I want to say good morning to everybody. It's good to see everyone here. It's good to have Bill back. It feels like a reunion now, but it is great to have you back, have your wife back here. We're continuing in this series, Faith and Freedom. And I want to talk today about something called the new atheism. So if you haven't heard that, that's the whole point of us talking about it, because maybe not everybody's heard that expression or knows what it means, but it's worth exploring. As I often do, the back of the page, because I couldn't fit everything on the front, has some books and things. I may refer to one of those in a bit. But understand that atheism has been around a whole long time. If you ask an atheist, at least a lot of them, what does it mean to be an atheist, they wouldn't say it means we believe there's no God. They would say it means I don't have a belief in God. It's a shade of meaning. But the reason they would say that is they would say, I'm not making a truth claim that there's not a God. I'm just simply saying I just don't have a belief in a God. If you want to make a truth claim that there's a God, you have the, quote, burden of proof to show that. Although in practice, atheists will not only argue, but write voluminous books to try to demonstrate there's no God. So it's semantics, but just it's one of the things you may hear. I want to cover at least a few of the arguments you may hear just so you have an awareness of this and you have an opportunity to think about it. Is atheism popular? I think in our country, probably not. It's there. It's hard to do studies on it. You can go read different studies that usually put the numbers around like 5%, 3%. The difficulty is a lot of the people that would say they believe in God or a God, if you have them define it, You may find out that what we might call a pantheist, a pantheist believes everything you look at is God. God is the trees, the butterflies, the rivers, the streams, and so forth. And so, you know, the terminology, you can throw it off, but it is safe to say this. If you do the same studies in Europe, you're going to get numbers more like 30%, maybe higher, of those who would say they're atheists. If you do that study in some communist countries, not all of them, but some, you're going to have 90 plus percent, because communism tolerates no rivals. That is why in communist nations, typically, you eventually get to a point of persecuting any religion, and you just go look on the news and you'll see, if you look at news for China, for example, that crackdown. But I can tell you from traveling there, there's a high percentage of atheists. It wasn't always that way. You study missionary history, there were great missionaries that went to, like Hudson Taylor, that went to China, and it was a time of a great proliferation of Christianity. There are more Christians in China than there are in the United States, so put that in focus. We're dwindling in the United States. It's growing in China, but it's through home churches and things like that. But nevertheless, we think maybe a quarter of the population in the world is atheist, so we should think about this. And some of the issues that I'll try to bring up So I want to think about back to the beginning. This whole series has been about the idea that God established in the book of Genesis foundational principles. And we look around and we see all these weird things happening. And I'm trying to give a grid about how to think about these events. And you think about them through how they are attacks on the foundations God established. because they have a root purpose regardless of whether all the people that might adhere to a certain philosophy or ideology actually have that purpose individually. I'm telling you, the concepts have that purpose. And of course, atheism is a pretty obvious one. But if you accept the theology of Satan that he gave to Eve in the garden in Genesis 3, he said, you know, did God really say you couldn't eat of this tree? Is that really what he said? I'm gonna go back there and read that, but there is a theology there of sorts, way back in Genesis three, and everything flows out of this. So this Satan that was more cunning, did God really say you can't eat from any tree in the garden? He didn't say that, of course. And a woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden, but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, you must not eat a touch of it or you will die. And he said, no, you will certainly not die. In fact, God knows, meaning God's hiding the truth from you. God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened. And you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. Your eyes will be opened because this tree will provide you this fantastic new knowledge that will make you an equal with God. You'll be like God. And if I'm like God, then I don't need God. I need me. That is the theology or the philosophy here. And she saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at and so forth. We know the story. What I'm suggesting, and I have a couple notes here, is just that If you remove God from the picture, all you have are physical things you can see. We call that naturalism. It's just the stuff of this material planet. There's no divine, no supernatural, no spiritual, no unseen realm. There's