The Resurrection - Argument from Personal Incredulity or Methodological Naturalism - Licona vs. Dillahunty - Part 2

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The Resurrection - Argument from Personal Incredulity or Methodological Naturalism - Licona vs. Dillahunty - Part 2

March 26, 2025

In this episode, Dr. Licona provides a positive case for the resurrection of Jesus at the 2017 [UN]Apologetic Conference in Austin, Texas. He bases his argument on contentions that 1) empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension and 2) that historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead. Mr. Dillahunty, an atheist activist and former Christian, disagrees, positing that there is not sufficient evidence for this conclusion. Instead, those who believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection are committing the fallacious argument from personal incredulity. This means they take on this belief because they can’t find a better explanation for the historical evidence. Licona responds that Dillahunty is steeped in methodological naturalism, and the debate continues.

Transcript

Welcome to the Risen Jesus podcast with Dr. Mike Licona. I'm Dr. Kurt Gerris, your host. In today's episode, Dr. Licona, an atheist activist, Matt Dillahunty, debate Jesus's resurrection.

Dillahunty contends that those who believe in the resurrection have no better explanation for the historical evidence used to argue for it, but that it cannot be scientific. In his view, they are committing the fallacy of arguing from personal incredulity. Licona counters and charges his opponent with methodological naturalism.

This is the Risen Jesus podcast. Thanks for listening. Empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural component to it.

Well, I would say that what empirical data strongly suggests is that people attribute things to the supernatural, when they can't come up with an explanation for it, and that's fallacious. How do you come up with empirical data for the supernatural? This is the bait and switch that we're seeing with the argument from the supernatural here. All he's really said is, hey, there's a whole bunch of these experiences, and because we can't think of a better explanation, given our current understanding, we are justified in accepting a supernatural one.

I do not and cannot accept that because it is obviously fallacious, and it leads to you believing things that are not true. Now, you can't put God in a beaker. You can't put God in a test tube.

You can't put the supernatural there. So your science just isn't sufficient to investigate. I agree.

It's not. So how do we investigate it? What methodology do we use to determine that this is true? Is it our fault? Is it the fault of science that it can't confirm this? That's like saying that your daughter can't lift the 300 pounds. That's not her fault.

Science is trying to find the best explanation and acknowledging when the answer is we don't know or we don't know yet. And it realizes that imagine we were all, we had spent our entire lives in this particular room, which some of you probably feel like right now. But there are no windows.

You're blocked in. You have no access to anything out. How do you know whether that wall just keeps going forever or if there's something on the other side of it? How do you go about testing that? I had a conversation about the supernatural with my friend and apologist Blake Jonta, and I was asking, how do you demonstrate? Like, let's imagine there's somebody outside this room who can communicate telepathically and telekinetically.

What would you do to go through to find out if that's happening? And he gave all kinds of great examples. Oh, there would be things moving around the room and he would be communicating to me what he's going to move around the room, this sort of thing. Okay? How do you demonstrate that there's a God? All of a sudden you get wildly different examples.

Why wouldn't it be the same? Oh, there's answered prayer. Well, prayer has been tested. Intercessory prayer has been tested by the Templeton Foundation, which has some motivation for it to come out in favor of prayer.

And what do they find? Prayer works at the rate of chance unless you actually know you're being prayed for and then it works less. And they have hypothesized that there was some kind of performance anxiety of knowing that people were praying for you. And this gave you anxiety because you felt compelled to get better so that the test results would go.

When it comes to the minimal facts approach, I find it strange to say that Paul is the best source. I understand, I agree that scholars hold this position and it may in fact be the case that Paul is the best source. But what do we know about that best source? Well, never met Jesus while he was alive, claims he did later.

After he was real alive, wasn't around for any of Jesus' events, wasn't around for the death, wasn't around for crucifixion, the burial, wasn't there to see the empty tomb. There were people who were supposedly far closer in time to these events than Paul was who was writing decades afterwards. He's the best.

There's a reason why when somebody comes up to you and tells you a story that they heard. You're a little dubious. In Paul's case, we have, oh, I got it directly from Jesus after he was dead.

I'm not saying that didn't happen, saying how do you confirm that this is what happened? The consistency of gospel messages among a bunch of people viewed thousands of years, from thousands of years in the future. This is something that needs better evidential support. And this is why we end up arguing about it over and over again.

Now, I'm not closed off. I'm not, I didn't get mad at God. Nothing bad happened to me.

I just wanted to have the best model of the world in my head. And as unfortunate as it may be for proponents of the supernatural, methodological naturalism, and I don't know why we went to safe spaces in triggering in our demolishment of the single most reliable path to an accurate understanding of reality that the world has ever known, isn't barred from investigating reality. And if your God manifests as a detectable in reality, then it should be confirmable.

And by the way, if there is a God, God should easily be able to provide convincing evidence to everybody. He says, oh, he has, and you just won't accept it. Then he hasn't, because God should be able to convince me, God should be able to convince skeptics, God should be able to convince Muslims and Hindus, and that hasn't happened.

Oh, it's just all of these ad hoc explanations, which I agree we should avoid, of, well, you know, it's our fallen nature. Well, it's free will. Okay.

I understand what you're saying. That doesn't change the facts. Even if you're right, barring an acceptance that it's possible to raise someone from the dead, or that it's possible that there's a being who can raise someone from the dead, you don't have the justification.

What you have is, here's an empty tomb, we don't have a natural explanation, so we're just going to say that because we know so much, the most reasonable explanation for these copies of copies of translations of facts is that Jesus rose from the dead. How do you demonstrate that? I can't. I haven't heard any attempt to do so.

And so I'm stuck. All right. During this next section, it's going to be more of a discussion, but each participant is going to control the discussion in such a way that they are the ones bringing the question.

So Dr. LaCona will question Matt De La Hante first, and we just want to limit those answers, obviously, to be respectful for your opponent's time and give as brief as answers as possible so that they can get through as many questions as possible. And so first, Dr. LaCona. Okay.

All right, Matt. So you were talking about how you said both in your opening statement, and your rebuttal, that people attribute to the supernatural when there is no other natural explanation available that they can think of. And I was trying to be clear that that is not at all what I was saying, that what we do, and I agree, a God of the gaps explanation is not acceptable to me.

But a nature of the gaps explanation is equally unacceptable to me, that when you look at it and you say, oh, well, yeah, I don't know of any natural explanation. And yeah, a supernatural explanation would certainly work here given that the laws of nature would suggest that's not possible, but I'm not going to say that it's supernatural because somewhere along the line, we might find a natural explanation. That's a nature of the gaps, and it's no better than a God of the gaps.

So here's my question for you. I gave you that example of the beheading. On the headed up here, everybody's out of the auditorium.

You've already seen my headless corpse. I come walking out an hour later, and you all see me alive, and I testify that I met someone in heaven, and they shared with me a private conversation that they had had with you that you know is correct. Now, wouldn't our understanding that that is impossible by natural causes, wouldn't that justify you to infer that a supernatural event has indeed occurred? Yes, I like this question because it proposes the very thing that never happens.

