Have the Objections of Atheism Driven People Out of the Church?

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Is it true that the objections of atheism have driven people out of the church? It's time for the Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on the Line of Fire. And now here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown.

Hey friends, Michael Brown here. So glad to be with you as we are ready to infuse you with faith and truth and courage, helping you stand strong, Lord, helping you be the healthiest you can spirit, soul and body. I won't be taking any calls today. I'm going to be diving into content in my new book, why so many Christians have left the faith responding to the deconstructionist movement with unshakable, timeless truth. We have the books in stock. That means when you pre-order your signed numbered copy, we'll be sending them out, oh, somewhere after the second week in February. But we've got the books in stock. So well ahead of the release date.

So excited to be holding this in my hand. And we want to be practical. What I did and why so many Christians have left the faith was not just tell you why, here's the problem, but also, okay, here's the solution.

Here's how we respond. Maybe you yourself are struggling. Maybe you yourself have questions and you don't know where to go with them. You know, if I tell people I have a question, what if you're a pastor, what if you're a leader? What if people look to you as a young person and you're an example, but you're struggling. You're in college, you're in grad school, you got hit with things, you're struggling with your own questions. What do you do?

Where do you go? Well, within the book, we provide lots of answers and then we give you resources to go to and then a link online with resource after resource, after resource, online resources, books and things like that to say, hey, fear not. There are answers to your questions. Whatever your questions might be about God and the Bible, there are answers. But more importantly, when we really know the Lord for ourselves, when we really have a solid walk with him.

Leonard Ravenhill used to say, a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. So when you've really experienced the Lord, it's not that you turn your mind off. It's that even when you don't get an answer to every question when it comes up, you're confident in the goodness of God, not because of ignorance, but because of reality, because of experience, because you've seen him work, because you know he's changed your life, because you know he's spoken to you and helped you. You know that there have been answers to prayer that have no rational explanation other than God himself exists and cares and is involved and answered these prayers. And then over time, you get answers to the questions. Over time, things resolve themselves. But when you've really experienced God for yourself, not just some, oh, I felt goosebumps or oh, I just, I got excited.

No, I'm talking about reality. When you've really experienced God for yourself, the questions tend to be less powerful. But maybe you've gone through a difficult time and you have questions or maybe you're doing great.

Maybe you've just one of those people that never doubts. You know, God's good. You know, the Bible is true.

How can you understand better people who struggle? As you read why so many Christians have left the faith, not only will you get answers to the problems, you get an understanding for why some struggle. And look, we know in the Bible that there is a type of unbelief, a type of doubt that is sinful.

Jacob, James, the first chapter says a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. He believes. He doesn't believe. He believes. He doesn't believe.

Jesus would rebuke his disciples for doubt. Where is your faith? How is it you're with me and you've seen who I am and what I do and you're still doubting?

You still have questions. Where is your faith? But there are other times when the doubt is, God, I want to, I don't know if you're there. I mean, I want to believe, but am I, when I'm even saying, God, are you there?

Is this real? I don't know. Jude, Judah, it says, have mercy on those who doubt. Yeah, and others snatched from the flames, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. Have mercy on those who doubt. The man with the demonized boy who was having these seizures in Mark 9, Jesus says to him that all things are possible and believes it and the man had said, Lord, if, if you're able, you know, if heal my son, Jesus said, if, what do you mean if? All things are possible and believes it. The man responds, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. It's fine to pray that if that's the condition of your heart. Why, why mask it?

Why put on a front? Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord. Then the bottom falls out. You fall away. You don't know where to go. No, let's be genuine and let our churches, let our congregations, let our small group meetings, let our relationships, our personal relationships, be safe places where people can say, I'm struggling.

I'm hurting. I don't even know if God exists. I don't even know if the Bible is true. I don't know if the particular things I believe are true. Rather, what do you mean?

The Bible says it. How about being secure enough to say, hey, we'll work that out. We'll work it out. You know, you raised some great questions.

I never thought about it. Let's find the answers together because the answers are there. So what I want to do is open up today one particular chapter in the book. The book has 11 chapters overall. I've been through some of the contents over these days, but it is a chapter two.