just the stuff. And if I have just the stuff and I scratch my head long enough, I have to say, how did the stuff get here? I know there's no divine, supernatural, unseen God. And so I have to have a natural explanation for how the stuff created itself. And you have two options, either the stuff popped into existence, just bam, there it was, or somehow it sort of popped into existence over a long span of time, but it gets you to a Darwinism. It's the only logical way to explain the stuff from the presumption there's no creator, no designer, no intelligence behind what we see, not just the animals. the trees, the rivers, all that stuff. And it gets you something else, and it gets you atheism. I mean, a priori, if there's no God, no divine, no unseen, There has to be atheism. I mean, it just flows from what was being taught there. I have a quote here from Carl Sagan. He had a TV show in the old days on PBS, whose job it seems to be to promote this stuff. And this was his quote. The cosmos is all there is, all there was, and all there will ever be. That pretty much summarizes an atheist position. What you see in the universe here, that's it, that's the whole thing. So this new atheism is not new in the sense of the concept, it's new in the sense of the approach. If you read older literature, And you have, it just is an example of what you would see if you have someone in the older literature who's atheist, they're not belligerently so. They're not offended by the fact that you're a theist. They just don't believe. It's just a general thing. They don't have it as an agenda to evangelize you with atheism. That is not the case anymore. Largely led by various scholars who are articulate and they write. You have a new atheism that wants to evangelize atheism and make it what everybody believes. And they are very aggressively attacking theism and we call that the new atheism. The term has only been around since about 2006. I forget the fifth guy, or lady rather, but there are four people that are really popular for, at least one of whom's deceased. I listed them on here just so you'd have it. It's in the column on the left of the page. sometimes called the Four Horsemen because they've come in and destroyed theism and especially Christianity. They're not as aggressive with Muslims. I don't know why. But they're very aggressive with Christians. And they are Richard Dawkins. He's a biologist, evolutionist. Sam Harris, neuroscience and some other things. Christopher Hitchens is deceased, so he now knows one way or the other. about theism, and then Daniel Dennett. So these are guys, and I can't underestimate their influence. They have written, at least like Dawkins, for example, his book, The God Delusion, you know, a bestseller in this country. I mean, people are just eating it up. And I'll talk some more about their arguments. Here's where I'll say, because I can only fit so much in one session, and you should really give some thought to at least getting one good book or audio book on atheism and listening to it explained in some cogent, well-reasoned responses. The Ravi Zacharias book here, The End of Reason, And it's technical in the sense that it's argument, and you have to really listen or read closely. It's not that hard of a read. It's not that long. He does an exquisite job. And all he addresses is this fellow Sam Harris, who's a very, very belligerent person in his writings towards Christians. You know, this isn't a kind debate. Ravi Zacharias is now deceased, but that book, The End of Reason, does a very cogent job. John Lennox. near and dear to my heart. He's a mathematician. I think he is a professor, I believe, at Cambridge in England. Irish guy, PhD in math, very smart philosopher. And he's got his book, Gunning for God. It's about the new atheism and arguments against it. And then Stephen Hawking had written, you know, he kind of stood on the fence for a long time, but before he died, he wrote a book reasoning that there's no God. And there's a reason why you need someone like him to package it. But this God and Stephen Hawking is a good, you know, I mean, he's widely considered like the smartest of all the smart guys ever. And surely he is, right? So John Lennox addresses that. And this Frank Turek book, Stealing from God, is a nice philosophical type book if you like those kind of things. So just to say, there's good stuff out there where you can really get your hands around it. We're gonna do a flyover like really fast. Okay, so Some thoughts about this new atheism and I'm going to deal with some arguments for theism at least a couple of them One is they're usually highly educated. They have pieces of paper on their wall that give affirmation that they're really smart people. That's important because I think what the New Atheism Movement is largely about is legitimizing a philosophy. Now, someone know what Psalm 14.1 says? All right, Psalm 14.1? The fool says in his heart, there is no God. That's what the Bible says. And so this, you know, it needs legitimacy, and there's a few ways to get it. But one, because we, especially in Western culture, have such a high value placed on education, that we need some people with paper on the wall to give us affirmation that there's no God. Okay? And so that's where these people come into play, and they have different fields of science. But I make a comment here. not driving in their lanes. Let me try to give you an illustration. I hope you'll understand this. I have a math degree. That's my advanced training is math. Now let's, if I wrote a math book, you could say, okay, well this person spent years studying math and presumably at least knows an ounce or two that he could put on paper about math. But let's say I'm a mathematician and I don't publish a math book. I publish a book on Shakespeare. And I haven't spent years studying Shakespeare. 