Claim Of Debunking Every Atheist Argument Crashes Hard

[00:00:05]One of the most common atheist arguments.

[00:00:08]>> I don't believe in God. THE ONLY ARGUMENTS I NEED, SEAN.

[00:00:12]>> HELLO EVERYONE. I'm Professor Plank. I respond to various theological and ideological questions and claims from a rationalistic and naturalistic approach in an effort to give and explain the opposite viewpoint and help to balance the conversation.

[00:00:25]One of the most common missteps about the believer versus non-believer dynamic that apologists make is when they attempt to refute or debunk atheist arguments because doing so displays a clear misunderstanding about the very nature of the ideological standpoints and the rhetorical interplay of the two groups. Atheists don't need to make arguments because the very nature of atheism is a rejection of theistic claims and beliefs. And one does not need to make a positive assertion or claim in order to simply be of the mind that I don't believe what you're trying to convince me of. Now, that isn't to say, of course, that atheists don't make some arguments or positive assertions from time to time. So, it's not like there isn't substance there for the apologist to work with. The problem, however, is twofold. One, the God claim, particularly any Abrahamic God claim, is built around being unfalsifiable.

[00:01:23]So any arguments that atheists do make aren't really designed to be conclusive evidence of God's non-existence, but instead are made to show some fundamental cracks in the theistic foundation, such as the problem of evil in the face of a supposedly allloving God with the power and knowledge to eliminate all pain and suffering from the world, but chooses not to. But apologists will always be able to run back to the idea that, well, that argument doesn't conclusively, absentively, possolutely disprove God.

[00:01:55]Therefore, I'm right and you're wrong.

[00:01:58]Well, of course, it doesn't conclusively falsify an unfalsifiable concept. That's kind of the point of designing your God concept to be unfalsifiable.

[00:02:09]So pointing out that atheist arguments don't 100% prove God false doesn't really get them anywhere. It certainly doesn't add anything useful to the conversation and it's a rather obvious dodge.

[00:02:22]Secondly, since atheism is primarily the rejection of theistic belief, apologists can debunk every single atheistic argument ever made and that doesn't get them a single step closer to actually proving their faith or establishing that their god is real and existent. And so it becomes a rhetorical version of a dimwit flapping their arms and expecting to fly. You're wasting energy and you're not getting yourself anywhere. Enter the subject of today's video, The Quiet Shepherd. A Redeemed Zoomer knockoff who attempts to make comprehensive list videos focusing around Christian faith in the Bible with titles like Every False God from the Bible explained in detail or every deadly sin explained in detail and more. And the video we're going to be looking at today, every atheist argument debunked and explained in detail. So, let's get stuck in and hear a Christian tilt at windmills and try to debunk a philosophical standpoint that at the end of the day boils down to an undebunkable I don't believe you. But before we get to that, if you end up liking what you see in this video and would like to help out the channel, make sure to subscribe and click the bell so you'll always be notified when new content comes out.

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[00:04:09]One of the most common atheist arguments is that religion causes wars. Historical analysis shows that this claim is exaggerated. Out of all recorded human wars, only about 7% were primarily caused by religion. If Islamic conflicts are removed from that number, it drops closer to 3%. The vast majority of wars have been fought over political power, territory, resources, or ethnic rivalries. While religion has at times been misused as a justification for violence, it is not the dominant driver of war in human history. Right out of the gate with the war statistics, it's the quintessential move of the surface level apologist to just find a specific narrow metric to ignore the broader systemic issues of religious dogma.

[00:04:53]Look, even if only 7% of wars were primarily religious, that ignores how religion is used to dehumanize other people, making political or territorial wars palatable to the pious masses. So even if that 7% of wars were primarily religious, that doesn't mean that the other 93% weren't at least partially religious in motivation.

[00:05:17]You even try to lower that number to 3% by removing Islamic conflicts, which is just a dishonest way of cooking the books. I mean, why the hell are you trying to separate out the different religions as contributing factors if the religion isn't yours? Especially considering Muslims ostensibly worship the same God that you do, just with a different prophet to follow. If atheists are using the existence of religion-caused wars as an argument against the existence of God, not Christianity specifically, then you don't get to ignore the bloodiest parts of religious history, just to make your specific brand of theism look better.

[00:05:58]Another frequent objection is that a lot of evil has been done in the name of religion. This is true, but it cannot be used as proof that religion itself is false. For example, individuals such as Stalin, Mao, and Paul Pot, who rejected religion entirely, were responsible for some of the deadliest regimes in history.

[00:06:16]>> No, it's not debunk. It's totally bunk.

[00:06:20]This is a perfect example of what I was talking about in my introduction about how the Abrahamic God concept is unfalsifiable and the common apologist retort is to whine about how well that doesn't completely disprove God.

[00:06:34]Shepherd, if you're going to try to hide behind that refrain for every argument that you try to debunk here, it's going to get real tiresome real fast. Now, as far as what you try to claim here, it's lazy bogstandard apologetics. And frankly, I'm surprised you didn't try to include the bad guy from World War II as an example of an evil atheist, as so many apologists always attempt to do.

[00:06:59]But this is the common Stalin was an atheist trope that apologists love to trot out whenever they're feeling defensive.

