revealing his existence so that I can have informed consent about whether I want a relationship, which is allegedly his goal.
29:30
SPEAKER_06: Supremely, if we want to help ourselves understand who God really is, we look to Jesus, we look to what he did, we look to what he said, uh and so forth.
29:41
SPEAKER_06: And uh we believe that he is one with the Father, and that's why we believe, you know, in the Trinity.
29:50
SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's basically because um that revelation is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching.
29:57
SPEAKER_05: This is an odd point upon which to appeal to clarity.
30:00
SPEAKER_05: If one of the primary theological conclusions we are to draw from Jesus is the doctrine of Trinity, why do Christians themselves routinely describe it as mysterious, difficult to understand, and ultimately beyond human comprehension?
30:15
SPEAKER_05: Enormous effort has been spent trying to explain what the Trinity is while avoiding explanations that accidentally become heresies.
30:23
SPEAKER_05: Entire councils were convened to settle disputes over how Jesus relates to the Father.
30:27
SPEAKER_05: And those disputes continue to this day.
30:30
SPEAKER_09: And bottom line, this idea of the Trinity is fully beyond our comprehension.
30:35
SPEAKER_09: And actually, that's the way we should present it.
30:38
SPEAKER_09: I think that's part of the point of the Trinity.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: There's no good analogy of the Trinity that won't devolve into a heresy, and you know the simple answer is yes, it is beyond our comprehension.
30:47
SPEAKER_05: The first Christians spent centuries debating the nature of that revelation before arriving at the current doctrine.
30:55
SPEAKER_05: None of that screams clear revelation.
30:58
SPEAKER_05: If the point of Jesus was to reveal himself plainly, it seems to have failed.
31:02
SPEAKER_07: So in in that, in that sense, th through Jesus, there was um that's kind of a historical moment that's profound, that's really powerful.
31:11
SPEAKER_07: But do you also think that God makes himself seen in less obvious ways in our world today?
31:20
SPEAKER_05: Less obvious?
31:21
SPEAKER_05: We're already talking about a first century revelation known only through anonymous ancient texts.
31:26
SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure what do you have that's less obvious is the direction I would have gone.
31:33
SPEAKER_06: The outlook of Jews and Christians throughout uh history that God is seen in the creation, that we when we look at the creation, we see to some extent the wonder, the majesty, the might of the person or the entity, but the person who created it.
31:54
SPEAKER_06: And uh and that's a way in which scientists particularly uh have over over the ages and uh certainly m over most of the last uh five centuries since the scientific revolution, scientists have seen, in a certain sense, the hand of God in creation.
32:14
SPEAKER_05: There seems to be a bit of tension here.
32:16
SPEAKER_05: Just moments ago, Ian argued that if we were left to our own devices, we would know very little about God, and we therefore need revelation.
32:24
SPEAKER_05: Now we're being told that God's wonder, majesty, and handiwork are visible in creation itself.
32:30
SPEAKER_05: Why do wonder and majesty count as a revelation of God's character, but suffering and indifference do not?
32:36
SPEAKER_06: It's remarkable to me how influential um Christianity and religion in general has been in science.
32:45
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
32:45
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, most of the scientists do history as if you described, I mean, God has been a very big part of their life, and there were certainly up until the twent at the beginning of the 20th century, that was the case.
32:57
SPEAKER_05: This observation tells us something about the historical demographic of scientists.
33:02
SPEAKER_05: It does not tell us about whether God actually exists.
33:05
SPEAKER_05: For much of history, most scientists were religious for the same reason most farmers, kings, merchants, artists, and blacksmiths were religious.
33:14
SPEAKER_05: Religion was the cultural default.
33:16
SPEAKER_05: In many societies, it would have been difficult socially and professionally not to be.
33:21
SPEAKER_07: So maybe this is a good time to can you tell me what scientism is?
33:24
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I mean the short answer is that by scientism, we mean the belief that science is all the real knowledge there is.
33:33
SPEAKER_06: I mean, that's a shorthand.