So it goes to the extreme to say, ah, if this happened, would you then accept that there's a supernatural explanation? And the short answer is no. What I would accept is that the null hypothesis that people's heads don't come back on, that's clearly disproved. The reason that you came back from the dead, the explanation for why and how this happened, I don't know.

I'm not precluding the supernatural. There needs to be a demonstration that this is caused. And frankly, in that situation, I'm not so sure that I care that much about why you were able to do that.

Just that, you know, the possibility that something like that has happened would spur a new regime of investigation. I mean, where's the Nobel Prize for discovering the spiritual, the supernatural? Okay, so I didn't ask whether that would convince you that God exists and raised me from the dead, okay, or that might claim. But given all that data that you saw me beheaded, now I've come back, I'm alive, you see the scars, and I repeat that private conversation you had with that person, would that be enough to convince you that a supernatural event had occurred? So here's where we get into a little bit of the word thing.

I think by what you're asking, the answer is yes. But what I'm specifically addressing is that I don't get to call that supernatural. What it would be is there's something new and weird and undiscovered and unknown within nature.

I would fully accept that it happened. If you're asking, would I then be reasonably convinced that the best explanation is that something beyond nature did this? I don't know. You don't even know if that would convince you.

What does it mean to say that the supernatural caused something? Something that is beyond, it's a cause. Something either has a natural or supernatural cause. If our current understanding of nature and natural law suggests that that is impossible, which it certainly does, then it seems to me one is justified in inferring that it's a supernatural cause.

You can always have some scientist discovers later on that nature can indeed do this. Well, then you'd have to readjust your conclusion. But in the meantime, it's based on what we currently know from science and natural law that would seem to suggest that is impossible by natural causes.

And so we would be right to infer a supernatural cause. So what I just heard you say is that based on our current understanding, if we don't have a natural explanation, we are reasonable to infer a supernatural explanation. It's not just having not a natural explanation.

We know that such explanations are not even possible. Based on our current understanding, it's not possible. We're reasonable to infer a supernatural explanation.

And then if it's some later time, a natural explanation arises, we should accept that. That is exactly how lightning got attributed to Thor. But we learned some, but then stop us right now.

I don't care whether or not, so first of all, it's fallacious because I care whether or not something is actually the explanation. Whether or not it's reasonable. So to say, hey, based on my current understanding, this is impossible given what we know about nature.

Therefore, I'm going to call it supernatural. With the acknowledgement that later on somebody might find a natural explanation, my answer is you don't have justification to call it supernatural. What you're expressing there is a discomfort with saying, I don't know what the explanation is.

Not at all. Just one fine thing. I would just say that if someone was beheaded like I'm given and you were still unwilling to say supernatural, then Matt, I think the problem is your epistemology there.

I don't think there's anything practically that could convince you. For the next five minutes, now Matt De La Hante will ask the questions. So this idea that there's nothing that would convince me.

I don't know how many different ways I can actually refute it. I'm talking about what I'm going to attribute as the explanation. And I am unwilling to attribute something that hasn't been reasonably confirmed.

Is apart from just saying if we understand that this to be impossible and it occurs, we are therefore just fine calling it tentatively, I suppose, supernatural. Is there any methodology by which we could confirm something is in fact supernatural? Well, like I said, we don't have a supernatural detector, right? So, and every discipline has different mechanisms for detecting things. So I don't have a love detector either.

But if, as a historian, I want to answer the question, did Antony actually love Cleopatra? I would look at the actions of the person. So I'd say, okay, well, Antony was co-leader of Rome with Octavian. And he neglected and even abandoned Rome because he couldn't stand to be away from Cleopatra.

He abandoned his army, his navy. And while they're engaged in the most important battle against Octavian, out at sea, because he couldn't stand to be away from Cleopatra. And then he took his own life when he erroneously believed that Cleopatra was dead.

So a historian looked at the actions and says, yep, I infer from that, based on what we know that Antony loved Cleopatra. We don't know what's going on in his head, but we do that. We do the same kind of stuff with supernatural.

I understand that, but all the things that you described are things that we all understand. And when we describe what love is, those are all characteristics of love. What are the characteristics of the supernatural that would allow you to do something similar? Well, if I'm Kim and I'm at a Ouija board and I see this lid come up and throw itself against the wall and slow and all that stuff, I'm going to know that that is not a natural event.

How would you know that? So I'm asking because I can't apparently read people's minds on stage. Are they reasonable in concluding, based on the information I have, that what I did was supernatural? Well, as a mentalist and illusionist, a magician, they would look at that, they can be stunned, and yes, some people are going to do that. I know they're going to.

I had a guy in Australia who was amazed that I could levitate to the point where he wanted to claim I had demons. Is it reasonable for them to conclude when I apparently read someone's mind that supernatural is the best explanation for that? Perhaps at that moment, and then if they are talking to some others, they say, no, look, I don't know the answer to that, but there are people who do things like that for a living. That's what they do for a profession.

In fact, I've even had seen some guy named Matt Dilahoney say that it is, you know, to think that it's supernatural, that's the hard way of doing it. We have ways of doing it with trickery. But when it's what we do know, if you're sitting there and you see that lid come up, boom, it appears to you at 2.30 in the morning, and then on Monday morning, you learn that the person died at that time.

You know that that is not a natural event. So if you see an apparition at 2.30 in the morning, how did you rule out hallucination, lucid dreaming, all these things that we know and understand, because one of the things that happens is that people think they have hallucinations. I saw somebody like that person doesn't die, and so it's no big deal.

I thought I saw you last night, and you're not dead. I thought I saw you last night. You're not dead.

I thought I saw you last night. Oh, my gosh, you were dead right then. How do you rule out hallucinations and to reach the conclusion that the supernatural is the best explanation? Well, certainly in a number of apparitions, you know, I think the majority of apparitions are hallucinations.

But it is those in which they are seen by groups in which the apparitions, like in the case hikes, the Percipian, learned some accurate information they could not have known otherwise. Later discovering that that person had died at the very moment that apparition appeared to them. It's things like that that would seem to suggest this is not a hallucination.

Okay. So it would seem to suggest, but I think it suggests that it was a hallucination. How is it possible to suggest an explanation that isn't defined, that you can't give any sort of description of other than it doesn't appear to be natural? Well, there are only so many options.

I mean, we'd look at the kind of... Well, how many options are there? Well, I don't know. I'm not counting them. Well, how do we rule out the other options? Because there's corroborating data here, okay? When you see things like Pat did in the morning at 2.30, and then she learns, you know, 36 hours later, or 48 hours later, whatever it was, 24 hours later, that the person had actually died during that period of time.

To me, that's some corroborating data that sets it apart from a typical hallucination. Okay. At this time, Dr. Lacono, you can question Matt Dilhante for five minutes.

Okay. So I'm going to look at Paul here because you went after him. You said Paul never met Jesus.