[00:07:06]Stalin and Mao didn't commit atrocities because of atheism. They committed them because they were totalitarian autocrats who demanded the same kind of absolute unquestioned devotion that religion demands. The only reason those regimes were secular was because they saw religion as an obstacle to having unquestioned devotion and complete control over their people and their countries. While many totalitarian regimes use religion to maintain authority, those particular ones viewed people being devoted to religion instead of themselves as them serving two masters. And they couldn't have that.

[00:07:44]They weren't pushing for or advocating secularism. They were pushing for dictatorial idolatry and saw religion as a hindrance to that goal.

[00:07:54]Look, atheism is not a worldview. It's a single issue position on one question.

[00:07:59]Do you believe in a god? It doesn't tell you how to treat people. It doesn't tell you how to run a government. And it doesn't tell you right from wrong.

[00:08:07]Religion, however, often provides the literal script for genocides and subjugation in its holy texts. Claiming atheism is to blame for Stalin is like claiming off is a TV channel that only shows static. If Stalin had a worldview that led to death, it was a secularized version of the same dogmatic with us or against us mentality that so often characterizes fundamentalist faiths.

[00:08:33]Atheists also argue that if someone were born in another country, they would not be a Christian. While cultural background does influence what people believe, this reasoning applies equally to atheism. An atheist born in a strongly religious culture would likely not hold the same views either. Um, what what in the hell are you babbling about?

[00:08:54]If the claim is that where you were born generally dictates your beliefs and then you say that applies to atheists as well, but then atheists, at least in America, are born into a highly religious culture where the vast majority of people are Christian, then we too should be Christian.

[00:09:13]But we're not. So, I don't even know what point you're trying to make when you say that atheists born into a strong religious culture would have different views.

[00:09:23]Atheism is one single view regarding all God claims. And I guarantee you, atheists in America have the exact same view on the God claim that atheists in Europe do or atheists in the Middle East or atheists in Asia or atheists in South America or atheists in Africa or Australia.

[00:09:42]But none of this even addresses the point. You're likely only a Christian because you were raised in a Christian culture. If you were born in Riad, you'd be Muslim defending the Quran with the same fervor that you're defending the Bible with. If you were born in a Hindu culture, you'd be talking about Vishnu and Brahma. This doesn't prove Christianity is false, but it certainly shows that your spiritual certainty is just cultural indoctrination.

[00:10:08]You aren't reaching truth through some objective investigation. You're just rationalizing the beliefs that were pounded into your head since childhood.

[00:10:17]Indoctrination is not a reliable path to truth. Another argument is the claim, "How do you know which religion is true?" This question assumes that the existence of many faiths discredits the truth of any single one, but everyone, whether religious or not, holds a worldview that they place faith in. Some worldviews are labeled religious [music] and others are considered secular, but each one requires a foundation of trust in unseen truths. This is largely just an extension of the previous one. I don't think it really needed its own separate debunk. And I think that the only reason you did it, Shepherd, was to try to cast atheism or a secular worldview, as you try to cast it, as just another faith, no more justified than any religion. But if secularism and atheism is the rejection of religious faith or faith in unproven, unjustifiable assertions, then it is in no way on the same footing as any religion. If you're talking about science as something that atheists hold to, which to be clear, they don't have to. Well, science relies on repeatable observation and reliable data, not the conviction of things not seen the way is laid out in your holy book. To say an atheist has faith is like saying bald is a hair color. And again, this point does nothing to validate your religion or your belief in God. Nor does it even truly address the point being made with this argument. If the argument is that there are a lot of religions that claim to be true, especially to the exclusion of all others. Therefore, how can you reliably say that your religion is the true one, if indeed any of them are true at all? Then pointing and going, "Nuhuh.

[00:11:58]you does absolutely nothing to answer that challenge.

[00:12:03]>> Another common claim is that there's no scientific proof that God exists. This argument misunderstands both science and God. Science by definition studies the natural world. Things that can be measured, tested and observed. God by definition exists beyond the natural world. Ah yes, the defining God in such a way that it keeps him safe from scientific inquiry.

[00:12:26]You know, Shephard, by definition is not the flex that you think it is. I mean, by definition, Herby, my magic pet unicorn, sleeps with every wife of every apologist and makes their toes curl in ways that their apologist husbands never could. So, your wife cheated on you with my magic unicorn, and there's nothing you can do to argue with that because, I mean, it's by definition.

[00:12:53]or you don't get to just define things however you like to suit your purposes and therefore they automatically are that way that you chose to define them.

[00:13:03]And you especially can't use this [ __ ] line of reasoning claiming that your god is outside the physical world and therefore science can't investigate it when your god supposedly interacts with the physical world in a multitude of ways that would all be very very investigatable.

[00:13:22]Science has consistently upended the magical spiritual explanations for reality that were once the purview of the almighty according to the church. We found germs instead of demons. We found meteorology instead of wind gods. Every single time science and religion have buted heads about what is true about reality, science has ended up being proven right. You can't claim God is immaterial when you need him to be, then claim he's doing magic tricks in the laboratory of reality when you want a miracle.

[00:13:53]God made the global flood. That's proof God is real. Well, science disproves there ever having been a global flood.

