Greg highlights the intellectual inconsistencies of an atheist who can recognize design everywhere but in nature and who wants to be ethical but denies the existence of God and sin.
Transcript
Caller: My older brother is by far the most staunch atheist I’ve ever known, and I’m in my late 60s. So, here’s the thing about him: He’s very unusual, because he’s kind. He’s courteous. He’s ethical. He will listen to you. He doesn’t spit fire when you talk about God or Jesus Christ. He’s got a master’s degree, he’s very intelligent, and I think—IQ-wise—he’s probably much smarter than I am. But it’s as if he read the book of tactics for the atheist. There’s no getting through, and there’s never any crack in the armor. But here’s the anomaly of it all—he’s extremely ethical. And I always hear you put morality and atheism together and how they don’t combine.
Greg: They don’t.
Caller: Well, I can’t trap him. He would never steal, lie, cheat, go out on his wife—none of that. And when you present this to him, he says, “God doesn’t have anything to do with that. I’m not going to steal because it’s not my money. It’s not for me to steal. I’m not going to go out on my wife because I made a commitment.” So, he’s ethically moral to the max. So, I don’t know—and I could go on and on about this guy.
One other quick example is the cosmological argument. He doesn’t believe in Darwin. He’s like, “Well, I’m smart enough to know that this didn’t all evolve.” And I heard him mention intelligent design. He goes, “Well, maybe there’s intelligent design.”
And just two real quick examples. One, I said to him, if you’re walking down the beach—and I like to use this because I think it’s a good example—if you’re walking down the beach and you see a beautiful sand castle on the beach, are you going to think that the wind and the sun and the rain and enough time happened so that that sand castle developed on the beach through wind? “Well, no,” he said. “Of course not. Somebody created the sand castle. It’s obvious.” But he doesn’t relate that to the billions of stars and the magnetism of the earth and gravity. Then I asked him one time, “What do you think happens when you die?” He said, “Well, you’re just going to cease to exist.” He said, “Where were you in 1912? You weren’t born yet. So, that’s where you’re going to be when you die.”
I just—I love him so much. He’s always been such an excellent brother. He will come over to my house at the drop of a hat and help me. We have a loving relationship. But when it comes to God and Christ and the Bible, he’s out.
Greg: All right, well—wow.
Caller: I know.
Greg: Let me offer a couple of thoughts. Here’s the first thought. It was my younger brother who led me to Christ.
Caller: I’ve heard you say that.
Greg: Yeah, he was the principal gardener in my life. And it was his testimony, his witness to me, his talking to me over time that God used to get to me. Now, there are other factors in my life that made his message look more appealing and got me thinking more about it later on, but he was the mouthpiece. God was doing other things, too, that put me in a position to listen more to what he had to say as time went on. Okay? I mention that because—is this brother you’re talking about your older brother?
Caller: Yes, two older brothers.
Greg: Oh, okay. So, my younger brother, Mark, led me to Christ. He also was the principal in my youngest brother becoming a Christian—the one I mentioned going fishing with recently. So, we are all Christians now—the kids in our family—through the impact of one brother, right in the middle of the five. Okay? Two above, two below, and sisters at both ends, and three boys in the middle. And we all became Christians there. So, look, you never—and I think it’s probably fair to say that, though I wasn’t like a flaming atheist and had all these different thoughts that your brother has, I was equally—appeared to be equally—unreachable to my brother Mark. So, you never know. Also, my father became a Christian a year and a half before he died, and it was a genuine transformation. So, God works miracles. That’s the first thing.
I want to talk for a moment—what happens when you die, and he tells you that—okay, this is not a useful piece of the conversation for either of you, because both of you are going to answer the question “What happens when you die?” in light of the worldview you’ve already been convinced of. And for him to say, “Well, you cease to be. You are nothing, just like you were nothing before you were born. Now, you’re nothing after you die”—well, that follows from an atheistic worldview. Okay?
I don’t know what he makes of the cosmological—what you described actually was more the teleological argument, the design argument. The castle and the sand. And you said, well, he doesn’t really connect those two together. No. The castle had to be designed, but he’s not connecting the world of the universe, the unbelievable complexity—forget about the universe, just think about details on this planet that we see that are wildly complex—the animals, the creatures, and everything. But are you making that connection for him? Are you saying, “Hey look, bro, we got the same thing here on this planet. Look at that. Look at that ant, right? Look at that mosquito landing on your arm. That mosquito has a hypodermic needle in its beak, and it’s going to suck your blood so that it can reproduce. [LAUGHTER] Okay, like who made that hypodermic needle?
Caller: So, let me tell you what he said. He said, “John, you know, years ago, people thought the earth was flat, and they thought that the earth was the center of the universe. But now we know better. Now we know the earth is round, and it’s not the center of the universe.” So, his answer to your question would be, “We just don’t know yet, and time will tell. We just don’t know.”
