Brad Stine Mini-Cast

The Faith An Atheist

I was in Greensboro, North Carolina. Now the reason I was in Greensboro, North Carolina over the weekend, that was Friday and Saturday was, I was performing at The Comedy Zone in Greensboro, which is a comedy club in Greensboro, North Carolina. Now, the reason I was at that comedy club is something that I’ve always tried to do for quite some time now, and those of you who watch my show and come see me know what that means, and that is that I try to affect the culture.

See, I believe that there’s a reason that you exist as a human being, and that reason that you exist as a human being is a lot more than just survival. And think about this. If you really think about this, life is really one of two perspectives. The natural view, the naturalism or supernaturalism, one of those two ideas is all that human beings have come up with in the last thousands of years that we’ve been around and have been making cave paintings or clay tablets or parchment or whatever, to make a record that we existed, we were here. And here’s how we saw the world.

And yet through all of these years, through the most Stone Age time in human history, to the most sophisticated time in human history, we’ve only come up with two actual reasons why we exist, that we believe fits the category distinction as to purpose: teleology, as they say. And that is that we are either here because we were created by a force much grander than anything we can imagine, anything we can begin to even put our minds to, created us. This is something that is so powerful. So beyond our understanding that it is supernatural.

Now, when you say the word supernatural to an atheist, to an agnostic, of course, they immediately check out because what they have decided, and this is very important because if you talk to an atheist or an agnostic about God, one of the usual things that they’ll say is I don’t believe because there’s not enough evidence. I don’t believe there’s enough evidence for me to believe about God. If you show me the evidence, I will believe in him. It’s that simple, just prove it to me he’s real and I’ll jump in. If you don’t prove to me he’s real then of course, I’m not going to because I just care about what is true.

But here’s the dilemma that the atheist has. The atheist has the same dilemma that the scientist has, who is a secular humanist scientist. And that is the scientific method around the late 1800’s, I believe, could have been up into the 1900’s, decided that for science to be considered, for something to be examined, an idea, whatever it is that you’re trying to prove in your scientific theorem, for it to be examined it must be done strictly materialistically. In other words, you can’t ever go to the supernatural to try to discover what it is We’re trying to discover.

Like what is H2O, or what is gravity, or whatever you’re trying to figure out, or the origins of humans, you always have to use a natural explanation because if you don’t, then it’s no longer science. That’s what they said. They decided that the supernatural, which human beings have believed longer than anything in our human history, that is that there is something bigger than us gods or goddesses, plants, trees, moon, star, whatever it was. They said there was something bigger that made it. It was inherent in the human at all ages at all times that there was something bigger than us. And they just had, I guess, this instinct that something was out there. There’s no reason for them to have thought that other than they don’t know what the sun is, they don’t know what the stars are.

So it’s certainly going to be very unique and intriguing to you. And if you don’t have the scientific ability to see that it’s just a gaseous glob of nuclear fusion blowing up all the time and creating light, you’re going to see a mystical thing. But that also begs the question again: why would the human be intrigued by the sun, or the moon, or the stars? Why would we even care to know why it’s there or what it’s for, or that it has some deeper meaning?

Why would we automatically, if we came from dirt… Keep this in mind, keep this in mind, whatever you believe, I don’t care. I hope there’s atheists that watch. I hope there’s agnostics that watch. Oftentimes they’re very smart people that really are seeking answers the best they can. And if they’re articulate and if they’re smart and if they’re educated and if they’re civil, we can have some wonderful conversations. I’d love for people that don’t believe like me to be here. And we can talk amongst ourselves.

That’s how truth has always been discovered. Dissenting views, coming together and clashing. So I want you guys there, but here’s the thing. If you have decided that there is nothing but the material world, then if I give you information that alludes to something outside of the material world as evidence that there’s something outside the material world, you can’t see it. Literally, you can’t see it. Not because you’re not smart. You probably are really smart. Not because you’re not educated. You’re very much very educated, but you must remember that the way you train yourself how to think is also going to confine you to certain perimeters that you cannot escape.

And if you are a materialist, if you’re a humanist, you can’t think the supernatural is even accessible or even potentially there. Thus, anything that would lead to potentially that space, you can’t see it. You’ve already eliminated that. So if you’ve already eliminated the supernatural, you can’t see it even if I’m showing it to you. Part of that is what I consider one of the most important arguments for God.

And that is meaning. Why should we find meaning in anything if we’re here by accident? So if you believe there is a supernatural entity so grand, so great, so majestic that it’s not even in the material world, it’s outside of that. And it actually made the material world. Kind of like if we would go make an aquarium or an anthill, we put it all togother, we put all the pieces together. We put all the ants in there, or the fish in there, and we create their world for them. We’re outside of that, all they know is the world that they’re in there.