[00:14:01]So then you retort, well, that doesn't disprove God because God's outside the material world.

[00:14:08]Or another common theistic claim, God made man and woman separate from the rest of the animals in a garden 6,000 years ago. That's proof God is real. But then science disproves young earth creationism and genetically tracks the origins of homo sapiens back hundreds of thousands of years and unmistakably connects us to the rest of the animal kingdom as well as every other living thing on this planet. And the theists come back with, "Well, that doesn't disprove God because God's outside the material world." I mean, stop trying to have your cake and eat it, too. If your God actually interacts with the physical world the way that you so often claim, then those interactions are investigatable.

[00:14:50]And if that investigation turns up evidence that your theistic claims of God's involvement are indeed false, then that lends credence to the notion that the very religious beliefs those claims sprung from are also false.

[00:15:05]>> Now you get it.

[00:15:09]>> Some insist there is no evidence of anything supernatural. Yet history and medical documentation point to cases that strongly challenge a purely naturalistic worldview. Reports of demonic possession include individuals speaking languages they never learned or demonstrating knowledge they had no access to. Near-death experiences also show people acquiring verified information while unconscious or clinically dead.

[00:15:32]>> God damn it. You know, when most or all of those claims occurred a long, long time ago, when medical science was young and still gave deference to religious claims about magic and curses and demonic activity that had existed for generations before humans even learned the most basic aspects of neurology.

[00:15:53]Near-death experiences have been debunked as chemical and neurological reactions in a dying or highly stressed brain. The tunnel of light are symptoms of oxygen deprivation to the brain and demonic possession. In the 21st century, we call that untreated mental illness.

[00:16:12]Science has a 100% track record of replacing demons with neurochemistry.

[00:16:17]As for things like speaking unlearned languages, hell, I just spoke Latin earlier and I don't speak the language.

[00:16:25]It's called memorization.

[00:16:27]Or worse yet, a mentally ill person could be speaking gibberish and their highly religious family members then insist that they're speaking Latin even though they themselves don't speak Latin because they believe that their family members possessed by a demon and they have confirmation bias.

[00:16:43]Ignorance dressed up as evidence is a bad look for your side, Shepherd. Do you know how many modern verified cases of supernatural activity, demonic possession, or out-of- body experiences have been recorded?

[00:16:57]Bubcus, Goose Egg, Natada, Zero, Zilch.

[00:17:01]Regardless of how many times you've seen The Conjuring, hey, I mean, I love those movies, too, but Ed and Lorraine Warren were con artists, not bonafide demon hunters.

[00:17:12]>> Another objection is that the Bible has contradictions. This argument assumes that supposed inconsistencies in scripture prove it unreliable. But for 2,000 years, theologians and scholars have examined and explained these apparent conflicts. No. For 2,000 years, believers who had a deep streak of confirmation bias have fallen back into the recesses of unfalsifiability that their God concept was created under so that they could tell themselves that it's all really, really real despite all evidence to the contrary.

[00:17:44]And where biblical inconsistencies are concerned, they do some truly impressive mental gymnastics in order to handwave this very valid criticism away.

[00:17:54]Especially when it comes to the crowd who insist that the Bible is the inherent word of God and that it's 100% true down to the last syllable.

[00:18:03]The Gospels give four different incompatible versions of the most important event in your religion, the resurrection of Jesus and the discovery of the empty tomb. Who went to the tomb?

[00:18:14]How many people were there? Who did they see? Whether or not they told anyone, the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John can't even agree on these very basic aspects.

[00:18:25]Not to mention the separate books of the Bible that say completely contradictory statements that are bedrock aspects of the faith. Romans claims that humans are saved by faith alone. But the book of James clearly states that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. that faith without works is dead.

[00:18:45]The Old Testament insists that Moses and the elders literally saw God and spent time in his presence. Not to mention Adam walking with God in the garden and Jacob literally winning a wrestling match against God. But then the New Testament in the book of Timothy, it insists that it's impossible to see God and that no one ever has.

[00:19:06]Exodus claims that the sins of the father are indeed visited upon the children, punishing the children for the sins of the parent to the third and fourth generation. But then Ezekiel says, "The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child." This happens again and again and again throughout the Bible. and a variety of completely biased theologians, desperate to come up with some convoluted way of explaining away these clear contradictions through claims of some being metaphors or parables or God changing his supposedly unchanging mind between the Old and New Testaments are not only not convincing, they're rather pathetic, vulgar rationalizations from clearly desperate apologists.

[00:19:56]I'm going to skip the next few of these because they're all continued Bible apologia. With Shepherd responding to claims that the gospel authors were anonymous, which they were, practically all biblical scholars admit that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write their respective books, and that they were basically all written after those apostles would have already been dead.

[00:20:17]misquing Jesus, which is pointless to argue about at all since we don't have any non-biblical accounts of Jesus quotes to compare the Bible to, and biblical claims of Jesus's divinity, which I largely don't care about because I don't actually put any stock in any of the factual claims that the Bible makes.

[00:20:35]Suffice it to say, as an atheist, I don't believe in any god. Therefore, I don't care what it says in your holy book, especially the parts that claim that there is one. So, moving on to something a bit more interesting.