So chapter one, there really is a problem. I talk about prominent Christian leaders, Josh Harris and others that that have fallen away from the faith and no longer believe the gospel as they once did, no longer believe some in the existence of God, others no longer believe that the Bible is true, others no longer believe a particular form of Christianity is real, but the problem is undeniable. Is it the last days of possible? Jesus said that many will fall away. Well, people have been falling away through history. And even if there is a final falling away, who's to say that we're in that exact time period and the Bible not only speaks of end time falling away, but of end time outpouring, glorious outpour, as we've talked about many times on the show.

But there really is a problem. Let's not deny it. And then chapter two, atheist, agnostics, and the trickle-down effect. That's chapter two in the book, atheist, agnostics, and the trickle-down effect. So obviously reading the book you get a lot more depth, a lot more information, a lot more quotes, a lot more sources, but I want to make this as edifying and helpful for everyone.

For those who haven't read the book yet or aren't going to read the book, I want this to be as edifying as possible. So it was, oh, 16, 17 years ago, really around 2006, that suddenly a number of atheist books became national bestsellers. Richard Dawkins, the scientist, the biologist in England, his book, The God Delusion, became a New York Times bestseller and stayed there for month after month after month. It was top selling book in the religion category as a book bashing religion. Christopher Hitchens now departed, but another British intellectual hitting it from a different angle.

God is not great. Sam Harris, an American philosopher, and again, I'm not giving you the exact descriptions of who they are. His book, The End of Faith, and thinking about after 9-11 attacks in 2001 and the danger of religious fundamentalism and his book, Daniel Dennett, these first four were called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, these four atheists who were raising serious objections to the faith, and there was even what was called the Year of the Atheist back around that time. And it got my attention. I thought, okay, I should read some of these books.

I don't specialize in this. I never came out of atheism. My wife Nancy did and she's really sensitized me over the decades to the mindset of an atheist and how an atheist sees the world and things like that. But it was something I majored on. I mean, obviously I've majored on Jewish apologetics over the years and biblical questions and those kinds of things and as the years have gone on, culture wars, etc. But I'm not a specialist in dealing with atheists and to this day, I'm not a specialist in dealing with atheists. There are others that can do a much better job than I can do in terms of atheist apologetics. But I thought I should be reading some of these books. I should be understanding some of these objections and seeing where people are coming from because it's out there.

All right. Now, here's what happened over a period of time. No, not everyone read those books. Millions of people did, but most Americans did not read the books, right? If there's 330 million Americans, let's say 5 million people read those books.

I mean, whatever, it's still a small number of Americans total. However, the ideas get out. The mindset gets out. And what's happened in the chapter, I talk about the trickle-down effect. So what's taken place is that over time, the objections, the memes, the quotes, the sayings, they have trickled their way down to the larger society, not just in a classroom setting where you're going to have a teacher teaching about biology and evolution and therefore the Bible is not true. Not just a setting like that, not just a college or university setting where you may have a skeptical professor mocking the religious fundamentalists and things like that.

Those things have been around for ages. No, we're talking more specifically that objections raised in these books, mocking quotes, strong accusations, just trickled their way down into the larger culture. So that Josh McDowell, famous topologist Josh McDowell said this publicly and privately to me, that the objections that he encountered in his thousands of times on college campuses over the years, the objections he encountered from college-age students, he's now encountering from 12 and 13-year-olds. And this Josh McDowell has been saying for years, it could be even younger kids now. In other words, they don't have the intellectual ability to process things, say the way a 20-year-old does. They don't have the philosophical underpinnings. They don't have the life experience.

This is just trickling down to them. And now you quote the Bible, that's just some Bronze Age book, you know, or they might even not even know what the word means. You know, the God of the Bible is misogynistic, you know, or he's just a bad, he's a bully. He's a hater.

He's a bully. So this has trickled its way down and made its way into the church, especially with the younger generation. And when we just get up and says, well, I'm going to say the Bible says, you know, my friend Darryl Bach, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, said for years that we used to be able to say it's true because it's in the Bible. Because quoting the Bible carried authority to people.

Now we have to say it's in the Bible because it's true. You know, when you're talking to someone in the world who doesn't understand. So there's already a wallop. There's already opposition. The idea of God is viewed with more hostility, perhaps than in any time prior in American history. So we need to understand this and then we need to know how to respond.

So that's what I want to get into more in the broadcast. So let me tell you how you can get a signed, numbered copy. This is only through our ministry. Every dime that comes in of prophets goes right back out into ministry work. And I love letting you get resources through our ministry.

