Arguments Against Christianity : ANSWERED!!!

I'm about to say some things that might seem a little bit insensitive, maybe even a little offensive to some. Because over the next few minutes, I'm going to be presenting three very hateful arguments against us Christians. And I don't want you to be discouraged. I don't want you to turn off your brain. I don't want you to get up and storm out because Satan hates you.

And it's not just Satan. There are demons. There are powers. There are principalities. The world hates you. And I'm not talking about a mild dislike for you. Let me explain what I mean. The world wants to convert your children to the dark side.

That's how much you're hated.

And so it does no good to sugarcoat these arguments against us. Not only that, but there are sufficient ways that these arguments can be dealt with. And that's what we're going to be looking at. How do we deal with these hard arguments?

At some points in my life, these arguments, they had the potential to shipwreck my faith. Now, obviously, they didn't, but these were things that I had to really struggle through. I had to wrestle with these things. This gentleman's name here is Matt Dellahante. And this is one of his arguments. This is one of three arguments I'm going to present against Christianity. And he basically describes the story of the Bible, but he does it in a very condescending and a very belittling way.

This is his argument: "Why not just create the chosen people in heaven and leave everybody else out of it? If the end goal is to make some people who like you and who are like you to spend eternity with you, then that's the most efficient plan. Create those people in your location with you." But the God of the Bible does this in a very boneheaded way. First, he creates the universe, waits billions of years, creates man out of mud and then woman out of that man. Then he tells them not to do something that he knows that they're going to do, and then he threatens them with death if they do it. But then when they do it, he doesn't actually kill them.

He just makes their lives miserable. He then goes through a comedy of errors, having people fail to love him and fail to listen to him and fail to obey him over and over. He gets fed up, so he floods the earth to try to start over again. Then he confuses their languages to try to start over again. He then follows this up with encouraging war and rape and genocide.

He gradually goes from walking and talking with them to not interacting with them in any detectable way. And then he impregnates a virgin girl so that he can take a form of a human as some sort of God-man, one that is fully God yet somehow fully man, which doesn't actually make sense, all so that he can sacrifice himself to himself as some blood magic loophole to let men off the hook for the rules that he's in charge of. All of this so that he can set aside his own anger, for that is what we're being saved from: God's wrath.

Somehow, it's justice when God does it. And then expect future generations to believe without sufficient evidence. Why not just create the chosen people in heaven and leave everyone else out of it? It makes no rational sense. You put your ignorance on display by believing in such stupidity.

Argument number two: Isn't it nice that you won the God lottery? I wanted to show a video on this one, but I lost it and I couldn't refind it. But I remember what the video says, and this is what it says. It says, "Did you know that there are 4,000 religions, but my parents just happen to believe in the one true God?

Isn't that amazing?" Oh, wait. Yours too? Ask 100% of the children in this room, "Do you believe in Jesus?" 100% will say, "I sure do." Because that's what we've been spoon-feeding on their entire lives. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do, but that's what's going on.

And I would venture to say that most of you grown-ups, all of your parents probably believed in Jesus too. I want to take a poll. Listen carefully. If both of your parents believed in Jesus and taught you to do the same, do not raise your hand. If one of your parents believed in Jesus and taught you to do the same, do not raise your hand.

Only if both of your parents did not believe in Jesus, raise your hand.

For the record, there are no hands in the air. Looks like all of you swallowed the same things that were being spoon-fed to you. Isn't it nice to be born into the right religion? Listen to how Ricky Gervas describes this.

If you're born in India, you're probably a Hindu. If you're born in America, you're probably a Christian. If you're born in Pakistan, you're probably a Muslim. That's a coincidence, isn't it? That you're always born into the right God. Always.

Isn't that lucky? I was born into the right God. All those others are going to hell. But I was born into the right religion. I'm going to heaven. It's strange that we hold on to these sort of medieval beliefs.

You know?