33:34
SPEAKER_06: There are lots of different facets of it and what which one can explore.
33:37
SPEAKER_06: And the book in which I explored it mu most most pr thoroughly was actually an earlier book called Monopolizing Knowledge.
33:46
SPEAKER_05: Oh, great.
33:46
SPEAKER_05: So Elijah gets to react to this video with slipping into scientism.
33:51
SPEAKER_08: What is this?
33:52
SPEAKER_05: But now I have to read not one but two books in order to properly respond.
33:58
SPEAKER_05: All right, I'm gonna find copies of these books to do fact-checking, but I'm not gonna read them cover to cover, particularly since scientism isn't a thing that anyone need be interested in.
34:08
SPEAKER_06: And and the the purpose of that title is to is to draw attention to the fact that in our society as a whole, in particular in the West today, we have grown so reliant on science that we uh tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things.
34:29
SPEAKER_06: And so um, of course, at MIT we are focused on science.
34:33
SPEAKER_07: How come you spend eight years in MIT to become a cable repairman?
34:36
SPEAKER_06: Some we do um focus on it very much.
34:40
SPEAKER_06: But the truth is that there are many ways of getting to know things in our world, know things reliably in our world, and a lot of them are not science.
34:51
SPEAKER_05: Sure.
34:51
SPEAKER_05: Mathematics isn't science, logic isn't science, history isn't science, at least in the same way chemistry science, literary analysis isn't science.
35:00
SPEAKER_05: This is a massive red heron because it is an attempt to shirk Christianity's burden of proof, to give an excuse to cover for the complete absence of scientific evidence for Christianity.
35:11
SPEAKER_05: In all those non-science disciplines, evidence is still presented.
35:15
SPEAKER_05: People make evidential cases for Caesar crossing the Rubicon, for example.
35:20
SPEAKER_05: And any god who interacts with the material realm will leave evidence of the interaction, if not direct evidence of their alternate realm.
35:27
SPEAKER_05: I sure hope he doesn't compound the problem by giving a bad impression of what science is to further obfuscate the problem.
35:34
SPEAKER_06: Scientism, in my view, is a terrible intellectual error.
35:38
SPEAKER_06: It's to bel it's the belief that somehow the methods of science, as we've developed them with experiments, and in the end, they it relies particularly upon reproducibility in the world and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements and mathematics and related types of skills.
35:59
SPEAKER_06: Those, powerful though they are for finding out about the world, are not all the knowledge, do not give us all the knowledge we we have, and there's many other forms of knowledge.
36:11
SPEAKER_06: And the illustration that I usually use to try to help people to think about this is to say, well, look, let's think about human history.
36:20
SPEAKER_06: I mean, to what extent can human history be discovered scientifically?
36:24
SPEAKER_06: The answer is essentially it can't.
36:26
SPEAKER_06: And the reason is because human history is not reproducible.
36:30
SPEAKER_05: This is where Ian's portrayal of science becomes questionable.
36:33
SPEAKER_05: He treats reproducibility as the defining feature of science, but it is not.
36:38
SPEAKER_05: The Big Bang happened once, the extinction of the dinosaurs happened once, the formation of the moon happened once.
36:45
SPEAKER_05: None of those events are reproducible, yet they're all investigated scientifically.
36:50
SPEAKER_05: Why?
36:51
SPEAKER_05: Because science is about testing explanations and using those explanations to predict future data, and then seeking to confirm that data.
36:58
SPEAKER_05: That's why in 2006 there was a Nobel Prize in Physics given to John Mather and George Smoot.
37:04
SPEAKER_03: Smoot, Smoot, S-M-M-O-T-T.
37:07
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, two O's, one T.
37:09
SPEAKER_05: For measuring the cosmic background radiation, which was predicted as far back as 1978 as an expected consequence of Big Bang cosmology, testable predictions about future data.
37:21
SPEAKER_05: For example, we can't directly test to see if a burial cloth contained Jesus.
37:26
SPEAKER_05: But we would expect that if such a cloth existed, it would carbon date to the first century.
