Is Atheism Dying?

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. Now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown.

Thank you for watching. My name is Michael Brown, and I'm the host of Truth Network Podcast. I've been in the studio for a long time, and it's been a highlight of atheism, how this was on the decline.

So, it's really interesting to look at this picture, and here's what I find really interesting that Justin himself has done. I met with him, I think, on two occasions, at least two for sure, and then did maybe another, I don't know, three, four shows, maybe a half dozen shows total. Other guests were on many more times than that, but it was an amazing discussion show. The format was terrific, and it was on premier broadcast in UK, and UK does not have Christian broadcasting, secular broadcasting. This is kind of broadcasting, so there's a lot of mix in terms of what people listen to, and the format was terrific. He would, Justin would have guests on, and you get to talk somewhat freely, all right?

You get to talk for a few minutes as an atheist, as Richard Dawkins or someone else, explaining why you don't believe in the existence of God, why it's silly to believe that a God exists, and maybe you talk for five minutes and give your views. Well, now the person on the other side gets to respond, and then Justin would go back and forth and moderate. Let's see, I think the most recent discussion that we had was with Doug Wilson, Christian brother Doug Wilson, The Gifts of the Spirit, whether they continue to this day, Justin hosted that.

He's only recently stepped down from doing the unbelievable broadcast. And then, let's see, in studio, a recent trip to England a few years ago, I sat with Reformed Rabbi Jonathan Romain, talking about Messianic prophecy and his Jesus the prophesied Messiah. Some years earlier, I sat in studio with my dear friend Rabbi Shmuley, and we debated whether Jesus was the Messiah there. I've done other broadcasts, some interacting with him with atheists, and some with folks about other doctrines. Did he host one with James White and me?

I forget. Calvinism, Arminianism, but different discussions, miracles today, do they exist? And again, what I loved about the show was it was an informal debate, but you really got to interact. You really got to express yourself and lay out issues. So, Justin, after all these years, maybe sitting and doing more interviews with atheists, non-believers, agnostics, people of other religious faiths, than any Christian leader I can think of in our generation, his faith is stronger than ever. The book comes out in September, and hopefully we will be able to connect with him directly and get him on the air to talk about this. I got a bunch of questions I want to ask him. We just have been unable to reach him at his number for some time now. Spoke with him a little earlier, he was already, and somehow can't get through with him.

So, we'll see if we get to him. But, what I want to say is this, and I think this is so important for all of us to hear. Young people, old people, please let me share with you candidly, and to whatever degree you can respect the fact that I've been in the Lord now over 51 years. In other words, I'm not just coming at this for the first time.

It's not that I'm wet behind the ears and I've never heard an objection. It's not that I've never been in a hostile environment. It's not that I've never gone through a difficult situation or lost someone close to us that we prayed for or never gone through any suffering in this world.

Like other people living this long, 68 years old, you see a lot. And in the Lord's 51 years, you experience a lot. And, in many, many, many cases, what I've seen and experienced has been difficult, negative, and yet, my faith is stronger, not weaker today. My confidence in God is stronger, not weaker. And what I want to say to you before we bring Justin on is that we don't have to fear the objections.

We don't have to fear the questions because we are on the side of truth. All right, without further ado, Justin, so good to have you as a guest on my show. Welcome to the broadcast. Thank you so much, Michael.

It's an absolute pleasure to be with you. So, let me ask you, how is it that the unbelievable broadcast started? Where did you come up with the idea, the format?

