Jonathan Noyes is at The Babylon Bee to talk about his past days as an "evangelical atheist" when he would try to convert the Christians to his wonderful worldview where nothing ultimately matters but you can do anything you want. He became a Christian and now he tackles the major atheist objections to faith in God, like the problem of evil and suffering, and gives his reasons for believing in the God of the Bible. Listen to find out why Jonathan put his fedora-wearing days behind him. Jonathan is a speaker with Stand to Reason: https://www.str.org/ In the full-length ad-free podcast Jonathan takes some questions from subscribers to The Babylon Bee. Use PROMOCODE: 'PODCAST' and get 20% off becoming a subscriber at: https://babylonbee.com/plans?utm_source=Libsyn&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=description
And now it's time for another interview on the Babylon B podcast.
Well, everybody, this is the interview show here at the Babylon Bee Podcast.
Very excited today.
Adam and I are here.
So nice to, this is a good combo.
I always like getting to be on the show with you.
Do you like being with me better than being with Kyle?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, good.
It's not even a competition.
I just wanted to ask that.
You can ask the rest of the questions.
Okay, that's it.
Yeah, it's not true, Kyle.
I'm just kidding.
Don't fire me.
Okay, so with us today is John Noyce from Stands to Reason.
We're very happy to have you on today.
Thank you.
Thank you for making the long trek from Long Beach today.
This is amazing.
Yeah.
I'm with the guys at the B.
Yeah, it's a dream.
Well, at our secure and undisclosed location.
Oh, I just published the adjustment.
Oh, shoot.
Yeah.
And what is it?
Can you say it again?
It's...
It's f***ing.
Yeah, they have to blame.
Now they have to blend out.
Now they have to bleep that out.
Now they have to bleed that out.
I love it.
I try to say the address as much as possible.
They always have to bleep out.
I mean, the more work for post-production, the better, right?
Yeah.
So you are a former atheist.
We're going to talk a little bit about atheism today.
So you're a farmer atheist.
And you're from Massachusetts, aren't you?
I am.
I am from Massachusetts.
You want me to say some type of words?
I'm not.
I get so excited.
I'm not your monkey.
I get so excited when a word comes out in that accent.
It's so funny.
And the further you get up the coast, like I grew up in Pennsylvania and I drive up to Maine with friends sometimes.
And by the time you get to Massachusetts, it's kind of endearing and amusing.
And then when you get to Maine, it's abrasive.
Yeah.
That accent of being like, oh, don't do that.
Maine is an interesting.
Maine, they have these things called Mainas where it's really funny.
So you'll get rid of certain as, like R is A for me.
Yeah.
And so we'll get rid of the As, but then in Maine, they add as to the end of the words.
Like, for example, for the longest time, I thought the world, I thought the word spatula was a spatula.
Spatula.
And I thought I said it incorrectly.
Yeah.
But in reality, come to find out.
I mean, I was literally like 37 when I learned that the word.
The word spatula actually didn't have an as.
Spatula.
Yeah.
So that's actually true.
My grandparents are from Maine, or they were before they passed away.
And they lived in Portland.
They live in Portland, Maine.
And, you know, they would put R's at the end of everything almost.
Yeah.
So my wife's name is Christina.
And she'd be like, oh, Christina.
Yeah.
Christina and I. You know, like, ayah.
Ayah.
I was like, yeah, it's all right.
I couldn't even hear the accent when I was a kid.
It's like a different world.
Yeah, it is so weird.
It's so weird.
I remember I pulled into a hotel one time in our motel and the valet comes over and he goes, you boys looking for valet packing?
Me and my friend got excited because he said parking.
He said the word.
And then we go, no, we're just looking for self-parking.
And he goes, oh, there's public packing on the street.
Pependicula to this one.
He's just trying to do it.
No one uses the word perpendicular conversationally.
It's really funny.
It's really funny.
Well, we live in the part of the country because I'm in Southern California as well now that they actually speak correctly, right?
No accents and stuff like that.
So whenever we hear Valley Valley, we use it with you.
Well, the Valley girl type thing.
Yeah, I guess.
I guess I have that accent.
I got really criticized last week for saying like all the time.
There's one commenter.
There's one commenter on our YouTube channel who complains about us saying like in almost every video.
Okay, so I haven't seen that criticism before.
I felt very self-conscious.
Thank you.
I've seen a few times and I became self-conscious because I don't think I do it a lot compared to what I hear some people do it.
But when I am on the podcast, I do use like every now and then.
Well, granted, the story I told last week had a lot of likes in it.
It had a lot of likes in it.
It happens.
Okay, well, let's get to it.
Let's get to John here.
Let's get to atheism.
Let's get to atheism.
So you're at Stand to Reason, which is an amazing.
So Greg Kochol and who else is part of that?
So we got Greg Kochle.
We got Tim Barnett.
That's right.
He does Red Pen Logic.
Yeah, Dr. B. Mr. B, not Dr. B. Not Dr. Don't give him things he doesn't deserve.
And then we've got Amy Hall, who's amazing.
She does basically all the blogging and everything.
We've got Alan Schliemann who hits up the non-controversial issues like transgenderism, homosexuality, Islam.
All of those things are settled.
All bad, all wrong.
Yeah, the easy stuff.
Yeah.
Just the straight condemnation.
So he's fantastic.
Controversy.
And then we just brought on a year ago, a year ago, this young, well, not young man, he's my age, Robbie Lashua.
And he's actually our first out-of-state, well, I guess Tim Barnett, but he's in Canada.
That doesn't count.
It doesn't count.
That's kind of like out there in the ether.
Canada doesn't really exist.
It doesn't.
I don't believe in it.
And it's good to meet another Canadian conspiracy theorist.
So Robbie Lashua is with us as well.
And so now there's four or five of us full-time speakers.
Wow.
It's awesome.
Full-time.
So you're flying around doing all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, we're pretty, I'm getting busier and busier.
Yeah, it's full-time.
And then I pastor a small little teeny high church.
I started static.
This is going to be a long time.
We're going to do it every time.
I know.
This is going to be.
I started four years ago.