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ASK, as in Ask Dr. Brown. So one more time, 800-538-5275. So this is a signed, numbered copy. We only do this with the first edition. It makes it kind of a collector's item and I sign it myself. To you, you think of the right scripture verse for everyone, put that verse reference in and then sign it. Yep, my hand, my pen, to say, hey, let's dig into this together. So we're going to dig deeper when we come back.

Signed, numbered copy for yourself. So in the book, I note that Sam Harris' book, The End of Faith, came out in 2004. Again, that was prompted by the horrors of 9-11 and the horrors of religious fundamentalism, specifically Islamic.

But that was time for Sam Harris to say, look, this whole religion thing, this fundamentalist religion is dangerous and destructive. So it was then 2006. That's why I said that was the big year when things really started to shift in terms of more and more objections of the atheists rising. So that was when Daniel Dennett published his book. That's when Christopher, excuse me, Richard Dawkins published his book.

2007 was Christopher Hitchens. So all within just a few years. So here's what I mentioned in the book. Harris' book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks. They were called the Four Horsemen of New Atheism.

I call them Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. So Harris' book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks. Dennett's volume stirred up a firestorm of criticism and reaction. By 2010, Dawkins reported sales of more than two million books, while in 2016 he claimed the number had surpassed three million. Not to be outdone, the book by Hitchens was published on May 1st 2007 and within a week had reached number two on the Amazon bestsellers list behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in its third week. So here are the full titles of the book. Sam Harris, The End of Faith, Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell. Oh, Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The God Delusion. That's it. That was Dawkins.

No subtitle. And Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything. This is what Harris said. Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths. This leaves billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. So in other words, you have to be crazy to be a deeply religious person. Daniel Dennett wrote this.

There's simply no polite way to tell people they've dedicated their lives to an illusion. I'm going to quote now Richard Dawkins. Now remember friends, this stuff is being widely read, ultimately by millions of people back then. The ideas filter down, but now the quotes filter down. Now the memes filter down.

Now people grab hold of them. Hey look, you're already in an environment where you're 14 years old. Your best friend is gay. Your other good friend just came out as trans. From what you know, the church hates gay and trans people. The church says they're the worst people of all.

They're abominations. That's what you know, right? That's what you think. That's your perception, all right? You're bombarded by worldly songs, worldly mindset, worldly attitudes, many of them hostile to God, right?

And, you know, maybe your favorite singer, you know, some hip-hop singer and she's got the most sensual videos. Oh, the church says I shouldn't be enjoying them. So the church is bad. Church is bad. As for God, all this people believe in who just ignorant.

So you already have this preconception. God is bad. The church is bad instead of growing up in an environment where you have a healthy respect quote for religion, you know, where even if you're a non-believer, you don't speak against God or against the Bible because there's certain reverence for spiritual things. No, it's become the opposite and mulch of the culture, right?

And these memes filtering down now that they're all the more powerful. Are you understanding some of this? Why people have left the church over this?

Why questions have arisen and they haven't found answers. So Dawkins said this, faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. Christopher Hitchens said this, gullibility and credibility are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life except religion.

Why are we praised by godly men for surrender a quote Godly gift of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? And this quote from Dawkins that's that's become famous. Dawkins said the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.

Jealous and proud of it, a petty unjust unforgiving control freak, a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic homophobic racist infanticidal genocidal philicidal pestilential megalomaniacal sadomasochistic capriciously malevolent bully. Yeah, that's a mouthful. It's a famous quote from Dawkins. And Dan Barker, former evangelical, now aggressive atheist, published a book following on this called God, the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Hitchens said we keep on being told that religion, whether it's ever its perfections, at least instills morality.

And every side there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid. All right, so you're you're getting the feel, right? This aggressive assault, it may not have hit you, but it probably has hit someone you love or someone you know or colleague or coworker or someone who used to be in your church.

So what do you do? Think of this. You've been praying for the healing of a loved one, really believing that God's going to do it. You pray, you fast, you feel sure it's going to happen.

The person dies. Your faith is in shambles. What about the promises of God?

What about the goodness of God? And and now you start hearing these quotes and come on. It's not real.

He's not real. Come to grips with the fact that it's not true. You get a hit with this at a weak, vulnerable moment. It can be very, very challenging. Or what if you get married in the Lord, right? So you're a young lady, love the Lord, meet your husband. He loves the Lord. And over a number of years, you know, you honor God, you seek to have a blessed relationship, and he just starts to stray. And he wants nothing to do with you. And he starts committing adultery.

