Truth Really Matters

Sun City Center Jenny grew up in a stable, but atheistic family raised, ostensibly, on a “diet of science and reason and evidence-based rational thought.” She loved Carl Sagan’s book, Cosmos. She was a contented atheist as a young adult, into the early years of her marriage . . . until the birth of her first child.

“I looked down and thought, What is this baby? . . . Well, from a pure atheist, materialist perspective, he is a collection of randomly evolved chemical reactions.” She realized that if that is true, her love for her child was also “nothing more than chemical reactions” in the brain. She realized, “That’s not true. It’s not the truth.” Jenny eventually became a Christian.

Love is an existential argument for the God of the Bible. So is morality. Neither are found in the laws of physics nor in the Periodic Table of the elements. Many unbelievers think we’ve been duped into an illusion of objective morality, but they don’t act like it from day to day. “If they are mugged in the street, swindled in the shop, or treated unfairly at work, morality suddenly starts to look objective and universally binding.”

“Atheism cannot account for such a world. That’s why God is the best explanation for human value.”

So argues Justin Brierley in his 2025 book, Why I’m Still a Christian: After Two Decades of Conversations with Skeptics and Atheists – The Reason I Believe. The book is sourced in two decades of radio and podcast interviews with believers and skeptics. After all that, Justin is still a Christian. Typically, he would sit down with two guests, one a Christian and the other not. The show was called Unbelievable?. At Christmas, for example, they might discuss evidence for the virgin birth of Jesus and at Easter, evidence for the Resurrection. At times the non-Christian guest was a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim, a Jew, or a New Ager.

I’ve listened to a number of Justin’s podcasts. He works in a style similar to Sean McDowell, with friendly, measured, and sane / intelligent discussions with people in disagreement. It’s a deliberate attempt to contrast the frequent vitriol often seen online. Justin is hopeful that there are many people open to changing their minds if they can consider rational argumentation and evidence.

I’ve tried to design my tracts (visit ThinkTracts.com) with a corresponding hope, that straightforward evidence and argument might help someone rethink the stumbling block that hinders his salvation.

Justin cites one of the founders of quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” That was my life experience. My junior high and high school science classes, and the Chicago museums, and the rest of the culture, were drenched in evolutionism, provoking my youthful atheism. But when I dug deeper, I found the overwhelming evidence grounding a biblical worldview.

Justin never had such problems, raised in a Christian family. His dad’s education and career focused on biochemistry and electrical engineering. He realized that a naturalistic narrative for the origin of life would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Physics and chemistry simply do not generate specified complexity from random natural environments.

Atheistic evangelists like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss accuse creationists of “god of the gaps” thinking, insisting that science has a way of closing the gaps as knowledge increases. Indeed, meteorological knowledge explains thunderstorms better than the temper tantrums of the Greek god Zeus. But Justin suggests that “good gaps” actually advance science by pointing towards design and purpose. The fine tuning of the universe’s laws and its physical constants, for example, is balanced oh-so-just-right to enable the very possibility of life to exist. Also, decisively, there is no naturalistic source for the information content of the DNA code. All experience shows that information derives from a mind. In the spectacular example of life’s genetic code, that creative mind can match only the mind of God almighty.

Unfortunately, I’ll note that Justin, like many evangelicals, compromises on the Big Bang, thereby disavowing the simple and clear testimony of God – Himself – in the book of Genesis. (But nobody’s perfect. In several of the science essays on this site I address the creationist perspective on the origin of life and the origin of the stars and galaxies.)

Justin cites William Lane Craig’s exposition of the Kalam cosmological argument (KCA): Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe had a beginning; therefore it had a cause. Since time, space, and matter came into existence, the cause must be immaterial, timeless, and amazingly powerful. God is the best candidate.