Four years ago.
Okay, that's a man.
So it's a small church.
And are you Pentecostal?
Are you Catholic?
What are you?
We are non-denominational, lean, reformed.
Okay.
We're reformed.
I won't say we lean.
I'll just own it.
Okay.
So when you were an atheist, how many fedoras did you own?
Oh, dude, fedoras.
I wouldn't even know what a fedora was when I was an atheist.
Did you dress like an atheist?
Are there stereotypical things about an atheist?
Glasses.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, always trying to look really, really smart.
No.
No.
Dressed the same.
Summer scarves.
Tunics.
If I, yeah, cumber bun.
Did you do a lot of outfits?
Did you do a lot of fun stuff when you were an atheist that you can't do now, like steal and covet wives and stuff like that?
Well, I mean, if we're being serious, yeah, I did a lot of things I shouldn't be doing.
But that was part of the experience for me, too, though.
So there's two things here.
First is there's this idea that Christians are stuffy and they don't have any fun.
And I'll tell you what, life for me has gotten more and more interesting as my walk progresses with Christ.
However, there are limitations on what we can do.
I was a young man living in Hollywood, you know, working at a really great law firm, making good money.
I was having a lot of fun.
Like I look back at my, like, some people are going to be like, oh, you know, it was awful.
No, I really enjoyed my sin.
What was your favorite sin?
Well, let's do this.
And I'm going to lose my job.
No, I had a lot of favorite sins, man.
Didn't we all?
That's the thing about sin, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is it's attractive and fun.
It's fun for a season.
It's fun, man, until your conscience is awakened and you realize that the things that you're pursuing are actually sin and they're destructive, not just for you, but for the world around you as well.
And so we talked about this a little bit off camera before the podcast, but were you raised religious one way or the other?
Were you raised atheist?
Yeah, no.
So I was raised, I'd say non-religious, ultimately.
The Northeast in general, at least my experience of the Northeast being raised there, was it's culturally Catholic.
And what I mean by that is like people would go to Catholic Mass on Christmas and Easter and stuff like this.
They weren't actually Catholic.
They didn't actually believe in the Catholic faith.
I actually didn't know any.
Looking back on, I'm trying to think of my friends now.
And I didn't know any real like Christians.
Nobody went to church on Sundays nobody, and uh, but because it's culture of the Catholic, my parents, for some reason or another, wanted me to go to CCD, so like that's a midweek kind of Sunday school.
Oh, I thought it was like that weed thing.
Yeah no no, that's CBD, and that's later in the story.
No they uh, they wanted me to for some reason.
I maybe they thought it would instill morals or whatever, and and uh, but it didn't go well with me.
I actually ended up getting kicked out.
Um, but that's actually my earliest memory.
My earliest memory is being walked out of the church by a priest kind of holding the back of my not not mean, just making sure I was going where I was supposed to go, my mom pulling up in the car, him opening the door, putting me in and saying, you know what, Mrs. Noise, we'd love it if your son, if your son, never came back to this church.
Oh, that was nice of him, it was really nice.
Well, the thing is, it's like we, we would, we would like to uninvite you yes, but but I was actually like I was.
I wasn't a great kid, you know what I mean.
So, like I was probably, I was probably doing things that warranted that and I was probably doing it, multiple times, even being asked to stop.
I was a troublemaker.
So I kind of understand it.
But that's my earliest memory and it's not like that led me into atheism or anything like that.
You know that that'd be ridiculous, but it definitely seasoned the worldview, the Christian worldview for me, a little bit.
And then growing up it was like it was really like relativism, kind of utilitarianism, whatever kind of works.
So that's what actually led you into atheism.
Is this priest?
Oh yeah no no, it's other like.
What did actually lead you in?
Well, I would have said, and I would say now that my, my investigation of the world, for some reason, the I've always, I've always wanted to know what's true.
You know, truth has been paramount.
It's been kind of the supreme ethic for me forever.
So I was experiencing the world, I was living in the world and I came to understand the, the naturalistic worldview, the idea that everything that exists comes about by a purely physical process, best explains the world around me, and that's how I thought that.
That's what I thought the intellectual response was that's what I was being taught in hindsight in school and as I adopted that worldview and digged into that worldview, it provided me a way to live the way that I wanted to live.
You know, there were very little consequences to my actions, which led to really dark places, ultimately hard places, but fun places.
But really I mean some of them were really fun, not all of them, but some of them were fun.
I mean, did you guys, did you guys ever learn fun places?
What do you mean?
Like an escape room, board games?
Have you guys ever played board games?
There's so much fun.
No like, but we'd have fun.
You know, I'd I because?
Because, according to my worldview, there are no consequences for my actions.
Right, you know, in an ultimate sense, so I could do whatever I want for sure.
But what happens is is if you really lean into that, if you own that worldview and try to live it consistently to its logical consequences, you you find out that it doesn't work.
Functionally speaking, it just doesn't work.
It's not practical.
Not only can it not explain fundamental features of the world around you, it it doesn't work.
Relationships get broken And what I realized is I was leaving in my fun.
Yeah.
I was kind of leaving a little wake of destruction behind the trail of broken bodies.
Broken people, man.
Well, just broken everything, you know, broken jobs, broken people, broken, whatever, you know, because there was no consequences.
So I did what I wanted.
You know, I said before this, I speak a lot on suicide right now, has been a topic of focus.
And I remember I had a friend who died by suicide in high school.
Well, he wasn't, we were out of high school.
He was a friend in high school.
And I remember my sister telling me he died.
And my response was, well, okay, who cares?
Like, who cares?
Because at bottom, life is meaningless.
And I was really trying.
That was towards the end of my.
You were trying to be consistent.
I was really trying to be consistent.
And I think when you read good, like when you read the atheists and they're being consistent, they say this, right?
Dawkins, nothing but pitiless indifference is what Dawkins says.
Dawkins says there's no morals.
There's no right and wrong.
There's no justice.
That's right.
Pitiless indifference.
You know, Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan, life is solitary, poor, brutish, and nasty.
Nasty.
Nasty.