And next thing you know, he's out the door and he wants to divorce. And like, Lord, I prayed for years that you'd give me the right man. And I fought so hard for this marriage. And I've been pure and I've honored you. I've obviously not been perfect, but I've sought to honor you.

And now, now he's gone. And I thought you brought us together and I know he has free will, but okay, so you're struggling, you're hurting, and now you start getting objections to the goodness of God and questions about his existence or whether the Bible is really true, or you lose a child in a tragic car accident. You say, well, God, you said, look, Psalm 91, we have that on the wall in our house and that you protect your people. And we know it's an imperfect world and there's suffering and pain in this world. But Lord, that we dedicated to you out of the womb.

And Lord, how could this be? So in the midst of struggle, or maybe you're just battling sin in your own life. You got a porn addiction.

You're 30 years old with a porn addiction. You're male and you're trying to get free and you can't get free. And you battle and you rebuke the devil and you get counseling and this and that. It's like, and then you feel condemned all the time. Well, of course, you can't get free because there's no God to set you free. Of course, there's no blood of Jesus to cleanse you.

What do you do? Whatever the situation is, or just you're going to be a science professor and you're in advanced biology classes and things and every professor you have is an atheist. It's a massively disproportionate number of atheists as biology professors compared to many other professorial positions and, of course, compared to the general public. And look, they're brilliant. They're smarter than I am. They've studied this longer than I have. Well, we're saying we came from monkeys, ha ha ha. It's like, come on, they have answers to all those things. Just being primitive. You're being ignorant.

Everybody knows that there's solid answers in evolution and Darwinian evolution is a fact, not a theory. And you get hit with this and it's very easy to struggle. Okay, now let's add this factor in. You once had a really solid relationship with the Lord, but because of the pressures of life or the the rigors of study or demands of the job or just your own spiritual laziness, you don't really spend much time with God anymore. So that that beautiful fellowship that used to be there isn't there. That intimacy with God and seeing prayers answered, that's not there. And it's more of an intellectual knowledge of the faith. Now you're in those biology classes getting hit. Or now you're in a liberal seminary with these brilliant scholars who've memorized much of the Bible in Hebrew and Greek. And, you know, you come with your little apologetics book or your apologetics Bible and they kind of snivel out like, come on.

And they're starting to hit you with all these objections and your own relationship with God's not that strong. You see all these different scenarios. It's ripe ground for people to fall away.

Ripe ground, fertile ground, easy for people to fall away. So what I want to do is spend the rest of today's broadcast. I want to spend the rest of today's broadcast opening up some of the solutions that we present. Some of the answers that we present in Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith. Again, I can only give you some of what's in the book because to read through the whole book on the air would take many, many, many hours.

So the content is rich. But listen, this is for you to build up your own faith, to strengthen you, to help you, to help you be spiritually healthy in terms of understanding these objections and how to help people struggling. This is for people who are struggling or maybe for those who've walked away from the Lord, but they still remain open to hear. In other words, they haven't shut you out entirely. It's like, hey, would you read something? Yeah, I'll read it. The moment they pick this up, they'll realize, okay, this guy is writing with sensitivity.

And this guy understands what the issues are. I'm not saying, how could you be so foolish to not believe in God? Only the fool does not believe in God. No, we don't berate people.

We don't berate people. Try to reach them where they are. So this will fortify you, help you. You're in youth ministry, you're a pastor, you're a parent. You'll really get the information that will strengthen you to strengthen others or at least get more understanding and compassion to help people where they are. And those struggling, if you're one of those struggling, maybe you've walked away. I know many people that listen to this broadcast and not believers. Check the book out.

I think you'll find it helpful. Again, go to AskDrBrown.org Just click on store to order your sign and number. Copy or call 1-800-538-5275 Get used to the new number 800-538-5275 I've laid out the problem that's digging for the solutions. This is how we rise up. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the line of fire by calling 86634TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back friends to the Line of Fire broadcast. Michael Brown delighted to be with you as we talk about why so many Christians have left the faith, how we respond to the deconstructionist movement with love and with truth.

Okay, I said I want to get right into solutions, but one more thing I need to say. In the chapter, I also deal with Bart Ehrman, who is a former evangelical who became agnostic slash atheist, who's written best-selling books, attacking the veracity of the reliability of the New Testament in particular. And I started reading his material as well.