Here's another gem from Ricky Gervas. He tweeted, saying, "There have been nearly 3,000 gods so far, but only yours actually exist. The others are silly made-up nonsense. But no, no, no, no, not yours. Yours is real." And then Richard Dawkins says, "We're all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. You don't believe in Zeus. You don't believe in Hercules. You don't believe in Poseidon. We're all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

You think it's silly to believe in Zeus. Some of us are just a little less silly than you." Finally, argument number three: You think that Jesus is so special, but the reality is you just don't know history. There's nothing special about Jesus that's any different than the other gods or any other fictional heroes for that matter. First of all, there's no empirical evidence that he was divine. In that sense, he shares with every other god that's ever been proposed. The myths associated with Jesus are associated with all the other myths and the Bible. The flood myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written well before the Bible, exactly the same. The hero of the Bible was asked to create an ark and put all the species two by two on seven levels.

Same thing. Virgin birth. Nothing special about Jesus. Look at all these. They're all supposed to have been born of virgins.

The whole story, in fact, take Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, versus Jesus. It's exactly the same. They were both born from a virgin mother. They were fathered by the king of heaven. They were returned from the dead. They transformed water into wine. In fact, they talked about eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the creator. They were taken as a liberator of mankind. That story has been told over and over again. And this is just one of the most recent renderings.

And the parable of the sower, the seeds that were thrown along the path are snatched up by the evil one, while the others are scorched by the sun because their roots weren't deep enough. I'm telling you that these arguments are designed by Satan to snatch up seeds and rip out roots.

How well are we preparing our children to face an onslaught of texts like these? I could literally stand up here for hours on end with no break, relentless. And this is one of the reasons why many Anabaptists are against sending their children to higher education, because you send your kids to college and odds are very high they will face these arguments and many more like this. And they will be surrounded by the type of men and women who are in this room.

They will be sheep among packs of wolves, and they will be shown no mercy. The mental attack will come wave after wave, never giving up. And if they are not equipped, we would lose them. In my life, I had to wrestle with these very rational and logical-sounding arguments, especially the one that points out that there are over 4,000 religions. What are the odds that I'm right? I mean, they're against me. The odds are against us. What are the odds? Thousands of other possibilities. And I was lucky enough to be born into the right God.

I can't run from the argument. That does describe what I claim to be true. Luckily for me, though, my roots were just deep enough that the evil one could not pull up my faith. But there were days in my life when I was down to one single green leaf trying to make it through a cold winter.

And so the message today and the next message for sure, it might be two after. I think I'll be able to get it done in the next one. These are messages to myself. If I had a time machine and I could go back and speak to the 15-year-old me to prepare myself to deal with a text like this, these are the things that I would be telling to myself. But before I tell you what I would be telling to myself, let me tell you what I wouldn't say to myself. I wouldn't go back in time and try to poke holes in all of the arguments. I wouldn't explain to myself how to tell when someone is putting words in my mouth or how to tell when someone's building up a straw man or how to spot fallacies or inconsistencies in the arguments.

This is not the approach that I will be taking with myself, because the reality is that sometimes throughout your life, an argument will come, and in the moment, you will not know how to handle it. My goal is not to prepare the young me to be able to combat every argument. The goal is to provide a framework in which you can operate that will allow your roots to stay firmly planted even when you are unable to answer the argument in the moment. That's the goal.

So let us say that their arguments are 100% accurate, factual. Let us leave these arguments on the table. Let the other side have their voice. My goal is not to remove their voice or to silence them. My goal is to add to the conversation, to add things onto the table that are also true. I want to lay enough of a foundation on the table that even if someone comes to you with a well-crafted and well-articulated argument, one that you don't know how to respond to, you could still be like, "Well, you know, I don't really know how to answer that." But even if what you're saying is true, even in the way that you're presenting it, there's also all this other stuff that's true.

And what you just said here didn't change any of this stuff over here. Let me explain what I mean by this. Some months ago, my vehicle was in the shop getting an oil change and some other maintenance. And so I asked Josiah if I could borrow his cartographs at lunch.