[00:20:49]>> Critics also point to slavery in the Bible as proof that scripture condones oppression. However, the presence of slavery in the biblical text is not the same as approval of it.

[00:20:59]>> Why the [ __ ] [music] you lying?

[00:21:03]>> The Bible literally says you can buy slaves from the nations around you, keeping them as property and bequething them to your children. It even says you can beat them so long as they don't die in a day or two because they are property.

[00:21:18]That's not regulation. That is approval.

[00:21:22]And don't try to tell me this was just voluntary indentured servitude. Exodus 21:20 and Leviticus 25:44 are very clear. You could own humans for life and you could pass them down as inheritance.

[00:21:37]While some Christians were abolitionists, they had to fight against other Christians who use the inherent Bible to justify slave owning. If your God is all good, he should have just said, "Don't own people as property."

[00:21:52]The same way he said, "Don't wear mixed fabrics."

[00:21:55]It's always funny to me when apologists try to soften and even justify biblical slavery because it's one of the most clear and blatant L's that Christianity has. But instead of just holding that L or what would be even a better strategy for them and just trying to ignore it entirely because it is such an obvious fail of their faith, they try to turn it into a win and explain it away, further digging themselves into a moral and ethical hole that showcases the monstrous nature of their theology.

[00:22:26]And I mean I fine, keep going with it, shepherd. There's truly nothing easier and more satisfying than roasting Christians on their biblical slavery defense.

[00:22:36]One common objection is that God killed many people in the Bible. Scripture does record judgments where God ends lives.

[00:22:42]But the Bible also teaches that God is the giver of life and numbers every person's days. Because God is the author of life, he has the authority to take it.

[00:22:52]>> He has the authority to take it. That's the logic of a moral monster. If an all powerful being judges a whole city by burning it down or drowns the entire planet, including the innocent children and animals, and you call that justice, then you've completely abandoned any sense of objective morality, and are leaning into the idea of god-derived morality, which is just another way of saying subjective morality based on the whims of a god who has a boner for wholesale slaughter. You're essentially saying that might makes right. If God can do whatever he wants because he numbers our days, then morality is just his capriccious whim. This divine justice looks exactly like Bronze Age brutality being rationalized after the fact by religious zealots. Your god sounds like an abusive parent telling a child they should be thankful for the roof over their head while beating them with a belt. Or the terribly abusive notion that I brought you into this world so I can take you out of it. Well, no. No, you can't. If you create life with supposedly inalienable rights, then that means that you don't get to violate those rights because you decide to, and you've decided that those pesky rights aren't going to stay your hand because you wrote them in the first place, therefore they don't apply to you.

[00:24:14]Unassalable rights means unassalenable rights, even by the one who bestows them. Another argument is that atheist countries are more prosperous. It is true that some modern secular nations such as those in Northern Europe are prosperous and stable. However, correlation is not causation. Prosperity often weakens a society's sense of dependence on God, leading to secularization rather than atheism causing prosperity. Furthermore, these nations became prosperous while deeply rooted in Christian values and culture for centuries. There is far more evidence that secularization is indeed causitive of prosperity than that prosperity causes secularization.

[00:24:56]The countries with the lowest crime rates and highest happiness levels tend to be the most secular. It's not that they forgot God because they got rich.

[00:25:04]It's that as people get more educated and apply better scientific and social policies, they stop needing the cage of religious dogma.

[00:25:13]To claim that they are rooted in Christian values while they actively reject Christian teachings on things like LGBTQ rights or abortion or the separation of church and state is a massive shifting of the goalposts.

[00:25:27]These societies aren't thriving on Christian values. They're thriving on enlightenment values like reason, individual liberty, and empirical science. Values that the church fought against for centuries.

[00:25:40]The real prosperity shifts in western society began during the enlightenment when Christianity was already far and away the dominant and driving force in society. But as enlightenment values propagated, completely opposed by the dark age clinging clergy, prosperity really started to flourish. And now, centuries later, when we are continuing to see just how much moving away from Christian dogma has benefited countries all over the world, Christian apologists want to try to finagle the data and say it was actually Christianity that caused that prosperity for no other reason than because it was the ideological big dog when things started getting better.

[00:26:22]Well, sorry, Charlie, but Western society has a longer memory than that.

[00:26:27]and your blatant attempt at historical revisionism isn't gonna fly here. The data is pretty clear. When people stop ostracizing people who think, believe, or love in ways that the Bible commands they shouldn't, when rights and respect are given to all people, including women and heathens, when a society bends towards the scientific method rather than mysticism and superstition, things tend to get better.

[00:26:56]And how many times does history have to prove that before people like you get it through your thick skulls?

[00:27:03]>> Oh, it's never enough. Not for them.

[00:27:06]>> Atheists sometimes argue that since there are thousands of gods in human history, rejecting one more god, the Christian God, makes sense. But this is a false comparison. The question of whether any god exists is entirely different from the question of which religion best describes him. Dismissing all gods is not the same as thoughtfully considering evidence for the existence of a creator. I find this line of thinking especially ironic given that this entire video up to this point has been attempting to push the idea of the Christian God specifically with every one of its points. Oh, but now you want to retreat to the idea of some nebulous unspecified creator.

