How Atheists Misunderstand the Bible

I really enjoy my Canadian Catholic friends, and I’m sorry for any drama that might arise if I poke fun at you, but in all seriousness, I really do enjoy them. People like Stephanie Gray, Matt Nelson, from Word on Fire. And now the Canadian Catholic. He invited me onto his YouTube channel recently to answer a variety of questions. So I’ll include a link to the full interview below, but definitely go check out his channel. He gets a lot of cool people on there. And for this interview, we touched on a wide range of subjects, but for today’s episode, I’m going to focus in on our discussion about what atheists don’t understand when it comes to scripture and the hard passages of the Bible. So check it out.

Canadian Catholic:

I mean, this came up with you in your second debate with Ben Barker, who seems to be a nice guy. I mean, I have nothing personal against him. This idea of God has to do something to convince me. As in, you know what? I don’t care about these arguments. What I want Him is to light up my napkin right in front of me, or rearrange letters in the sky, say, “I am here.”

Trent Horn:

Dillahunty seems to make a similar argument.

Canadian Catholic:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do we handle that?

Trent Horn:

Well, I think what I would say is why should I believe that? Whenever someone puts forward an argument or an assertion, I’m going to say, “What is your evidence for that?” You can say something all you want, and that is essentially an assertion, or I guess you could make it, it’s an argument. If God exists, it’s a variant of the problem of divine hiddenness. And there’s a lot of times when I listen to people and they say, “God should do X, God should do Y.” I say, “Okay, that’s a demand. Why? Why should I believe that?” And then there’s an argument implicit in that God should do X. If X does not happen, that shows God does not exist. So sometimes when we’re listening to people, we need to tease from it, “Say, are you just making a demand? Or are you making an argument that’s packed in your demand or your assertion?” And that’s what it seems to me, this is some kind of an argument. That if God existed, he would perform feat X. Feat X has not been performed. Therefore, God does not exist.

Canadian Catholic:

Yeah, that’s a terrible argument.

Trent Horn:

Of course. But the thing is, people don’t recognize it when they just say, “If God wants me to believe in Him, He should just do this.” And then I said, “Okay. What I do when I listen to people is I try to repack it into a syllogism and say, “All right, that doesn’t make sense to me. Why should I believe that?” If God has given sufficient evidence, it would be like saying, “If I’m supposed to pay my taxes, why doesn’t President Biden send me a letter telling me to?”

Trent Horn:

He could do it. Why doesn’t he just send me a letter? Well, he’s already provided enough evidence to show that you have to pay your taxes and the federal tax and IRS code. “Why do I have to go and look that up? If he cares so much, he can come to me.” Well, you have a responsibility as a citizen to figure that out. You should do the work. I think also we have to be careful. I guess that reminds me of another point. When we’re engaging with atheists, I feel like many atheists treat the question of, even if God existed, God is just some other person out there. It’s like debating if Fred exists. “I don’t even know if there’s really Fred. Is there really Fred? I don’t know if Fred exists.” So, okay. So there’s a Fred, but Fred sounds [crosstalk 00:03:39]

Canadian Catholic:

Yeah, that’s completely incompatible with comystic philosophy.

Trent Horn:

Yes, but that’s why, because for a lot of them, I might ask, “Look, if it were, incontrovertibly proven that God exists, would you worship God?” And many of them would say, “No. Why? Why would I worship God?” So I think that there’s this idea that it’s like, we’re just having a parlor game about whether this person exists. But if this person is the source of all meaning and truth and existence, and goodness, then I would say you have the obligation that other people have found evidence to be convincing. You have a duty to see if that evidence is convincing as well. So hat would be the problem that I have here, that not understanding the intrinsic value of God.

Canadian Catholic:

Yeah. I think we can push that a little further and actually even assert that it’s pretty, I wouldn’t say dogma. But it’s pretty consistent with Catholic teaching that God does not actually have obligations towards us. So there’s bad presuppositions going on in those kinds of demands. Okay. Let’s move on to some of the questions now. Okay. So now Marshall had a question. He’s an atheist viewer of mine, and he wants to ask you a question. There’s a couple, but let’s go with this one. Okay. So he asks that Old Testament tells us how to test God. And he brings the example of Elijah. Now again, this is misread often, but I mean off the cuff, how do you respond?

Trent Horn:

Well, I’m not sure of the complete question. I don’t have access to comments right now. You can fill me in if I’m mistaken.

Canadian Catholic:

Okay. Can you see it on the screen?