So he throws me his keys. I call Brother's Pizza, order a couple of slices of pizza, and out the door I go. Now, I'm not the most observant person. And though I had worked with Josiah for nearly two years, I wasn't really sure what car he drove. And so I'm stepping out into the parking lot and I'm trying to figure it out. And so I look down at the keys and I see that his key fob is an infinity. I'm like, "All right, okay." So I'm looking for an infinity. Next, I start clicking the lock button to make the horn beep. So the horn beeps. I get in the car.

And when I went to go put the key into the ignition, I realized that it's a push button. I was like, "Oh." So I looked down at the key and there's one key and one key fob. And so I'm thinking, "Oh, maybe the key fob starts this." So I reached up, pushed the button, boom, starts right up. And I'm on my way to get my pizza.

Now, at this point, I had no idea that Quinn also drove an infinity. I had no idea that Quinn's infinity had been parked right next to Josiah's infinity. I had no idea that when I hit the lock button on the key fob, the horn that beeped didn't actually belong to the car that I got into.

I had no idea that Quinn had left his own key fob in his own car. And when I started the car, it had nothing to do with Josiah's key. I straight up stole Quinn's car. Didn't have a single conversation with him about it. Fully 100% convinced I was driving Josiah's car. I would have sworn in court. I'm driving Josiah's car.

Later that day, I asked Josiah if he could take me to the mechanic to go pick up my car. The work was done. And so we get into his car and we're pulling out of the parking lot and I notice something. He shifts gears.

And I look down and I see it's a manual stick shift. I'm thinking, "Hmm, an hour ago, this was an automatic vehicle." Then I was like, "Wait a minute. That's not how cars work." Now, it's a running joke to anyone who knows me that I was born without a man card, but no man card is required to know that an automatic transmission doesn't magically turn into a stick shift. So I said to Josiah, "Do you have two cars at work?" And he said, "No."

And I was thinking, "What in the world kind of fourth dimension did I just walk into?" I was so confused. And here's my point. I had a lot of evidence telling me I was in Josiah's car. The infinity symbol matched. The horn beeped when I clicked the button, so I thought. The key started the car, so I thought. And cars don't start without keys. And the majority of responsible people don't leave their key fobs in the car, especially when it's a push button starter. And Quinn's a rather responsible young guy, so I thought.

I had all of this evidence. I was convinced I was in Josiah's car. All of that evidence is still on the table. And for argument's sake, we can leave the evidence on the table. None of that needs to go away. It was the added evidence that changed my mind. The evidence that now Josiah is personally chauffeuring me somewhere in his car, and it's definitely not the same car I was in. All of the evidence I really that I originally had was real in some senses. It was true in some senses, but there was more to the story, more to the conversation. And this is what I mean when I say that I'm not trying to remove the arguments presented.

Let them have their arguments. We will leave them on the table. I want to add additional evidence and add additional conversation. So let's hop into the time machine and go speak to the 15-year-old me. And when we get there, this is where I would begin: our shared humanity.

There are four aspects of shared humanity that I want to look at. Number one, we didn't ask to exist. No human that exists chose to exist. None of us asked to be here. And it's not that we were put here against our will. The fact is we had no will. We didn't even exist. This is one shared reality of humanity.

You didn't ask to be here. You simply emerged. You woke up one day. You became self-aware one day. You don't remember it, but there was a day where you were realizing, "I'm in this body." I'm 41 years old, and sometimes I still marvel at it. I'll look at my hand and think, "How am I moving that? How am I in this body?"

So number one, we did not ask to exist. Number two, we desire to be loved. We didn't ask to be here. Next thing we know, we want to be loved. And again, when this desire comes, we're too young to articulate it, but the desire to be loved eventually exists in all of us.

It's so self-evident. I don't even need to explain it. So number one, we didn't ask to exist. Number two, we desire to be loved. And number three, we suffer. There's something called the innocence of a child. Children are protected from the reality of suffering in two ways.