[00:27:46]Well, how about this? There's no evidence not only that your God concept exists, there's equally no evidence that any God concept exists, nor that any kind of creator being of any kind exists. So I can equally reject the notion in its entirety.

[00:28:04]And frankly, this is just a rewarding of the earlier point about how do you know you picked the right religion? But this one is just how do you know you picked the right god? So just refer back to that reputation and replace the word religion with your God.

[00:28:18]>> Another frequent challenge is the question, [music] if God created everything, who created God? This misunderstands what Christians mean by God. By definition, God is the uncaused cause, the necessary being who exists outside of time and matter. Everything in the universe has a beginning, but the chain of causes cannot stretch backward into infinity. Ah, once again, by definition.

[00:28:42]Well, then last night, Herby, my magic pet unicorn, had another role in The Hay with Your Wife because remember, by definition, Herby the magic unicorn, sleeps with the spouse of every apologist and gives them the best night of their lives. So, that must be the case because it's by definition.

[00:29:01]>> [ __ ] idiot. And way to completely miss the point of the then who created God statement because it exists purely as a response to the theistic claim that everything that exists has to have a cause. But if everything that exists has to have a cause and your god exists as you claim that he does then your god also has to have a cause. Airgo who created your god.

[00:29:27]Hiding behind a special pleading fallacy does not get you out of that logic pickle. Shepherd, you insist everything needs a cause, but then invent a god who gets a free pass from the rules that you just made. If God can exist uncaused and outside of time, then the initial energy state of the universe can also exist uncaused and outside of time as a brute fact. And back to defining your God however you need in order to define him into existence. If you can define God as self-existent, I can define the universe itself as self-existent.

[00:30:01]And I need no God of any kind to cause or create it. Some claim that science disproves God. Historically, this is false. The church was central in the development of modern science. Many of the founders of the scientific revolution, such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were devout believers in God.

[00:30:21]meaningless dril that again needs to hearken back to the long long ago when science was still young in order to try to say, "Hey, science is totally in line with my theology."

[00:30:32]No, it's not. Because the reality of history is that science has had to drag religion, particularly Christianity, kicking and screaming into modern day.

[00:30:42]And much of what religion absolutely insisted on once upon a time as central parts of its theology, science has indeed disproven.

[00:30:52]The church once insisted that the earth was the center of the universe and any claim to the contrary was downright heresy.

[00:30:59]Which makes it ironic as [ __ ] that you bring up Galileo as a devout Christian since the church condemned him as a heretic for exactly that.

[00:31:08]Fundamentalist Christianity has long insisted that humans occupy a special place in the balance of nature outside of the genetic order and that we were created as is not subject to evolution and even that evolution itself is simply not a thing. But science has disproved all of that and clearly established evolution is real and that humans are as subject to it as anything else. Young earth creationism scientifically debunked. The power of prayer debunked.

[00:31:39]Ancient people living for hundreds of years and being giants debunked.

[00:31:44]Again and again, every time religion has positioned itself in stark opposition of scientific findings, science has proven to be correct and religion has proven to be wrong. Now again, the Abrahamic God concept itself remains unfalsifiable.

[00:32:01]So apologists can continue to hide behind the notion that disproving all of these claims of religion that once were thought to be so central, so foundational to the religious beliefs does not conclusively disprove the existence of God itself. But this maybe more than anything else we've looked at so far today showcases the massive fissure-like cracks in your religious foundation.

[00:32:27]And Newton and Kepler being believers doesn't mean their science was driven by religion. It means they lived in a time when you could literally be killed for not being a believer. Another objection is that God is only used to fill in the gaps where science has no explanation.

[00:32:43]This idea is called the god of the gaps.

[00:32:46]Christianity does not claim that God is simply a placeholder for the unknown.

[00:32:50]Instead, God is the ultimate explanation for everything. That's the same freaking thing, just in different wording.

[00:32:57]Shepherd, you're basically admitting that this atheistic challenge is correct, but that it's fine to engage in God of the Gap's reasoning because you're sure that your God is really, really for real. And therefore, it's perfectly fine to use him as a magical catch-all explanation for anything that you can't explain.

[00:33:19]>> I'm sorry, I'm allergic to [ __ ] Atheists sometimes ask, "If God is good, why does he not destroy evil right now?"

[00:33:25]The Christian answer is that he eventually will, but if he did so immediately, he would also have to remove every human being who sins. God delays judgment out of mercy. Yes. Why is God not doring evil as you had it in your video? And you say it's because of mercy.

[00:33:47]Tell that to a child with bone cancer.

[00:33:50]If an all powerful, allloving God watches a child suffer and delays helping them just so he can wait for someone else to repent, he isn't merciful. He's a capriccious, mean-minded monster.

[00:34:01]Also, you've effectively given a rock-solid reason why your God will absolutely never destroy evil at all, even if he does exist. Because you've just established a reason for not destroying evil that has no expiration date.