Trent Horn:

I see it, but it’s just a statement. It’s not really a question per se. The Old Testament tells us how to, how to test whose god is more powerful, Baal and Yahweh, and so they drench a bowl and Elijah is able to call down fire. And the priests of Baal are not able to. And so that’s a way of demonstrating that Yahweh is superior to Baal because he can interact with the world, and engage in this way. But I would just challenge Marshall’s first premise when he says, this is the way to test which God is powerful. Just because an episode is depicted in scripture, it does not follow that that is a standard forth for all believers.

Canadian Catholic:

Of course.

Trent Horn:

That’s where I would say, so far, you’re just describing the story of scripture. Now if the implicit argument is, if that’s what Elijah did, why can’t we do that now? And I would say that God chooses to manifest Himself in different ways. Even when we look in the Bible, miraculous events tend to cluster around the formation of covenants, whether it’s with Abraham or the Exodus or the Davidic kingdom, they tend to appear in clusters. They’re not spread evenly. The book of the Maccabees talks about the prophets, there being a lull in prophecy. The Psalms also talk about this. There has not been a prophet. So in the old Testament, there are long periods, centuries, even, God doesn’t manifest himself miraculously, then He does.

Trent Horn:

I would say that these feats where God manifests Himself in miraculous ways to demonstrate his existence and superiority, the last public example of that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ and any miracles that followed in the New Testament. Then after that, I would say there’s a case there have been private revelations where God has engaged in miracles. The miracle of the dancing sun at Fatima would be one that I think has a very strong claim. Not every Catholic miracle claim has strong evidence for it. I think that one actually really does. I would say that it actually still happens, but it’s going to be in different episodes, but it’s not going to be for public revelation. It’ll be these kind of private revelations. I don’t know if this answer makes sense.

Canadian Catholic:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it’s really comprehensive. Okay, now we need to touch a little bit on a couple of objections and then move on to different issues. So this again came up with your second debate, I believe, with Dan Barker, which is that some people have emotional response when it comes to certain passages in the Old Testament. Okay. So the one, two checkmate of Dillahunty and his cronies is okay, you know what? God commands slavery, and that’s it. Or as came up with you. First Samuel, God commands genocide or something like that in [inaudible 00:08:03]. How do we deal with these? Now, again, you don’t have a pencil to open to you. We’re not prepared and [inaudible 00:08:11], so I’m not asking you to [inaudible 00:08:11] passages. How do you generally approach this?

Trent Horn:

It’s a general question. And so I think it’s important to cut it off at its feet, what it’s aiming to do. The Bible records something immoral. If it were true, and God is supposed to be all good. That would mean the Bible’s not divinely inspired or God doesn’t exist.

Trent Horn:

I would say when we look at all of that at most, all the objection would prove is that some parts of the Bible aren’t inerrant. So first I think it’s important to not leap from, “Oh, here’s a problematic passage in scripture, therefore I’m an atheist.” Because there’s a lot of places you go for that. You could say, “Well, I don’t know how to interpret this to maintain the God is all good and scripture’s inspired, but that interpretation must be out there somewhere.” You could start there, then you can just go, “Well, maybe it’s not inerrant.” You have a long way before you get to atheism.

Trent Horn:

Number two approach I might take is to turn the question back to an atheist. I did this a little bit with Barker in my debate. I think he was asking, “Is genocide good?” And I said, “What do you mean by good?” What do you mean by that word? Because good is often relevant. Is eating a zebra good? It’s good for lions. OR I might say, “Is pesticide good?” It’s good for plants. It’s not good for pests. So if you have a relative sense of good, is genocide good? I guess it was good for the Israelites, and it’s bad for the Canaanites. What’s your point? What more I think what they mean is no, it’s just always wrong, no matter what. It is bad in and of itself. Well, why should I believe that? So I might turn it back to atheism defending its claims for objective morality.

Trent Horn:

Then I think it’s important though, when we are speaking with atheists , and really engaging in dialogue, not just doing debate tricks, strong scoring points. We’re going to have a hard time debating if we’re super far apart. If we’re debating how God revealed himself in the Old Testament. If my interlocutor doesn’t even think God exists, we have so little common ground to be able to talk about. It’s like debating whether Jesus Christ, as my friend, Jimmy Aiken would say, debating whether Jesus Christ has two wills with the Jehovah’s Witness. It’s like, “A divine and human will or just a human will.” We’re too far apart.

Trent Horn:

So I do think though it’s important. I might say, “Look, I don’t want to have cheap scoring points here. Let’s talk a bit. What do you think of the idea of God tolerating certain things because he knows people have hard hearts and then eventually He won’t tolerate that anymore?” Slavery is a really interesting one. I cover in my book, Hard Sayings, in two chapters. It’s funny to me to have people like Matt Dillahunty, who will say, “Oh, I cannot believe that slavery was tolerated in the Bible. Slavery is wrong.”