He wasn't around for many of the events. How do you know that? Well, what I'm saying is that there is no attestation that this occurred. The story of Paul is that he was opposed to Christianity, and he had the experience of the Damascus Road.

This was years after Jesus purportedly died. I'm just going with what the gospel reports. I'm not saying that I'm convinced that that is, in fact, the case.

Okay. Because I know Ermin claims this too, and it's like, you don't have a shred of evidence for that. In fact, why does Paul hate the Christian movement? Well, it's the null hypothesis.

The null hypothesis would be that Paul never met Jesus in person while he was alive. Right, but there's no evidence that that's the case. In fact, I would think that he did.

I think it's plausible. Perhaps even probably that every time you turn around in the gospels, you find that Jesus is going on some kind of a trip to Jerusalem to celebrate some sort of a festival or something, and he's making commotion in the temple. Paul was a Pharisee according to his own testimony.

He's going up through the ladder, and his climbing ladder is doing pretty well on it. I think there's a really good chance he was probably there at Jesus' trial before the high priest. But to say that Paul had never met Jesus, which you made that claim that he wasn't around for any of Jesus' events, you were making assertions there without a shred of evidence.

No, no. I was expressing the null hypothesis. You are personally convinced that Paul probably met Jesus.

Do you have any evidence that he did? I think there's a good chance. Well, good chance is an evidence that he actually did. No, but that's not my argument.

You're the one making an argument here. I'm saying you don't have the evidence for that. I was expressing the null hypothesis, which is... Well, if you make an assertion, you bear the burden of proof, and you said he did not know why the assertion never met Jesus.

The fact is he must have known enough about Jesus to know he wanted to oppose him. And where would he have heard those teachings? Is that a fact? Because my understanding is that it wasn't that he was out there opposing Jesus. It was that he was out there opposing Christians in Christianity.

And certainly he knew enough about that. I mean, yeah, but they're representing Jesus. Well, okay.

Now we're going way down the rabbit hole. I mean, you seem to be suggesting that you think it's likely he met Jesus and had some personal problem with Jesus. And I'm just saying that based on the book, there's no evidence for that so the null hypothesis is that he didn't meet Jesus.

And the timeline... I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's impossible.

We're not getting anywhere with that. So you said, how do I confirm that Paul saw the risen Jesus? You know, if it were just Paul on that, I'd say, well, perhaps it's a hallucination. Okay, if it's just Paul.

If it was just Peter, I might say, well, maybe that was just a hallucination. You can come up with these different kinds of explanations, but the historian must look at all the data. And that's what explanatory scope is.

And I look and I see, all right, Peter said that he had an appearance of Paul. And Paul wasn't even a disciple. He hated Jesus.

Jesus would have been the last person Paul would have wanted to see or expected to see. Paul was not grieving over Jesus' death. Here's a group of parents over here to 12.

Here's another group, another group of parents that's being claimed by the earliest Christians. You start to look at these and say, okay, well, group appearances are implausible. The appearance of Paul would have been unlikely.

And then you got all these, you put together and say, well, what's the best explanation? And resurrection, actual appearances of Jesus work out better than a hallucination hypothesis. So that's where historical method comes in. I may not be able to look at a single data and say, I can prove it based on that.

But I look at all of the data and say, this is the best explanation for it. All right. Was that a question? I mean, I can comment on it.

I'll wait for my question. Oh, I'm sorry. It's your question time.

I just don't want to... What do you think of that? Okay. Thanks. So what I think of that is that in order to say that the resurrection is the best explanation for these facts, first of all, you have to demonstrate that resurrection is in fact an plausible explanation, that it's something that could happen.

Which we did. When did we demonstrate that it's possible to be resurrected? It's a supernatural dimension. There's four evidences right there.

And certainly, if there's a supernatural realm, you'd have to say that resurrections are possible. No, first of all, I don't accept that there's a supernatural realm. Second of all, if in fact there is a supernatural realm, that doesn't mean that resurrection is possible.

Okay. Maybe there's a supernatural realm and resurrection is impossible. But I find it strange that we're talking about getting messages from the other side.

That's something we could potentially test for. And yet what we have is fake psychic after fake psychic over and over again doing this. Can we do it? But just because there's a lot of counterfeits doesn't mean there aren't authentic ones.

There are plenty of authentic ones. So you say there's 300 authentic. How do we verify that these are actually what they claim to be? Because there's this corroborated data from at least one external source.

It sounds like we've already started the final five minutes. Because Matt's starting to ask those final questions, which is good. So for the last five minutes, Matt Delahontay will ask the questions.

Actually, for the last five minutes, I'll ask questions, but you can ask questions back because that's just fair. Do you believe that people are abducted by aliens? No. But I would be open to it.

But I don't think the evidence is good enough for it. Okay. So despite the fact that there's nothing supernatural about the idea that there might be life somewhere else who made it to Earth, I don't believe that they were abducted by aliens either.

Oh, I don't agree. But at least Viacom's razor were not appealing to anything beyond what is naturally understood. And yet, for that, what is the plausible explanation for, in the cases of group hallucinations about alien visitations? What's the explanation for that? Well, you know, there's an interesting book that was co-authored, I think, by Hugh Ross and Kenneth Samples and one other.

It's called something like Lights in the Sky and Green Men or something like that. It's talking about aliens and things, UFOs, Ross is an astronomer. And he talks about the possibility of there being aliens anywhere in the universe and he's saying that, you know, with all the things that must be, he doesn't think their life support anywhere else, at least carbon-based, intelligent life.

It's not only light years away, but given the fact, even if you could travel at the speed of light, which he says you can't, but even if you could, you'd have to slow down because of space debris and radiation. It would take you about 23,000 years to make the trip, which no one could survive. And once you got here, you'd have all kinds of problems anyway.

He says, when you look at the alien sightings and the spaceships, they do things that defy the laws of nature, which even if you have technology and stuff, you can't defy the laws of nature. So it's kind of like if the spaceships do all this kind of stuff, but if it moves like this and it's next to trees, it's going to suck the trees over when it does this, but the trees don't move. So he thinks there's a good chance that this is either an extra dimensional or spiritual dimensional thing.

So he would say that there are a number of cases of these alien abductions, UFO sightings that he thinks are authentic because the witnesses seem to be good, but he wouldn't attribute it to aliens. He might attribute it to some sort of spirit beings for this. Sure.

So I don't, well, I do disagree about his conclusion about what it's likely to be. I don't disagree that it's implausible given what we know that aliens are visiting Earth. However, that's given what we know.

And given what we know, you and evidently you and others would seem to think that it's more plausible that UFO sightings are spiritual in some sense rather than not all of them, of course, a very small minority of them that can't be accounted for adequately by natural explanations. So you're back to can't be accounted for. This has been like the repeated theme.

Based on what we know, we can't account for this. Based on what we know about things like hallucinations and all this, plus what is possible according to the laws of nature. But we know that group hallucinations are possible.