[00:34:16]If he needs to give everyone all the time in the world to repent, then that will never not be the case. As long as there are people still alive, quote unquote, sinning, then God will always have to keep delaying that judgment to give them more time. And since that would never not be the case, if you insist that he will eventually, then eventually he'll have to cut off people's repent time. Some people just aren't going to get the opportunity to repent and thus the supposed mercy of God that all those who came before them got. Therefore, that leads us right back to the initial question. Why doesn't God distory evil right now? So, your excuse is just that. It's an excuse and it's one that doesn't hold water. Another challenge is the suggestion that perhaps God himself is evil. This collapses under logical examination. Evil is not an independent substance but the absence of good. Just as darkness is the absence of light. No, it's not. The absence of good would be apathy.

[00:35:26]Something clearly and distinctly different and apart from evil. This isn't like darkness being the absence of light. This isn't like cold being the absence of heat. Evil in regards to a thinking agent and their motivations is malice, hatred, and a desire to do harm upon others. Good, on the other hand, is benevolence, love, and a desire to help out others. Now, these are diametrically opposed positions and motivations. One is not simply the absence of the other.

[00:35:58]If I don't love you or don't want to help you, that doesn't mean that I automatically hate you and want to hurt you. Like, this should be trivially easy to understand, Shepherd. But of course, this is the Christian narrative that you've been indoctrinated into thinking, and you clearly haven't done even a modicum of critical thinking on the matter. Not to mention that your own holy book explicitly disagrees with you on this matter. As it clearly says in Isaiah 45:7, "I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things."

[00:36:35]Meaning that within your own theology, your God is the arbiter of evil things in this universe. And that's all people really mean when they say that someone is evil. It means that they do evil things. They engage in evil acts. They create evil.

[00:36:54]And your own holy book admits that your god does exactly that. So this one seems to stand as absolutely proven. By your own standards, your god is evil.

[00:37:06]Now, of course, that doesn't prove that he doesn't exist. Just that if he does exist, he sucks.

[00:37:14]Familiar challenges the question, can God make a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? This is a logical trick rather than a real objection. Being all powerful does not mean that God can perform contradictions or act against his own nature. You're surrendering to the argument. You're admitting that God is limited by logic and existence.

[00:37:36]That's the entire point of the atheistic argument in the first place. It's to get you to recognize the illogical nature of your claim of divine omnipotence. If God can't do the impossible, then he isn't all powerful in any meaningful sense.

[00:37:50]You're just rewriting your fictional character because the original draft got stuck in a paradox. This logical trick is actually a valid showcase of why the concept of an omnipotent being is an incoherent one. If he can't lie or create another god, then he has limits.

[00:38:09]And welcome to reality, shepherd, with everything having limitations, including your imaginary friend. And a god with clear limitations is one who cannot be infallible or inherent. The second your god comes up against those limitations, it becomes incapable of doing something.

[00:38:27]Something that could be something that you absolutely need it to do in order for your theology to work. Like for example, inherent knowledge of the future in the face of giving humans free will to choose. But in order for that choice to be truly free, it can't be predetermined. Meaning your god can't know the outcome in advance. Meaning that your god can't have all knowledge.

[00:38:51]This means that there are things that your god can't know. So in the last point, we concluded that your god creates evil, meaning he isn't all good.

[00:39:00]And now in this one, we've concluded that your god can't be truly all powerful, nor have all knowledge.

[00:39:06]Congratulations. We've successfully debunked all three aspects of your tri- omniod concept.

[00:39:14]And what are we left with then? A supposedly powerful, though thoroughly flawed being that you want in charge of everything for all time while insisting that he's not thoroughly flawed while proving that he would logically have to be in order to be real.

[00:39:30]The cognitive dissonance required to be a Christian is truly mind-boggling.

[00:39:36]We're skipping the next one about why God allows evil to exist. I feel like we've already dealt with it given that we've already established that in the Christian faith, God creates evil and is therefore evil himself.

[00:39:48]>> Some argue that religion is just wishful thinking. If that were true, one would expect religious texts to focus on comfort and positivity.

[00:39:56]>> No, you wouldn't. Obviously, any theology must contend with the reality that the world sucks and many aspects of life suck. If they ignored the existence of suffering entirely, that wouldn't be a very useful religion in terms of dealing with those rigors of day-to-day life, now would it? But furthermore, it ignores one of the primary uses of religion to a society, which is as a method of social control. A message that tells you that you're broken, a worthless sinner who needs to be saved by a supreme authority is a textbook tool for how to compel behavior in the masses. Either for justifiable reasons like establishing a functional society of cooperation and rule following or as a more manipulative tool for those in power to solidify that power. It keeps people compliant and fearful. The comfort comes from the promised reward of eternal life if you just follow the rules and don't question the leadership.

[00:40:53]Not to mention that it gives people an excuse for the suffering that they endure and a promise that it's for a purpose, that it means something because it's part of some divine plan rather than the more realistic and dower reality that is [ __ ] happens.

[00:41:09]The next handful we're going to combine them because whether you're talking about belief in God being the result of psychology, brain chemistry, or drug inducement, it's all pretty close to the same thing. It's the idea of belief in God being the result of neurochemistry.

[00:41:24]And his reputation of all of them is pretty much the same. The idea that our real emotions are not just chemistry, but something more metaphysical. with the common example that apologists always bring up when trying to spin that idea.