Number one, by nature, and number two, by design. By nature in that young children, they don't have the mental capacity to understand the complexities of life that ultimately lead to suffering. They don't have it up here. And a child cannot comprehend the concept of utter despair. Try to explain to a four-year-old what utter despair is. The child is innocent of these things by nature, and the child is kept innocent of these things by design, by the design of the parent.

Good parents do what they can to protect their children from the realities of suffering to keep their innocence from being taken from them any earlier than it must. But in the end, it must. The reality cannot be hidden from them indefinitely.

Eventually, the reality of suffering enters into the child's life, and it is stripped of its innocence. Suffering becomes an inescapable part of reality. But as humans, we do not need to be exposed to war or famine in order to suffer.

Suffering comes in all sorts of different forms. When I was in high school, I didn't know what despair was. I didn't know that you could be alive on the outside, but somehow be dead on the inside. I didn't know that was a thing.

And I'm not talking about just feeling dead. I'm talking about experiencing deadness, emptiness. That concept didn't exist to me before it happened to me. And all that didn't come upon me because of war or famine. My heart was broken by a girl.

I remember thinking, "If this is life, wouldn't it be better to just not exist?"

Despair, it takes the mind into dark places.

If this is what it means to exist, I would rather just not be. So number one, we didn't ask to exist. Number two, we long to be loved. And number three, we suffer. And this brings us to point number four. At some point, as we navigate this complex reality that we exist in without our say-so, we find that in the end, we die.

This is humanity. This is our shared human experience. It does not matter if you were born rich or poor, black or white, left or right, Christian or Muslim. This describes you. This is shared humanity. Now, why would I bring all this up? Because somewhere in every person's life, in one form or another, it doesn't always manifest in the same way, but somewhere between existing and longing to be loved and despair and suffering, I mean, faced with the reality of death, somewhere in there, the question emerges, "What is the meaning of this?

What is the purpose of this? If this is life, what's the point?" From all of this emerges within the human the existential crisis, which is defined as an inner conflict characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning. Now, why would I explain all of this to the 15-year-old me?

Because the meaning of life, the purpose of human existence, these are not trivial matters. These things have been the greatest questions, the greatest struggles that mankind has faced for as long as history is recorded. We live, we long, we suffer, we die. What's the point?

Is there any meaning to this? One of the tactics of the demons that they use to rip up roots of the rocky soil is they talk about these most important things regarding meaning and purpose, and they belittle them.

They present them as trivial, as unanswerable things. They present that humanity has finally arrived and that now that we have science, we no longer need to be barbaric Neanderthals who believe that the reason that arrived was because we sacrificed our children to the rain gods. We've moved past that.

And here's another tactic of the evil one. Now that we've arrived, now that we have science, now that we know what makes the world tick, how stupid and silly of an idea to turn to a book that's thousands of years old as some source of truth. For heaven's sake, they thought the world was flat.

But my question is this: how else are you going to find it? How else are you going to find the meaning of life? Think about it with me. As creatures that didn't ask to exist, you just woke up one day. When the question arises, "What is the meaning of life? How can the answer be found?" It can't be found within yourself because if it were found there, you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place.

When the bubble is popped, when the innocence is broken, when the despair sets in, and the child says to his parents, "What is this? I didn't ask to be here, and life is tough. I'm suffering here, and no one can seem to help me get around this death thing. Father, what is the meaning of this?"

But when this question comes, all that has happened is history has repeated itself. Why do I say that? Because the people that you're begging for answers from, they're just like you. They didn't ask to exist either. They just woke up one day too.

So the question must be answered by grandma and grandpa. But grandma and grandpa, they're in the same boat. And it doesn't matter how far you go down the line. There is no single human that will find they had any choice in their own painful existence.

You can travel to the edges of the earth, and you will find the seven-plus billion people on the planet, not a single one of them didn't just wake up one day. Everyone's in the same boat, and no one has their own authority to tell you what the meaning of life is.