20 years ago, I read Hamlet and Macbeth. I'm no scholar of Shakespeare. But I have strong opinions about it, and I write a book. And should I be given credibility in my writing on Shakespeare because I have a math degree? Now, think about it. You would say, well, of course not. That's absurd. Now, I don't need a degree to know Shakespeare. But I can't know Shakespeare without studying it and really contributing the time. And frankly, I don't care to. I don't like Shakespeare that much, okay? I have studied other things that aren't math. But I'm just telling you, if I wrote something, no matter how clever it may be packaged, and I said, look, I've got a degree from Texas A&M University, there's some real scholars on Shakespeare that are gonna say, you don't know what you're talking about. And you've said things that people have debunked a hundred years ago, and we knew that wasn't true, but here you are parading it around. Now let's try it again. I've got a degree in biology. I've never really honestly studied the Bible, but I write a learned book about how there is no God, and I pitch the arguments that the Christians make that I've never actually read myself, and I don't know the Bible, and I try to discredit the Bible. Just like me as a math person writing a Shakespeare book, I'm no longer driving in my lane The person that has that biology degree is not driving in their lane unless they've done independent, fulsome study. But they get free credibility in this world because they have a piece of paper on the wall from some university, some institute of higher learning. It doesn't necessarily match, but it gives it plausibility. Because they have a piece of paper. It says they're smart. Their mama told them they're smart, maybe. Just think about that. And Christians can do the same thing, too. We can have very strong opinions about things we would have been too lazy or too arrogant to personally engage and study. in a rigorous study so that we can speak intelligently about it. This is the not driving in their lane, but they're trying to brand atheism as intellectually reasoned. That's important because it's not just a sort of a disbelief. This is an affirmative. Here are the reasons you shouldn't believe. appeal to science. One of these guys listed as a neuroscientist, you know, Dawkins is biology and other things. I mean, these are scientists. Science has become worshipped, in a way, in our culture. You end a conversation, at least some conversations, with it's science. You can't stand against it, right? It's not hard to go back in time a little bit and see where science was wrong. When I was in school in the olden days, and some of you were in the olden days before my olden days in school, and you were told that your appendix was something, an evolutionary leftover. Because we had evolved, and this was something we needed a million years ago, or whatever, and we don't need it anymore. They don't say that anymore, you realize they don't say that anymore? Now they say your appendix has a purpose. But you told me it was science. In fact, you told me it was proof of evolution. You've got tonsils and appendix and you don't need them. There's a lot of things in science that It was never science. It was a philosophical argument from a presupposition that no God exists. And you label it as science and, oh, now I can't touch it. You can. If someone tells you it's science, ask for the evidence. Scrutinize it. Think about it. This appeal to science has not helped atheism. It's undermined it. On a macro level, looking at the universe as a whole, We are peering further and further into the universe, tens of light years or more away, and what we're discovering about the cosmos is telling us the whole thing is fine-tuned. I'll say a little more about this later. Things aren't just out there for no reason. The whole universe, the position of the galaxies, the way the Milky Way is tailored designed, are to support life on one planet so that the people on that planet can see All the other stuff. And that's just a fact. And in that way, on a macro level, those studying cosmology are really unveiling more and more a designer had to be behind it. And a good resource for that that I've listed here is this Hugh Ross, Why the Universe is the Way It Is. If you like thinking about the stars, this guy has got a PhD in this stuff, so he's not just some guy. He's not a math guy writing on cosmology. But it's a good book. He's a Christian guy. Has an apologetics ministry. There's a lot to the universe that you may not know. To all the galaxies. But they speak a designer in every way. From the little things like the moon, right? The moon is there for a lot of reasons. If it wasn't there, you couldn't see anything at night. And if it wasn't there, the oceans wouldn't have a tide. They wouldn't