And what struck me was this. He's a respected New Testament scholar here in North Carolina, respected New Testament scholar and textural critic. In other words, someone studying the earliest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and that. So a respected scholar in his own right. And when he wrote his first book, a popular book for the general public, neither he nor his publisher had any thought that it would become a national bestseller. I mean, I talk with them face to face about this.

There was not the slightest thought about this. I mean, why is it New Testament scholar and he's talking about the untrustworthiness of the Gospels and the New Testament, et cetera. And suddenly the books take off to everybody's shock. And then he wrote one after another that they all took off. Well, he continued his academic work on another level, but it was kind of what he did in college.

He'd have a big, big class, you know, New Testament survey, maybe a class that you could take on the way to your other degrees. And he just started off by saying, pointing out alleged contradictions in the Gospels. And before you know it, people's faith is shaking. Trust me, I lived through that. I started hearing objections from the rabbis when I was a brand new believer.

Literally brand new. Just weeks old in the Lord. And then, and then I went to secular college and university. So I was always being challenged by people who didn't believe what I believed. Always. And they always knew for a time more than I knew and were, you know, who am I to argue with them?

Right? So Bart Ehrman stuff started to trickle down quickly. And the problem was this.

All the things he was raising, those of us in biblical scholarship, we're always familiar with. And there are answers to them. But the general public is getting hit for the first time. What? We're not sure about this?

What? I never noticed that contradiction. My Bible's not trustworthy. And a lot of pastors, I mean, they're there, many of them well-trained in Bible theology, et cetera. But they're, they're more there to help the flock and minister grace in life. And they're not there primarily as apologists. So a lot of these questions were coming in and people are getting hit. And the general public, the general Christian public wasn't ready to respond to these. Well, we got plenty of answers on the academic side. The difference was our books weren't becoming best-selling books like Dr. Ehrman's books.

Right? You follow? So his books took off and the books responding to him, they got readers, but many less. This is another of the things that we cover in the chapter about the atheist agnostic effect and how it's trickled down in the body.

So quick anecdote. I'm looking at some of the atheist books, the Bart Ehrman books, and I get this sense. I'm supposed to debate Bart Ehrman.

I just have this sense. I'm supposed to debate Bart Ehrman. Literally a few days after that, I hear from a professor, law professor at Ohio State University, Messianic Jewish Rabbi Elliot Klayman.

And he said, Dr. Brown, we'd like to host a debate here at Ohio State with you and Bart Ehrman. Are you willing? I said, I'm in, man. Of course I'm in.

Already had a sense from the Lord that I was to do it. I mean, just days before I was looking at some of his books, the atheist section I had on my shelf. And yeah, I'm supposed to debate Bart Ehrman. So I said, how about we do this? You wrote a book, God's Problem, claiming that the Bible does not provide an adequate answer to the problem of human suffering. And how about we debate that? Because I'm not a New Testament specialist. In other words, there are New Testament scholars who do a better job from an academic viewpoint of debating these things than I will. But I do know the Bible and especially Old Testament issues and Job you want to raise.

Yeah, you specialize in those things. So I said, how about we debate your book and ask the question, does the Bible provide an adequate answer to the problem of suffering? You watch that debate either on our home page, AskDirectorBrown.org, or over on our YouTube channel, Ask Director Brown, just type in Ehrman Brown, E-H-R-M-A-N. You can watch the whole debate. You'll notice I was quite a bit bigger physically back then. Packed house, maybe 450 people filled the event at Ohio State.

And then it was live streamed as well. After the debate, one couple came up to me, older couple, they said, if you had only spoken here when our daughter was in college, she'd still be in the faith because she heard objections and didn't get answers. I guess she didn't know the groups on campus that could help her, but just felt that she could have heard someone else equally intellectual, equally knowing the scriptures, equally knowing ancient languages, et cetera, that and heard the answer she would have been strong. And then some atheists came up to my table afterwards as I was meeting people and signing books. Dr. Ehrman was his table. I was at mine. And they said, you know, we agree with with his objections, but we really appreciate your spirit and you could tell it was coming from a point of real love. Ah, so there was something going on that they could sense as well. All right, so let's start back with some of the objections to Professor Ehrman.

