Hey, I'm Seth Andrews. I'm host of the weekly radio podcast, "The Thinking Atheist." I'm
a former Christian. I was a believer for 30 years. I was a Christian broadcaster for over
10 of those years before I finally walked away from my faith in 2007.
Now I normally dont take the time to respond to religious videos that are out there. There
are so many of them, I mean thousands upon thousands of them, and most of them are echoes
of previous religious messages that are out there. And frankly, in the face of religious
claims, theres already a wealth of wonderful, credible, vetted, peer-reviewed information
out there for anyone who cares to look. But there's a young pastor, his name is Josh
Feuerstein, you've probably seen him on social media. He's got the close-up camera, the beard,
the red ball cap. He's been getting so much attention lately, I felt like a response to
his latest video was appropriate. Now Feuerstein has gone online, and he's made a challenge
specifically to atheists of a cash reward of $100,000 to anybody who can prove that
God does not exist. Josh. Science called and said youre doing
it wrong. Scientists and non-scientists alike with any
cursory understanding of the burden of proof knows that we do not begin with anything and
everything that cant be disproven. That's not how science works, Josh. By that standard,
fairies exist. The boogeyman exists. Plush, time-traveling teddy bears in outer space
exist. Prove they don't exist. Look, if we are starting with anything and everything that
cannot be disproven, then we are forced to give equal scientific credence to the theory
that that our universe is nothing but a giant snow globe that right now is perched on the
mantleplace of Father Christmas. Prove it doesn't exist, Josh, for a hundred thousand
bucks. Skeptics arent showing up in the court
of public opinion and demanding that it declare no God can exist. That's not what we're about.
We are simply operating as a judge or jury would in a court of law. We're entertaining
a positive claim, which is what you're making, right Josh? You're making a positive claim
about a specific deity and holy book and faith. And we're saying, "Fine. Show us the evidence.
and if the burden of proof is not met, we have no choice but to dismiss the charges.
And thats all thats happening here. We atheists, we non-believers are simply starting
at the null position, and we're examining all claims brought to us. Not just religious
claims. ANY claims. And we're vetting those claims against the evidence to see if there's
any merit to them. We are not angry at God. We don't want to become God. We are not on
a mission to kill God. We're not going through a rebellious phase against God. It doesn't
work like that. We just live in a world which is obviously governed by natural laws, and
we see apologists and pastors like you come to us and make a supernatural claim. And we
respond by saying, "Fine. Provide credible, measurable, peer-reviewable, scientific evidence
for your claim. Bring it! Show us the money. Or we have no choice but to dismiss the charges.�
On the issue of morality. You brought this up in your most recent video, where you said
outright that the only reason that an atheist would know that the horror of the Holocaust
was wrong was because we borrowed your god's objective moral standard. I am so tired of
apologist blowhards tossing out Holocaust and the Hitler grenade in an attempt (subtly
in your case) to align atheists with the most vile and horrible elements of human history.
And it's ludicrous to assert that a human being would not know that mass murder was
wrong simply because they didn't have your invisible friend tapping them on the shoulder
to tell them so. In fact, it is offensive to good, upstanding, moral people all across
the planet. You say morals come only from your God. Not
any god, but a specific god. You are a Christian. You're talking about the Christian god. Try
this one on for size.
I once asked bible-believing Christians in a survey, kind of an informal survey, if God
appeared to you as he did to Abraham in the Old Testament and he commanded you, as an
act of obedience, to take your child out, drive a knife into their heart and sacrifice
them him, would you do it? And the vast, vast, vast majority of responses I got back from
Christians said, Absolutely not. No way would I ever lay a hand of harm to my own
child. In fact, many admitted outright that they'd rather receive punishment from
God for their disobedience than to hurt their child. Now why did they respond this way as
Christians? They are operating from an evolved moral system that naturally recoils at the
idea of harming a child or killing another human being. It's a moral system that stands
apart from your supposed Good Book and the deity which they claim is responsible, which
you claim is responsible, for the objective moral standard. By the way, they also prove
that they are much more moral than God. They're hugely more moral than any being who would
command a parent to kill their child for its own pleasure.