37:30
SPEAKER_05: If it doesn't, the hypothesis is less likely.
37:34
SPEAKER_05: Ian is making basically the same mistake that Ken Hamm and Answers in Genesis make.
37:39
SPEAKER_02: You see, when we're talking about origins, we're talking about the past.
37:42
SPEAKER_02: We're talking about our origins.
37:44
SPEAKER_02: We want it there.
37:45
SPEAKER_02: You can't observe that, whether it's molecules to man evolution or whether it's a creation account.
37:50
SPEAKER_02: When you're talking about the past, we like to call that origins or historical science, knowledge concerning the past.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: Here at the Creation Museum, we make no apology about the fact that our origins or historical science actually is based upon the biblical account of origins.
38:05
SPEAKER_05: And I'm guessing that someone from MIT would be embarrassed for such a comparison to be apt.
38:10
SPEAKER_06: You can't do reproducible experiments or observations and go back and you know try it over again.
38:17
SPEAKER_06: It's a one-off thing.
38:19
SPEAKER_06: You know, the history is full of unique events.
38:22
SPEAKER_06: And and so you, you know, you you you can't hope to do history using the methods of science.
38:29
SPEAKER_05: Now, to be fair to Ian, his actual position is more sophisticated than it sounds in this interview.
38:34
SPEAKER_05: In his book, he does acknowledge that historians use what philosophers call inference to the best explanation.
38:40
SPEAKER_05: He even says historians make what he calls retrodics, reverse predictions.
38:45
SPEAKER_05: That is, if a hypothesis is true, what evidence should we expect to find today?
38:50
SPEAKER_05: And he explicitly notes that science uses this kind of reasoning too.
38:54
SPEAKER_05: And obviously, the observation of the evidence is generally reproducible, as long as we're not talking about sample destructive tests or other niche cases.
39:03
SPEAKER_05: So the real disagreement is whether Ian's particular narrow definition of reproducibility should be considered the definitive mark of science.
39:12
SPEAKER_05: And I'm baffled that such an accomplished scientist is promoting such an unnuanced position in order to refute something he calls scientism, which very few hold.
39:22
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, in in in some sense, history is a story of miracles.
39:27
SPEAKER_07: I mean, they don't have to to do with God, but it's just uniquenesses, anyway.
39:31
SPEAKER_07: Unique events.
39:32
SPEAKER_07: Unique events.
39:33
SPEAKER_07: And uh that science doesn't like that because it's uh unique unique events by their very definition are not uh reproducible.
39:40
SPEAKER_05: Again, science studies unique events all the time.
39:43
SPEAKER_05: Cosmology studies a unique universe, geology studies unique events in Earth's past, paleontology studies one-time evolutionary events, forensic science studies unique crimes, archaeology studies unique civilizations.
39:55
SPEAKER_08: I would say that with that mindset, it's so closed-minded to think that something can't happen that you don't understand, to think that something outside that happens could be supernatural.
40:08
SPEAKER_08: We're seeing over and over, there's so many things that we don't understand.
40:11
SPEAKER_08: With all these UFOs, these aliens coming out, we don't know anything.
40:15
SPEAKER_05: Are you talking about the flood of nothing coming out of the US Department of War in the last few months?
40:20
SPEAKER_05: Basically declassifying hundreds of unsubstantiated reports from the public in what seems to me to be an attempt to distract people like you from much bigger problems?
40:31
SPEAKER_05: Or are you talking about the marketing for Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day movie, which I really wanted to love, but is ultimately a very flawed film, which Christians are using to try to leverage another moment of persecution because it explores religious themes?
40:46
SPEAKER_01: Is is God our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there's civ civilization, intelligent life, and even uh uh developing life?
40:57
SPEAKER_02: Really?
40:58
SPEAKER_05: Well, if they they believe they're thinking on the Bible, they shouldn't do that, that's for sure.
41:02
SPEAKER_05: Do you think these things are real, Elijah?
41:04
SPEAKER_05: What exactly is the point of your channel and commentary?