So the question eventually becomes this: is there any accurate record that exists that explains the beginning of this thing called humanity? And the answer to that question is actually very simple, not complicated, black and white. There either is a record or there's not.

There either is or there isn't. And this introduces the possibility that there is no accurate record. And if this is the case, if there is no accurate historical record of the purpose or cause of humanity, then in the end, humans can never know their purpose, not in the sense of real knowing.

We can guess, we can make theories, but if there is no record, there's no knowable answer. 4,000 religions seems complicated, but in the end, it's not that complicated. If there is no preserved record describing the purpose of existence, then there is no knowing. And as we will see through these messages, there are very few claims that such a record even exists. I mean, there's not many at all when you actually dig into it.

And the digital world is a recent reality. The only hope that we have that these records exist are the ancient texts. After you've asked the two or three generations before you, "What is this whole life thing about?" and you find that they have no answers, how else could you find the answers other than the ancient documents that claim to have a preserved record of it? There is no other way.

To reject history because the record of it is old is to abandon the pursuit of meaning behind human existence, all because it started a long time ago. Now, who's not making any sense? Some will disagree with the argument. They will say, "You do not need to know what happened in the beginning in order to find the meaning of human existence," but I disagree with that.

And here's why. Again, it's black and white. Existence was caused by a mind or it was not. Not as simple. Let me unpack that a little.

C.S. Lewis put it this way: "Ever since man were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And very roughly, two views have been held. First is what is called the materialist view.

People who take this view think that matter in space just happened to exist and always have existed, and nobody knows why. And that matter behaving in certain fixed ways has just happened by a sort of fluke to produce creatures like ourselves who are somehow able to think."

The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else that we know. More like a mind than anything else that we know. Why does this matter? Why does it mind if there's a mind behind it or not? Because if there was a mind and a will behind your existence, then the possibility exists that you were created for a purpose.

It does not necessarily mean that you have a purpose. It means the possibility exists that you have a purpose. In the end, if there was no mind and no will behind existence, if humanity was a fluke, then there is no purpose. We can find a use for our lives, but no ultimate purpose.

You cannot fulfill your destiny if no destiny has been given, and no destiny can be given unless there's a mind to give it. It's difficult to explain, I know. Let us say that the universe let us say that the existence of the universe was a fluke, that there actually was no mind behind the creation of the universe. In this case, the purpose of your existence would only be found in your parents. Why is this so? Because your parents, they do have minds and they do have wills. And if a mind and a will chooses to bring something into existence, and that mind does it with and for a purpose, then that new creation has a purpose for its existence.

And its purpose was established in advance by the mind of the parents. Let us say, for example, that there is no God, that there is no mind behind the universe. And let us say that your parents choose to have you so that when they get older, they have someone there to give them baths and help them feel comfortable in their old age.

If that was your parents' sole purpose for having you, and if the universe is a mindless accident, then the meaning of your existence would be to take care of your parents. No more, no less. Doesn't mean you would fulfill that purpose. You're free to reject that purpose. But if materialism is true, if there is no mind behind this chain of humanity, and your parents had you for the sole purpose of wiping their tushes when they get old, and wiping tushes is your lot in life, that's your destiny. To refuse that would be to reject your destiny.

What then if it turned out they didn't even want you? They didn't want to get pregnant. They didn't want a child. You were an accident. In this case, you would literally be meaningless in an absolute sense. There would be no ultimate purpose because the universe was a fluke, and your parents, they didn't even want you. This would make you a purposeless burden. That's how this stuff works.

Now, if you take that same example and now say there was a mind behind the universe, this is the religious view. Now, only now does the possibility exist that there is a meaning of your life greater or above what your parents will.

So this is what I mean when I say that if there is no mind, there is no ultimate meaning. If there is no will behind all of this stuff that exists, if it's all just a fluke, then it's ultimately meaningless. We can find a useful purpose for our existence, but no ultimate purpose.