[00:41:38]>> Love is like oxygen. Love is a many splendid thing.

[00:41:42]>> Love is an evolutionary survival mechanism executed entirely through a cocktail of neurochemicals designed to keep a solitary species together long enough to pass on our genes.

[00:41:54]We're driven by a progression of hormones for lust, neurotransmitters like dopamine and neuroepinephrine that mimic a manic addictive state of infatuation, and bonding agent hormones like oxytocin to establish long-term attachment. Love behaves exactly like a biological adaptation.

[00:42:15]Because these pathways are shared with other animals, they can be completely disrupted or manipulated by altering physical brain chemistry and prioritizing genetic survival over human happiness. Love leaves a clear evolutionary signature, proving it's not a transcendent divine creation, but it's a complex neuro reality that was created by natural selection. Similarly, prayer and faith in God work largely the same way. When a person believes an omnipotent deity is interceding on their behalf in the world, the brain triggers a powerful placebo effect, flooding the system with a lot of the same kind of hormones you experience while in love.

[00:42:53]Dopamine and endorphins that lower stress.

[00:42:57]Hormones that reduce blood pressure and allow the body to heal itself.

[00:43:01]Neurologically, repetitive prayer functions identical to meditation. It quiets the brain's fear centers while dulling the parietal lobe. This creates a feeling of cosmic unity or as if you've truly interacted with your preferred assumed deity. So basically, you're trying to argue that because love and belief in God feels like something special that therefore it is and it's not just neurochemistry.

[00:43:27]Funnily enough, that's exactly why it is just neurochemistry.

[00:43:32]Emotion wouldn't be that powerful of a motivator if we recognized it as just a feeling and not representative of reality. It wouldn't be able to motivate us to do things like sacrifice for our family members or to form strong bonds with those around us if it didn't feel like something special.

[00:43:51]So basically, you feeling like love and love for your God is something beyond physical reality is the neurotransmitters in your brain doing exactly what they're supposed to do in order to get you to do things based on those feelings.

[00:44:06]You're just being a slave to your base biology while claiming that it constitutes metaphysical truth. A popular internet claim is that the story of Jesus was copied from the story of Horus or other mythological figures.

[00:44:19]This idea has been widely circulated on forums and in videos, but is rejected even by secular scholars. Detailed comparison shows that the supposed parallels between Jesus and pagan gods are either fabricated or extremely superficial. Really? You think a dying and resurrecting deity is unique?

[00:44:40]Osiris, Addis, Dionis, and Methus all share these themes.

[00:44:45]Christianity didn't just arise in a vacuum completely unique to anything around it. It's a Jewish offshoot that absorbed the surrounding mythological tropes of the era. Even if the specific Horus parallels are debatable, the broader archetypal structure of a miracleworking god-be savior who triumphed over death is pretty common across ancient history.

[00:45:09]It's pretty well established that other aspects of Christianity have been stolen whole cloth from pre-existing religions like the very obvious attempts to overwrite holidays like Soul Invictus, Saturnelia, or winter solstice with Christmas to the point of outright lying about when Jesus was born in order to steal those highly religious holidays.

[00:45:29]Furthermore, early Christian thinkers integrated elements of Platonic philosophy to articulate complex theological concepts like a belief in a soul or a spiritual afterlife, which early Judaism didn't believe in. And their concept of eternal life was a literal physical bodily life. Much like they had no concept of hell as a spiritual place of punishment. And Christianity stole that idea from the pre-existing Greek notion of Tartarus.

[00:45:57]Jesus is just the latest version of a very old story edited and enhanced by early Christians to fit their cultural needs. Another frequent objection is that faith is the opposite of logic and reason. In reality, faith means trust.

[00:46:12]People exercise faith in everyday life when eating food without scientifically proving it is safe or when trusting that a spouse truly loves them. Now, we are really just leaning into the redeem Zoomer knockoff because though it's been a while since I made my response video to him, I remember him saying those exact things verbatim.

[00:46:33]But to your attempt at an argument, apologists love to conflate the word faith that you have with your spouse and that they love you with the faith that requires you to believe in a Palestinian carpenter walking on water. Your spouse is there. You interact with them physically every day. What you have with your supposed god would be better described as a parasocial relationship, which is a one-sided psychological bond where one person extends emotional energy, interest, and time, while the other party does not.

[00:47:06]In terms of people becoming infatuated with a celebrity, it's because the celebrity doesn't even know that that person exists. With a religious belief, it's infatuation with a god who very likely doesn't exist. And that's why they remain silent, not because they move in mysterious ways. And your attempt to redefine faith as reasonable trust is a classic conflation of terms.

[00:47:29]There's a massive gaping chasm between scientific confidence and religious faith. Scientific confidence is a sound prediction based on repeatable observation and reliable data. If I poke a hot coal 50 times and get burned 50 times, it isn't faith to assume the 51st time is also going to burn me. It's a conclusion based on evidence. Religious faith, however, is exactly what the Bible says it is. It's the conviction of things not seen. It's a firm belief in something for which there's no proof.

[00:48:01]You aren't basing your belief on knowledge and experience of God. You're basing it on ancient texts and cultural indoctrination.