Yeah, it's interesting because if you live that out really consistently, murder, rape, all those things are just amoral actions and they don't really have consequences.
There's nothing.
Yeah.
So all that.
So why would they ever have a problem with any of those actions?
That's right.
And it's important to make the distinction here that we're not, at least I'm not.
You guys can argue whatever you want.
I'm not arguing that atheists think rape is good.
What I'm saying is that the worldview of naturalism can't tow that freight.
They can't shoulder the burden of an objective morality.
At best, they can say it goes against cultural convention.
Maybe it's taboo.
Yeah.
But they can't say it's actually wrong.
That's right.
And you alluded to this.
I think, you know, to their credit, I don't think it's a good way of living, but they're intellectually consistent in that.
There are atheists who try to impose some universal morality or say there's right and wrong, which I think is hard to argue for without a God or some universal good.
Yeah, if you have a saying is a moral law requires a moral lawgiver.
That's right.
And actually, that was one of the things that led to my ultimate conversion.
One of the, I call them bumps in the reality, you know, because so the world is a certain way, right?
I mean, it doesn't, what I mean by that is it doesn't, it doesn't bend.
The world doesn't change according to your emotions, your likes, or dislikes.
And so reality is the way the world really is.
So when you don't live according to reality, you bump into it.
And some of those bumps, they hurt.
And the bump of a moral depth, the bump of, I call it the bump of bad, that hurt because you start to realize, oh, wait a second, there is a fundamental feature, a moral depth to reality.
And this brokenness out here that we all complain about, right?
There's brokenness out in the world when we know everybody uses Nazi Germany, right?
Everybody uses Hitler because he's awful, right?
So when I said like what happened in Auschwitz was wrong, what was I saying?
As an atheist, I was kind of the same thing as saying, you know, Brussels sprouts are gross.
And Nazism's bad.
Except for the same indifference as your friend dying, but on a massive scale.
a more obvious scale yeah and then and then except for kanye he doesn't use hitler that way Yay, is that what Yay?
Yee?
He loves.
He loves Hitler.
But he loves His mind also.
Well, now.
Disney, did he say that recently, too?
He said them both in the same sentence.
Oh, that's right.
I love Hitler and I love the Jews.
That's what he said.
Don't take that out of context, please.
When you are Kanye, you can say whatever you want, apparently.
So, well, that gets you to kind of an understanding of that there might be a God.
There might be something beyond that.
Well, there has to be something beyond me because I came to the realization that I would complain about the brokenness out in the world.
I'd complain about Hitler.
I complain about the girls who dumped me, right?
I complain about if somebody...
I'm Christian, I still complain about that.
Well, absolutely.
Because that's a fundamental feature of reality, right?
But you have a grounding for that.
But then what hurts, what hurts is when you realize the brokenness isn't just out there.
The brokenness isn't here.
No, it's just them.
Yeah, it's just them.
I'm just a victim, right?
Right?
No, but I'm a victimizer.
You know what I mean?
Like, and that's when I started realizing, oh, shoot, like the way I'm living, it's not just wrong.
It's like I'm wronging people.
I'm actually, I thought I was a great guy.
You know, I thought I was doing all this good.
But in reality, I was hurting people.
I was hurting myself.
I wasn't contributing to society in the way that I thought I was.
And that hurts.
You know, when you realize that, you're like, oh, man.
So you had this revelation that you're hurting people that kind of brought you to a sense of there's something transcendent out there.
But there's 4,000 different religions around the world.
So how did you end up landing on Christianity?
Yeah, that's a great, well, so a multiple of factors, right?
So a belief system is only as good as the evidence for the belief system, right?
So I didn't just wander right to Christianity.
At the time, I was dating a girl, my now wife, Rihanna.
The way I say it is the way I always begin the story is my story begins as all good stories do with I met a girl.
Gentlemen, we will do anything to win the affections of a lady, even go to church, you know, and my wife asked me to go to church with her.
And so I went with her and it was crazy.
It was weird.
But what happened is, is I've realized through these, there were bumps, there were things in my life going on.
I was realizing there were fundamental components of reality, morality being one of them.
But then also at that same time, I was forming relationships with people who were actually like real Christian.
And they were cool.
And you'd never met real Christians before.
No, I mean, I don't want to say that because I think I probably knew some, but if I found out you were a Christian, I'd be like, hey, we got to go get coffee.
Or can I buy you a beer?
Because like, I need to destroy you.
Real Christians don't drink.
Real Christians don't drink.
So you were an evangelical atheist.
You would go out there and try to convert people to atheism.
Totally, man.
I was passionate.
Oh, that's interesting.
I was totally passionate.
You were an evangelical atheist.
Absolutely.
And I would be out there.
You know, I just said that two seconds ago.
You said evil.
Well, he doesn't listen.
You can hear dad laughing.
The point of conversation is waiting for your space to talk, isn't it?
You don't actually know.
I can't remember what I was thinking about, but I wasn't thinking about what you were saying.
Oh, we want to hear about you being an evangelical atheist.
Yeah, well, I'd love that, you know.
Adam thought of it.
And I'd love talking to people about important things.
I always have.
I worked at a law firm, a really great law firm, very prestigious, really great casework.
And I liked arguing.
I liked that world.
So if I found out you were a Christian, I figure, oh, well, we have a lot to talk about, how I'm right and you're wrong.
And I'm going to show you why your God is a vindictive person.
Now, what would you have said to me when we went out to get our beer?
Yeah, so I would have chilled with you and I just be like, so you're a Christian.
Can you tell me what that means?
What exactly is it to be a Christian?
And I'd say probably half the time most people couldn't tell me, oh, I believe in Jesus.
Why do you believe in Jesus?
Like, you believe he existed or do you believe all the things that, oh, I believe in, okay, so tell me about that.
So I'd ask questions as to why they believe what they believe.
So oftentimes people could tell me what they believe, but they couldn't tell me why they believed it.
And this was true across the board for me and it was somewhat frustrating.
So I'd ask you questions and then I'd just start digging in.
I'd be like, okay, so wait a second.
So you're telling me you're going to go against 98% of the scientific community.