And again, it's really simple. It's black and white. It's not complicated. There either is a mind behind creation or there isn't. Once again, there's not a plethora of choices. There are only two. There was or there wasn't. And here's something else that's and here's something else also very simple. If there is a mind behind creation, there either is a record of it or there is not.

It's really not that complicated. There either is an accurate record that exists or there isn't. So a quick recap before we go on. If there is no mind, there is no meaning. Number two, there either is a mind behind creation or there isn't. Number three, there either is a record of it or there isn't. And number four, the record is scribbled on the walls of caves or preserved in ancient books and scrolls. There is no other option. The digital age is new. There is no other median for which this record can reach us outside of oral tradition.

Now, all I've done here is provide a framework for humans like us who didn't ask to be here and who long and suffer and die, a framework with which we can seek the answers to these haunting questions. Is it all this meaningless? This gives us a direction to go towards. So the notion that someone has arrived because they do not seek the answers to existence in 2,000-year-old books is so irrational. It's unlogical, disconnected from reality. It's a silly argument.

So back to this idea of 3,000 gods and 4,000 religions that Ricky Gervas and others that talk about. You Google it, and it's just parroted all over the place. 4,000 gods, 4,000 gods, 4,000 gods. How do you know? How do you know? Where does this idea come from?

We can't know for sure because I literally found zero of them that quoted a source. My guess is Google because when you Google how many religions are there in the world, this is what you get. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, which at some point in the future will become countless. That top listing there you see on the listing there, if you click on that, it takes you to this list of 4,200 religions that it's talking about. And what you find in that list is that this statement is indeed accurate. It is not simply a list of religions. It is a list of religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, and movements.

To present the argument that there are 4,000 religions leaving out these eight other very important qualifications makes it seem way more complicated than it actually is. When you dig into the data, you will find that if you don't count the churches and denominations and all the religious bodies that exist within each religion, there are only considered to be somewhere between five and seven religions in the world.

Major religions. Qualify that. According to the Pew Research Center, the world's major religions by percentage are Judaism, 0.2%, Christianity, 31.5%, Islam, 23.2%, non-religious or unaffiliated, 16.3%, Hinduism, 15%, Buddhism, 7.1%, and folk religion, 5.9%. Now, granted, these are percentages of people's professing, professions of their religion.

Now, do you see that little blue sliver, really small blue sliver up there at the top? Just for a moment, ignore that, and let's look at all the rest of it. Between all the rest, the non-affiliated Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and folk religion, that constitutes a whopping 99.2% of the total population on earth.

All the other thousands of options that we're told that exist, all exist in that last 0.8%, that little blue sliver at the top. Let's look at that blue sliver a little closer. This 0.8% equates roughly 65 million people. Of that 65 million people, over 50%, 35 million of them believe in something called Sikhism. That leaves a whopping 4% to cover all the other options that we're told that we have.

What does this prove? Nothing. Doesn't prove anything. It's just evidence. It's a part of the conversation. Evidence that those who make such claims as this, they either don't know what they're talking about or they're being intellectually dishonest. They are presenting something that's not really that complicated as something that is so complicated that blind stupidity is required in order to believe that truth can be discovered. But it's not that complicated.

Back in 2013, a popular Christian apologist was asked the following question: "If all religions claim to be truth, then how can you know that the Christian worldview is the truth?" His answer in short was this. He said, "You take a look at all the world religions and you see where these four questions are dealt with: origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. These four questions," he says, "have to have two answers or passed two tests: the test of correspondence and the test of coherence."

He said, "Every answer to these four questions has to correspond with truth either through the empirical form of measurement or through the logical reasoning process. This means that where it can be tested, do we see that it matches up with the reality that we know? Does it correspond to truth? Does it hold up through the logical reasoning process?" Now, this was a very difficult concept for the 15-year-old me to grasp.