Now Josh, you like to use the word "accident" or "accidental" when you're talking about
evolution, when you're talking about the Big Bang and the cosmos. A hugely intellectually
dishonest way of describing life, our planet and this universe, which is a an amazing symphony
of random (yes, random) and measurable and predictable phenomenon. And honestly, if you
insist that everything exists because your God created and fine-tuned it just for us,
I've got some questions. Ask God why the whole of legitimate evolutionary biology only sees
evidence of evolution. That's all we see. Common ancestry with living things both animal
and plant, verifiable down to our DNA as we decode the genome. A universe measurable at
about 13.7 billion years. Of a natural world governed by natural laws. Ask your Intelligent
Designer about some questionable design decisions that have been made, like earthquakes that
cause tsunamis that wipe out a quarter of a million people in a single day, redundant
DNA, a sun that gives off harmful UV radiation that gives people cancer, vestigial organs
and limbs, explain those. Pelvises in whales, human embryonic tales, useless insect wings,
deep-sea fish with eyeballs that cannot see...are completely blind, flightless animals with
wings, wisdom teeth. The list goes on and on and on. If fact, while you're chatting
it up with God, ask him why he bothered to give men nipples. (Always wondered about
that.) And the biggest question Id like you to
ask God on my behalf, by the way...a God who I consider to be the Hide And Seek Champion
of the Universe. why, with eternity in the balance, Heaven and Hell in the balance, here
in the year 2014 - the information age...Why has God been so ineffective at proving himself
to humanity that right now a full 2/3 of the planet either worships somebody else or
nobody at all. Why is the only instruction we have the product of anonymous primitives
who were working 1400 years before the invention of the printing press? Why would an omniscient
God, a god who knew everything, past, present and future, continue with a plan that he foreknew
would fail and result in the damnation of billions. He's omnipotent, right? He can do
anything. He could have come up with a better plan. And finally, why is God, the most powerful
being in the universe, relying on a YouTube pastor to set the rest of us straight? This
is not an ad hominem against you. This speaks to method. Its a legitimate question. If
God really cares about me, and he can talk to me the way he talks to you, why am I stuck
listening to you? Why are any of us listening to you?
Personally, I have my suspicions. I think you are a true blue Christian. I think you
are a true believer. But I also think you're enjoying the attention, and you may be more
interested in the notoriety than anything else these days. That's another reason I debated
doing this response video and giving you even more attention. Those of us who are familiar
with concepts like branding get it. The close-up camera. The beard. The ball cap.
People instantly recognize your stuff, and they are talking about you. You have effectively
moved out of obscurity and, in some places, become kind of a household name. And people
are watching your videos by the millions. But it is important to keep this stuff in
perspective. This is the internet. Cat videos have millions of views. Car crash videos have
millions of views. Water skiing squirrels. Twerking has millions of views. Giggling babies.
Elevator pranks. Friggin' Justin Bieber has millions of views. And while there is no doubt
you have tapped into this sort of lazy, hazy, casual Christian viewing public, you are
essentially preaching to an entire culture of people that thinks it's perfectly fine
that God lets 14,000 children starve to death today while he's busy helping them find their
car keys. That's your demographic, right? They've got a bible in every room of the house,
and they lug it to church every Sunday, but they have no idea what's in the thing, and
they couldn't even tell you who write the book of Genesis, arguably the most important
book ever written. And some of us simply hope that, one day,
some of those people in your audience will come to the conclusion that they have a greater
desire to know than they do to believe. They'd rather know than believe. Theyll ask questions
before they claim an answer. They'll reject faith and crave knowledge. They'll start getting
their science, not from pastors, but from actual scientists. Wouldn't that be something?
Theyll accept the hard evidence presented right in front of their faces. And theyll
start thinking for themselves instead of relying on Joshua Fuerstein to spoon-feed them these
empty calories of armchair theology in cell phone videos on the internet that contain
bogus rewards to millions of people who should already know you cant prove a negative.
Look, a god who genuinely cared about us would have already proven the positive claim. He
would have already proven that he does exist...beyond a doubt. Josh, the world is waiting. Science
is waiting...for the real burden of proof to be met.