You're going to say that you're going to hang your hat on two original human beings created out of the dust of the earth when the entire scientific community is saying that we're evolved from common ancestors through apes.
So you're going to go against that because you're going to believe some antiquated fairy tale that's shared throughout Mesopotamia, by the way.
All these false religions that you don't believe in believe the same thing.
It's all just a myth to explain what we don't know.
Well, now we have a thing called science and now we know it.
You know, it used to be that, that to explain thunder, you know, we created a God for that.
That's what we've done for Christianity, too.
His name was Thor.
Thor.
I love Thor.
I really do, actually.
Until the last movie, those were the best of our movies.
No, I agree.
I totally agree.
Ragnarok was the pinnacle.
Dude, so good, right?
That was like the perfect mix of comedy.
People disagree with me, but I love Ragnarok.
I love Dragon.
I still watch it.
I mean, I've probably seen it 20 times.
Oh, yeah.
We should hang out.
I've seen it the most.
Yeah, we should.
Watch Ragnarok.
That's good.
We were talking about marrying our kids off to each other earlier, too.
That's where it could start.
Possibly.
It starts with a passion.
How many goats do you have?
Not many.
I work at Standard Reason, you know?
Yeah, but so that's what I would say.
I'd try to pick on the religion.
I'd say what everybody says, and I bring up eventually, I bring up our problem of evil, ultimately.
And what's interesting is in hindsight, I bring up the problem of evil.
But the atheist who brings up the problem of evil, if you think about it, they don't actually do anything.
This is what happened to me.
I wasn't doing anything to solve the problem.
The problem of evil is a problem because we all recognize that there's evil.
There's an oddness to the world and things aren't as they ought to be.
And so when you get rid of the, when you bring the objection up, you assume there's an oddness.
And getting rid of God doesn't do anything to solve the problem.
It just gets rid of one of the possible solutions.
So at the end of the day, in the dark of night, when I was in my own head, I still had the problem, you know, as an atheist.
I still had the problem.
And I couldn't wrestle my way out of it, you know, because it was constantly there.
And then you combine that.
Like, this is like, you start combining that.
Well, what am I doing when I'm wrestling with the problem of evil in my own mind?
What exactly is that?
That was another bump for me, the bump of me, the existence of the soul, consciousness.
When I'm thinking to myself, what exactly is it that I'm doing?
Because I would have said it's just chemicals, a chemical reaction.
No, it's not.
Because the law of identity, right?
The chemicals that are interacting are not the same as the thoughts.
Like when you have a song stuck in your head or an idea stuck in your head, I can't cut your skin open, crack your skull, and then take the song out, right?
There's no song.
These chemicals come together.
Yeah, well, it doesn't, that doesn't describe reality.
That's not the way the world really is.
So I was wrestling with all of this stuff, you know.
But that's what I would do.
I just try to pick apart your worldview.
Did you find that you converted anyone to atheism or did you ever encounter a really strong argument that you were impressed by that someone's not aware of?
Did you encounter any arguments that you were impressed by?
No.
I'm just going to repeat all the assumptions.
There's two things that I kind of take away from this time period in my life.
Oftentimes Christians were reaffirming the stereotype I had in my mind to them.
They were fairly ignorant and hadn't really thought through their worldview.
Because no, I never really, I really didn't get arguments.
I mean, you think about the average Christian out there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's who I was taking out and that's who I was like berating.
Bunch of idiots.
Well, sometimes, you know, I mean, Christians over time, this is a bit of a tangent.
Do you think Christians over time have become more informed and would be better argued today?
Because I feel like in the past, in certain contexts, there are people who were raised Christian.
And if you talk to them conversationally in public and say, what do you believe?
They'll identify as Christian and say, I'm a Christian.
But I think by the time I got to college and certainly after that, if I encountered someone who said they were a Christian, a lot of them had investigated some of these, at least to some degree.
See, that was, see, that's the opposite experience that I had.
But maybe it's because you were a Christian, you knew more Christians.
That might have been the circle that I was in that were.
Yeah.
And so that attracted you.
I was hanging out with like, well, I was hanging out with everybody because I just like people, you know, but so, but I wasn't a Christian, so I wasn't probably exposed to that type of thing.
And the people who take their Christian worldview more seriously are more apt to probably look into it, right?
So I would say that as far as the knowledge base over time, I think that's a tough argument to make because I look at the people.
I mean, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, right?
So I think that there are samplings of people.
There are people who take their worldview very seriously on all worldviews, right?
If you adhere to it.
And then there are people who don't.
I'd say the average person in the West today, at least, this is where I know, they don't take their worldview seriously, whether a Christian or not.
I think that we see that in the evidence if you look into worldview trends.
I think we see a lot of people combining worldviews together because they don't really understand what we believe about the world.
Our ideas have consequences, as implications to them.
So what we do is we try to join worldviews, even if there's an inconsistency there.
So yeah.
I meet a lot of those types of Christians where, and I know there's been, you know, like the Summit Institute put out a study where people are primarily like 60, they're like 60% Christians.
Yeah.
Like in their worldview.
Like nobody's really like 100% Christian in their worldview.
Yeah.
And, you know, so that's, I encounter that all the time.
There's like Christians that are mostly Christian, but kind of pagan too.
Yeah.
The David Barna at Arizona Christian University, they just came out with a, every year they come out with a, it's called, I think it's called like the worldview inventory or something like this.
And it's a 120-page like pamphlet book thing.
Then it's, it's worth your time.
He makes the argument that 6% of the United States is Christian, meaning they adhere to, you know, what we would describe as not Orthodox, not a big O Orthodox, but historical Christianity.
And then there's like one or two percent's atheist, and then all the other ones kind of trickle down or naturalists.
And what he's seeing is there aren't more naturalists, there aren't more Christians, there aren't more Hindus being created in the culture.
Those worldviews aren't rising or falling.
It's pretty consistent.
What's increasing is syncretism.
So syncretism is when you infuse two worldviews.
So it's like the Christian who believes in reincarnation, right?
They don't go together, but yet you're going to believe it for one reason or another.
