This is Why I Don't Believe in God

my name is Alex I am a graduate of philosophy and Theology and I'm a YouTuber and that's about all there is to me I'm afraid uh but I'm ready when you are if you could let me know when I've got two minutes remaining by saying two minutes that would be very helpful thank you thank you uh of course Brian and Jonathan and Sattler college and ladies and gentlemen for coming uh this is the second time that I've engaged with Jonathan publicly I'm glad to pick up where we left off we didn't quite get to the

bottom of God's existence last time I'm confident we might get there today uh I wonder it'd be quite interesting just to get a fill of the room actually how many people here are Christians is that is that the time okay well it looks like I've got my work cut out for me but that's my favorite kind of debate I think um of course this is an opening statement so I won't respond to the arguments you just heard just yet instead I want to make my own case that upon uh an honest analysis of the world

we find ourselves in it should compel us to dismiss the hypothesis of a supernatural creator I will not be asking you to look in ancient scripture nor to the beginning of the universe nor indeed down microscope instead just to your direct experience of the world and facts about the lives of people within it I will however indulge in a brief biblical recital um because I want to begin with a book with a reading from The Book of Psalms so if you could all turn to Psalm 139 unless of course you've already committed this famous passage

to memory verse 7 onwards reads where can I go from your presence or where can I flee from your spirit if I Ascend to the heavens you are there if I make my bed in the depths of the xiaol you are there if I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea even there your hands shall guide me and your right hand shall hold me fast this poem in its entirety is given by the nrsv a title the inescapable God it's a message of bold reassurance to the believer

reminding them that since God is present everywhere pervading every inch of our universe he is in the happiest sense possible inescapable but my first argument and it's going to be the first of three uh against the viability of theism flows from the demonstrable fact that this Divine consolation is seemingly not offered universally and often in fact restricted from those who want it the most I'm going to be making the claim specifically that atheism or naturalism provides a better account for three facts of our universe the first being the hiddenness of God the second being the

geographical uh statistical uh Arrangement shall we say of religious belief and the third will be the problem of gratuitous suffering and we'll see if we get time to finish it off far from being unable to escape God there is a very real contingent of non-believers and I would count myself among their number who are unable by any means to discover him who seek and do not find who knock and receive as it were no answer this strange phenomenon is known as the problem of divine hiddenness if there is a God then simply why is he

hidden from so many of us so much of the time if theism is to offer a sufficient account of reality then it must offer an account of what J.L Schellenberg has famously labeled non-resistant non-belief which he distinguishes from resistant non-belief it's sometimes said by atheist who wishes to explain the problem of divine hiddenness that people simply disbelieve through their own fault they're too stubborn they're purposefully blinding themselves to the evidence because they don't want it to be true they're not approaching the arguments on honestly with an open heart and that if they would only do

this then God would surely reveal himself such a person would be what shellenberg calls a resistant non-believer he disbelieves in some sense because he actively resists it for what it's worth I do think that such people exist I think many such people exist there are people who come to this debate with their minds already made up there are people who want it not to be true that God exists and in fact wouldn't submit to that truth even if it were true there was a recent poll run by the atheists experience YouTube channel which I know

Jonathan you're a fan of which asked if there was a God would you worship it to which an astonishing 85 percent of respondents said that they would not there are however also people who disbelieve in God not out of resistance or stubbornness or a hardened heart but rather due to sheer lack of conviction indeed many such people actively want to be convinced of God's existence and would jump at the charts of entering into a relationship with him if they thought that he did but no matter how hard they search they simply find no answer forthcoming

from the heavens and this is the non-resistant non-believer formerly then schellenberg's problem of divine hiddenness can be stated as follows premise one if there is a God he is perfectly loving something I'm pretty sure Jonathan agrees with premise two if a perfectly loving God exists non-resistant non-belief does not occur premise 3 non-resistant non-belief does occur for therefore no perfectly loving God exists and the conclusion from the first premise is that therefore there is no God a loving God like the Christian God would surely not refuse any willing person from developing a relationship with him and

so if somebody is truly non-resistant and open to receiving God's grace we should expect them to receive it thus shellenberg's assertion that if God exists then non-resistant non-belief does not exist the question then is there such a thing as non-resistant non-belief a non-resistant non-believer to which all I can really say is nice to meet you the last time I debated Jonathan a number of years ago when I was just a few months out of being a teenager I said that even if I thought even if I found Christianity to be true I still wouldn't want