41:08
SPEAKER_07: Of a tricky question.
41:09
SPEAKER_07: I don't even know what atheist or atheism is, but is it possible for somebody to be an atheist and avoid um slipping into scientism?
41:20
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
41:21
SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
41:22
SPEAKER_05: Most atheists accept mathematics, logic, history, philosophy, testimony, and ordinary human experience as potential sources of knowledge.
41:32
SPEAKER_05: Let's set aside your non-secular describing of motive and talk about whether supernatural claims have any of these insufficient quality to believe, and not whine about whether some fringe expectations are unreasonable.
41:47
SPEAKER_05: Before today, I could not have told you the name of a single human in all of history who self-describes themselves as adhering to scientism.
41:57
SPEAKER_05: But alas, Ian's book identifies one.
42:00
SPEAKER_05: Apparently, Duke philosopher Alex Rosenberg explicitly adopts the word in his book, An Atheist Guide to Reality.
42:07
SPEAKER_05: So congratulations, Ian.
42:09
SPEAKER_05: There's one.
42:10
SPEAKER_05: We have the same number of self-proclaimed scientism adherents as we have God men who raised from the dead.
42:17
SPEAKER_05: This is a pejorative label that apologists put on others.
42:21
SPEAKER_05: And one that Ian seems to be admitting is a straw man, in the words of Elijah.
42:28
SPEAKER_06: I'm quite sure there are many people who don't believe in God and yet recognize that there are many different ways of we get knowledge.
42:36
SPEAKER_06: You know, some is history, some is sociology, economics, politics, um, philosophy, art history, uh, language, literature, etc., etc.
42:47
SPEAKER_06: There are many people who recognize those disciplines as having their own approaches to epistemology and to get how we get knowledge and valuing them very highly.
42:58
SPEAKER_06: Correct.
42:58
SPEAKER_05: Now, have any of these fields demonstrated Christianity to be true?
43:02
SPEAKER_05: Because presumably that's the point here.
43:04
SPEAKER_06: Aaron Powell I don't mean to say that everyone who's an atheist automatically subscribes to the scientistic viewpoint.
43:14
SPEAKER_06: That's not true.
43:16
SPEAKER_06: But it's certainly the case that many of the arguments, in fact, most of the arguments of the aggressive atheists of this century, people are sometimes called new atheists, although they're actually rather old.
43:30
SPEAKER_06: Most of their arguments are rather old, um, you know, are drawing heavily on scientists.
43:36
SPEAKER_05: Who are you talking to when skeptics challenge the resurrection?
43:39
SPEAKER_05: They're not demanding laboratory experiments.
43:42
SPEAKER_05: They want to know how reliable are the historical sources, what are the alternative explanations, how much legendary development occurred, what are the nature of visionary experiences, and what were the social circumstances of those involved.
43:54
SPEAKER_05: None of these questions draw on scientism.
43:57
SPEAKER_06: So when they say things like there's no Evidence to support Christianity.
44:02
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
44:03
SPEAKER_06: What they are really focusing on is to say is saying that Christianity isn't proved, or the evidence for Christianity is not science.
44:13
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
44:14
SPEAKER_06: Science doesn't prove it.
44:15
SPEAKER_05: No.
44:16
SPEAKER_05: What they mean is that the evidence is not compelling.
44:19
SPEAKER_05: An individual skeptic says they find no compelling evidence.
44:22
SPEAKER_05: And what is compelling to an individual is going to be unique to that individual.
44:26
SPEAKER_05: You can't hand wave away an entire category of people's objections as identical and unfounded.
44:32
SPEAKER_05: While I've learned to avoid this kind of imprecise phrasing that is fully acceptable in informal colloquial conversations, you can't shrug off my objections with a scientism label, nor the objections of anyone I've interacted with.
44:45
SPEAKER_05: Again, this seems like a huge distraction to cover for the inadequacies of evidence for Christianity.
44:52
SPEAKER_05: And these inadequacies are not the fault of the skeptic.
