In this Q&A highlight from Catholic Answers Live, Trent Horn addresses a common challenge in sharing faith: the apathetic response of “I just don’t think about it.” He provides practical strategies for engaging those who seem indifferent to deeper questions about God and existence.
Transcript:
I work at a fast food place in Indiana too.
Whenever I try to ask my co-workers what they believe or just about important things, they always just shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, I just don’t think about it.” When I started on the contingency argument for God, they just responded, “Well, I don’t think that everything has to have a reason. How do I respond to that statement?
I know I can’t make people care, but how can I get through to them better?”
Well, it’s hard. People respond to different kinds of reasons and evidences for the existence of God. For some people, I know especially for philosophers, the contingency argument is one of the most powerful reasons for the existence of God.
Although he has to be formulated very carefully. You don’t necessarily have to say, “Well, everything had to have a reason for existence.”
But you could say, “Look, things either exist because of something else, they exist for no reason at all, or they exist because of their own nature.”
We look around the world, we see there’s… We at least can say, “All right, aren’t there at least some things that don’t have to exist like this fast food restaurant we work in? It didn’t have to exist, right? It has a reason for existing.
And the reasons that it exists, those things, they didn’t have to exist either. The founders and the creators, well, they’re from human beings. I mean, human beings didn’t have to exist. Evolution could have been different. The Earth didn’t have to exist. So you don’t have to necessarily say, “Well, everything needs a reason or this or that.” You could say, “Look, are there at least some things that need a reason for why they exist? Are there at least some things like that? Okay,
well, then what explains at least those things that need a reason? They just exist for no reason?” Well, we don’t say that for just anything that we happen to come across. We don’t use that to explain just other things. If something could exist for no reason at all, you couldn’t even do science. How could you ever rule something like that out? You might say, “Well, all the things that don’t have to exist,
the things that could have failed to exist, they all explain each other in a great web of explanation.
So there’s nothing else outside like God that needs to explain it.” But I don’t think that’s a good explanation. That’s like saying, there’s an old story, why are there five Eskimos in New York City? You might say, “Well, number two followed, number one, three followed, number two, four followed, number three, five followed, number four, and number one followed, number five.” And that’s why they’re all there.
Okay, but wait, that still doesn’t explain why they’re there. You’ve made a great circle of explanation that doesn’t really explain why all of them are there at all.
So that’s a problem when people try to outsource the contingency argument that way. We have things that don’t have to exist. You can’t have an infinite regress that doesn’t really explain anything. So we need something that doesn’t need explanation, something that exists necessarily, it must exist, it is existence itself. And then there’s other reasons you can give. I also like the argument from motion.
Also, you could say, “Look, if the universe began to exist, then that means you couldn’t just say, “Oh, well, it just exists because it came into existence.” How do you get something from nothing? You can’t. So those are cosmological arguments. But you might find also that people who,
a lot of people, they don’t have their head up in the clouds as much, they don’t want to grapple with cosmology. I see as Lewis, I mentioned this to the previous caller, he thought morality was a really big clue to the existence of God. And there’s certain elements of morality, like the fact that humans have a special dignity that other animals, even if they’re animals smarter than human beings, do not. We treat a disabled infant as having more dignity than a really smart dolphin or pig. They have more rights and value. Why? Well, because just humans matter. Well, there’s no biological explanation for that. There has to be a theological explanation. Or your fast food friends. If your manager takes away your pay and doesn’t pay you, you would blame him, right? You would say, “Hey, he did something wrong. I can’t believe he would do that. That’s so awful.” But if atheism is true,
well, he doesn’t have free will. He just does whatever chemicals in his brain basically program him to do or what different external events program. He could not have done otherwise. He’s determined. That’s at least what many atheists, not all, but many atheists would say.
But if we believe people can have moral responsibility, there has to be something that allows us to rise above just the chains of physical causation in the world. So a lot of these elements sort of come together to show the existence of God. If you’d like, Lily, if you stay on the line, I’d be happy to send you my book, “Why We’re Catholic.” And you could read it, take a few things from there, and then maybe give the book to a friend and see what they think about it. But is that at least like a helpful start?
Yeah.
So, yeah, I kind of asked her, “Well,
do you believe the universe has a beginning or is eternal?” And in either case, it would still need a reason as to why it’s there.
But it’s just kind of like… I’m not sure if it’s relativism or anything, but it’s like sometimes it just seems like people can kind of shrug off religion as just kind of a comfort thing because the world is so brutal. And it’s like, but this matters. It might be comforting, but it’s true.
It does matter. You’re right, because you could say, I find it quite the opposite. The people who suffer, who are more likely to suffer, are more likely to embrace religion, and those who have managed to distract themselves enough with modern distractions avoid the question.
And then they’re more open to the question when they’re reaching the end of their life or maybe they’re facing the end of their life, seeing the void ahead of them. “Oh, wow, what is waiting for me there? Is it just this finite life or do I have unending life ahead of me?” That’s something you should really work out first before you’re looking at that great expanse where we’re the press of us at the moment of death. And then other things too, when people get married and they have children and start to see the world in a sort of richer, multifaceted way, those arguments from human dignity, from morality, I think can be very helpful there. That’s why I’ve also thought though about approaching the topic of atheism again for a book. I’m finishing a book now on the Catholic view of salvation that will hopefully come out in a few months. Well, the manuscript needs to go in, so maybe like early spring, late fall if we’re lucky. But after that, I’d love to approach the topic of atheism again to really pose this in a way that helps people like you’re describing get out of this kind of, it’s not really relativism, it’s more like apathy to help them to see, look, there’s really serious things that if atheism are true, we wouldn’t expect the world to be this way. And yet it is, shouldn’t that shake your atheism a bit?
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