And that's what's becoming really popular.
And this is ultimately why when I talk to Christians, oftentimes they didn't have answers for me.
And it's often I used to, I felt like I knew more about the Christian worldview than some of the Christians I was asking.
Yeah.
You know, at least I was cherry-picking better.
You know, I would cherry-pick my doctrines or verses and be like, yeah, but Jesus says this.
Jesus says I'm the only way.
He says I'm the only way.
How can you claim that?
You know, we have 7 billion people on the planet.
How many people do you think are going to hell?
Like the majority of them?
How is that?
And then go to the problem of evil.
But it's because Christians would join worldviews together.
They weren't being consistent.
And I'd point that inconsistency out.
And it all kind of culminated.
So Rihanna brought me the church and then she wanted to be a member of this church.
And so had she been a Christian her whole life or had she just come to it recently?
She had been a Christian her whole life and she had like the Christian term is backslidden, right?
So she wasn't, she wasn't missionary dating.
No, and this is actually a distinction.
When I'm at like these, these huge conferences that we do, like we do these conferences, reality student apologetics conferences.
And I share this this year from the main stage.
It's like thousands of teens.
I have to make this very clear.
This is not an excuse to go and start dating a non-believer because if my wife is in the audience afterwards, she'll have a line.
But that's they like they like the bad boys.
Well, they like, yes.
I mean, but like, oh, he's, he's over there sinning.
Yeah, the atheist paralegal.
Atheists, paralegals, man, high demand, dude, let me tell you.
You know, yeah, well, there is like, I don't know what the deal is, right?
But my wife, you know, we make this very clear.
This is not an excuse.
It worked out for us, thank God.
But what you don't see is you don't see the drama and the hard work and what's kind of even the damage that we're not going to experience healing from this side of glory, you know, because of the way that we were living, you know, and pursuing sin, not righteousness.
But she was so great, you know, putting up with me.
I would berate her in my kitchen.
I remember cooking dinner for her.
She'd ask me, like, she'd be bringing up things of the faith because she was trying to be a good Christian, you know, and I was trying to be a good atheist, evangelize her as well.
And I'd be like, you're telling me, I thought that you were smat.
Like, I thought that you were an intelligent human being.
You don't believe in Darwinism.
You're an idiot.
I'd literally say that.
And if she was here, she'd say she would leave our dates crying half the time for two reasons.
One, I was just being antagonistic and mean, borderline mean.
Two, she knew the relationship ultimately couldn't go anywhere because she was, and she was starting to make her way back to church, back to walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
And it was at that time that she kind of wanted to become a member of this church.
She ended up getting baptized at this church.
I think by then I was probably a Christian.
But one of the things that the church required is for membership, you had to do an interview with the pastor and his wife.
So we went for the interview and I went with a stack of papers because I wanted to debate this pastor and I had it in my mind.
Could you imagine?
John Noyes destroys pastor.
He's like, he wanted the YouTube video.
Dude, that's like Babylon B stuff right there.
You know what I mean?
Like big time.
Yeah, I had in my mind, I'm going to wreck this guy.
I've never talked to a pastor before.
You know, notch on my atheist belt.
It's going to be amazing.
I was going to be like a god of atheists.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So I went in and I asked all my questions and it was actually fantastic the way that this happens.
I asked all my questions and a lot of the times Pastor Dave, he said, I have no idea.
That's a good question.
I've never heard that before.
That's a good question.
Sometimes he give me answers.
Sometimes the answer is even satisfied.
But at the end of the meeting, him and his wife, they hug my wife.
They hug Rihanna.
They say, we'd love to offer you membership.
We're so glad that you came.
And then Pastor Dave took my hand in his and he's shaking it and he looks at me.
He's like, you know what, John?
We have enough members right now, but thanks for coming, which is awesome, right?
Because could you imagine if he's like, hey, John, you know what?
Like, we'll just work on you.
You're a work in progress.
God's going to do something.
You know, I would be like, this is rubbish.
This is exactly what I thought it was.
You just want my button, you see, my buck and you coffee.
You just want like whatever.
You don't really care about any of this stuff.
But he didn't.
And it was amazing.
But the best part is he turned me around and he handed me a book off of his shelf on Christian apologetics.
And he handed it to me.
And he said, you know what?
I didn't answer all of your questions to your satisfaction.
But I think the beginning of some of those answers are in this book.
Would you read it?
Which book?
Yeah, so this is a tough one.
It was Can Man Live Without God by Ravi Zacharias.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, and Ravi.
Whatever happened to him.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
Yeah, where did that man go a couple years?
Where did he end up?
Yeah.
No, these are great questions, but I do think, no, Ravi's work is actually still really useful.
Well, you separate the art from the artist.
Like, I love Bill Cosby.
Yeah.
Anyway.
No, I, you know, that book was like, was, was foundational for me.
And then right at the same time, like right around that same time, my future in-laws, they gave me my first Bible, a new believer's Bible, you know, edited by Greg Lorry, Cornerstones of the Faith.
You know, who is Satan?
Who is Jesus?
What is sin?
And I read that cover to cover Genesis to Revelation over the course of three months.
I used to ride the train to work.
I worked in downtown.
I was living in Hollywood, so I just take public transit.
And the way I look at it is God used the intellectual side of the faith through Christian apologetics, that book and more, to kind of cause fissures, cracks in my naturalistic worldview.
And then he filled those cracks with the water of the gospel through the word.
I had a direct encounter with the word of God that filled those cracks and he froze and did you even find like the minor prophets good?
Or did you skim those?
Yeah, you know, I skimmed a lot.
But I did find actually a lot of that stuff was really interesting to me because, so here's the deal is when I'm reading these stories, the good, the bad, and the ugly, I would have said they were just myths.
But as I was reading them, I'm like, this doesn't sound like a myth.
That's right.
And then I realized, oh, wait, the authors, they're actually saying it's supposed to be true.
It doesn't, it doesn't read like myth.
Like, I don't understand, you know, and then I started looking in because I had the apologetic stuff going on on the side.
Wait, is this really like, let's look at the historicity of this stuff.