44:55
SPEAKER_05: This video is just a smart in one area Christian, assuring those who agree with him that they can turn off their brains and category ignore all skepticism and disbelief.
45:06
SPEAKER_06: And and you, you know, if you read their books, that's what you find they really mean is science doesn't lead you necessarily to believe in a creator god or into in any particular in um r religion.
45:22
SPEAKER_06: I accept that.
45:24
SPEAKER_06: Because I don't think that science is all the knowledge there is, and I think there are other important ways of getting to know things, and one of them is historical, for example, and I mentioned earlier that I think I became persuaded, and I already and I still am persuaded that the historical evidence for the resurrection is very persuasive.
45:42
SPEAKER_05: But you shouldn't be.
45:43
SPEAKER_05: The evidence for the resurrection is limited to hearsay testimony, and testimony of any kind, if taken alone, will never be sufficient to establish a miracle, even if you fully believe miracles happen all the time, because testimony alone is incredibly commonly mistaken and incredibly commonly lying or embellished.
46:02
SPEAKER_05: That is not scientism.
46:04
SPEAKER_05: That is accepting the natural limits of the evidential value of testimony.
46:08
SPEAKER_05: So we look at the data that a movement gained members, that the movement generated documents, that the movement spread geographically.
46:16
SPEAKER_05: You know, those kind of testable observations.
46:18
SPEAKER_05: And we see if there are competing explanations for said data.
46:21
SPEAKER_05: And there are many competing explanations, with varying degrees of explanatory power depending on what data you grant.
46:28
SPEAKER_05: If Ian's complaints are valid, where is the flood of formerly skeptical historians coming to faith in Christianity due to the strength of the historical evidence?
46:38
SPEAKER_05: In the past, Gary Habermas has been challenged to provide a list of such people, and so far he hasn't given the name of a single one.
46:45
SPEAKER_05: Are all these historians also rejecting historical methods for scientism?
46:50
SPEAKER_05: Are you serious right now?
46:52
SPEAKER_05: Again, maybe because Ian is hanging out with scientists all day and he's frustrated that they don't find him compelling.
46:58
SPEAKER_05: But his impugning motive on everyone who disagrees with him is never a good look.
47:03
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, at the end of the day, science cannot prove everything.
47:07
SPEAKER_08: Science is a bunch of tests that is done over and over and over.
47:14
SPEAKER_08: But the thing is, Jesus was only here once.
47:17
SPEAKER_08: He died on the cross once, he rose again once.
47:20
SPEAKER_08: You don't see resurrections happening all the time.
47:23
SPEAKER_08: If you didn't see it happening all the time, then it wouldn't be that great of a miracle.
47:27
SPEAKER_05: Is this seriously what's become of Christian apologetics on YouTube?
47:30
SPEAKER_05: Elijah has 125,000 subscribers by sitting in the corner, playing clips of people he agrees with 100%, and every once in a while adding his own affirmation.
47:40
SPEAKER_05: He's not adding anything new, and he's certainly not confronting anyone who disagrees with his viewpoint.
47:46
SPEAKER_05: Here I am, like a sucker, actively seeking out the best arguments against my position.
47:51
SPEAKER_05: I basically ignore channels that agree with me.
47:53
SPEAKER_05: I'm out doing research to make sure that what I'm saying is accurate as possible.
47:57
SPEAKER_05: And if I can't find the information, I try to talk to experts.
48:00
SPEAKER_05: But apparently what I should be doing is just finding people who agree with me and nod my head and say, yep, and amen, and feel like I've done something.
48:08
SPEAKER_05: This hurts my heart.
48:10
SPEAKER_05: If Christianity is true, it can withstand every argument.
48:14
SPEAKER_05: There's an answer for every disagreement.
48:16
SPEAKER_05: The creator of this universe doesn't need sycophantic hype men.
48:21
SPEAKER_05: So if you want more of this former Christian, taking a look at the claims of Christians, tap on the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there.
48:28
SPEAKER_05: Until next time.
48:31
SPEAKER_05: Later.