So we'll unpack it in just a little bit. But before we do, in that video, that speaker, he exits off the stage, and then this guy steps up. And I wish I knew his name, but they never said what his name was. Because what he said, the way he explained it, gave me something I really could start to sink my teeth in. This really helped me when I was younger. He said this: "This question comes also in this fashion: Have you studied all the religions in the world in order for you to know that your religion is right? Is it not possible that you've missed something?" Now, that sounds like a very daunting question, but it's really not that difficult to deal with.

Because all the worldviews in existence can actually be grouped at a basic level. You could spend an eternity studying just one of these religions. But all of the worldviews in existence can be grouped in under three different categories. The first category is the view that only the universe exists. Here you have atheism and naturalism. The second category believes that only God exists.

Some Eastern religions will tell you that God exists, only God exists, and this is cashed out in different ways. I'm just using the name God so that we can easily grasp the concept. Then in the middle, you have the view that both God and the universe exist. Both God and the universe exist. And under this, you have Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So it's not difficult to apply these tests of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny to these systems as a whole without having to study each one in particular. You just need to know the basic idea. What are the basic thoughts for these views? Then you can critique all of them without having to be an expert in every worldview that's out there.

So it's important for us to know that it's not so difficult to do. We are not just making it up and trying to come up with answers to these kinds of questions. A couple of things I want to unpack from that.

What's being said here is that all religions, no matter what, can be grouped into one of three categories: only the universe exists, only God exists, or both God and the universe exist. The second thing that's being said here is that there are ways to test these things. The question, what exactly are we testing for? These tests are to determine if one worldview is true and if another worldview is not true. Another way to say this is, how can you know when one worldview is an actual description of reality versus a worldview that does not describe reality?

Some may ask, why does one need to be true? Can they not all be true? Short answer to this is no. Because every single worldview does indeed fall into one of these three categories: either only the universe exists, only God exists, or both God and the universe exist. And each one of these are mutually exclusive from each other. For example, if the worldview that perfectly describes reality falls into any one of these, if it doesn't matter which one, let's just say number one, if only the universe exists, if that's an accurate description of reality, then any worldview that would say that only God exists or that both the universe and God exist would not be accurate, accurately describing what's real.

They would be false. So no, all worldviews cannot be true. It is possible that all worldviews that we know are false. That's a possibility. But it's not possible that all of them are true. We're almost finished. Just hang in there just a little bit longer.

So circle back to these four questions: origin, meaning, destiny, morality. And let's look at more at origin and meaning.

We touched on this a little bit already. If a mind and a will exist and it creates you for a purpose, then you have a purpose. But if you were an accident, would this mean your life is useless? No, we've already talked about this. A person can still self-prescribe a purpose for his life. A person can say, "This is my purpose in life because I say so."

But here we're using the same words, purpose and meaning, but we're using them in different ways. When a man wakes up and he becomes self-aware and he's longing and he's suffering and he's faced with the reality of death and he cries out, "What is the purpose of this?" He is clearly not asking what his self-prescribed purpose is.

He is asking, "Is there a purpose beyond what I have found a use for in my life?" And what I want you to notice is that origin and meaning, they both point us to the past. Throughout history, every time you find humans, you find the concept of God emerging. You find any pocket of humans, a God will exist once you dig into their culture. And here's one of the reasons why. Because we all see generations coming from generations. A man, he's intimate with a woman, a seed is planted, life comes forth. Generations coming from generations, humans coming from humans, humans. We never see humans coming from non-humans. We talk about it when we talk about evolution.

But to this date, we haven't seen it. It's called the theory of evolution for a reason.

Also, all of us humans experience this thing called time. We experience the before and after. You look at your children, you say, "I came before you." Then you look at your parents and say, "You came before me." And you look at grandparents and say, "They came before them." And it goes on and on through the generations. That's a shared human part of our shared humanity. But inescapably, every human across all times is faced with this question: Do the generations just keep going back through all of eternity? Have humans been coming from humans for hundreds of billions of trillions of gazillions of quadrillions all the way back to infinity of years?