Well, I don't think we even know that because they're like dreams. So it would seem to me they are actually impossible. There are accounts of not credible documented accounts.

Okay. In fact, in the book put out by the American Psychological Association, hallucinations, the science of idiosyncratic perception. It's like the most recent thing on the last hundred years on hallucinations.

They don't have anything on group hallucinations. I contacted the authors and said why not? And they said we couldn't find any documented sources, reliable documented sources on group hallucinations. They seem impossible.

So because we don't have a way to confirm any accounts of group hallucinations, we are then justified in accepting tentatively, I guess, that it's supernatural. And because what we do understand about hallucinations, professional, the reason I'm asking is this. If we're justified in saying that it's supernatural, is there anything else we can determine from that? Because it seems to me that supernatural ends up just being the bucket label for we don't really know.

It's strange. It's outside normal. Yeah.

No, no. If it's a bucket for we don't know because we don't have an explanation. How can that possibly serve as a justification for believing specifics about a God or spirits or souls or resurrection? Well, remember, it's not just the fact that I can't think of a natural explanation.

It's what we do know about nature that would seem to render it as improbable or implausible based on our background knowledge. So, yeah. What was the last part of the question? I forgot the last part.

I just want to clarify, it's not just what you're saying. It's not a God of the gaps. It's based also on what we do know about nature to suggest that that is not the case.

Now, in terms of identifying God, I can't say whether it was God or whether an ET from a parallel universe or whether it was a demon or an angel. But I can't say that when Jesus comes on the scene and says he claims to be God's uniquely divine son, he predicts his resurrection and boom, all of a sudden, you get all these appearances and they can't be accounted for by naturalistic explanations. I think God is probably the best candidate for it.

For our appreciation to our group two presenters, we are going to give them and all of us a much deserved 10 to 15 minute break. Just a little before three, we'll start with the audience questions. So, you can be dismissed.

There's the bookstore right out here. The bathroom is straight out the back. And so, see you back here in about 10, 15 minutes.

If I could get everyone's attention, we're going to start with our audience participation questions. Let me just remind you, as we get started, if you would like to ask a question, you can stand at one of the two microphones on this side. And you can just wait in line behind the next person that you would like to ask.

Again, we ask that you limit your questions time to under 45 seconds and there will be no time for follow up. This is to allow for the most number of questions possible. Obviously, please be respectful and try to, if you can, rotate questions to the various participants.

What we'll do is allow for the person that's addressed to have about two minutes to respond. And we're going to be, obviously, lenient with that. I'm just going to be watching that myself.

And then, if the other person would like to comment on that, we can give them about a minute to give commentary on the answer that was given. To start us off, as I promised, from the Twitter exchange, I thought I would start by giving a question for both of our participants to kind of break us in here. One Rachel Cottle was asking, can we get a specific definition of the word supernatural? Jay Rosh actually asked a similar question or made a similar comment saying, supernatural is an event attributed to some forced beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

So it seems to be if something is unexplainable, does that necessarily make it supernatural? How do you define what is or is not supernatural? I'll let Dr. LaCona start. Well, I would just say supernatural will be something that transcends an event that transcends what is possible in the natural realm. Now, I mentioned during the debate that I found 23 different definitions for miracle in my research, and that wasn't even exhaustive.

The one offered by statistician David Bartholomew was the one that I preferred and adopted, but I couldn't quote it right off. But someone gets my real big book on the resurrection. I think it's chapter two and it's in there.

But yeah, I would say something that transcends what is possible on the physical realm, according to the laws of nature as we know them. Matt? So I don't know how you identify that because if your definition is that it transcends the laws of nature as we know them, we know that throughout history what we've known would have allowed us to attribute all sorts of things to supernatural and we keep finding out we're wrong. Throughout history, every single time that we've actually been able to identify what the cause is, it has never been supernatural.

And it's there are people who immediately object to all that's achieved because you don't you can't identify this. You can't confirm the supernatural. Yes, that's the problem.

Okay, we'll start here in the middle microphone. Just state your first name so they'll know how to respond to you and state your question. All right, this question is for Matt and my name is Darrell.

I don't remind me the t-shirt you had. You mentioned it early on. What does it say? I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible.

Okay, so since that's important. My question is is this is where do you go to find the truth? I go to the Bible, but where do you go to find the truth? How do you determine? How do you determine what's true versus what's false? Thanks. Sorry for interrupting.

I thought it was the end. So when I say something's true, all I mean is that it comports to reality. It comports to now there's a lot of philosophical questions.

Do I have any access to truth? Is there truth? Rather than getting into debates about solipsism and truth and stuff. All I will say is I want to have an accurate understanding of reality so that my internal model of reality matches the facts as best as possible. And so where do I go to find that? Exploring reality.

I don't find that going to any book is a way to discover reality necessarily. You may find truth in reality, but it is the independent confirmation. And this is why I talk about science being the single most reliable path not to truth.

Science doesn't make truth proclamations. Science creates probabilistic models that describe the universe to our best understanding. Science is not telling you truth.

However, to the extent that scientific findings seem to agree with and describe reality accurately, I'm okay with using that as truth. I'm not overly concerned with a kind of, is there an ultimate truth? If somebody, if there is an ultimate truth, that would need to be kind of demonstrated. Dr. Lacona? I just simply say I take a correspondence theory of truth and truth is whatever corresponds to reality.

Holy, we agree. We agree on quite a few things, which I really enjoy. On this microphone.

Yes, my name is Marsha, and this is for Matt. You said you spent quite a few years as a Southern Baptist. Did you consider yourself saved during that time? And if so, would that now make you a saved atheist? Yeah.

So it's a great question. Thanks. I have a friend who's a pastor here in Austin who couldn't make it today, but I wanted him to impart because he and I have shared a lot of time.

He thinks I'm still going to heaven, and he thinks he's going to see me there. That's his model, the once saved, always saved, and he's convinced that I was. I have family members who can think that I wasn't.

I was never actually saved. Was I convinced at the time? Absolutely. There are actually people here who I think, who knew me during that time frame, who would say that, well, you know, I wasn't the best Christian in the world for sure, but I was active and seemed to sincerely believe.

Right Comfort once asked me if I thought I was ever a true Christian. And my answer is because I don't think that there's anything to be saved to or from or by, I don't think anybody's a true Christian. If your definition is actually has a relationship with the risen Christ, well, I don't think there's a risen Christ, so obviously I don't think anybody saved.

But if your definition is, is convinced that they have a relationship with the risen Christ, then yes, I absolutely did. Dr. Laconi, any comments on that? Okay. If you like to comment on my life experience.

In the middle, is there anybody with a question for Dr. Lacona? Okay, step forward, please to the microphone. My name is Adam, this is Director of Dr. Lacona. How do you deal with eyewitness testimony in the case of the disciples or anyone who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus? And the occurrence is when eyewitness testimony is proven to be false in their perceptions.