That’s all they know, they see, they don’t know how they got there. They don’t know why that plants here and now it’s there. They don’t know why that scuba divers here. Now he’s on his side. They don’t know any of that stuff, but that’s how it happens because we’re controlling their world. What they don’t know is we’re there. We’re watching the whole thing. We’re watching it take place. This is kind of what God did. He made matter. He made time. He made space. He made molecules. He made the whole concept that we exist in, in the biology. He made it. So he’s not part of it. He’s something else. That’s where he lives.

Well, if I only believe in the material, I’m never going to find him because he’s not here. His fingerprints are here because he crafted the world, but he’s not part of it. He’s a spirit. He’s a mind. He’s a mind! And that’s so crucial because the words that the Bible says in the beginning was the word, which is the logos, which is ideas, thoughts. That’s who we’re talking about. That’s why he uses mathematics. That’s the language of God.

So that’s one idea. But the other one is we’re here by accident that at one point in human history, nothing exploded. And then literally nothing was there. Then suddenly it exploded. And that turned into all this kind of heat and energy. And then all of this stuff sort of cooled down and turned into globules, into stars and suns and moons and… Wyatt?

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

So what’s the difference between a star and a planet?

Are you talking about-

Well, if everything blew up, right? Why did something stay on fire, like a star? And another thing become a planet? Because if a star cools down, it disappears, right? It becomes a dwarf star and explodes or something.

Depends. So the stars, according to the Big Bang Theory, when everything blew up, for a long, long, long time the universe was a bunch of gas. And that gas just started getting closer together until eventually it became a star. Now the star, because of its fusion, was able to combine that gas and turn it into heavier things. And it’s those heavier materials that eventually become different planets, and stuff.

Oh. So they kind of fell out of the star.

Sort of, yeah. [inaudible 00:09:30] we need from the stars would explode.

Oh, okay. Okay. So there you go. So anyways, that’s how the planet, why they’re not on fire. But the reason I’m bringing that up is because if you believe in Darwinism: that we’re here by accident, then you have to believe, see, they always say, oh, you believe in that invisible man in the sky. You believe in that guy that nobody can see, right? Yeah. Whatever. But what they believe in is that they came from rocks. There was just sort of this non-biological material and it somehow came alive.

Now that’s equally ridiculous in my eye, actually more so because we actually have science now. We can actually look at inanimate objects and realize they never come alive. That’s what a Darwinist, an atheist, an intelligent double doctorate has to believe that at one point in time, inanimate dead material became biologic life and became sort of encoded with information to allow it, to sort of grow and expand and become something that even could look at itself and say, “Guess what? We’re here for no reason whatsoever.” That’s what they have to believe.

So it’s equally difficult. But I didn’t expect to talk about these ideas, but the reason I did was because life is really that simple. There’s either a purpose to life, or there is not. That’s really all there is to it. There’s either purpose to life, which means God made you an engineer, made you a mind, gave us purpose to move forward. Or there’s not. And then you’re just here to just kind of just live through life until you die and go to internal oblivion, which is nihilism and what a horrible thing to think about. But that’s what they have to believe. So I, with that long, crazy backstory that I didn’t expect to go off on, but I thought it was important to just discuss it for a second, believe that every human being has a purpose, a bigger purpose than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.

Sometimes we think, oh, that guy is really amazing because he’s a great musician, or a great actor, or a scientist. They’ve done something significant. Yeah, they have a great purpose. I’m just a regular, I’m a fry cook at Denny’s, I just work at the tire store. Hey, I’m a whatever. And we don’t think we have a purpose. Well, you do. If you exist, you have a purpose. One of your purposes in your existence, did you ever think of this, is to show that God’s here because you were made in God’s image. That you have value that you’re intrinsically valuable, that you can love somebody, that you can give empathy to somebody, that you can give care to somebody, that you can take care of another human being or something else that is in danger or is weaker than you.

That’s the beauty of God showing him self here, because again, Darwinism would never do that. All it cares about is eating those who are in danger in our harm, let’s go eat them. They’re easy to catch. There’s no purpose, no empathy, no love, no altruism. And once we start seeing that, they can’t account for it because remember the only thing that Darwinism says drives it, is survival. So there’s no reason to be altruistic. I know what they say. Well, listen, we just made this sort of this compact. That if you be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. And then we’ll all live. I have no reason to have to listen to your compact. I don’t have to agree. I can agree to it, but if I decide, no, I’m going to kill you and rape your wife because she’s mine now, there’s nothing immoral about it.

Because there’s no morals. These are just rules we made up to get by. We don’t have to follow them. Only with God do morals have value. So those are the two ideas that I think are most important to sort of study and to be hanging on to, for me, for sort of dealing with God. And that is why is there a purpose and why is there morals? Ways that and reasons that we should do anything, and those ideas simply cannot be discovered in Darwinism.