to worship the god uh that it promotes I now since then have realized how irrational and self-defeating this assertion is and stand before you today as an example of a non-resistant non-believer I think it would be great if God existed I really do I would I would absolutely love to escape death I would relish being the recipient of unconditional love less selfishly I would love to be able to worship that which deserves to be worshiped I just don't think it's true now try as I might look where I can I find no response no hint

nothing I don't choose to disbelieve in God any more than I choose to disbelieve in Aliens despite how much I might want them to so when faced with a Psalm like Psalm 139 I'm overwhelmed with a sense not of beauty and consolation but envy and disappointment where can I go from your spirit where can I flee from your presence where can I go I should ask in response to find it of course you cannot know my heart you can't know if I'm truly as non-resistant as I claim but I hope that my actions here might

betray me as a Catholic child I was once an altar boy I would serve the altar of mother church every Sunday dressed in a white robe um in the time since then I have to put it mildly been looking for God I went to Catholic schools I studied philosophy and theology at a levels I made a career out of engaging with religious arguments I have explored arguments from contingency from fine-tuning from motion from mathematics from indeed from irreducible complexity and the alleged resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth it may surprise my followers online to learn that

at University I visited numerous churches on the invitation of various friends I spent hours talking with religious friends until the sun rose again if you like I spent I attended Bible groups regularly too which might surprise people as well and in fact I I still do attend such groups just recently I agreed to embark on a series of study of the wisdom literature specifically reading it again in the hopes that this time I might finally feel a divine presence seeping from between the lines I moved into a house for a year with two devoutly Christian

housemates with the express intention of seeing if the obvious truth of Christianity and theism that people like to talk about can be found in the minutia of daily life I have looked in other words in a great deal of places I read athanasius and Anselm I read Augustine and Aquinas I looked in Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena I looked at the sociological origin of religious belief in durkheim and Marx and Freud and young I looked at religious experience in William James and Rudolph also I've looked in the modern works of people like Ed

faiza and Bill Craig and Michael Murray and Richard swinburne and Alvin plantinger I've looked in poetry I've looked in the Psalms I've looked in job I've looked in Ecclesiastes I've looked in Dostoyevsky I read C.S Lewis I listened to worship music I prayed I studied the gospel I even got an actual degree in theology from a university and nothing nothing not once not nearly not ever not even briefly have I experienced anything that speaks to the existence of a God in the universe I think it's asking a lot of any atheist to seriously engage with

the religion that he does not believe is true in any circumstances but I think like I have gone above and beyond what can be reasonably expected of any atheists who wishes to entertain the god hypothesis and for my effort I have been awarded radio silence the inescapable god of the nrsp in other words is for me the invisible God or The inapproachable God the deaf distant God the best account that I can give of this experience of complete and utter Silence from deaf Heaven is that all that truly exists me is impersonal space and air

and rocks I know I know it sucks I'm sorry it's it's a shame but there's no need to cry about it and nothing more my question to Jonathan then is simple how can theism account for this lived experience how can it account in other words for non-resistant non-belief and if atheism a doesn't atheism offer a better explanation at the very least am I a non-resistant non-believer if so what offers a best account or a better account of such a condition a universe in which there is a loving God who does want to be my friend

but is for some reason refusing or hiding or toying with me or a universe without one or is there no such thing as a non-resistant non-believer which is the only remaining option do we all secretly resist in some way or other after desperately in other words trying to convince myself of God's existence for years and being left painfully unconvinced will you just submit as if to add insult to this spiritual injury that this is in some way my fault and if it is then what could I have done differently what should I be doing differently

what could I possibly have done differently given the course of my life now assume for a moment ladies and gentlemen the alternative hypothesis of naturalism of atheism and ask if it provides a good account of non-resistant non-belief and I think the answer is obvious but it does get worse yet you'll remember that my second fact that I said that I would bring up is the geographical predictability of religious belief not only does theism need to account for non-resistant non-belief but also for the fact that such belief is unequally present across the globe Stephen Mason has

pointed out that the populace of Saudi Arabia is 95 percent Muslim and therefore 95 theistic whereas the populace of Thailand is 95 Buddhist and therefore at best five percent theistic How likely you are to be a theist in other words is intimately tied to the place in which you happen to be born what can better explain this geographical spread theism or naturalism or atheism well let's consider our two competing hypotheses could it be that God does exist but that the Thai are simply naturally 20 times more likely to be resistant to belief in God than

say the Saudis are they just naturally 20 times more stubborn or something this seems implausible this doesn't seem to be their fault okay so maybe then it's not their fault and God just has some reason to hide his face disproportionately more from the tie than from Saudis or indeed from those born here in Massachusetts which uh it has a theistic according to one statistic it's 75 percent theistic if theism is true it seems to me that God has a lot to answer for here is it not troubling Jonathan for as a Christian that your place