All right, how say that again, please? Sorry, it's a bit complicated. And there's a little echo up here too. So step a little closer to your microphone.

Better? I think so. How do you deal with eyewitness testimonies in the case of the disciples or anybody who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ? And the occurrence is when eyewitness testimonies currently have proven to be false on their perceptions in the case of someone having believed they saw something, but then that comes out later to be false, even if it was an eyewitness testimony to claim that they saw it. Yeah, well, I'm trying to think, yeah, I was talking to you.

It was you a little bit earlier talking to about this, I think, that you look at all of the evidence. Or maybe I said this during the question. I don't recall.

I said it here in this auditorium, you know, but, you know, you might look at just Paul and say, well, maybe he had a hallucination. You know, if it was Paul, and all we had was the testimony of Paul, then you might look and say, that's a hallucination. That might be the best explanation.

Or if it was just Peter, you might say, well, hallucination is the best explanation if it were just Peter. But then what we do know from the mental health disciplines, psychology, I mentioned a book, hallucinations, the science of idiosyncratic perception, I mentioned that during the published by the American Psychological Association, they compiled all this research on hallucinations over the past hundred plus years. And they found that the group most likely to experience a hallucination are senior adults bereaving the loss of a loved one.

But only 7% of them experience a visual hallucination of that loved one. So the group most, the people most likely to experience a hallucination, only 7% experience a visual hallucination of that person. So when you say that he appeared to all the apostles, well, that's a hundred percent.

He appeared to the 12, that's a hundred percent. And then you look, he appeared to more than 500 at one time. That is a group hallucination, the 12, that's a group hallucination.

And then you put Paul together and you say, well, we have no reason really to think that Paul would have experienced when he wasn't grieving. But gosh, if it's going to require three group hallucinations and a hundred percent of the recipients involved in even an enemy, you start to put these in. If you want to go with hallucinations, then you lose explanatory power because you are really straining to make things fit.

And it's implausible as well, and it's ad hoc. So that hypothesis just doesn't work. You put things together and you consider the data within historical method and it makes it more probable that these were actual appearances of Jesus than hallucinations.

Mr. Dentalante, do you have a comment on that? Yeah, so we know that I witness testimony is notoriously unreliable. But the other thing is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you tell me your name, and I've forgotten your name, I'm sorry.

Adam. I believe Adam, that's his name, because there's really no risk to me being wrong. I mean, the likelihood that your name is going to significantly alter my worldview is really low or seems low.

So this idea, for example, just take the 500. He appeared to the 500. Who are they? I have no information about them.

I have no information from them. I have no way to investigate who these 500 were, what they saw. It's just he appeared to the 500.

So far as I'm aware, and Mike's got an incredibly thick book out there, which I hope to read, maybe there's more about who these 500 were. But that's an extraordinary claim. And simply saying, oh, he appeared to 500 when we have no way to investigate that.

I don't think you have to worry about whether or not the hallucination, this was a hallucination, a group of hallucination of 500. I think you have to worry about whether or not this actually happened. And I don't have sufficient evidence to say it happened.

Okay, I'm going to take a moderator's license because I see a point that would be a good discussion point, and I'll give Matt equal time here. So would you like to reply to that? Yeah, I'd love to. Number one, the extraordinary claims required, extraordinary, and this is false, and I think it's easily demonstrated.

Recall that hypothetical scenario I gave of being beheaded here, and then all of you are being interviewed out there. And then I come walking out there, and I'm alive and my head's attached and everything. You would be, that would be an extraordinary event indeed.

But all of you being witnesses would, to that would be ordinary evidence, quite ordinary. And just as ordinary as you'd be, and evidence is here. And you would believe it, and you'd be justified in believing that I came back from the dead, that it was a miracle that had occurred.

So it's not that you need extraordinary evidence, you need good evidence. It can be ordinary, it just needs to be good. And I don't know what it means to be extraordinary, does it need to go? You don't think it'd be extraordinary evidence after I watched your head being chopped off for you to walk back in the room, that that alone would not, I think that would be extraordinary evidence.

No, that would be the event itself to see that I would be alive. I'm just saying the eyewitness testimony in here would be quite ordinary. The claim is that you came back from the dead.

That's right. The extraordinary evidence for that would be you walking in and talking to me. If I wasn't here, and somebody said, hey, we chopped off Mike Laconis head, and an hour later he walked back in the room, I don't have enough, I don't have even anecdotal evidence or barely anecdotal evidence.

So I'm not yet justified in believing it. You walking back in, that's a monumentally extraordinary. And you still wouldn't believe in the supernatural, you said.

I'm not even if you saw that. No. What I would believe is that this happened.

I will not accept the explanation because there's been no justification for a causal explanation. So the supernatural is just a bucket that you throw in. I don't know how this happened.

Well, it's more than that. It's to say, this doesn't happen. My natural causes.

How did you determine it's not natural causes? Well, everything we know about nature. And if you're saying about that. Do you know everything about nature? Everything that we currently know about nature.

And if you're going to say, well, there may be stuff we learn in the future that shows that you can come back with your head attached by natural causes. Well, now you're doing a nature of the gaps. I'm not doing a nature of the gaps because I know it's not because I'm not saying that is the explanation.

I'm asking how you ruled that out. And by the way, you cut off a starfish's limit grows back and we share a genetic code. Maybe there isn't a non-zero possibility.

I'm not saying that it's like all I'm saying is I will accept that it happened and I will accept that I don't know how it happened. What I won't accept is that your claim of how it happened, which by the way is devoid of any content. Oh, it's supernatural.

That tells me nothing. I think it's this, you know, your magician. And you know very well that if I shuffle a deck of cards and then I deal out 13 cards and they all end up being spades.

You know very well that even though there is a one chance and 365 billion that that is just happened arbitrarily, you know that what that looks like, the deck was stacked. Now you could lie awake at night and say, nope, nope, I'm not going to say the deck was stacked. I'm not going to say that was intentional in your part because it's still possible.

And maybe there's something in the way those cards could have been arbitrarily arranged that they came out that way. I'm not going to say that you were behind it as an intelligent cause behind it. But I think most of us would look at that and if those 13 spades came out, we would all be saying the deck was stacked.

I actually used this example in my video about the teleological argument because the first thing is the reason you have good reason to conclude that is because I'm a magician or you've seen card sharp so we know that it's possible to cheat and cheating becomes a likely explanation for this. Despite that though, and despite the fact that there have not been enough games of bridge played to exhaust every possible combination, of shuffled decks, we know of instances where a perfect bridge hand, 13 spades, has been dealt. Was that supernatural? Probably not in that case, no.

Was it cheating? It could have been, who knows? I wasn't there. I agree with you. I wasn't there.

But if I did it right now, you would think that it was super natural or that it was designed that way, right? So if you dealt my most reasonable explanation would be, as I know that you dabble with card tricks and stuff, is that it's most likely that you conspired to make that event occur. And that's what historians go by, the most likely explanation. Yeah, but we're appealing to what we know is most likely.