And I started looking at, you know, Gary Habermas and Mike Lacona and all of these things.
And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is actually true.
Yeah, Habermas is great.
Dude, I like him.
He's so good.
Yeah, he's so good.
Well, this is like yours.
I've heard somebody say this, but it's kind of a golden age of apologetics.
There's so many good, there's so many good resources.
Man, there's like, it's almost unending.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's so cool.
Well, it is interesting about the scripture too, because when people say that it's a myth, when you get this a lot talking to atheists or even anyone else, and people that have the courage to call themselves atheists, you know, that's a different crew.
But the average person might say, well, the Old Testament's a myth or this is a myth or Abraham's a myth.
Even some Christians now are sort of mythologizing the Old Testament.
And so when you read it, though, it just kind of, it's like, are you reading the same book?
Because it doesn't seem like fiction.
No, or even just a moral tale.
A moral tale.
Very historical.
Yeah, it feels that way.
I think it's a whole point.
So, so, okay, you have a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, right?
That's how, that's how fiction starts.
Yeah.
You know, once upon a time, there lived the prettiest little girl who ever did live, right?
That's the start of Little Red Riding Hood or something like that.
That's how, that's how, that's how stories are written, like myth.
That's how fiction is written.
But then you start reading, you read the introductions to the gospels, you know, you start reading Luke, you know, and you read these guys.
You read John and you read Paul and then even the Old Testaments, right?
These are, these are true events for a number of reasons, right?
There's the criterion of embarrassment.
I mean, the including of all the embarrassing details, you know, they just read like they're true, you know, and then you combine that even with science with archaeology.
And you have these things that are proven true when they believe they didn't have any, they didn't have any reason to believe because they hadn't seen any evidence, evidence outside of the Bible for certain things.
They didn't have any reason to stand to reason.
No standing to reason.
Standing to reason.
Okay, so since you're an atheist that is now a Christian, let's go through some of the common atheist arguments and see how you're free.
So if God is all-powerful and all good, why do bad things happen to good people?
Why is there childhood cancer?
Checkmate.
Yeah, check me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I would say, well, there's free will defense, you know, that we all know, you know, but I would say that one, if it's ancillary, well, we have, you know, we live in a world where we live in a fallen and a broken world and cancer is a part of being in that fallen and broken world.
This is just the truth of it.
You know, bad things do happen.
They're absolutely right.
But what do you mean when you say a bad thing happens?
Because when you say a bad thing happens, you're using a standard to judge good and bad from good, right?
So, C.S. Lewis says that you have to know what a straight, you have to have a straight line in order to know what a crooked line looks like.
And it's the same thing with the atheist who brings up the problem of pain and suffering.
Now, if I'm in the situation, guys, like I'm a pastor at heart here, so if I'm in the situation, I have a friend that comes to me and says, you know, my five-year-old just got diagnosed with leukemia.
I'm not going to offer the intellectual response.
Yeah, of course not.
But I am going to point out the reality that we live in a fallen and broken world.
And what do you do with that?
And oftentimes, like what I think a part that we miss from this conversation that I'm pretty passionate about is that God doesn't just allow bad things to happen to us, like willy-nilly, right?
Paul says that these are but momentary light afflictions producing in us eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.
Notice, and Paul knew suffering, right?
Paul knew suffering.
Notice there's two things going on.
One, these are momentary, they will pass, especially on the timeline of heaven.
Like you're looking at future glory.
This too will, it's going to be a drop in the bucket, the pain.
That's right.
Now, when I say, when I say to this person who has a five-year-old who has leukemia, oh, this too shall pass, they're going to go, get on my face.
Yeah.
Completely unhelpful because it is, but it's true.
Second, notice what Paul's saying.
He's saying that there's that the struggles that we go through are producing something in us that otherwise wouldn't be there.
Right.
You know, they're the struggles that we go through.
This is the reality of the world.
We all have to live in the world that God made, whether you believe it or not.
And this is part of the reality.
We have struggles.
Life is hard.
Like, I've got four girls.
Okay.
Somebody is always crying in my house.
It's usually me in like the fetal position in the corner, like wondering what in the world is going on.
Like, what have I done?
You know, I live alone with no wife and kids and someone is always crying in my house in the corner.
Yes, this is, yes, this is the cry for help.
Every night.
I cry myself to sleep.
But let's move on.
Let's go past that.
No, but notice, notice, like, we all know that life is hard, right?
Life is thinking hard.
But God is preparing us for future glory.
What?
What does that mean?
That means that one day, guys, like your true identity, gentlemen, like, let me remind you who you are.
You are sons of the living king, the living God.
And he's charged you with leadership.
And in the heavenly realms, you're going to be given charge of angels.
I'm going to be like, Michael, go get me a Coke.
You know, rub my feet.
No, I'm not.
But, but no, but foot massage.
No, but no, it's like, but these are, this is the reality of the world we live in.
And God uses the pain, right?
The struggling that we go through here to prepare us to be able to rule and reign alongside King Jesus forever and ever and ever.
And when we put that in our minds, it makes suffering bearable.
It makes it, it makes it bearable for us.
And this is the reality of the world.
So my response to that is like, if you're going to ask me a question according to my worldview about pain and suffering, that means I have access to my worldview.
And that means I'm going to answer you according to the truth of my worldview.
Yeah.
You know, God is not some far-off being.
He doesn't assign us pain and suffering because he gets enjoyment out of it.
No.
There's actually purpose in it.
And sometimes we forget that.
I'll tell you what, like something a number of years changed in me.
I used to ask when I was in my, we had, we had some, my, uh, my second daughter, uh, she's now 10.
She was born premature, like early.
And so she spent some time in the NICU.
And during that time, it was just like, like, what are you doing, God?
You know, like, I'm faithful.
At the time, I was a pastor.
You know, I left a lucrative, great career at the law firm to become a pastor.
Pastors don't make a ton of money.
And they do?
No, you don't, you don't do it to get rich.
And like, and, you know, and I'm struggling.
I'm like, I'm trying to be obedient here.
Like, what's going on?
But then something changed in me.
I changed my prayer.