Let's ask the big question. Is the New Testament reliable? Does just the text itself, it's not even here with the contents, but the text itself, is it reliable? I could get into massive detail here, but we can safely say that out of all the books and compilations of books in the ancient world, the New Testament is far and away the best preserved. We can say that unequivocally, meaning that the earliest manuscripts we have from when the events take place are the earliest detested from any of the major works in the ancient Greek world. And then the amount of manuscript evidence and then the amount of manuscript evidence in different languages. So when the Greeks being translated this way, you can check it against the original is better than anything we have for any ancient book in the ancient Greek world or just any ancient book that's been preserved or compilation of books. The New Testament is the best preserved with the earliest attested manuscripts that can be said unequivocally.

Now someone might say, whoa, hang on, hang on, hang on one second. There are thousands of Greek manuscripts. Most of them are not from their earliest time. Yeah, we understand that, of course. The thousands of Greek manuscripts and out of the thousands and thousands, there are hundreds of thousands of variations.

Yeah, exactly. This is what you call textual criticism because you have lots of people making copies and they're not all professional scribes and even professional scribes make errors. So when you have so many, you compare them. You know, just before when I was reading from my book, but not the physical print copy because it's just easier for me to read on my computer screen, I noticed that the quote I was reading, I said Hitchen instead of Hitchens. All right, I will carefully proof one of my articles and then I send it out and my assistant will then shoot me a note right afterwards, typo here or these words got switched here. That's human error.

You can immediately fix it because it's evident. Well, when you have thousands of manuscripts to compare, you can very, very easily say, oh, here's the error, here's the original. The other thing, the vast majority of the quote contradictions are super minor.

I mean the vast majority. It would be like a comma versus a semicolon. Or you spell Dr. DR or you spell Dr. DR dot or you spell Dr. D-O-C-T-O-R. I'm talking about really, really minor variations that change nothing whatsoever. What you have is this embarrassment of riches of manuscripts. And this is an actual science called textual criticism. It's not being critical.

It's sifting through these. And you know who the, normally the world's foremost textual critics often are? They're evangelicals. They're believers because they love the word. They love the text. So when I sit down with all my years in the Lord, 51 plus years in the Lord with my PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. So it's just my own background right through that lens. And having interacted with scholars and skeptics and rabbis and critics for decades, literally for over 50 years, often continuously, often not a week goes by, sometimes not a day goes by when I'm not interacting with people from these backgrounds.

Okay? Often writing on these things. I pick up my English Bible. I pick up my English New Testament and I read it as God's Word.

I read it knowing that it is God's Word speaking to me, that it has been reliably preserved, that when it tells me Jesus said something, or Paul was here or there, I read it as absolutely true. And I know there's going to be a footnote here and there. There's meaning of the Greek uncertain, or some manuscripts say this, some manuscripts say that. Yeah, I know that because it's been so abundantly preserved and we don't have the physical original copies. We understand that. And in that environment, that ancient world even have as much as we have preserved this incredible, even like the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Old Testament, that was providential and amazing because otherwise that climate and writing on scrolls, things are just not going to be preserved as opposed to being written in a rock, you know, used in a rock or something like that.

Like you have some of the ancient Akkadian inscriptions and things like that. So I read it with absolute confidence. Dr. Brown, with everything you know, yeah, I'm not the world's greatest scholar, but with everything I know, I read it with absolute confidence. Therefore, you can be confident. And where there are questions, we have answers to the questions and where we're not quite sure where this account might go, you know, we have it in one or two places, or whether this verse is authentic in the original, it doesn't change anything. In other words, it still makes good sense.

It still works. It doesn't affect fundamental doctrines, which are laid out clearly everywhere else. You can read it with confidence. And if you read two, three, four, five different English translations, compare them. Wow.

Okay, getting this overall message is clear. When it comes to the Old Testament. Yes, we have abundant attestation. It is true that the oldest copy that we have of the complete Hebrew Bible is, is a good thousand years after, a good thousand years after the copies from the Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that. All right, I'm not going to give you the technical names of the manuscripts and things like that. However, what's fascinating is that in many cases you have letter for letter. You have word for word.

Overwhelmingly word for word, sometimes letter for letter. The exact same thing in the Hebrew Bible from say a thousand years ago, as in parts of that Hebrew Bible from a thousand years or 1200 years prior to that. Because in this case you had Jewish scribes copying things out meticulously. And many of the errors that we have are when people who weren't professional scribes, just writing more freely or with different spelling. And then it is true you have different textual traditions and sometimes you have variants, but it's the exact same thing.

No fundamental issues of doctrine are affected. Nothing that affects who God is, what redemption is, what pleases him, all that straightforward. And rather looking at this as a negative that you got a footnote, an alternate here, alternate there. It's saying this is how much has been preserved for us. So yes, there are textual questions. That's what textual scholars deal with.