You don't get to use God of the supernatural as most likely until there's a demonstration. I can show you a card cheat, show me God, show me your resurrection. I can show you the supernatural.

Show me the supernatural. I gave four evidences. No, you told stories that people attribute to the supernatural.

That are corroborated. How do you corroborate? I want to challenge what this guy said about eyewitness testimony. You said that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.

There's no question that eyewitness testimony can be unreliable. And in some cases, of course, it's notoriously unreliable. But overall, it is quite reliable.

And if we're going to say that all eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, then forget the legal system. There's no such thing as good witnesses. And let's all face it.

Most of us in here, I'm 55. Most of you in here will remember 9-11. I'll bet you remember where you were at, what you were doing, even what the weather was like that day.

And that's reliable stuff. And even Barturman in his recent book on eyewitness testimony, who he trashes it and says is completely unreliable. In other books, he refers back to events when he was 14 years old.

He says, I remember like it was yesterday. The guy just contradicts himself. And so this eyewitness testimony can be very good testimony.

And especially when you have multiple witnesses saying the same thing, it becomes even more so. I agree that there's a potential for that. We don't have to throw out the legal system.

But the legal system does not allow spectral evidence any longer. Okay. Lucy, turn me into a newt is no longer allowed in courtrooms.

That's right. For criminal cases, like the Salem witch trials, because the evidence there, the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the very highest form of evidence, because according to our loosey, turn me into a newt to be allowed in any courtroom. Because our burden of proof for beyond a reasonable doubt is such that in our legal system, we would rather set free 100 guilty people than have one innocent person condemned.

I agree. I don't know what that has to do with what testimony should be allowed. Because in historical investigation, we're looking for probability.

I was talking about the courtrooms. Okay. You want to throw out the legal system? Go ahead.

No, sorry to interrupt. I would let you all just keep on going. Well, there's people standing.

These people standing here, and I hate to ignore them. We can't do this whenever. Yeah.

Let's go to this microphone here. Okay. My name is Michael, and my question is for Mr. Matt, and I want to thank both you, Mr. Mike and Mr. Matt, for coming out here today.

It's been a great experience, and it's not just watching you to debate. My question is, Mr. Matt, I know you used to be a man of God, and now you're not, and you don't believe in the supernatural. My question is simply, do you believe in miracles? Do I believe in miracles? So, it would depend on the definition of a miracle, because one of the things is people use the word miracle all the time, like, hey, there was a bus crash, and everybody died except for me.

That's a miracle. If you just mean, do I accept that highly unlikely things occur, sure. But if you're talking about, do I believe in miracles in the sense of there is some causal tie between something occurring and something supernatural? No.

Okay. Let's go over here. My question actually kind of ties several of these things together.

My name is Mike. My question is for Matt. If I were to go outside, and this sort of builds on a different example than Mike had, but if I went outside, we all went outside, walked down to the lake, I walk out on the water, stand there for a few minutes, and then shoot up into the sky.

I mean, you're being a magician, you're practiced in spotting and knowing how people do illusions, and you're completely floored. If I, to all possible scientific investigation, have contravened the known law of gravity, one of the major laws of the universe and nature, it sounds like you're still unwilling to ever admit to something beyond natural explanations, because you said several times during your discussions that you always feel like there's, it's just, well, we didn't understand that properly. There's always another natural explanation.

It seems like that's always your fallback, and I want to clarify, I want to get clarification because I've never been my fallback, I just specifically countered that a minute ago, but go ahead. No, I'm just saying if to all possible investigation and evidence that a natural law has been broken, which I would think would be at least a reasonable subset of supernatural, then is that ever a case? I'm trying to figure out if there's really a case when you say you're open to explanations, it sounds like you're only really open to natural explanations. In other words, in other words, in a situation like that, that your default is always going to be, well, there must be a natural explanation that we found.

I will be open to supernatural explanations, the moment somebody defines, describes, and identifies the supernatural in such a way that it could be an explanation. If we were able to investigate, you walking in the water, and we confirmed that you didn't use the method that dynamo or whoever used, thorough investigation, we watched you walk in the water and fly all the way up to the clouds, I would believe that you walked on water, flying up to the clouds, in defiance of everything that I understand about the natural world. I don't know how you did it, and I don't know what the justification is to say, oh, it's supernatural, other than saying it does not fit my current model of what the natural world can do.

My objection to the supernatural is not that, oh, it can't happen. It's that it's not defined. It has no ability to explain anything.

It is just the bucket we put things in when we don't know how they happen. If that's what everybody means by supernatural, if they're going to take supernatural and use it the way they do miracle, like, oh, I passed that test, it was a miracle, then I'm okay with the supernatural because that's just a colloquialism for, wow, that was really weird and I don't know how that happened, but if instead you're going to use it to say, therefore, the supernatural is real and I can then bucket load all of these other things that we've said are supernatural in and say that they're real too, that is logically fallacious and wholly unjustified. I need to know what the explanation is, not what you're going to call the explanation.

Dr. LaCanna? I just simply disagree with that. I would say that if we buy our current understanding of nature and the laws of physics, if we can verify that an event has occurred and that event was not possible given the laws of nature, well, then we would say that is a supernatural event, it transcends the laws of nature, that's the definition of it, I don't know why that's a problem, just because I can't specify what the cause is, whether it was God or an angel, a demon or an ET or whatever. We can still say that the event occurred, that the event was a supernatural event and leave the cause undetermined.

The historians do that kind of stuff all the time to say this event occurred. We don't know how King Ludwig died who had the Neusch von Steincastle, was he intentionally drowned or did he commit suicide when he and his doctor were found face down in the lake, but we still know that they were dead. We can come up with the Reichstag over in Berlin in 1933, I think it was, when it burned down, we still don't know whether it was the Nazis or whether it was the Communists who burned it down, but no one questions that the Reichstag burned down, it was torched intentionally, so we can determine that an event occurred without determining the cause of that event.

Which is why I said I would accept the event, I think you actually just argued for the colloquial usage of the supernatural, but last note on this is when you can walk on water and fly up to the clouds and when he can chop his head off and put it back on, come back and talk to me then so that I can actually investigate it, because it is incredibly telling that I keep getting examples of if this happened wouldn't it be enough for you to just believe, and yet we have no examples that approach the ridiculous extremes that were offered, except the resurrection that you can't answer. There's a difference between him walking on water and flying up into the clouds where we are by his explanation offered the chance to investigate it thoroughly and hearing that he walked on water and flew up into the clouds two thousand years later, there's a difference between those two, to put them on the same playing field is intellectual dishonesty. Not at all, I mean you're looking at something that you'd say you'd have to observe and repeat if possible and to investigate in it that's the different tools than what historians do, like I said historians investigate whether Anthony loves Cleopatra, even though they have no love detector, they can still go back and say he probably loved Cleopatra, we can do the same thing with an event such as the resurrection.

Okay, I want to make sure we get the audience questions, I'm going to, we've had two for Matt in a row, so is there anyone asking a question of Mike out of this line over here? Step forward. If not, I can take it. I like to talk.