Trent Horn:

What do you mean by slavery? what do you mean? If slavery, for example, is just compulsory labor that restricts people’s movements, then we still have that today when prison inmates are forced to work. When a prison inmate is cleaning up the highway, that’s slavery. He can’t leave and he has to work. The courts have said that you don’t have to pay prisoners.

Trent Horn:

So I think the question is more when could slavery be justified and look at the context to say that it’s not ideal, but if you look at a culture in biblical times where you had people saying, “Look, I’m going to starve to death.” You had people in Genesis who went to, when Joseph was in Egypt saying, “Please give us grain, and we will sell ourselves to you.” Because I will say to me, if I lived in the ancient world and my choice was between starving to death and having guaranteed room and board, but losing my freedom, I might choose to give up my freedom, so I don’t have to give up my life. Bt here’s the thing. When we’re talking to an atheist, we’re so far apart, we can’t even just have just the discussion, why would God tolerate something like this that we don’t tolerate today?

Trent Horn:

For me with someone like Matt Dillahunty, it’s interesting. When he had that discussion with Alex O’Connor about veganism. I really feel like the way atheists look at slavery in the Bible is the way people 500 years from now are going to look at factory farming. I really think 500 years ago, they may just grow meat in labs. They will think, “I can’t believe people did this.” And we’ll say, “Well, we didn’t like it, but how else are you going to feed seven billion people?”

Trent Horn:

I went on a digression, but I think when we’re talking about the Bible difficulties, we have to admit the limitations, especially in a debate format, but find an interlocutor who’s willing to wrestle with the deeper issues and not take the things that concern us and go way too far to an unwarranted conclusion like atheism. That’s a lot, but I hope that makes sense.

Canadian Catholic:

I think, I think that for now puts the issue to bed. Okay. Let’s scroll up a bit and go to Bobby’s question. Do you think that most atheists come from a naturalistic background and presuppose it and thereby they think miracles are irrational?

Trent Horn:

I think so. I think what’s interesting here is that there are a lot of, and this is the same with someone like Matt. We had our debate. I asked him, “How does he know?” A lot of atheists seem really confident miracles don’t happen. Every single report of a miracle that’s out there is false. It’s like, well, how do you know that?

Trent Horn:

CS Lewis talks about this in his book, Miracles, that you would say, “Well, we can’t believe in miracles because they violate the uniformity of nature.” Well, how do we know nature’s uniform? Well, because miracles don’t happen. So it’s like, it violates uniformity of nature. We know that because miracles don’t happen, miracles don’t happen because they violate nature. And Lewis then says, “And to which now we are arguing in a circle.”

Trent Horn:

And I would say there’s other things that are even natural. Like do aliens exist in the universe? I honestly, I’m 50/50 on that one. And I may be like, “I don’t know, five or 10% probability they visited the Earth.” I haven’t found an alien abduction that I’ve found to be very compelling, but I won’t rule it out as crazy talk. It’s not Harry Potter or Batman. But I find, I think with a lot of people that when it comes to miracles, as, as someone who’s an atheist that presupposition, they’ll say, “Well, I just lack a belief in God.” I think it’s more than that. You just take for granted in life, this is a world where there is no God in it. So you hear miracles and the default is that didn’t happen. Whereas for me, I will kind of look at the world and say, “Wow, the world is a really weird and strange place. I don’t know what the limits are to what we observe.”

Trent Horn:

And so I’m open to the testimonies that people give, but I’m going to be critical when I look at these things. And some things I may be able to say, “No, that’s probably not a miracle.” Other times, maybe. I just don’t have enough evidence to adjudicate one way or the other. But I do think many people who identify as atheist, the bar is set very high from a presupposition that they don’t happen. And I would say for an atheist, look. Like for me, when I look at miracle claims, if many of them turn out to be false, okay, whatever. But for an atheist, if even one of the claims turns out to be true, your entire worldview is false.

Trent Horn:

So it’s like, what’s more likely? Every single one is false. My worldview survives even if 99.9% of them are false, but the atheist worldview only survives if it’s a hundred percent. What are the odds of a hundred percent instead of any other percentile, unless you already assume God doesn’t exist. So we’re not doing a statistical argument, we’re doing a presupposition.

Trent Horn:

Thanks again, guys, for listening. Be sure to check out Canadian Catholics channel on YouTube and definitely consider supporting us here by going to trenthornpodcast.com or at the very least checkout Council of Trent on YouTube, like this video, and click subscribe. So thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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