move around in the right way. Okay? The whole thing gets thrown off. Likely, life wouldn't exist without it. If our planet was a little further or closer to the sun, we don't exist. I mean, there's a lot of these things, but it gets more than that. Why are all those other planets? Why didn't God just make this one? There's a purpose for that. I'm just saying science might legitimize atheism, especially Darwinism. That was what was key. But in reality, science is undermining it. On a micro level, I talked a couple weeks back about how biological chemistry within our body how our body uses amino acids and proteins are formed and proteins are what makes us live. The complexity is so much that there simply isn't a Darwinist who can explain how it happened. They'll insist, yes, it's evolution, yeah, yeah, yeah, but how in fact did we get all the pieces of the mousetrap at the same time? That's what we talked about a few weeks ago. So that blood would clot and all those kind of things. So I'm just saying on a micro and macro level, This is not helping, but Darwinism has really been the champion theology used to legitimize being an atheist. I don't need God to explain why people are here. I have Darwin. And you can put a little fish on the back of your car that has Darwin in it. You know, people do that kind of thing. Darwinism never explained how life got here. Its purpose was to explain how simple life became complex life. But such as it is, the new atheism appeals to science. I listed neuroscience as well. One of the problems with atheism is they have to deny the mind. This sense that the real you, the real personality and the intellect, isn't all housed in your brain. That there is a soul, if you will, a part of you, we might call the mind, that is distinct from your physical brain. And atheism has to deny that because that's not something you can see. But the struggle is that it doesn't seem like the brain can do everything that it actually does, plus nobody can explain it. And so the Christian concept of a mind, of a soul, of a spirit, if you will, the real you, the part of you that when this body winds down and it's done, You go to be with the Lord, and you're going to remember, and you're going to think, and all of that without a brain, just like the scarecrow. How are you going to do it? Because you have a mind. You have a soul. And they have to deny it. So this neuroscience stuff, some of that's just studies to try to argue that you don't have a mind, that everything is just automated within the brain that matters, if that makes some sense. So I made one more comment here. Actually, two. Rhetoric over reason. It's an interesting thing that if you want to deal with a subject matter, it's a lot easier not to address it to people that know something about it. It's easier to convince people who know nothing about it. So for example, years ago, somebody kept asking me, go visit his church, go visit his church. And sure enough, I went, and they spent an hour trying to convince me that the only way you can become a Christian is that the moment of faith, when you trust Christ, you immediately have to go get baptized by submersion, or you're out of luck. Do it a week later, going to hell. And they spent an hour on this. And I'm telling you, a bunch of people in the room got baptized that day. But you're preaching a heresy, but to folks who didn't know. If I wanted to try to convince people of atheism, I'm not gonna try to convince a Christian that knows their Bible. I'm gonna try to convince a non-Christian who's never looked at it. I'm gonna tell them what to understand from the Bible, and then tell them why it's wrong. And I call this a straw man argument. Rhetoric over reason, okay? Rhetoric is just, you know, you can have the eloquence of like an Abraham Lincoln or something, but everything you say may be wrong. And strawmen, strawmen is when you say, here's what Christianity believes, although that may not be true, it's just what you say, and you set it up in a way that's really easy to knock it over. And that's a strawman argument. And what I'm saying is you start looking at the arguments that are made, and they say, here's what Christians believe, and you're like, I don't believe that. Here's what the Bible says, that Bible doesn't say that. I'm suggesting that people will lie. Satan even, in a pinch, will lie about Christianity because people who are already predisposed not to believe it will be given further reason not to consider it. That's what's going on. So that's what I mean by rhetoric over reason. Lack of scholarship, what I mean by that All the scholarship you need is that paper on the wall. There's your credibility. But there are a lot of Christian writers, some of whom I've listed on the back of this page, that write intelligent, well-written, they cite sources. It's good stuff. They are generally not going to be addressed by these atheists. And all you have to do, don't watch, I'm not gonna list the names, I don't wanna be embarrassing somebody. There are some Christian leaders in our country, they're gonna be put on the news because they're a good image of how stupid some people can be. And they use it to whitewash all the Christians. But there are some really smart guys, and your run-of-the-mill atheist is not gonna get in a debate with Hugh Ross or John