Was that from you or from the station? It was actually me who first proposed it, and one of the reasons was that I thought we were doing a good job as a Christian radio station at the time in London, speaking to other Christians about Christian things, but the fact is, in the UK, you know, you live cheek-by-jowl with people who don't share your faith, and I felt there was space in our schedule for having something which modeled good conversations between Christians and non-Christians. That was really how Unbelievable was born, 17 and a half years ago, and I really enjoyed all the time I spent there hosting those conversations, sometimes between quite prominent atheists and Christian thinkers, and showing, just as you were saying there, that actually the truth can stand on its own two feet, and that we don't need to be scared of asking questions and looking for answers. Justin, obviously you'd have to go back to your records to remember everybody, but who would be some of the best-known atheist agnostics that you interviewed over the years? Well, some of the key figures from the New Atheism are probably some of the best-known. Richard Dawkins is probably the pre-eminent example. He's a British biologist, but best known probably by most people as sort of one of the chief architects of the so-called New Atheism. He wrote a best-selling book called The God Delusion that came out back in, I think, 2005, and really, he was at the fourth movement that was saying religion is just a fairy tale, science has disproved God, and I had him on the show a couple of times over the years, probably most recently to debate science and faith, and so it's been really interesting to have that kind of opportunity to discuss and debate with one of the best-known atheists in the world. But another good example would be Daniel Bennett, who's an atheist philosopher, someone who claims that ultimately our consciousness is purely a product of physical forces, and he thinks he's kind of, you know, unwoven the spell of religion, that was the name of one of his books. So again, I was able to host a debate between him and a Christian philosopher looking at the mind and consciousness and whether we have a soul.

Those are just some of the memorable moments that stick out. And what about Bible scholars that did not share our beliefs, people that would have a critical view of Scripture or, quote, progressive beliefs? Who are some of the most prominent ones that come to mind? Well, probably the most prominent one is Bart Ehrman, who people may know as a critical scholar of the Bible, someone who himself lost his faith, actually. And to that extent, he's written a number of very popular books, questioning the historicity of the Gospels, questioning their transmission.

Bart himself is actually a very pleasant person to sit down with, he's very genial, he actually comes over to the UK fairly frequently because he has family here. So he's been in my studio plenty of times and we've had some really great debates between him and Christian Bible scholars where actually they really go toe-to-toe on the intellectual case that is the historicity of the Bible. And I'm always impressed by the fact that he's been open to coming on and having those kinds of discussions, not everyone would be open to doing that. But also, actually, again, I've found that the Christian story and the historicity of the Gospel does stand up to scrutiny when it's put into the bear pit or the fluffing pit. Yeah, absolutely. So that's fun.

Absolutely. And I had the pleasure of debating Professor Ehrman, oh, probably about 12 years ago on the problem of suffering, and we got to have a meal together again, found him very pleasant. In fact, his folks reached out to me about a debate on the book of Revelation, if I would do it with him, but we had to find a topic that we differed on that I could have some expertise in.

And then they just said actually all the work that it would take to make it happen, they were going to put it off. But, you know, we interacted fairly recently. Just got a minute before the break, what about non-Christians? Have you had rabbis, I know some of the rabbi ones, Muslims, others with different faiths, have you had them on as well? Yeah, over the years we've had a number of Muslims. Some of those were the most feisty debates we did, actually, because some of the Muslims we had on were, you know, quite aggressive in some cases in the way they brought forth their arguments. So it was exciting to engage some of those debates. And we've obviously spoken at various points to Hindus, people from Jewish backgrounds, but probably it's fair to say that the show has mostly revolved around those conversations between atheists and Christians or skeptics and Christians.

Because to some extent that's been where a lot of the conversation has been in the culture, and so we've tended to reflect that on the show by and large. All right, friends, we're going to be right back with Justin Brawley. His new book actually comes out in September, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon and elsewhere. The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity. Again, we're going to unpack this. I think, friends, you are going to be encouraged. I believe you will be edified. And for many who are listening that you may identify as an atheist or agnostic or a former Christian, keep listening. Keep listening.

If you'd like to call in with a question from my guest, 866-348-7884. This is how we rise up. It's our resistance.

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Friends, if you haven't checked out these great wellness products, 800-771-5584 is the number to call. So, back to my guest, Justin Briley. Justin, when you've sat and heard some of these arguments, obviously you've studied, you've learned in certain areas, but you can't be expert in everything.