Yes, there are questions about exact meanings of words and things like that. Hey, look, we read something in English together today and we debate exactly what it means. You hear somebody preach and you debate exactly what it means. So it's natural that's going to happen in Scripture. But I'm just telling you and I give you a lot of data, faith building, encouraging data in why so many Christians have left the faith. I'm telling you that from my perspective, in the perspective of the world of believing biblical scholarship, you can rest assured, God has preserved his word for us. And when you're reading it, you can translate, you can say, this is God.

This is the Word, and I'm blessed. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for joining us, friends on the Line of Fire. I'm about to give a few more answers, responses, just some gleanings from my book, Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith. Some of the objections of atheists and some that are scientific, and again, I'm not responding as a scientist.

That's not my area of specialization, but I can read what other specialists have said and share that with you. So one of the wonders is the way God made the body, right? And the little I know, the more I study, it's like, you gotta be kidding me. And the more I learn about the impossibility of getting from here to here with just the standard evolutionary process, or even just the making of the cell. How'd that happen? The manufacturing of life.

How'd that happen without a creator? So we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Just want to give a shout out to our partner TriVita, helping you live out wellness with a purpose and helping us bring you this very broadcast today. Remember 100% of your first order is turned around by TriVita, not minus shipping minus profit, but no, no, no.

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Everything starts with diet lifestyle, but these supplements can really enhance the quality of your life as well. So call 1-800-771-5584. It's not for the book, but this is our friends at TriVita. To place your order, 800-771-5584 or go online TriVita.com. Use the code Brown, capital B, Brown25 to get a 25% discount on your first order. And remember, whatever comes in, if you enjoy the products, nitric oxide that I use, Nopalea, MyoHealth, these different products I've really been blessed by, then in the future as you order at least a tithe, a tithe or more will be donated back in an ongoing way.

But 100% of your first order, 800-771-5584. Okay, so let's get back to this issue of thinking through responses to atheism. Let's, and I just want to scroll down a bit more. Yeah, I have a section in the book called the failure of the new atheism. The failure of the new atheism.

There's an article in the Psychology Today website. It called out Richard Dawkins for being inconsistent on the question of free will. So this was an atheist actually attacking an atheist. The article was written by philosophy professor Tamler Summers and was titled can an atheist believe in free will?

And Summers, I believe Summers is an atheist, you can confirm that, made reference to a five minute video accusing Richard Dawkins of being inconsistent and holding that belief in free will and moral responsibility is justified, but that belief in God is unjustified. So Summers explained in response to a questioner, Dawkins concedes that if you take a deterministic or mechanistic view of the universe, in other words, it's just set in motion, because there is no God, because there is is no, you know, luck or something like that. There is no guiding force. There are no mysterious outside force. It just, things just happen.

Things just happen. And they happen because they're set in motion. In other words, to be mechanistic or deterministic would be this.

You push a rock off the side of the mountain and based on the size of that rock, based on the condition of the rocks and soil that's hitting on the way down, based on how far it's going, based on wind and the temperature and all the other factors, there's only one possible outcome. In other words, it will always inevitably, if you knew every factor, go boom, and land at a certain spot or trigger other rocks falling. That's just the way it would be a hundred times out of a hundred. Right, just like if you're flipping a coin. If you knew every aspect of the weight of that coin, of the strength of the flip, of, you measure exactly how high it's going to go, what type of table it's hitting or the floor that it's in, what the distance is, you would know.

You'd be able to calculate a hundred times out of a hundred if it's going to land head or tails. Because there's nothing random about it. It's only random because we don't know. Right, if you are deterministic, mechanistic, there is no God, there are no outside forces guiding things.

There is no spirit realm, spirit world, right? Then it's, if you knew all that, it's a hundred percent, it's going to go a certain way. Well, it's the same with us as human beings. That free will, according to a consistent, hardcore atheist, is an illusion. We may think we're making choices, but the choices we're making were predetermined by our nature. All right, so let me give you an example from this atheist mindset.

Not every atheist holds to this, of course, but from this atheist mindset. And think of it like this. Okay, you're a parent, you have a child. You know that you can get a certain reaction from that child by creating certain circumstances around them. They will respond a certain way, right? You know that your spouse is terrified of spiders.