Lennox, no. Now they have these debates, go watch one. I mean, it's an interesting thing. Richard Dawkins got pushed so far that he decided that it would be better to claim that little green man put us on this planet, or put the primordial soup on the planet to form humans, than to just admit there could be a designer. But when you're preaching to the choir, it's a different thing. And just be aware of this. There's a real lack of scholarship, but it's being veneered as true scholarship. And I'm telling you, it's convincing the young people in the universities where these people are teaching. It's making great inroads, and it's why atheism is growing. So traditional Christian arguments, and then Let me mention a few of these. I want to see if there's a question. I know I've said a lot. A lot of these arguments are not new. I didn't have space to try to list them out. I want to just describe a couple of them. They're not new. There's lots of people that write on them. In fact, lots of people seem to repackage them every year or two and publish them. Some of these books get real popular, but they're the same arguments. One is the ontological argument. That's a very old argument that goes back to a guy named Anselm. But I've quoted a new version of it on the bottom of the back page. I don't buy this argument, frankly, but it's got a position in history. And what it basically says, and I've quoted it here from a guy named William Lane Craig, who's a very articulate Christian philosopher out in California at Biola University. I think it's at Biola. And he travels around and does these debates, and he's extraordinarily good at it. people get embarrassed that are debating him, he's very good. But he says the ontological argument goes something like this, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being. Now what would the greatest conceivable being be like? Well, he would have to be omnipotent, omniscient, he would be all good. you know, he would be necessary in his existence, in other words, kind of self-existent. And if such being, and this is kind of the key to it, if such a being is possible, in other words, if a God is possible, who's sort of maximal in every way, that means that being, a being like that would have to exist somewhere. That's the big leap. And philosophers like to talk about different worlds. There could be our universe and other universes. So in some universe, if it's even possible for there to be a God, in some universe there probably is. But if he's a God like this in that universe, he has to be a God like this in our universe too, otherwise it wouldn't be God at all. That's the argument. I don't know if that moves you, but it's interesting, I mentioned a couple weeks ago, is Darwinism is sort of unraveling, and not publicly, but privately, it's unraveling at this time. What's becoming very, very popular is this idea that there's multiple universes, and just an infinite number of universes. This starts to look like a lot better argument when someone's physician is, there's an infinite number of universes, and you say, well, is it possible there's a God in at least one of them? Or are you actually going to try to argue there's no God in no universe? See, that's where this kind of comes in. That's why I listed it. But the argument with more bite is this cosmological argument. It was usually called the design argument. I mean, you can go back just a few, not long ago in history, there was a Christian biologist named William Paley who had this classic example that you're walking along the woods and there's a rock there with a watch, just stuck a watch on. So it has a watch sitting on the rock. And you see that watch, and no one thinks that just put itself together all by itself. You think somebody made that watch. What about the rocket sitting on? Right? That's kind of how you reason. And I would say a lot of writers today, they always attack him for some reason. He had been dead for centuries. But they'll say, well, no, no, this design argument, this isn't very strong. Isn't there a place in the Bible that makes the design argument? That is, that if you just looked around at the universe around you, it would speak to your heart, it should, that you know what? Somebody made this. Can you think of that? Where's that at? It's right in the Bible. No less astute student of scripture than Paul the Apostle. He said in Romans chapter one, For God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all godliness and all unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Think about what he said, God's wrath, that's not going to hell later, that's God dealing with people today, present tense, is revealed from heaven against all godlessness, not some of it, and unrighteousness of people, how are they unrighteous? Who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, oh that's atheism, and other things. Some Christians do this. But atheism does this. And God's wrath is revealed against those who suppress the truth. Well, what do they do? Since what can be known about God is evident among them, what's the evidence that they have for God? Because God has shown it to them. See what Paul's saying? I mean, he's making what a lot of people say, no, that's a simple argument. That doesn't work. The more we study the cosmos and the more we study on a micro level the human