Have you ever heard a presentation from an atheist, be it attacking the notion of God or the Bible scientifically or philosophically or on some other grounds, and they're presenting their case and you're thinking, wow, that case sounds strong. I'm glad I have a guest who's an expert on the other side. Has that ever happened at any point where, as they're presenting or even in your own study or research, some big questions came up that you needed answers to? Oh, absolutely, and I think that's just the nature of when you put yourself in the firing line in that case. Especially in those early years, I would say when I probably was pretty wet behind the years when it came to apologetics and theology. And I was frequently bringing on guests who were presenting ideas that were new to me, where they were bringing objections that I hadn't really thought through myself. Now, I was in the fortunate position of having access to some great Christian thinkers who also came on the show and were able to give answers. But in a way, I think as the show went on, as the years went on, I increasingly came to be able to categorize certain types of argument and put them in certain boxes, if you like, and say, okay, well, that's just another version of the problem of evil or that's another kind of argument that falls in the area of biblical criticism, and started to be able to connect some of the dots myself. And in a way, it was a sort of apologetics and theology training ground, actually hosting the show over all those years, such that I felt able, you know, at about the 10-year mark of hosting the show, to write a book of my own, where I made my own case for faith, for Christianity, and kind of arguing against the atheist worldview. And in many ways, the new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, is about how that journey for me has continued since writing that first book, but the way in which I now see many of the cultural issues being framed by the Christian story as well. But yeah, it's absolutely been a journey of discovery. There are often great areas, areas of mystery. I don't claim to have the answers to every question by no means. But what I have realized in the course of hosting all these discussions is that there is an intellectual, credible core to Christianity, and that actually, even if some parts are mysterious or you've got questions at the center of it, there's something that is very coherent, actually, and for which I've only had my faith grow and deepen, in a sense, because of the journey I've been on in that way. Yeah, and again, everyone's had different life experiences. For me, being challenged by the rabbis as a brand new believer was really challenging. I didn't know Hebrew. They did.

They had traditions going back hundreds, even thousands of years. Who was I to differ with them on going to some little church somewhere? Challenging. And serious questions raised. Then I go from there, starting secular education, studying all with professors who did not believe what I believed, and I would take every challenge seriously and say, God, I believe what I experienced is real and true, but these are genuine questions. We're supposed to love God with all our heart and all our mind, not turn our brains off. What happened, just in a certain point, I remember hearing yet another new objection, some intellectual objection to the reliability of Scripture, and I thought, you know, I don't have to prove this out like it's the first time anymore. I've been through this enough, this exercise enough, that yeah, you may have a question, yeah, I don't have an answer to that yet, but because I know for certain God's goodness, God's truth, the resurrection of Jesus, experiencing that in my own life, intellectually satisfying answers to our faith, yeah, we'll get an answer to that as well. What I think is most surprising, Justin, is not just that your faith stands strong, I'm not surprised at all given the credibility of the Christian case and the credibility of the case for Scripture, but that you're talking about a rebirth in God, even in a place like the UK, right before you came on, I mentioned the numbers of churches, church buildings closing, the rise in people professing atheism, so much of Europe looking post-Christian, and yet you're talking about a rebirth where even secular thinkers are reconsidering, so what makes you say this?

Obviously this is not just a feeling, this is something you have data for. Yeah, exactly, and I'd agree exactly with your analysis there, that on the surface, when you look at the statistics, it looks like Christianity is on the decline, and there's no denying that. Church-going has consistently been falling over several decades in the UK, I mean in parts of Europe it's practically dead on its feet, and the number of the people who tick the Christian box in the national surveys has been decreasing as well. For the first time here in the UK last year, that number was under 50%, and the number of people who describe themselves as nuns, as we know, has been rising in both Europe and in America as well. So there's no denying that obviously, in that sense, institutional religion, people willing to call themselves Christian, has been on the decline for some time, and this is just the continuing fact of secularism and the secularisation of our culture.

Yet, even in the midst of all that, I have been finding some surprising things. Firstly, the fact that the new atheism, which was this very dogmatic and shrill form of anti-theism that arose in the early 2000s, it's interesting to me that it actually didn't last long, and it's now very much a spent phenomenon. Richard Dawkins, who I mentioned earlier, was one of the chief architects of it, along with people like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, but none of those people are talking about religion anymore.