My prayer was, Lord, don't let me pass through this time of suffering before learning what you have me to learn.
allow this time of suffering, this time of wrestling to produce that thing in me that you want to be produced.
And when I started doing that, man, things changed.
You know, my outlook on the world, my outlook of difficult situations, they changed.
God uses our suffering.
We shouldn't be so quick to escape it.
You know, C.S. Lewis, again, he says God whispers, this is a paraphrase, but he says, God whispers to us in our pleasures.
But he shouts to us in our pains.
He says that pain is God's megaphone to arouse a deaf world.
So that's a really good answer.
Okay.
So putting our atheist hat on.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's the next atheist question.
Actually, I wish that we had the fedoras.
Yeah, we should have put fedoras.
Yeah, and neckbeards.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
You say that you say that God is necessary because the universe is here.
And the law of, I'm sorry, I don't mean to characterize atheists.
Because the universe is here and the law of thermodynamics says everything is winding down and it must have had a beginning.
Ever heard of the multiverse theory?
Okay, quantum physics.
Come on.
Checkmate.
Have you ever heard the quote that if you claim to understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics?
Like that was said by a famous quantum physicist because there's a great deal of mystery in that.
This is just the way that I am.
I'm pretty direct and bold with people.
If somebody's going to bring up the multiverse to me, I'm going to ask them, I'm not, at this point, I have no burden of proof in this conversation, according to what you just said.
Christians, we far, we take way too much responsibility upon ourselves in everyday conversations.
I've made no claims.
You've come to me and said, oh yeah, well, what about the multiverse?
Okay.
Prove it.
What about the multiverse?
Can you tell me what is it about the multiverse that causes you to believe that it actually is true?
And then let them bring the proof to you.
Because as I understand it, there's very little evidence, evidence for the multiverse.
However, there is a ton of evidence about a singular event in the distant past that created everything, right?
This is not controversial, by the way.
This is not controversial.
Stuff exists, but where did it all come from?
And where'd the universe come from?
What caused the beginning of the universe?
And it's not only not controversial, it's not complicated.
It's one of two things, either something or nothing.
So which one is it?
And which one's most plausible according to the data that we have?
Something or nothing?
You know, as an atheist, I wanted to say nothing.
But who in his rational mind says nothing caused everything?
Right?
Like, think about that.
What comes from nothing?
Nothing.
Nothing.
This is a fundamental feature of reality.
This is this principle here, nothing comes from nothing, makes science possible, right?
Could you imagine living in a world where stuff just like popped in and out of existence out of nothing?
Like you could be, I could be driving down the 101 here to see you guys.
All of a sudden, a cow just pops up in front of my car while I'm going 85 miles an hour down the 101.
And I mean, what a mess.
What a mess.
I mean, who's going to clean that up?
Not me.
Not me.
You know, it's like, but that could happen all the time.
If you're trying to study things, things pop in.
And so as an atheist, this put me in a really difficult position.
I think it puts all atheists in a really difficult position because you want to say nothing, but you can't.
So you have to say something.
But the moment you say something, that something, when you start assigning the qualities to it, starts to look like something specific.
Okay, this is interesting because I think this is a great point because we forget to do this as Christians.
I think what you said, I want to highlight it.
So Greg Kocole has his book, Tactics.
Fantastic book.
It's a really, really good book.
And we forget that the burden of proof is on the people that bring the stuff up.
That's right.
And we always forget this because we always feel like we're on the defensive.
But the truth is, like, every time they bring up the multiverse or they bring up other issues.
Problem of evil.
The problem of evil.
It's like, okay, tell me why you think that.
Why do you think this again?
Yeah.
See, how did you come to that conclusion?
Exactly.
Like those things, it's the Colombo, you know?
So good.
Yeah, it's super good.
What's really great about these, like if you read tactics, before I was at STR, before I was a pastor, I was just volunteering in my church and I taught some apologetics to the high school students.
At the end of a six-week session I was teaching, my wife and I were so affected by tactics.
We bought 100 copies of it yeah, and gave it to every student because we were so enamored with it, because it's the.
The Colombo tactic is really the beginning of it's like Greg, I think, calls it like the.
You have to do the voice when you do it.
I can't do the voice, Greg.
He would sound like this.
He would go, I've got a problem.
I've got a problem with what?
Yeah, you're a very smart person yeah yeah yeah, you can help me.
Have you guys ever seen Coco do this?
He dude, he on stage, he brings on a trench coat and in the pocket he has a fake cigar yeah, and he has like a pad of paper but no pencil and he like, doesn't he always impression Ellen would ever do and she'd always do?
Pardon me ma'am yeah, it's like, but it's such a good tactic and it's it's memorable, and you just ask questions and what the best thing is is when you start employing this tactic, you make it part of how you interact with people.
You'll realize and this is kind of like as an atheist, I used to do this, I just didn't know I was doing it, it's not new you find out that a lot of people their their understanding of what they say they believe is is is an inch deep, and Greg's the way Greg says it is.
When you ask these questions, what do you mean by that and how'd you come to that conclusion?
Expect the Simon And Garfunkel response is what they?
The sounds of silence, because oftentimes we don't think through it.
And as Christians, the most important part I think that you were trying to draw out here is that we take on way too much responsibility.
We we feel like when somebody brings an objection to us, we have to answer everything about it.
Instead like, why don't we just like sit back and have a conversation?
You know that's that's what I've kind of started doing, like I'm just going to look at you, number one, as somebody who's valuable unique, worthy of my time, because you're made in the image of God and you have questions, whether they're legitimate or not, whether they're real questions or not, it doesn't matter.
I'm gonna.
I'm gonna spend my time with you and do the best I can, but I'm not gonna answer every one of them when I'm gonna dig into your worldview.
What about your God's evil?
Because he allows all this suffering?
Oh interesting, when you say suffering like, what does that mean to you?
Because it seems to me like suffering.
Is you you ought not suffer?
Are you saying there's an oddness?
Where do you get that oddness on your worldview?
You know, and you just ask these questions and see where the conversation goes, it's great, it's good.
