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In this episode Trent rebuts even more silly atheist memes from the Internet.
Transcript:
We’ve covered awful atheist memes before and we’re going to do it again here on the Counsel of Trent. So why wait, let’s jump right into it. Here’s the first meme. “On the fourth day, God created the sun. If God created the sun on the fourth day, how the hell had four days passed?” What’s hilarious about this meme is that there’s a variant of it that’s at least 1600 years old. St. Augustine argued with gnostics who made this same objection to the Bible, which is why Augustine said that the account of creation, the Book of Genesis, is not a literal description. Instead, Genesis is a thematic description showing God creating all the realms and populating them with different creatures. That’s why Augustine said God made everything in a single instant. And that quote, “The sacred writer of Genesis, was able to separate in the time of his narrative what God did not separate in time in his creative act.”
Next, “We tried a Christian society run by the rich. It was called the Dark Ages for a reason.” So in this meme we have an image of an execution that shows someone being killed by having their limbs tied to horses who run off in different directions. What’s funny about this meme is that this is a medieval painting, but it’s depicting a killing of Saint Hippolytus in the third century, which was of course during the Roman Empire and 200 years before the so-called Dark Ages, which weren’t really that dark because it was the church that kept Western civilization going by copying ancient manuscripts after the fall of Rome. Here’s the next one, “Dear religious people, don’t worry when atheists become the majority and it will happen sooner than you think, we will treat you far better than you have treated us when you were the majority.”
You know, I really want to believe that. Except when you look in the past at what happened when militant atheists ascended to power like in the Soviet Union or Pul Pots Khmer Rouge, it didn’t turn out very well for religious people. And of course, let’s not forget about secularists today, who want to ban so-called hate speech and take children away from their parents just because the parents don’t want their children mutilated by so-called gender reassignment surgery. Finally, there’s no guarantee that non-religious people will be the majority globally in the future. That may happen in the United States, but some projections show that globally non-religious people will decline overall due to low birth rates and that the fastest growing global population are actually Muslims. All right, now let’s look at two memes that both use the argument from geography for atheism. “Think of a God you don’t believe in. Determine which standards of proof this God does not meet, apply those standards of proof to your own God, wonder why you didn’t see it sooner.” And this one, “There are almost 5,000 Gods being worshiped by humanity, but don’t worry only yours is right.”
The biggest problem with these memes is that they don’t define what the word God refers to. God for these critics is just any super being people worship, but that’s not God. God is the infinite act of being itself, unlimited in power, knowledge, and goodness. God is not a being in the universe. God is the ground of being. So God is infinite in all respects. The reason I don’t believe in Thor or Zeus or Buddha, who isn’t a God in Buddhism by the way, I don’t believe in these creatures, is because they’re finite beings. I believe in God and these beings are not God no matter what you call them because they are limited and finite. In their respective mythologies, these beings often come into existence, they change, they’re ignorant of some things, they’re thwarted and sometimes they do evil.
The fact that they exist in time shows they are not God because God made time itself. Since these mythological beings are not pure actuality, they are not God. They may be super beings, but they’re not God, which is why I don’t believe in them because I believe in God. I agree with classical theists like Aristotle and Jewish and Muslim philosophers, that there is one infinite God. We may disagree about how God revealed himself to humanity, but we can agree that one infinite God does exist. Moreover, atheists can’t say, I must reject the God of the Bible because he sounds like a God of mythology in some parts of the Old Testament. That’s because I interpret the Bible in accord with what reason tells me about God. So if I know from reason that God cannot have a physical body as part of his divine nature, because God created all material things from nothing, then that means the Bible’s descriptions of the Father having a body must be non-literal.
There are examples of God giving humans a non-literal image of himself, which is called a theophany. Finally, this meme can backfire on atheists. Imagine you’re at a party and 95 out of 100 people there say they heard a loud noise outside but they disagree on what the noise was or what it sounded like. Would you agree there was at least a sound that the 95 heard something even if they disagree about it? Or would you agree with the five people who said there wasn’t a sound at all? Now, large groups of people can be wrong about things, but they’re usually more often correct than incorrect, which counts in favor of large groups of people, at the bare minimum, rejecting a strictly material atheistic view of the universe as being the common consensus of human experience. And at a bare minimum, I would appreciate it if you could like this video and subscribe and definitely consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com so we can continue making great content.
All right, here’s a classic meme that continues this mistake of confusing God with other beings. “God can’t exist because of Eric, The God-Eating Magic Penguin. Since Eric is God-Eating by definition he has no choice but to eat God. So if God exists, he automatically ceases to exist as a result of being eaten. Unless you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, God doesn’t exist. Even if you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, that same proof will also be applicable to God. There are only two possibilities. Either you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist or you can’t. In both cases, it logically follows that God doesn’t exist.” I would just ask what is meant by Eric being a penguin? If he has feathers and occupied space and time, then he’s not God. And if he’s a timeless spaceless penguin, then he is not a penguin because penguins by definition are a kind of physical temporal bird. God is simply that which no greater can be thought.
So if you can think of a being that can annihilate God, it will just turn out that that being is God and you need to refine your definition of God. Next we have a monument to famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. “An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.” Christians literally invented the hospital. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare in the world. Think about how many hospitals are named after a person from the Bible like St. Luke versus someone like Charles Darwin. Survival of the fittest and altruistic hospitals don’t really go together and anyone who says Christians do not care about helping the downtrodden simply hasn’t read the Bible.
James 2:14-17 says, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” Next, we have arguments for atheism, which is a huge library and arguments for theism, which is just a Bible on an empty shelf. But there are hundreds of books on arguments for theism or the existence of God that are published by academic presses like Oxford University Press. There aren’t similar quantities of books or any books as far as I know, from major university presses defending the existence of Santa Claus or fairies or any other mythical creature. Instead, the existence of God is a major feature of philosophical debate. So you’ll see powerful arguments on both sides that need to be addressed. This one is more of a cell phone. Atheist dad says, “I don’t wear anything that states my lack of belief. So why do Christians feel the need to share to the world their belief system?” And the next picture is him wearing an atheist shirt with the tag, “Worn With Pride.”
Next, we have, “You like computers? Thank this gay atheist, Alan Turing, Father of Computer Science.” Okay, so computers prove homosexuality and atheism are good things? This is probably just a perpetuation of the stereotype that atheists contribute to science and religious people don’t, which is absurd because of all the religious people who have contributed to science in Western civilization. If you’re an atheist who likes the Big Bang Theory, the cosmological model, not the awful TV show, then you can thank Monsignor George Lemaître, the Belgian priest who helped to discover it. And the memes that defend Jesus never existing are easily the most embarrassing. This one, we have Hollywood Jesus, Realistic Jesus with and without clothes, and finally, Real Jesus. And it says, “404 error. Character not found.” Atheists who reject the historical existence of Jesus are like Christians who think the earth is flat. They are the fringe minority that modern scholarship does not take seriously. In his book, Did Jesus Exist? The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman writes, “The view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every expert on the planet.” All right, thank you guys so much for watching. If you’d like more replies to atheist memes, check out my previous episode on that subject. And don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel. Thank you all and have a very blessed day.