body, the more we see design. We were promised by Darwin, that when we would do that, we would find no designer. We would have the naturalism explanation, and it's been just the opposite. And Paul couldn't look in a microscope at that time, and he didn't have the Hubble telescope. But he said, God has made this known, what can be known about God is evident among them because God has shown it to them. How did he do that? For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen didn't need a microscope or telescope. Clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. The Apostle Paul thought that was a good argument. God thinks it's a good argument too. No one's gonna say, as they stand before Jesus, the king, who does the, you read Matthew 25, he says, eventually you're all standing before me, sheeps and goats. You can't stand before the king and say, I had no idea that there was anything more He says, yeah, I showed it to you. How big of a universe did you need to think somebody designed it? There's a reason it's so big, right? So just think about that. That's Paul's argument. Here's a modern version on the back of this page, and I've just literally I've almost quoted this, like added a word or two, but this is off of William Lane Craig's website. He's really popularized this. He'll admit it's not his argument. I mean, this is old. This has been around a long time. In fact, as I recall, this version was made by a Muslim. apologists, like a long time ago, to defend. And so sometimes it's called the Kalam argument, named for the person who actually made it first. But he says this, premise one, whatever begins to exist has a cause. The idea is just that if something has a beginning, it would seem like it would usually have a cause. If something isn't there and now it's there, there's some reason now it's there. Something's caused it to be there, like Paley's watch, as opposed to saying nothing caused it. And so as William Lane Craig would point out when he does these talks and stuff, he'd say, you know, if you were sitting at home in your living room and all of a sudden there was a lion in your living room, The best atheist wouldn't say, yeah, that just popped into existence. It just happened. They're going to say, who put that lion in my living room? Now you sound like a theist. It had to have a cause, right? This is a premise, but it's a reasonable premise that if something begins to exist, not if it exists, if it begins to exist, meaning there's a time when it didn't. It had a cause. Premise two is the universe began to exist, and this is where science has not helped the atheists. So in the old days, up into maybe the 1940s as I recall, Scientists believed the universe was eternal. What we see, the Earth, everything, had always been. It was called the steady state. Then they came up with something called the Big Bang. And it was the idea that in less than a second, a long, long time ago, but in less than a second, there was a single material singularity. Like think of an immensely dense rock or something, but so dense it contained all the substance of the universe. And that was there. and not a moment before. So in other words, the universe had a distinct beginning. That singularity exploded, this big bang, and it continues to expand, which is why in more recent times, there have been discoveries showing that the galaxies, the stars, are in movement. They're not just stationary. I'm not going to get into how they've done that. But there's strong evidence that the galaxies are at least moving some. My point is, whether or not you accept the Big Bang, mainstream science does. And that means there's a beginning. And that's one of the points he would offer, is like, you know, even many atheists will have to admit the second one. In fact, most atheists won't fight you on the second one about it began to exist. Some will. They'll say it's been here forever. Let me give you a common sense reason why it hasn't been here forever. Assume the Earth has always been here, okay? And how does the Earth get to today? Think about that. It's always been, infinitely far back in time, the Earth has been, How do you get to today? Does that make sense? In other words, if I'm on the planet, and I've always been on the Earth, and I've been around for a trillion years, it still isn't today, because it's been here since infinitely in the past. If I've been on the planet for a trillion, trillion, trillion years, I still don't get to today, because it started in the infinite past. Today never happens. And the reason is, and now I'm putting on my hat as a mathematician, mathematicians have a concept of infinity. We even have a concept of numbers, the quantities that are bigger than infinity. There's levels of infinity, if you will, that are even bigger. But they're here, okay? I can conceptualize them, and on a different day I would argue They actually exist, and God put them here. That's a very ancient philosophy from Plato, that math is, these things are kind of real, but not real in the seen world. But in the material world, you will not find an actual infinite. You will never find an actual infinite. Imagine a hotel. You're on a trip. You've made no reservations, but you're driving to Orlando, so you can be fleeced at Disney World. You get tired somewhere past Mississippi and before Pensacola, and