Go ahead. Testing. Okay.

I had a question about using the resurrection as an apologetic because Matt Dolan honey brought up the point, he read William Lane Craig, how we already have to know that God is willing to do the resurrection miracle and all that stuff. I thought natural theology came first, then Christian evidences, which is where the resurrection falls, so don't you have to prove God's existence first before the resurrection hypothesis like has weight? I was just wondering, it's a methodological, how to use the apologetic properly? Yeah, that's a fair question. So that's the difference between a classical apologetics approach and an evidential apologetics approach.

I don't really involve myself in those kinds of debates. For me, I look at, it's kind of like we said, you know, if I were beheaded and then I went out and I showed myself alive, I don't have to prove the supernatural or God or supernatural being before witnessing that before I would believe that a supernatural or a miracle event occurred. The event itself would prove the existence of the supernatural.

And I think if Jesus rose from the dead, then that gives you God and Christianity, it gives you the probability of God, it certainly gives you Jesus rose, it gives you the supernatural realm, it'll probably give you God. The classical approach where you add God's existence, I think it just continues to just stack up on the plausibility. I mean, I could have gone into that, but I just wanted to do the supernatural here.

But you know, you could add some arguments for God's existence, from design, for the cosmology, for molecular biology, all kinds of arguments for first calls. This adds plausibility to the existence of God. You throw in the supernatural, those four things that I gave, that adds plausibility.

You start putting it together, you've got a really strong case that I think you look at and you say Christianity is the most plausible and unified theory of reality. But sometimes you just don't have the time for all of that. You know, I had 25 minutes, right? So I couldn't even cover all the resurrection.

I wrote a 700 and some page book on it, so you know, try squeezing all that into 25 minutes. Matt, did you have any comment there either? I'll let that sit. There's a lot of people right here in the middle for Matt.

Yes, sir. My name is Jim. Matt, you and I go back a long way, as you may not remember, but 1980, 85, 89.

At Harvester. We were members at Harvester Baptist Church. We were so proud of you.

You were one of our bright stars. You were a bright young man. You were a leader in our youth group.

And I stand here today and I wanted to just ask one question. What was it that triggered in your life the change? Because if I had a bet in 1987 when you graduated from Francis Howe, you'd have been a star. And I just want to know for my own edification and for us, what was the trigger? Ah, and thanks, Jim.

By the way, when I mentioned that there were people here. So I grew up in the St. Charles area. I went to 1st Baptist Church of Harvester.

There are at least three people here from that church. So it's nice because not only I'm in a Baptist Church, but a lot of times when I say, you know, oh, it's a Baptist people are like, oh, I don't believe that. Well, you know, they'll vouch for it.

Thanks so much for the kind words, Jim. It wasn't one thing. It wasn't even bad that happened.

I felt when I was in our youth group, as did many of the kids in our youth group, that God wanted me to be a pastor. Some of my other friends felt a similar calling. It worked out to varying degrees depending, you know, I knew what you were talking about.

I didn't want to do that. I was terrified of public speaking, which is incredibly ironic now. And I had a girlfriend.

I decided I was going to go join the Navy. And I did that for a little over eight years. I got out of the Navy.

I moved to Austin. I worked for Dell. I was focused primarily on my career in building a life.

And around 2000, 2001, I lost my job that I had worked really hard at and should have been promoted instead of losing a job. And at the time, I said, oh, wow, this is God punishing me for running away from a calling to ministry. And so I said, okay, I give up.

You know, if that's what you want me to do, I'll do it. And I spent a little over 18 months or so in pretty serious prayer and study. And I went to my uncle, who was a medical missionary.

And I went to a number of pastor friends of mine. And at the time, my roommate was an atheist. We'd never had any conversations about this.

It's just the way it was. I believed he didn't. We didn't talk about it because, hey, we're best friends.

Why would we screw that up? You know, by me preaching and stuff. But when I decided that I was going to actually get serious about 1 Peter 3.15 and do what I thought I was being led to do, I did not want to get to heaven and have God say, well, why is this guy who you love like a brother burning in hell when you could have shared the gospel? And so I set out to find the best way to engage with somebody. You know, the weird thing is that growing up, money nights were visitation and you go out to anybody to fill out the cards.

In my head, there was a definition of atheist that was Madeleine Murray O'Hare, who I wasn't allowed to watch or listen to on TV. But then there were non-believers. They weren't atheists.

Yes, they were. At the time, this is how I looked at it. These people are, they're just unsaved.

They need Christ. So I had actually engaged with atheists without ever knowing it because my picture in my head was different. But I set out to figure out how to engage in the conversations with an atheist.

And to make the long story short, this time of parent study backfired spectacularly. I wanted to be the best Christian that God wanted me to be. And evidently the best Christian he wanted me to be was an atheist.

Is how I joke about it. But the truth is, I spent a long time on my knees and frustrated and getting no answer. But I still didn't give it up for that.

The reason I don't believe is because I discovered fallacies in the reasons for belief, a lack of evidence, an inability to demonstrate the truth of the proposition. It's demonstrated here. Mike has convinced that, hey, if our current understanding of what's possible doesn't count for something, we can conclude that it's supernatural.

I can't buy that. I want to know what the explanation is. Not how I'm going to label it as not natural.

I joke that this was going to take multiple lifetimes. And so I investigated Buddhism next to see if I would have multiple lifetimes to explore it. But what ended up happening is I delved into, I'm not making the long story short, sorry.

I got more into philosophy specifically to find out what kind of God might exist in order to direct my search towards the truth. And through that process and an understanding of critical thinking, logical reasoning, fallacies, the nature of evidence, and what we can and can't demonstrate, I found that I was unable, as was anyone else I was able to talk to, to demonstrate a good reason for belief. And by the way, I know that this will make many of you probably including you, Jim, and I'm sorry, sad.

I know it makes my parents sad. You guys aren't the enemy. I don't hate you.

You're not stupid. My IQ didn't go up when I stopped believing. I don't accept what you do, and I think I have good reasons for it.

And when I try to get good reasons from believers, they seem to fail, which I think explains why there's so much disagreement, even within just Christianity, let alone other world religions. I know that it makes people sad, which breaks my heart because from my perspective, it's extra sad that you're sad about someone essentially being liberated and free, and free to explore, and free to change their mind, and my search continues to do. I think that it's likely that I'm going to find it now, because for thousands of years, we've had the same arguments over and over and over and over again.

And I understand that it's frustrating and I understand for you and others in particular it's incredibly disheartening, and I mean to give a sermon about all this. But belief is not a choice. What you accept to be true is the result of what you are convinced of, and you can become convinced for good reasons or bad reasons.

I want to become convinced for good reasons. I haven't seen good reasons to believe Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, definitely not Scientology, blah, blah, blah. Dr. Lacona, any comments on that? Yeah, I would just say in terms of people disagreeing and stuff within the church, people disagreeing in everything.