Greg: Well, wait a minute. I mean, this is not intellectually honest on his part. And if I was in a friendly conversation with him, I’d be willing to say that.
First, you tell me that the wind and the rain and some time aren’t going to build the castle in the sand, and then you tell me about the mosquito—we just don’t know yet. Well, why didn’t you say that about the castle in the sand? The reason is because you do know. You know when a thing looks designed. You know when a thing—as Doug Axe has put it in his book Undeniable—that a thing requires know-how to make. We don’t have to be taught that. We can look at it. And the way Doug Axe will point out, you make an origami bird, right? You fold the paper in just a certain way, and then you pull the edges, and the wings flap. You show that to a kid, and he’s amazed. He says, “Oh, that’s great! Show me how to do that. Show me how.” In other words, he realizes that it takes know-how to make that origami bird, and he wants you to show him—give him the know-how—so he can make it.
So, we have this ability to recognize when know-how is required. And that’s what your brother counted on when he responded to your question about the castle in the sand—”Oh, that thing requires know-how to make.” He didn’t use that language, but nevertheless.
Caller: Right.
Greg: That’s what he’s getting at. But when the mosquito lands on his arm, why is he punting to ignorance? Why is he saying, “We just don’t know enough”? And then to compare it to a flat earth—are you kidding me? First of all—and the earth being the center of the universe—we don’t know where the center of the universe is.
Caller: But didn’t we believe that hundreds of years ago?
Greg: Well, that’s Aristotelian. That’s Aristotelian philosophy. That’s where that came from. It didn’t come from ignorant people. It just came from Aristotle. And a lot of smart people believed Aristotle, and they still do, for good reason, because he said a lot of things that were really smart and sound and accurate. But this wasn’t. That was the Aristotelian cosmology. But to point at a faulty thinking in the past and use that as a justification for denying the obviously designed characteristics of a mosquito—I mean, that’s silly. That’s just silly.
Although people thought the world was flat. Some people did, but lots of people didn’t. When you see a lunar eclipse—do I have that right? Yeah, a lunar eclipse—that’s when the earth gets in the way of the sun so that the earth’s image—its shadow, so to speak—is on the moon. Well, you can see it’s round. So, there are lots of people—they not only knew the earth was not flat, the Egyptians knew how big the earth was. And they did things with shadows that go down into wells, and they did the calculus and whatever, and they figured it out. So, that means that people had the ability to correct the error.
We have no reason to believe that there’s an error in our thinking when we look at a mosquito—that it was designed—just like we have no reason to think we are mistaken when we think that the sand castle was designed.
Caller: Well, what do the atheists say that you’ve spoken to when you tell them what you just told me to say about the mosquito? How do they justify it?
Well, what they’re going to say that it’s the blind watchmaker of Darwinian evolution that made that.
Caller: The blind watchmaker?
Greg: Yeah, it is a design of sorts, but not designed by an intelligent designer, but an unintelligent designer of mutation and natural selection.
Caller: He wouldn’t even believe that, because he knows the quadrillions of billions of billions, quadrillions to the 40th power. It’s not going to happen.
Greg: Yeah, it’s not going to happen.
Well, then, he can’t appeal to the most popular way atheists appeal, and that doesn’t work—as you pointed out and he already knows. That means that the smart money is on design. That means this is evidence for God.
And you mentioned the cosmological argument, and that’s another factor. You know, where did the universe come from? Do you think the universe has always been here? You can ask him. No.
And incidentally, some of these ways of arguing—asking these questions—I have, actually, in the book Street Smarts. And I talk about these ethical concerns too. So, you may want to get that and look at that.
Caller: I got to get that.
Greg: Yeah, I agree. You got to get that. So, that will be helpful. But I’ll just give you a thumbnail sketch of some of these. And I even use the beach and something on the beach as an example of design. I talk about footprints in the sand—not even as complicated as a sand castle. But if there are footprints in the sand, what are you going to conclude? That this happened by...? No. That somebody walked there. That’s the better explanation. And so, I’m asking, what’s the better explanation for, you know, the DNA in the human cell or any cell or any designed apparent design feature in the universe? The mosquito in your arm sucking your blood, for example.
Caller: So, Greg, let me just real quick tell you what me and my middle brother, who are both saved, believe. My older brother has it made. I mean, he just has always had a good job. He’s always had—he’s not a wealthy man, but he wants for nothing. He has no children, and he’s been happily married. And Christ says he came to fix the people who were sick, and my brother just doesn’t think he’s sick. And he doesn’t want to worship a God that’s going to get in his way of running his marathons and exercising and eating the way he eats.