They've all moved on to different conversations and different fights. In some ways, the culture wars have kind of subsumed the new atheism. In fact, the new atheism itself as a movement kind of fell apart, because once its proponents had agreed that God didn't exist and religion was bad for you, they couldn't agree on anything else. They started going to war with each other because they couldn't agree on issues like LGBT, on whether they were supposed to be atheism plus with lots of additional social justice movements attached to it, or whether they were just free thinkers who were there to decry religion and champion science. And so the movement quickly fell apart as it started to have these internal debates.

Conference speakers would no longer stand on the same stage with each other at events. Richard Dawkins even got stripped of his title of Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association because of his comments on transgender a couple of years ago. So it's just been interesting to see the way that that particular movement has kind of imploded on itself, is only a shadow of its former self. And in its place has come this interesting conversation. Again, many of the people involved secular thinkers, but people who are far less dismissive of religion, in fact, worry about the direction of our culture in the absence of the Christian story. I'm talking about people like Jordan Peterson, who's a phenomenally famous Canadian psychologist, and he started to draw crowds in about 2017, 2018, that were the same people, I think, who were listening at one time, you know, Dawkins and Harris, and he had a very different message, and it seems to me that he and a number of others are starting to take Christianity seriously again, because they're seeing what's happening in the culture in the absence of the Christian story. And they're realising when you eliminate God, it doesn't mean people believe in nothing, it means they believe in anything, as JK Chesterton put it. So for me, this has been a really interesting phenomenon, to see the way that many secular intellectuals are suddenly turning back to Christianity and what it's done for our culture and what it could do again.

Yeah, well said, and we'll return to this on the other side of the break. In my most recent book, Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith, I talk about the trickle-down effect of New Atheism, and how a lot of the arguments that were raised 15 years ago just become memes today. It's a Bronze Age god, the Bronze Age book, and God is misogynistic and transphobic and homophobic, and a petty genocidal, megalomaniacal deity, you know, all the Dawkins kind of stuff, trickle down. The problem is that the New Atheism really didn't deliver. We've cast off God, we've cast off religion, we've cast off these ancient shackles. Now what? Now what's the purpose of your life?

What's your sense of destiny? Dawkins even came under attack for praising people for certain things they were doing. I mean, he has some outreached out poor people, etc. It's like, well, why do you praise someone if it's all biologically determined? Your brain's just neurons firing. You don't have any free will or choice.

So the thing does implode on itself. Promises everything and delivers nothing. We'll be right back to talk more with Justin Broderly. The book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, comes out in September. Hey friends, this is Dr. Michael Brown.

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Ask Dr. Brown Ministries, A-S-K-D-R Brown Ministries. Join the thousands who are currently enjoying this app. All right, my joy to come back to Justin Briley who for 17 plus years hosted the unbelievable broadcast in England. Hey, as someone who's done daily live radio now for 15 years, this was a major part of your life, these key interviews every week. How does it feel to not have that as part of your routine?

It is a strange thing, I've got to say Michael, because I was actually at the station for 20 years, over 20 years really, ever since I started that old working life. So it has just been my day to day life really, you know, being in the studio and so on. I mean to some extent that rhythm got changed by the lockdowns and COVID and everything else when I started working from home, had to set up my own home studio. Which also in kind of turn also helped me to realise actually that there was a lot I could do under my own steam, simply where it made sense for me to branch out and start to develop something of my own independent ministry.

There were certain projects I wanted to take on that were going to be easier to pursue in my own right. So it was a very bittersweet goodbye to The Unbelievable show, which has just, as I said earlier, has really given me an amazing education in the whole area of theology and apologetics. And has actually given me a unique position, such a privileged position, to be speaking to both the Christian and secular world and bringing them together for all those years. And I hope that will continue, you know, as I continue to try to bring both of those worlds together in conversation with new projects, including the one we've been talking about, the surprising rebirth of belief in God. Because actually I think we need to do a better job of understanding each other, talking to each other, and hopefully sharing what we believe with non-Christian friends by actually understanding their point of view and understanding their world.

