In a recent post, I asked our readers to watch the video of an atheist gentleman who addressed his video to “all Christians.”  In the video, he attempts to convince Christians that they are wrong to believe in the Christian God and Bible.

I wanted to make a few comments about what he said.

First, he badly misunderstands religious truth claims.  In his video he argues that since there are multitudes of religions in the world, that the chance that Christianity is the true religion is extremely small.  The problem with this argument is that it assumes that all ideas have an equal chance of being true.  But that is clearly not so.  The way we determine whether an idea is true is we assess the evidence for it. 

Religions make claims about the world that we can test.  If religion A makes a claim about the world that is false, we can safely say that religion A is not true, or at least that part of it isn’t.  For example, some religions make historical claims that are seriously lacking any evidence and, in fact, contradict known historical facts.  Those religions should be judged false.

Besides, his argument boomerangs back on him, because atheism is only one of multitudes of options, so his chance of being right is just as small as the Christian, by his own flawed logic.

He next compares God to unicorns.  He claims that there is no evidence for God or unicorns, and therefore he doesn’t need any faith to not believe in God or unicorns.  A couple things could be said. 

First, nobody argues that unicorns are real, except for a few kooks, whereas north of 95% of all the people that have ever lived believed in a god or gods.  Surely the atheist has to explain why that is.

Second, there are numerous evidences for the existence of God captured in books that fill up libraries.  Anybody heard of C. S. Lewis?  He may not be convinced of these evidences, but to say that there are none offered is false.  I am not aware of huge libraries filled with books offering evidence for unicorns.

Third, if it is so obvious that there is no evidence for God, then why do so many people not see it?  And really smart people?  I have an electrical engineering degree from GA Tech, and I think there is a difference between unicorns and God.  Unicorns are just concepts that do not exist in reality, but God exists in reality.  Why?  What is wrong with me?  How did YouTube guy figure it out?  He needs to consider these questions.

But perhaps the saddest thing about this video is that he doesn’t understand Christianity.  In a period of a few minutes, he mangles the gospel, he misunderstands the use of metaphor in the Bible, and he misinterprets the doctrine of hell (the Bible never teaches that God literally burns people alive for eternity; it is a figure of speech). 

Based on these gross errors, I draw the conclusion that he really hasn’t studied Christianity, as he says at the beginning of the video.

Dinesh D’Souza coined a term for people who believe in a childish form of Christianity.  He calls them crayon Christians.  These are people who never grow in their understanding of the faith, and are stuck in a childish belief system.  That describes our YouTube atheist.  His Christian beliefs never advanced beyond the crayon stage.

I pray that some day he puts the crayons aside.