you stop. You didn't make a reservation. This hotel advertises they have an infinite number of rooms, but no vacancy. Your wife is mad. However, she fixes your problem for you. Because she tells the guy at the front of the hotel, just put the person in room one into room two. Put the person in room two into room three. The person in room 1,000,001 to 1,000,002 will take room one. We have solved your problem. You had a vacancy and no vacancy all at the same time. Right? Now, you have a family with a homeschool van and they've got an infinite number of children. Stopping at a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and no vacancy, and the wife again, because the husband didn't make a reservation, she says, I want you to put all the people into the even number rooms. Because there are an infinite number of even number rooms, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. We'll put our infinite number of children, our very large homeschool bus, into the odd number of rooms. Now there's a vacancy again. There are no actual infinites in this world. You can count the grains of sand. It'll be trillions on trillions, but it'll be a finite number. There are no infinite number of blades of grass, no infinite number of hotel rooms, and no infinite number of days that proceed today. There cannot be in a material universe. It is not possible to have an infinite. There has to be a beginning. And if there's a beginning, what did premise one say? Something caused it. What caused it? Something not in the box. This universe is a material box. Everything in it is made of atoms. Whatever caused it is not in the box. It's immaterial. Now we start looking like, not necessarily the God of Genesis, but a divine designer. Not only is he outside the box and therefore immaterial, what we might call a spirit, he has to have great power and great complexity that supersede the complexity within the box he has created. Okay? Assuming it's a he. Why would I think it's a person? Because there had to be a decision. Something changed outside the box to make the box exist. If nothing changed outside the box, the box would have always been here. It's because of a decision in time. It's like, you know, If all the conditions were necessary for the water to freeze, the water would always have been frozen. Some condition changed outside the fridge to make the water freeze. Somebody flipped the switch. Somebody did something. I hope that makes at least a little bit of sense. It's very difficult to have a universe with a beginning and no designer. And that's how science, cosmology, has sort of hurt itself. Let me mention one last, just one last thing, and this I'm going to go through quickly and I'm not going to do justice. You can go on any website where atheists list arguments for atheism, and every one of them, in my opinion, is frankly absurd. It's so poorly done, it so misrepresents a Christian viewpoint, misrepresents the Bible, except one. And this is a good question to ask, and it's one Christians should wrestle with, and it's been called the problem of evil. Part of the problem is, I would argue it's not a problem at all, But it is a reality, okay? And that is the way it's pitched. If you have an all-loving, all-powerful God, why does evil persist? Surely your all-loving, all-powerful God will put a stop to it. And sometimes it's on a very personal level, where someone's experienced a great tragedy and a loss of a child or something, and they want you to explain why your all-powerful, all-loving God didn't keep their child alive. I totally get it. This issue is actually not a good intellectual argument for atheism. It's a good intellectual argument for theism, but it needs to be dealt with. I'm going really high level, but I say, be clear on what the Bible answers and what it doesn't. I would challenge you that the Bible does not give a full slate of answers about this in this sense. If you ask me why a particular bad thing happened to a particular person, I may be able to answer it if I was a witness to it and maybe they did something stupid and God let them have the consequences. Sometimes that happens, you know, people sin and they have consequences. But when you talk about a lot of these questions, It's like the guy in John chapter 9 that was blind, and his disciples said, what caused this? And it wasn't his parents, and it wasn't him. And the answer is, I don't know. And some people will say, yeah, you won't know until you get to heaven. The Bible doesn't say that either. The Bible never says you'll get all the questions answered. Never says that. And I don't have the answer to why a specific thing happened. I have an answer from Genesis 3 as to why this planet is broke. And it's been broke since then. And sin and death entered, and that in a general sense is our answer from Scripture. Sometimes people say, well, we need to go to the book of Job. Book of Job, if you read it, Job never learns why he suffered. We learn why he suffered. He never does. Job got no answers at all in that sense. What was Job's real answer? He said all along, I haven't done anything wrong. His theology said, you know, it seems like I should have done something for God to let this happen. If I could put God on the witness stand and put him under oath, this is what I would ask God. Then God shows up and, Job, what