Not just bashing them over the head with Bible verses, but actually sort of getting really in with them in the culture. And that's what I'm hoping to do with this new book, to kind of take a deep dive into what's going on in our culture and ask how can we come alongside people who have big questions, who perhaps are looking for meaning and purpose, but didn't find it in the new atheism. You know, I think you put it exactly right earlier when you said they tore down God, but what did they replace God with? Science and reason alone can't bring you meaning, purpose, and value. You know, they are just tools.

They're not things that you can actually use to derive meaning and value in the world. And so there is this inner longing, this search that all people have, I think, and if it doesn't go in the direction of Christian faith, it'll go somewhere. And I think that's what we're seeing in the rise of a lot of these woke ideologies and identities. It's a kind of quasi-religious search for identity and meaning and purpose, but it's channeled in the wrong direction. And that's why I think Christians need to be really aware of the opportunity that they have to speak into that.

Absolutely. Even the rise of interest in socialism, people longing for equality, not just of opportunity, but equality of outcome, that's the kingdom of God that they're really longing for. The righteousness that only God can bring ultimately in the world to come, but even the leveling of making us equal in the Lord is something that the gospel brings that the world can't bring. You know, just in the 60s, I got caught up in the counterculture revolution and the whole drugs rock and roll, the sex drugs rock and roll hippie thing. So outwardly, you see the older generation looking at that, right, and you see rebellion, promiscuity, substance abuse, and all that was true. But behind it, we sit around and talk about God. We were on a spiritual search.

It was so overt that it was even satirized in Mad Magazine where all these Jewish hippies and even had something called Jew-boos because the largest number of converts to Buddhism in the West were Jews. So there was just this spiritual search, Jew and Gentile looking for God, and it's almost as if Satan said, okay, I've got to fill this void with something else. But the church, much of the church missed what was happening, and I feel it's the same. We can be so reactionary to extremes of the BLM or Antifa movement or something else without saying, well, what are you really looking for? What's the purpose here? So when you have a young generation that's dealing with loneliness more than any generation that we've recorded dealing with depression, suicide, these other things, kids still cutting themselves and so on, isn't that saying they're crying out for God, but they don't know? Isn't that what's going on?

Yeah. I think you're right, and there are psychologists, secular psychologists who have, I think, coined the phrase that describes what you're talking about there, the meaning crisis. I think we are living in a meaning crisis, and it's perhaps not dissimilar to the one that you and your friends were looking at in your day. I think it's just been accelerated today by technology, effectively, because actually we have become even more alienated from ourselves and each other because of the rise, actually, of social media and everything else. And so we're looking now at a culture which is, in a sense, wealthier, more prosperous, more technologically literate than ever before, and yet we don't seem to be able to save ourselves. We seem to be able to only dig the hole deeper and deeper of our own pit of misery. And for me, this is just another pointer to the fact that people ultimately are looking for something, but they're not finding it in the answers that secular culture, postmodern culture is trying to give them.

And I think you're right. At the bottom of many of these movements and these ideologies, there is a hunger for justice, for equality, for all those things, which are godly kingdom principles. It's just that very often, when they're only filtered through one particular lens, whether it be a particular social justice lens or an identitarian ideology or whatever it might be, it ends up becoming a religious thing in itself. And the problem is these new movements become very religious, but very unforgiving.

They have all the worst traits of religion. There's no grace. The cancel culture is kind of the modern-day witch hunts of the heretics. There is an original sin.

You can't cleanse yourself from the stain of your privilege or your background or whatever it is. And there's an almost puritanical scree to some of those ideologies. And I think it's exhausting.

I think people find it exhausting because they're having to kind of basically invent their identities from scratch. And they're having to keep up with the latest sort of demand for the place upon them by the kind of puritanical culture now that exists in this way. And what people need is grace. They need God. They need the real thing, not this kind of stuff that we tend to put in the place of God. And that's why I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic, that that tide of faith may yet come back in. We're living in the most secular age we've ever lived in, and yet at the same time I see these seeds that people are ready to give the Christian story another go. And many of the stories I tell in the book are of people who have crossed the line to faith.