And all you have to do is have a fake spider on the floor, put it a certain place in the bathroom, and you're going to hear a shriek. You know it, right? It's, okay, so the same way the thought would be that we think we're making choices. I thought this through, this is what I'm gonna, but it's just inevitable we're gonna go a certain way because that's the way we're made. And there is no spirit. If you're an atheist, there is no spirit. There is no spiritual realm.

There is no part of your being that continues to exist after you die. You die, it's over. It's your life, and there is no more you. End of subject. No more you. Period. The end. As Nancy likes to say.

In other words, emphatic. So, Dawkins concedes that if you take a deterministic or mechanistic view of the universe, it seems absurd to think we have free will and that we can go around blaming criminals and praising distinguished authors. The whole idea of blaming praise seems to go out the window. It's like someone blaming his car for not running properly. And since there's likely no one alive who takes a more mechanistic view of human behavior than Dawkins, he should stop going around affirming free will and blaming and praising people.

You got the argument, right? So, I'm just pointing out where atheism leads, the inevitability of where atheism leads, and then to the core of our being, we know this can't be true because we are making choices and the emotions are real and the experiences are real. And the saying no to this and yes to this is real.

And not to mention the experience of God in our lives. And the way that he's worked and overruled and said, God help me, I'm weak, and he's come down and helped. So, how can you blame Hitler for being Hitler if that's the only thing Hitler could ever do, being the biological product of his parents and them being the biological product of their parents?

In other words, just like the rock falling down the side of the mountain or the coin flip, it's always gonna go a certain way. How do you blame him? Well, he should have done differently based on what?

Based on what? Fear of God, there is no God. Compassion for other human beings. Well, why are we supposed to have compassion for other human beings? It's the survival of the fittest. Isn't that the very evolutionary process? Now, you may be listening as an atheist to say, ah, Brown, you're misrepresenting this.

I'm just discussing this discussion between atheists and fleshing things out to see where they go. Oh, she's a lovely lady, oh, she's generous. Well, isn't that lovely?

That's just what she does. Do you praise me for being taller than a jockey? Do you fault me for being shorter than an NBA basketball center? Oh, this is just the way I am.

I can't make myself taller or shorter. This is just the way I am. It's not to be praised, it's not to be criticized, right?

I didn't do it, it's just I am this, right? So how can you praise or criticize human behavior when it's inevitable that humans do what they do? That's just what they do. Their biological DNA programming has set things in motion and it's just gonna happen a certain way. So when asked, when Dawkins is asked why he doesn't stop blaming and praising, he says first that it seems to us that we have free will. Oh, so because it seems to us that we have free will is just go along with the illusion.

Actually, we don't have free will, but it seems like we do. So we should respond to that. And second, that life would be intolerable if we believed otherwise. This is how Summers says that Professor Dawkins responds when he's asked these questions, right? Why are you blaming and praising if human behavior is just determined, is predetermined by our very nature?

Why do you praise or blame anybody? So Summers says let's grant Dawkins those claims. Dawkins concludes that, quote, this is an inconsistency we have to live with. The brilliant Richard Dawkins. This is an inconsistency we have to live with. And so we may continue to believe in free will and moral responsibility and blame and praise people accordingly. In his defense, Summers says he does seem slightly uncomfortable about the tension.

Professor J.D. Greer says if all we are is biology and chemistry, then our behavior in any situation is solely due to what our genes and chemicals in us compel us to choose. Even when we think we're acting freely, it's only because some chemical construct in our mind pushes us to act that way because there is no us behind it at all. There is only our flesh.

Daniel Dennett said this. What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it's all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons. In other words, when you think and reflect, okay, my consciousness is just digging deep.

It's actually an illusion. So unless you wanna believe that free will is an illusion, unless you wanna believe that actually the choices that you think you're making have been predetermined when you're in the womb just by your biology and DNA, unless you wanna say that the very real things that you experience is human consciousness and the walk you've had with God and the experiences you've had with God and the things you've seen, unless you wanna say it's all an illusion, in which case, what is life? What is life? Why even have a relationship? Why love? Why stand? Why do what's right?

What is life itself? Why even care about morality? Unless you wanna say this is it, and when we're gone, we're gone, it's over, and there's nothing more. Unless that's your heart and that's your conclusion, friend. Atheism doesn't deliver. The fact is, atheism is a myth. God remains true, and if you'll call on him and pursue him, he will never, ever tell you anything. Another program powered by the Truth Network.