They disagree in science, and evolutionary biology, was it through saltation or this gradual change over time, as had been believed for years, or as some evolutionary biologists start by Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, they go by punctuated equilibria that there were these big bangs within the fossil record and within evolutionary stuff. So that's why you don't have the transitional forms because of that. So they don't even agree on that.

Scientists don't agree on whether there's a single universe or a multi-universe, and there's all kinds of disagreements. You go to any discipline of science. There's going to be lots and lots and lots and lots of disagreement.

Within the various worldviews, of course, even within all religions, all religions have disagreements in there. But that's not a test for truth. It just means that humans are going to interpret things differently.

Even when they're doing controlled and testable experiments behind, they're going to interpret the data differently. That doesn't mean that there is no truth. There is still a true view that corresponds to reality.

We are out of our time, and I want to be respectful to our presenters' time as well as the volunteers and people making this happen. However, this gentleman has been standing there for the longest, and so I'm going to ask for just one more question. The rest of you, I'm so sorry.

What I'm going to ask to do, the Texas apologetic Twitter page, you can tweet your questions there. I'm going to ask if our two participants, if they want to jump on Twitter and look at those, and if you want to respond, you're welcome to. No obligation to do that, obviously.

That's all I can do to offer, and I apologize for those that have had a weight. It's just the nature of time restraints, but go ahead. This will be our last question.

My name is Nestor, and when we're talking about worldview, I understand that Mike has a worldview that the Christian worldview, a worldview of an afterlife, of a God that has called him to reach others, teach others, and so he does what he does, and we all have a limited number of years left on this earth, and so that is why he dedicates himself to teaching what he teaches and coming here and doing what he does. Matt, you say you've been liberated, and after spending 25 years of your life in what I hear you say is you now consider to be a delusion, and yet you're sitting here surrounded by Christians and dedicating your life to teaching and debating. If you have found the answer, what are you doing continuing to spend the rest of the time that you have with this, or are you still seeking? Thank you.

If I can reword the question. There's a really rude way to reword that. I don't think you meant why don't you, Atheist, just shut up, but it's along the same lines.

Why do I bother? Because first of all, I care what kind of world I live in. I care about the truth. If somebody has the truth, if I'm in fact wrong, I'd certainly like to find that out, but if people believe for the same bad reasons that I did, why wouldn't I want to let them know about this? What you believe informs the actions you are going to take, and those actions have consequences, not only for you, but for everybody else around you.

I have to share space with people I disagree with, and I ask them to justify their position. I don't find it compelling. I explain why I don't find it compelling, and there are plenty of people who are agreeing with me and are glad that I've done it and have helped.

There was a 12-year-old girl who came up with one debate to say that she'd explored a bunch of stuff and blah, blah, blah, and now she doesn't believe anymore. I'm not targeting. I'm not trying to take people's hope or faith away.

I'm trying to have a discussion to find out what's actually real, what's actually true, and to have good reasons for it. If the idea is, okay, you used to believe this, now you think it's false. You know, don't ever address it again.

I agree with some things that were said about if, in fact, this is true, it's the most important message. If Christianity is true, it's the most important message. You would be a terrible person to not want to share that.

Similarly, if you see that the overwhelming majority of the population are accepting something that you don't find to be true, and in many cases potentially harmful, I'm not saying that there's plenty of great. I love you guys. You guys love me.

You need awesome. But if truth matters, what kind of person would I be if I said, ah, I found it, but, you know, let the little people keep their beliefs, and then I would be an awful human being. And I care about what kind of world we live in, and the truth is what we believe, each of us, what I believe and what you believe, and what everybody here believes, affects the world we live in.

And that's why I think it's important. Dr. Lacona, any comment on that? Well, I think I believe mad on this. I have no reason to distrust them on it.

So I believe that's this reason. I think a number of atheists that the reason that they do it, some of the militant ones, maybe like someone like a Richard Dawkins, is the reason they're out there is because they don't like where the Christian worldview leads in the political realm. Because it goes against certain views that impact what's legal morally speaking.

And I think that that causes a lot of the iconoclastic efforts out there to destroy the faith and the influence that Christianity has within a culture. Because we do have influence. As was shown in the recent election, we have influence, and it determines the way a culture, a society, our country goes.

And so I think that's why. In some cases, I'm not saying it's Matt's. I think that is partially in that camp, of course, because if we disagree on something.

So I'm just trying to get to the root of where we disagree and why. I will say this in closing. If the resurrection is absolutely verifiably provable, there would be absolutely no need for faith.

I think we could all agree with that, right? Actually no. No? Well, because we would still need faith, we could say Jesus rose from the dead that wouldn't necessarily verify that God did it. Or even if it did verify that God did it as Joshua and his colleague this morning were saying in that session, God could be a deceiver.

And saying he's going to save us, but then he deceives us and doesn't. So it still takes faith. Right.

Well, and also faith, you could actually like the demons believe and shudder so they don't necessarily have faith in Christ or faith in him for salvation. But if the resurrection by God were verifiable, in other words, we knew God exists verifiably, we knew he resurrected his son verifiably, there would be no need for no necessity of faith. And the Bible does claim that faith is necessary for Christianity.

Therefore, in my understanding, for Christianity to be Christianity, it's very claim, the root of what it is, then there has to be a reliance upon the faith of that, which is not verifiable. And so we're not trying to claim, at least from my understanding, on our conversation, we're not trying to claim something beyond what Christianity claims for itself, and that is it relies upon faith. That's what pleases God ultimately.

And not to start a whole other debate in the last 10 seconds, but I don't know why anybody thinks that faith is a good thing because you can justify any position and claim that it's based on faith. Why people are better than black people, it's a faith-based position. I'm not equating all usages of faith.

What I'm saying is, what is the justification, apart from the Bible says so, that faith in the absence of the confirming evidence that would make it unnecessary is, in fact, a good thing. Whatever worldview we have, we have faith in that worldview because no worldview is absolutely verified. And see, I'm opposed to the idea of absolute certainty at all, but this is an equivocation because I have trust in there.

What's that? I'm with you. We don't get absolute certainty for anything. But if we wait for absolute certainty for anything, we're not going anywhere.

We're never going to leave the house. Right, but when I talk about faith, I don't mean belief in the face of a lack of certainty. I'm distinguishing between a proportioning your confidence, as you would say, to the evidence and belief in the absence of sufficient evidence to justify it.

Except if I walked out after having been beheaded, you're still not willing to say supernatural. God exists. Well, when it happens, call me and we'll figure it out.

Let's give a hand to our participants one more time. We want to thank you for coming to the Unapologetic Conference, and please stop by the bookstore. Feel free to come and talk to the participants for a little while.

I'm sure they'd be glad to visit with you, and hopefully we'll see you next time at the time. Thanks for joining us today. If you'd like to learn more about the work and ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona, visit RisenJesus.com, where you can find authentic answers to genuine questions about the reliability of the gospels and the resurrection of Jesus.

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