We've got these secular intellectuals who are opening up the door to Christianity for some people. But I've also seen many interesting stories of people who have actually made that journey themselves and realized there is, you know, the promised land on the other side. There is something real to this Christian story. Yeah, and it's not a matter of us saying, hey, our story is a better story. Our story says a loving God created you and has a wonderful purpose for you in this world and will forgive your sins and give you eternal life to be with him forever and ever and ever. And the other story is a nothing story. You came from nothing.

You're going nowhere. There's ultimately no real destiny in your life. We may have a better story, but just creating the story doesn't make it real. What makes it wonderful is that it is real. What makes it wonderful is there's no denying Jesus came into the world and changed the world.

And it's not just the intellectual evidence for the resurrection, but the experiential evidence of the resurrection where the Lord changes us and intervenes in our lives in real ways. And you mentioned, again, friends, the title of the book is coming out in a couple of months. Order your copy, pre-order now, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and brightly dispelled B-R-I-E-R-L-E-Y. So you've interviewed Tom Holland. He's got an amazing book, Dominion. This guy is a real historian.

Where's he coming from with the message that he's bringing? Yeah, and I should distinguish him from the Hollywood actor who plays Spider-Man, Tom Holland, who sometimes gets mistaken for on Twitter. Tom Holland, who's been on my show several times, is a very popular secular historian here in the UK. He runs probably the most downloaded history podcast in the world.

The rest is history. But he's gone on this amazing journey himself. You mentioned his book Dominion, in which he basically spells out his own story of having had a sort of form of childhood faith, but it fizzled out quite quickly in his teenage years. And he grew up, you know, like so many people in the West, believing that all the rights and duties and values that he held dear as a Westerner were just part of what it was to be in a civilized society. It was only really when he started to dig into the history of ancient Greece and Rome that he realized how alien those cultures actually are to his own moral instincts. The fact that life was so expendable in those cultures, the fact that slavery was simply part of the economy, you know, it was an absolute given that some people were born into servitude.

The fact that women and children had, you know, far fewer rights than men and slaves as well, of course. And it was only by kind of living in the minds of these Greeks and Romans that Tom Holland realized, well, where did my belief in the sanctity of life come from, the dignity and equality of all humans? And he realized it didn't come from science, it didn't come from the Enlightenment.

It came from the Christian revolution 2,000 years ago. He said that at that moment, everything changed. And for him, that was a huge revelation. He went on to write in his book how he effectively realized that at the bottom, he was a Christian. Whether or not he believed the stuff or not, he had been shaped completely by the Christian story.

So he's been on a very interesting journey. Yeah, and I remember reading a few years ago the book by Rodney Stark, sociologist Rodney Stark about the triumph of faith. And he articulated in that book what Chesterton had said, you quoted earlier that if someone doesn't believe in God, it's not that they believe in nothing but in everything. And he showed how the more secular a society got, the more superstitions were embraced. You go to a country like Iceland, which has like almost zero percent registering the belief that God created the universe. And yet, if you're going to put in a new road somewhere, you have to get permission from the local spiritualists to tell you that there is not a hidden community, the hidden folk who live there, underground, these spiritual beings, mythical creatures like elves, and my way of putting it, to get permission to build just on and on that the more secular you get, the more bizarre things you embrace. But then when you go through history and say, well, where have women really been liberated, raised up? And where has the sexual ethic for men been raised where they have to live in a chaste way as well? And when has more been done to help the poor and the underprivileged and the hurting?

And who built most of the hospitals and started most of the educational initiatives? And even earthly and modern science comes out of the gospel. It comes out of the church. All right.

We've got a few more minutes with Justin Brierley, the book, The Surprising Rebirth of a Belief. I'm Paul Burnett, a board certified doctor of holistic health, and I want to take this opportunity to talk to you about the importance of healthy blood flow and how it's enhanced by a miracle molecule known as nitric oxide. You see, blood vessels release nitric oxide, which increases blood flow, known as something called vasodilatation.

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As a TriVita introductory offer, use promo code BROWN25 and receive a 25 percent discount on the products of your choice. Call 1-800-771-5584. 800-771-5584. May you live with Christ. 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. My guest, Justin Brierley, host for many years of the unbelievable broadcast in England, one of my favorite shows to be on out of all the shows I've been on over the years. Always one of my favorites.