your place of birth is a reliable statistical indicator of How likely you are to be saved I'll say that again your place of birth which is entirely arbitrary is a reliable indicator of How likely you are on Christianity to be saved you're significantly more likely to be a theist if you're born in Rwanda than if you're born in Thailand can this situation really obtain under the supervision of a God who wants to come to know us and makes his existence equally accessible to all the chances seem infinitely small now consider naturalism or atheism religion varying

by region is exactly what we would expect if it is a man-made cultural phenomenon and nothing like what we should expect if there is in fact one true God who loves all equally again I think atheism provides a much stronger account of this fact of our world finally then the third fact of our universe which is gratuitous suffering gratuitous here means something like unjustified or unwarranted or meaningless I do this because it's easy to see how some instances of suffering may be beneficial in certain circumstances or necessary to bring about some desirable State of Affairs

some desirable end but the existence of meaningless or unnecessary suffering does seem to be incompatible with the existence of a God who loves us and has the power to prevent it from happening we're sometimes told that God has morally sufficient reason to allow suffering to exist indeed if God is good then he must have such sufficient reason perhaps suffering is necessitated by human Free Will perhaps suffering helps to develop a person's moral character or maybe it's necessary to achieve some other end that God wishes to bring about but intuitively there appear to be instances of

suffering that cannot serve any such end and if even one example of these turns out to be an actual case of unnecessary or meaningless suffering this would be enough to cause a problem I want to propose something that might sound a little strange at first which is that the biggest problem for theism here is not famously the the great intense sufferings of the world like holocausts or earthquakes but rather meaning menial less significant suffering like being caught out in the rain or stubbing your toe or tripping over a curb on the street why it seems

a tad absurd I'll grant you that but consider this when we experience a great suffering like the death of a loved one or a devastating earthquake or indeed a holocaust it's easy to imagine that this might somehow be part of a grand plan the depth of our suffering may make us into better people the people who die may be experiencing a much happier State of Affairs in the afterlife now perhaps by allowing the Jewish Holocaust to take place God makes it such that we are far less likely to allow even worse projects of genocide to

occur in the future but what could possibly be served what possible end could be served what possible meaning could there be in subbing your toe or tripping over a curb or having a pigeon use your new suit as a restroom such instances are not significant they're usually forgotten within a day or two and therefore do not and cannot develop the soul nor do they seem implausibly part of some Grand Design or plan they seem that is to say meaningless and unnecessary more meaningless more meaninglessness than instances of let's say great or intense suffering much more

meaningless than these and truly meaningless unnecessary suffering is certainly more expected in a world without benevolent supervision than in a theistic paradigm a successful theodicy in other words then needs to provide not only an account of the great and intense sufferings of the world but also the menial sufferings which pervade The Human Experience now I'm actually quite surprised uh that I've made it this far without mentioning animals yet it's quite unlike me but that's a final consideration that does deserve our attention whatever the Odyssey might explain human suffering the existence of animal suffering seems infinitely

more difficult to explain animals are not free in the way that we are and so are immune to the Free Will defense they cannot morally develop in the way that we can and so are immune to Soul making theodicies they are on most accounts not going to heaven and so they will not be compensated for their suffering yet their suffering is immeasurably large somewhere right now billions of animals are suffering in the wild from predation from disease from Hunger from Fear imagine a deer with its leg caught under a Fallen Tree dying of starve confusion

it doesn't know why it's there it feels hungry that it's starving to death and it's trapped under a tree and it has no idea why what could possibly be the purpose or meaning of this I'll remind you that this is exactly exactly the kind of thing that we should expect to see if the natural world is an amoral Arena of accidentally existing organisms fighting with each other to stay alive but can we really expect this on theism should we expect this on theism what offers a better account keep in mind that in other words I'm

not arguing that theism can often know account of these kinds of situations and sufferings though I am skeptical that it can I'm only arguing that assuming that theism is false offers a better account of it than assuming that theism is true assume atheism assume that human beings and other animals are nothing more than evolved creatures who developed pain receptors to make them more prone to avoiding the menial and great sufferings that upset our survival prospects on this account the existence of all suffering small and great is not only explained but expected thus atheism offers a

better account in my view than theism of three crucial and unavoidable facts Divine hiddenness geographical religious statistics and the existence of gratuitous human and non-human suffering and I am truly excited to hear how Jonathan might account for these uh on theism in defending it as a more plausible account of our reality thank you the full conversation that the clip you just watched was taken from is available via the link that just appeared on your screen don't forget to subscribe thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one