do you got to say to me? Nothing. But God says this, and I think it's really the answer he would give us. Where were you when I made everything? He talks about the Leviathan. He talks about the behemoth and, you know, making the foundations of the world. He just says, listen, Job, You're wanting to put me in a box in this way, and you can't. And Job says, now my eyes have seen you. It's not visibly, although he saw something. He just has this greater comprehension of God, and he also comes to being satisfied that he will not have all the answers. He cannot fully box in God. Beyond that, he gets nothing in terms of, like God doesn't say, by the way, I'll let Satan do this. He never gets told that. So we need to not go beyond what the Bible says. But first, this argument, if God's all-powerful and all-loving, why does evil persist? Get an atheist to define evil. See if they can do it. Think about it. No God, that's humanism, that's Genesis 3. Satan says, you don't need God anymore. You remove God, how do you say what's right and wrong? You do it one of two ways. Totalitarian system, we talked about government a while back. Might makes right, or what's right for the community? Communism. Kill all the people we don't need because it serves the community. But the idea of a transcendent standard, of a God, that's all gone. Try to define evil without a God, without some transcendent fixed standard we can all agree on. Because if you tell me, well, killing little kittens and twisting their heads off is evil, Prove it. I mean, I hear it's your opinion. I don't think it's wrong. Show me objectively why it's wrong. See, you'll never bridge that objective gap unless you have a transcendent God. It doesn't have to necessarily be the God of the Bible, but there has to be a creator of transcendent truth, or you can't even define evil to ask the question. That's why Frank Turek wrote a book called Stealing from God that I list on the back. And his point is this question actually assumes a transcendent standard, which really assumes a God, in order to ask the question to begin with. I hope I'm making a little bit of sense. Second, evil and suffering are necessary for volition. Just chew on that a little, and I know a lot of folks don't believe in volition, and that's become popular since the Reformation, but if there's true, full-blown volition, and we can make free choices, how will God keep evil from happening? Think about this. Pharaoh and his army are chasing the Jewish people to the Red Sea to kill them. God has some choices, maybe. One was to tweak Pharaoh's mind so he would decide he doesn't care to go after the Jewish people and kill them. Why didn't God do that? Then he would just turn his army around and God doesn't have to split the Red Sea, wait for the troops to come through on their chariots and close it up on them. I don't know why. I just can't find a place in the whole Bible where God ever does that. He stops people in their tracks sometimes, physically stops them and says, Pharaoh, you'll go no further. And then he wipes them out after he lets them go into the Red Sea. But you won't find, in my thinking, anywhere in the whole Bible where God takes somebody and kind of re-engineers their mind and makes them think different. I think our volition is protected, but at a high cost. Pharaoh was an evil man. He killed the firstborn. He tried to. Herod the Great went to Bethlehem and butchered people. Could God have tweaked his mind? Maybe, but I never see that happen. Sometimes he stops them. In this case, he intervened and he got Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus out. But just think about the cost of volition. You know, it's not God that made the evil things happen. What you're really saying is, we tried humanism, it's not working very well, but if there was a God, he would have stopped us. And finally, atheism provides no hope. At the end of the day, that's actually the most salient argument. I mean, at the end of the day, the atheist version, you really ought to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Because there is nothing beyond the grave. No future. When I was asked years ago by someone I had known as kind of an acquaintance growing up, little child had died from childhood leukemia, what happened? And she was a Christian. She didn't stop believing. So I don't know. I know this. There's a family reunion on the calendar. She's going to be there. You're going to be there. That's what I know. God doesn't give all the answers as to why a particular evil happens, but he gives 100% the solution to evil. That's what the Bible's about. This whole redemptive plan that comes to a head on, you know, in the first century at a Roman cross where Christ triumphs over evil. And then the unfolding of things, as you read, as you go through most of the New Testament and you get to the end of Matthew and he returns, and the evil is done. So while it doesn't give all the whys, it gives the solution. And that really is the focus of scripture. And I think that's what's throwing a lot of people off. We wanna know why this happened. God's not gonna tell you, not always. But he's telling you this, I'm gonna pull it all together with a bow on it, I'm gonna deal with all the wickedness, they'll be judged by their works, but in Christ, you will live forever with him.