Always jumped at the opportunity when asked to do it and made it work in our schedule. He's got a new book coming out in two months, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Justin, I just wrote an article today about Piers Morgan, the new voice for sanity in the anti-transgender mania. I was on his show years ago and he challenged me, when he was on CNN, show me one place in the Bible that Jesus says anything about gay or being gay.

And of course I gave him three passages that were relevant and we went back and forth, him and another CNN guy, we clashed over it. I never would have guessed that he would be one of the most prominent voices day in, day out, challenging the idea that you are whatever you identify as. But it's just when things go, just you let them go on their natural trajectory, you see that everything reproduces after its own kind.

And many people who, I'm sure Piers Morgan is still a strong ally of the gay community, it's like, no, we didn't sign up for this. We wanted to get rid of this and get rid of this bigotry, but we didn't sign up for this and we've been saying, well, that's where this goes. There's an inevitable trajectory. So are you seeing that, that a lot of the things that people bought into and they were all excited about, that as they followed the trajectory it's ended to them up somewhere where they didn't want to go, hence the revisiting of the claims of the Gospel? Yeah, I think there is a definite sort of trajectory exactly as you described there, and I think it is that sense that as soon as you let go of something, you kind of open the door to everything in a sense. And it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle. I mean, one story I tell in the book is of the way in which so many of the atheists who were once the anti-God have kind of changed their tune a lot.

And it's because they've seen that they're a bigger part of the fight now in the culture. So one quite well-known atheist is Peter Boghossian, who at one time wrote a book very much along the New Atheist lines. It was called A Manual for Pre-Atheist. It was effectively a kind of manual for talking people out of their faith. And when he came on my show several years ago to debate with a Christian philosopher, he basically categorised religious belief as a sort of mental delusion. Well, a few years later, I got in touch with him.

This would have been 2018. And I was looking for someone in the US to take part in a debate on stage. He lived in Portland. He was at the time a professor of philosophy there. And he very kindly responded to my email and said, Justin, you probably wouldn't recognise me now because my views have changed so much. In fact, I see many Christians as my fellow comrades in arms now against a much more pernicious threat, I think, to academia and free thought.

He said basically, watch this space. And he was working on, along with some fellow scholars, was actually a set of hoax papers where they were so alarmed at the rise of so-called grievance studies, that certain ideologies, as long as you use the right language and that kind of thing, could pass for academic papers in peer-reviewed journals, that they had started to create their own ones, which were full of ridiculous concepts but dressed up in the latest language of politically correct ideologies. And they got a number of these published before their ruse was rumbled. Completely satirical.

And they got published. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's right. Now, you know, Peter Boghossian continues to be an atheist. He's not a believer. But what struck me very forcefully was that he was no longer, you know, against religion.

That wasn't his enemy. It was what he saw as this pernicious trend in academia that was suppressing freedom of thought and inquiry because you had to believe in certain ideologies and certain, you know, lines of thinking were off the table. And I think what he and others have realized is that their concerns about religion are not sort of in a sense linked to fundamentalist Christianity or anything like that. There are fundamentalisms in all walks of life. There are people who, you know, are willing to sort of label people as heretics and demand certain levels of purity in lots of different areas. And so to that extent, I think he came to see actually that a lot of Christian people were actually more on his side than against him in that regard. And so it's been interesting to see the way the battle lines have been redrawn in our culture now. That's why, as I say, the new atheism is very much a passé movement and lots of those figures, people like Richard Dawkins, have suddenly felt the sting of their own secular brethren who are now critiquing them, who are, you know, telling them they can't say this or they can't talk about people like that. And so it's been very interesting to see that Christianity is no longer seen in those circles as the better noir it once was because they've realized there are other kinds of religious enemies out there that are even more dangerous to them. Interesting.

Very interesting. And you have, of course, the passing of Christopher Hitchens a few years ago. Of course, to his dying breath, he wants to make clear that his views haven't changed. But the reality of death, you just think he's gone.

