Most Replayed Moment: Christian vs Atheist - Is Faith A Human Creation?

Theistic, what does that mean? A personal God. A God. There is a personal God who is involved with the world. He made the world and he still maintains activity as opposed to deistic, which just wound up the clock and let it go. Okay. So my view is God is still involved. In fact, so involved that he actually came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan. Now, what's interesting to me about this broader question, we can get into more details too, is that it's not... If there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don't know God. They won't be experiencing what they were made for, which is to be in friendship with him. with the plan that he's made for their flourishing, but they still can flourish in some measure insofar as they touch on these objective features. But insofar as we are able, even without belief in God, to kind of get in that groove of the things that God made us for, the purposes that he intends, in light of being made like him in some way in his image, there's going to be a measure of satisfaction. But what they'll be missing is... is the ultimate, and that is that friendship with God and being restored in that. Alex. Yes, sir. Same question for you about what you bring to this conversation in terms of your perspective, your experience, and maybe some of your sort of personal journey. Well, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the New Atheism movement, which was a mid-2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world. Saying that religion is evil and terrible. And I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular humanist utopia that if you'll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself. People tried that and it didn't seem to work. And I think that's because the New Atheist Movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn't seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place. And I think that is why it exists. I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness. we find ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those things. It's one thing to experience the world. It's one thing to be... It's another thing to be aware that you're experiencing it. Josh Rasmussen once said, there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree. We have this sort of second-order abstraction that we can do. So we know that... Death is coming, for example, …