So that, so that kind of would i'm gonna do the atheist, so that's why you believe in god.
But you know, Muslims have a law in the Quran and the Jews have the Talmud and they've uh, Christians have the Bible.
Mormons have the Book of Mormon.
Why Christianity?
How do you know those books weren't written?
They sound like they could have been written historically.
Yeah, absolutely.
They could have been written historically.
So what we got to do is we got to look at the evidence, right?
Every belief is only as good as the evidence that supports it.
So we'll look at the, I mean, the historicity of the Quran.
But more importantly, let's look at the historicity of the Bible, specifically the New Testament.
And then I would go off and maybe offer a couple bits like what we just did.
It sounds like it's written history.
Did you know there's all these details in there that make the authors look foolish?
Why would they include these things?
All the authors were martyred.
The people who have expressed through these historical documents that they lived and walked and ate with Jesus, they all went to their grave in horrible ways.
Not one record of anybody recanting.
Why do you think that is?
Because martyrs make bad liars.
Somebody said that.
I forget who.
No, but stay tuned for a Babylon Beast sketch that addresses just that issue.
Oh, is that right?
We tipped a sketch based around that last night that'll probably be posted sometime this.
Oh, that's awesome.
That's great.
Yes.
That's going to be the disciples.
What would have happened if they were lying?
If they were lying.
It wouldn't have lasted very long.
I can tell you that.
But I mean, all the same.
And then they came up with the hoax.
Yeah, exactly, right?
You know, one of the things for me, you guys asked kind of like, what was that moment?
Like, I had these bumps in the reality.
The bump of stuff is the universe stuff that we kind of talked about.
All right.
The bump of bad, the bump of me, the existence of the soul.
The actual, the thing where I remember, I don't have a moment of conversion like a lot of people.
The thing that I remember, though, where things really changed for me, as I was sitting, I used to have this like white Ikea love seat.
It was the most uncomfortable thing on the planet.
So I'd sit on that to read so I wouldn't fall asleep.
And I was reading about the resurrection.
I think I was reading Lacona or Havermass or something, and I was an atheist.
And I remember sitting there thinking, okay, I need to come up with a naturalistic hypothesis that explains all of the evidence surrounding the resurrection of Jesus.
I have to come up with a hypothesis that explains them all in light of each other.
That's naturalistic.
And I remember thinking this in my mind, I said, maybe aliens came down, took Jesus, healed him with their alien technology, and then put him back.
Was mushrooms one of the sins you did?
Yes, yes, yes.
You have no idea.
But not at this time.
But right then and there, I realized, wait a second, I'm willing to say aliens.
We have zero evidence for aliens.
I'm willing to say anything.
Why?
I remember thinking to myself, why do you, John, why do you think you're actually avoiding the Jesus hypothesis?
Why is that?
And then that's where kind of my conscience kind of came into it.
And I was like, oh, man, this isn't good.
Man.
So we mentioned a few.
From your journey, what are some books you would recommend to people who are either atheists currently or are struggling with their faith or are curious about?
Fantastic.
Okay.
You guys, Coco is gold.
Like, I'm not saying that just because I work with him.
He's my boss, but he's like, he really is amazing.
So Story of Reality is a must-read.
He does a great job of describing the Christian worldview and evidences for it in a way that's very understandable, yet not shallow at all.
Cochle's fantastic.
Oh, man.
Anything, well, theologically, theology-wise, is RC Sproll.
Man, I love Sproll.
Sproll is fascinating.
I watched some of his YouTube videos.
I haven't read his stuff, but I watch a lot of his lectures.
Yeah.
If you're just getting into apologetics, go to Keller, Reasons to Believe is a great book.
Jay Warner Wallace, he's written a number of books now, but Cold Case Christianity.
We had him on last year on the podcast.
He is something else.
He's an atheist that applied, he's a cold case homicide detective and applied his cold case homicide detective skills to the resurrection.
And at the end of the day, it was like, oh, I'm cooked, you know, like, I'm going to be Christian now, you know?
And he's fantastic.
You got like John Lennox.
Well, science stuff, man.
Lennox.
Science.
John Lennox.
You got Hugh Ross.
So good.
Fat Hugh.
We've had Hugh on.
He's a really cool guy.
Fuzz Rana, his colleague.
He's amazing.
William Dempski.
If you haven't read Dempski on Intelligent Design, you should.
He's not writing a ton right now.
Stephen Meyer is amazing.
And his colleague, Doug Axe, all of these guys you can pick up.
Doug Axe is unbelievable.
Yep.
It's a wonderful book.
You got Frank Turek.
Nah, man, don't go.
No, no.
Turek is amazing.
I was just with him the other night.
Turek is unbelievable.
Sean McDowell.
I mean, you said before that we're kind of in like a golden age of Christian apologetics.
And I think that's somewhat true.
These guys and gals too.
Natasha Crane, if you guys haven't had her on, you should.
Natasha Crane, she's local here.
She's unbelievable.
Okay, Natasha.
Natasha Crane is fantastic.
Alyssa Childers, she's pushing back at progressive Christianity.
Yeah, we've had her on a couple of times.
She's great.
That's one of my little hot button issues is progressive Christianity.
That's exactly all of our reality student apologetics.
But how can a woman teach us to push back on?
Well, if she wears a head cover on, then it's okay.
As long as she's seated lower and with a head covering, it's okay.
This is your chair, Alyssa.
I'm glad I'm on the Babylon B because I'm hoping people don't take everything I say seriously.
Sometimes you get on a show and it's like all serious and you make a joke and it's like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have done that.
No, we love jokes here.
Yes, I've noticed.
Especially Adam.
So that's a great reading list.
Some recommendations for people to check out.
We're going to switch to our subscriber portion shortly.
So for the people watching the YouTube version, where can they go to check your stuff out?
So go to str.org, str.org, stand to reason.
And that's where all my content is.
I have stuff on YouTube.
I'm not big in the social media.
I don't know how it's done.
I'm not either.
So that's it for the main portion.
If you want to check out the subscriber portion, we'll have some subscriber questions for John and we'll ask him the 10 questions.
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