And that's it. And a former atheist was telling me just how the fear of death was something very real in their lives because of there's nothing, you're gone. Everything that is you ends and there's somewhat of a terror to that. So even just the reality of death is a sobering thing. I even had a rabbi tell me privately once that Christianity is the most powerful concept on the planet, that there are redemptive elements in it. And then as I was emphasizing him to the assurance of eternal life and things that are not just pipe dreams. There's a reality that carries us.

So let's just focus here and kind of end here. Years ago, there was a discussion at Oxford, I think it was Oxford, a number of scholars were talking about the uniqueness of different religions. And the question came up, what is it that makes Christianity distinct and unique?

And C.S. Lewis happened to be passing by and hearing the discussion. And immediately he goes, oh, that's easy, grace.

So you brought this up earlier. But what is it that you're finding anecdotally is so powerful about the truth of the gospel message that in the trashing of the ideas of God and sexual abuse scandals in the church and where people have failed and all that, there's this recovery of, well, let's look to Jesus again because Jesus never hurt me. What are people finding in the gospel, Justin? I think what they're finding is something that equates to real hope, real purpose.

I think people have been starved of that. I think in the secular discourse around atheism and materialism, ultimately everything is an illusion. We're all just biologically determined machines.

And I think whether people recognise that or not, it has seeped into our culture. You're just one more cog in a mindless machine. And what the gospel gives you is a very different story of realities.

There's actually, you were meant to be here. You are loved, you are valued, you are made in the image of God, and you were worth dying for when it comes to God's intervention on your behalf. And I think once people grasp that, and once they grasp the idea that actually there is a way of having a new life, that there is actually, you're not basically the sum of your history and your DNA and your genetics, or whatever particular movement you've allied yourself with, they realise there is this thing called grace.

I think it makes a huge difference. And that's what I've noticed in some of the people I've interviewed who have become adult converts to Christianity. They're people who would have never dreamed a few years ago of becoming Christians, and yet it happened to them. And one of the things they've said very often to me is, please keep Christianity weird. They said, what we don't want, the thing that wouldn't look like Christianity is just a kind of formed over humanism earth.

Something that looks very much like the culture already. And what they want is actually the real thing. They want the real supernatural claims of Christianity. They want it to look different.

They want it to be mysterious. They don't want it to all be packaged up in a way that's kind of perfectly presented to them as a 21st century rational person. And I think we need to take that seriously. We need to realise that actually people are kind of tired of the banal and superficial kind of modern culture that's being presented to them constantly. And they're looking for the riches of Christianity. They're looking for something that challenges them, that convicts them, that says there's another life waiting for you that you can have that is yours.

And I think we need to step up to that challenge and not water it down, but actually there's something so much better. And it's true. It's not just a useful fiction. You know, that's what some of these psychologists say.

It's actually, it works because it's true and that's something we need to tell people again. Even the radical call to leave everything and follow Jesus and discover him is the pearl of great price that only enhances his value. You know, you're a young man. Are you interested in the gal in your school that everybody slept with and gives their self to anybody?

Are you interested in the one that no one can get near that's very, very special and she's waiting for the right person? You know, it was the German theologian Wolfhard Pannenberg who basically said, to simplify his deep thinking, that when people are looking for religion, they're not looking for more of the secular. So, you know, as we watch the Anglican Church in England become more and more progressive, more and more woke and more and more irrelevant, and then someone just preaching the old truths of the gospel and people flocking to really find out about this Jesus. So let us proclaim it, not just explain and give all the background, but let's proclaim unashamedly the gospel because that's where the power lies in the proclamation of this radical truth. And Justin, I remember talking to a young man over 20 years ago getting ready for this, what was going to be the largest Christian gathering of young people in American history. And I remember him saying this to me, and again, this is probably in the year 2000, he said, give me a cause and I'll die for it. And that remains this great cry, purpose, destiny, calling.

Friends, the new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, I think you'll be really edified by it. I couldn't think of a better person to write it than Justin Bradley after all the years of what you've done. And look forward to partnering on something else with you in the future, man. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. It's been absolutely great to be with you on the show. Thank you. All right. God bless you.