Or was there a first human? And when our brains reached that point, they glitch out a little bit. We don't even know how to comprehend that. Infinity of years? How do you comprehend that? Infinity of generations. What I'm speaking of is universal. All human civilizations wrestle with this. And in the end, at its most basic level, there's only two theories on the table.

We don't have 3,000 religions. We only have a handful. We don't have thousands of theories about the origins of the universe, nor do we have 10 or 5, nor do we even have 3. No, we have 2.

All of this in the end ends up being much more simple than presented to us. It's not that complicated. Either God or the Big Bang. Let us say hypothetically that there was a first human. And somehow we were magically able to bring him back to life. Even if this were the case, there would be no guarantee that the first human could shed any light on this human condition. Maybe he just popped into existence and no one ever gave him an explanation. It's possible. You became self-aware.

You look at yourself and you say, "Where do I come from?" And your mom's standing there and she says, "You came from me." But imagine being that first human. And you look up and you say, "Where do I come from?" It is possible that he looked up and there was no one or no thing there to give him an answer.

This is what I mean when I say there's no guarantee that the first human has the ability to shed light on our human condition. But the first human coming into existence, knowing what happened behind that, determines whether or not there is any hope that humanity can know if life is meaningless or not. Unless God just breaks open the sky and comes and tells us.

And I'm talking about in a transcendent sense, beyond what we can find a use of our life for. Our only hope of knowing in the sense of real knowing depends on the record of what in the world preceded or caused the first of humanity to become.

If there is no record, then knowing is not possible. If this is the case, then we must settle for theories and make the best use of our lives. And once again, it's very simple. There is a record or there isn't.

Not that complicated. And this is what I mean when I say the origin and meaning are tied together. Because the answer to the question of meaning hinges on whether or not there was a mind and a will that calls all of this to start in the first place.

Now let's look at origin and its relationship to morality. Once again, I want to point out that origin and morality are linked in the same way that origin and meaning are. And once again, it takes us backwards in time. And here is why.

Because at its most basic level, the debate regarding morality is whether or not morality is objective or subjective. Now, this was a very difficult thing for the 15-year-old me to wrap my head around. So I'm going to try to explain this in simple terms as I can. In layman's term, it basically is the argument of whether or not morality is made by man or not made by man. The question is, when a man says something is morally right or morally wrong, is he describing something that is unchangeable or is he defining what is real with his words? That's the question.

If morality is subject to the opinion of man, then it is subjective. And if it is subjective, it cannot be absolute. It cannot be absolute because two different men can believe opposite things about the same thing. One man can say it's perfectly fine to have sex with as many partners as you wish. The other man says, "That's morally reprehensible."

But both of these men are men. And if morality is subject to man, then it can't be absolute. And it is this concept of subjective morality that this idea has risen in our culture. And I suspect it's been rising in cultures all through history of my truth.

This says that morality is not outside of us pushing in. Morality is inside of us and we push it out.

Question: What gives a man the ability to create a moral law or a moral judgment for himself? I'll tell you. What gives a man the ability to make a moral law or a moral judgment is the fact that he has a mind and a will. With no mind and no will, moral law cannot come into existence. For example, this potato has no mind. It has no will. I could say it's as dumb as a rock. Might as well just say it's as dumb as a potato. Not much difference.

Let's ask this potato. Mr. Leroy, is it okay for me to hate my brother?

This question to the potato is absurd. Why? Because it has no mind. A moral law or a moral judgment requires a mind. And can you see where I'm going with this? Subjective morality is a moral law that is made by the mind of men, but objective morality, by definition, is not subject to the mind of men. But it's still, if objective moral law is going to exist, there must still be a mind behind it. So subjective moral law is made by the mind of men, while objective moral law is made by the mind of God. If there is no God, this is to say, if there is no mind behind creation and humanity, then there is no objective morality.