He’s just not sick from a world point of view. And then, one time, I said, “Well, what about sin?” And he looked at me with all the sincerity in the world. He said, “John, there is no sin.” I said, “There is no sin?” He said, “No.” Because we were raised in Catholic school, and he was an A student all our growing up. And even though we stopped going, he continued through 10th grade. And he said—because he’s an A student, he’s the firstborn—he’s going to do everything right.
Greg: Okay, well, now, there are two separate things here, though—whether there is sin or whether he is a sinner. Those are two separate things. He said there is no sin. How can anybody look on the world and say there isn’t sin? The most common objection to God’s existence is the problem of evil. And that is—if expressed in religious terminology—it is man’s sin against other human beings. Okay? Now, of course, there’s the issue of natural evil too, but characteristically, how could God allow all of these evil things to take place—for human beings to do these evil things? So, there must be sin in the world because that’s what evil is.
Now, he may think that he has no sin. All right. Well, it depends on what standard you’re measuring by. You mentioned—and this is another element—he is so ethical. Listen, if there is no God—now I’m saying this very carefully because there’s a distinction that you need to get, and I go into some detail on this in the book Street Smarts, but I’ll give it to you quickly—and that is, if there is no God, then no one is ethical, no matter how—in scare quotes, now—”good” they look, because to be ethical means to conform to an ethical standard, and if there is no God, there is no ethical standard to conform to.
Can you give food to people who are hungry if there is no God? Sure. But that doesn’t make—but it’s not good, because there is no good. There is no standard of goodness. It’s just giving food to the hungry. You have to have a standard of goodness to call that action good.
Caller: I see.
Greg: And, see, what he’s doing is he’s hitchhiking on an element that has no place in his worldview. He thinks he’s ethical. Lookit, if there is no God, Mother Teresa is not ethical, because there are no ethics. She still did what she did. Your brother still—
Caller: What makes ethics related to God? Why is—he’s going to say to me, “John, I’m ethical because that’s the better, happier way to live, and I don’t want to go to jail.”
Greg: Oh, okay. But notice how he’s characterized it in personal terms. If I do these kinds of things, I’m happy, and I don’t go to jail. Well, what if a despot—because he’s a despot, he’s not going to go to jail, he’s in charge—kills a whole bunch of people that he doesn’t like because it makes him feel good? Notice, he’s not going to go to jail for that, and he’s happy doing it. That’s the same criteria that your brother just offered. But your brother would probably suggest that that’s wrong. Why is it wrong? It’s not wrong because he might get caught. He’s the despot. It’s not wrong because it’ll make him feel bad. He feels good by doing it. So, what makes it wrong? Notice how he’s characterizing it in very subjectivistic, self-satisfied terms. All right?
Now, I think most people—when they think about a lot of stuff in the world—they’re going to say, “That’s just plain old wrong.” But to say that it’s wrong, it means it broke a rule. You ought to be kind, and you are unkind. That’s wrong. Why is it wrong? Because you ought to be kind. Who says I ought to be kind? Where did that rule come from? And I’m not asking, how do you know the rule? People say, “Well, it’s just obvious.” I’m not asking that. I’m asking, where did it come from? And the “Where did it come from?” question is called the grounding problem.
Caller: The grounding problem?
Greg: The grounding problem. I talk all about this in the book Street Smarts. I have three chapters on atheism and one whole chapter, “Can you be good without God?” And the point I’m making is—
Caller: That’s what I need to know.
Greg: The answer is no. You can’t be good without God.
“Well, wait a minute. Can’t I do the same things that Christians do?” Yeah, you could do the same things. But if there’s no God, it’s not good when you do it, and it’s not even good when Christians do it. It’s just behavior. It’s only good when there is a standard, a measuring stick, a way of keeping score
Caller: Of what good is.
Greg: Of what good is. And, if there is no measuring stick, this is like saying, look, we’re going to throw the ball, we’re going to go out in the field, and we’re going to throw the ball—the football—around. We’re just going to throw it around for fun. And then you pass it to your friend, and he says, “Hey, that was an illegal forward pass.” And you say, “How could it be an illegal forward pass? We’re not even playing a game that has any rules.” Right?
Caller: Right.
Greg: “Offsides? What do you mean, offsides? There are no sides to be off of.” But that’s the circumstance the atheist runs into. You can pass it around, but you can’t be offside. You can’t have an illegal forward pass, because there are no rules in the game. Okay? And so, therefore, there can’t be any good play or bad play, because there’s no way to distinguish good from bad if there are no rules. But if you say something is good, then you’re implicitly acknowledging the rules of the game. Got me?
Caller: Yes.
Greg: And if you say he’s good, he’s—even the term that you are using—he’s so “ethical,” well, of course. He may be ethical from the perspective of a Christian set of rules. But if there is no set of rules, then no one’s ethical. That’s the point I’m making.