[00:48:08]One objection is that evolution proves God did not create the world. This argument assumes that evolution and creation are mutually exclusive. They are when you go back to the original creation account. As already discussed, that would be the 6,000 years ago magical creation of all creatures as they presently exist today. and especially humans being formed out of dirt and rib and all descending from one pair and their assumed rampant incest with their two sons as those original two were the only humans created in that magical way.

[00:48:42]Evolutionary evidence conclusively disproves this story at every level.

[00:48:47]Human existence as homo sapiens goes back several hundred thousand years. And prior to that, our evolutionary ancestors who were prehomoc sapien humans goes back even farther. As does the evolutionary lineage of every living thing on this planet, all of which descend from other creatures and not formed as they presently exist, all in one day 6,000 years ago.

[00:49:10]The creation myth has been revised countless times over the centuries only when the religious could no longer deny the scientific realities that completely invalidated the fairy tales that they had been spinning to their congregations for generations.

[00:49:24]And now after revising those takes over and over again until they kind of sort of might possibly fit in with what modern science has determined. If you turn your head and squint, you want to claim that they aren't mutually exclusive, despite the fact that a strong contingent of your own theological brethren insists that evolution absolutely is incompatible with Christianity and that the answer to that must be that evolution isn't real at all. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for him. and skipping the next several because we're back to specific arguments and inconsistencies with Christianity specifically, which of course are no proofs that no God exists.

[00:50:07]They are just flaws with Christianity, which I personally couldn't care less about. These should have been put up there with all the Bible flaws crap.

[00:50:15]That way, we could have just skipped past them all in one shot. And this leaves us with just one remaining point from Shepherd. A final objection is that the universe is far too vast for God to care about individual human beings. With billions of galaxies and stars, it can seem unlikely that human life is significant. However, size does not determine value. A single human soul can have greater worth than an entire planet of lifeless matter. But that ignores the point entirely.

[00:50:45]The question isn't whether or not a living being has more intrinsic worth than a dead planet. The question is why create the dead, inconsequential, meaningless planet in the first place.

[00:50:58]The observable universe spans a diameter of approximately 93 billion lightyear and contains everything that we can theoretically see. Within that expanse, astrophysicists estimate there's roughly 2 trillion galaxies, which hosts up to a septillion stars, a number that dwarfs all the grains of sand on the entire Earth.

[00:51:20]Because modern exoplanet discoveries indicate that stars hold an average of at least one planet, the estimated number of planets in the observable universe is equally immense. Somewhere above 10 to the 24th power planets in the observable universe and that would be on the low side of the estimate.

[00:51:40]Now, if the only place in the entire vast cosmos that actually matters at all is this one tiny little blue dot, then why create any of the rest of it?

[00:51:52]Especially given that, as many Christians believe, Armageddon is scheduled to happen any day now, and it will all apparently be brought crashing down long before our technology advances enough for us to even see or experience any of the rest of the vast cosmos.

[00:52:09]So if the idea is that the entire physical universe was made just for us and we are the only thing in it that actually matters, then what is with all of the completely meaningless planets, stars, galaxies, and celestial bodies that have absolutely no impact on anything and apparently never will.

[00:52:31]That's the question. And much like so many of the questions posed by the atheistic arguments on this list, it's one that you have completely dodged, Shepherd, in order to spin your sermon about how awesome your god is. You're not very good at this, are you? And there you have it. Redeem Zoo. I'm sorry. I mean, the quiet shepherd's attempt at responding to a variety of atheist arguments. I can't call it responding to every atheist argument the way he titled it because he certainly didn't do that. I mean, there were some critical ones that were missing from the list, such as the claim that there's no such thing as objective morality or the inconsistencies of a triom god. and especially given his insistence on leaning into Christian theology, there were some major criticisms of Christianity that were left out like the invalidation of the global flood or the Tower of Babel or the Exodus from Egypt and several more. So basically, this was just going through the atheistic rejoinders that he felt he could best respond to and ignore all the rest. And even that failed because he barely even responded to any of those. He often would just state the atheistic objection and then reward it, claim that it somehow didn't count as an objection or leaned into special pleading or kept defining God however he needed to to accomplish his goal or just went off on sermonizing tangents rather than actually addressing and answering the challenge at all. whatever he could do to not actually engage with the substance of the arguments and thus not even coming within a country mile of actually debunking them. And even if he had, even if he had completely and totally debunked every single one of the claims, arguments, and challenges that he delved into today, as stated in the introduction, he still would not have come a single step closer to actually establishing the existence of his god, nor invalidating the rejection of that belief. and thus he hasn't and actually couldn't possibly push back against the atheistic refusal to accept his theistic claims in the slightest. And so that is where we'll end things for today. So, thanks for watching everyone. Don't forget to like this video, comment, and subscribe so you'll always be notified when a new video comes out. Check out my Twitter, Blue Sky, and Patreon if you'd like to support my work directly. My Teespring if you want some Plinky merchandise. All that link below in the description. Special shout out to my most recent super thanks here on YouTube, Michael Martin and Lex. And with that said, until next time, I'm Professor Plink reminding you to keep striving for greater understanding. It's the best way to get wherever you want to go.