Now, Craig is a Christian and resides in the Intelligent Design camp, but is an antagonist to young earth creationists. He believes in the Big Bang, billions of years, and hominids before Adam and Eve received a soul. A shame. I have not searched exhaustively, but have never seen evidence that Justin Brierley has interviewed a biblical creationist. Why not feature Ken Ham, or Jason Lisle, or Andrew Snelling, or Steve Austin? Why not feature some extremely well-educated and well-informed Christians who actually believe Genesis 1-11 was history, and can back it up with plenty of theological and scientific observational evidence? Sigh.

To stand by the Big Bang fantasy, you have to believe in “the most impressive example of fine-tuning” ever, namely a super-low entropy distribution of mass and energy in the moments following the Bang. Justin imagines a large tub of building blocks packed in such a way that when you pour them out at a certain angle, from a certain height, and onto a certain surface, they tumble and collide and settle into a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower. That would be fantastically improbable, of course.

The analogy is to imagine a Big Bang that produces an expanding universe organized into a trillion well-spaced galaxies of different symmetries, each galaxy with billions of stars tracking wonderfully stable orbits, most of which have a diversity of planets following their own stable paths around their stars, and so on. Far, far, FAR more likely from a Big Bang scenario would be a universe with one ginormous black hole, or millions or billions of black holes.

On ThinkTracts.com you can find my tract, “Stars & Galaxies – How did that happen?”, which cites the odds against a superbly organized universe like ours (assuming it came from a low-entropy Big Bang). The odds against are 1 in 10 raised to the power of 10 to the 123rd power. Yes, the exponent is 10 to the 123rd power. To write the odds out without using exponential notation would require more zeroes than there are electrons in the known universe (which is about 10 to the 82nd power.) In all my years in science and engineering I have never noticed a number so large.

Anyway, my conclusion on all this is not to marvel at the fine-tuning of the Big Bang. Rather, it’s to exclaim that the Big Bang is a bad theory! If the Big Bang were to be true, it’s obvious that only the God of the Bible could design the ‘packed tub’ that exploded into our universe. But if you must conclude that God did it, why not believe what God actually told us how He did it, in Genesis, namely by fiat creation?

Justin hosted a debate between John Lennox and Lawrence Krauss. Krauss objected to Lennox’s argument that God is an appropriate explanation for why the universe exists. Krauss insisted that the only valid questions were ‘how’ questions answered by nature. Lennox responded that if you have a Ford motorcar engine in front of you, you can ask how it works. But the ‘why’ question is both real and important. The answer is that a personal agent, Henry Ford, answers the ‘why,’ and that does not conflict with any scientific explanation; rather, it’s simply a different kind of question.

Krauss retorted that the ‘why’ question is an invention, assuming there must be a purpose; if there is no purpose, the question is irrelevant.

Sigh. So annoying. It seems that he deliberately refuses to understand the point. Of course the agent-based origins of automobile engines are relevant! More so, the origins of life and the universe are relevant, tied to WHETHER GOD IS THERE. If so, there is hope for this life and for eternity. If not, as Krauss believes, then why is he wasting the few precious moments of his brief life debating with Christians whom he thinks are idiots? But then if he’s right, then he has no agency himself, no personhood, and can utter only words derived from deterministic brain chemistry.

This, I believe, is the ultimate rational argument for the existence of God, yes even the existence of each of us as human persons, more than brain chemistry, an “I” that makes non-deterministic choices. Justin quotes C.S. Lewis famously: “If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.” I’ve constructed a 121 evangelistic package around this ‘ultimate argument’ you can find in my tract, “Who are you?” at the ThinkTracts.com website.

Lawrence Krauss is a physicist, who taught at Arizona State U while I lived in the Phoenix area. I visited the campus many times to distribute Gospel tracts (especially my own designs on creation vs. evolution) and to share the Gospel 121 with students. I never crossed the professor’s path, but certainly encountered some of his students. I wonder if any of my tracts got into his hands. If so, at least I was a small part of giving him a chance. (He’s had plenty of opportunities to rethink his lostness. Besides spending time with John Lennox, I’ve seen video of him with Ray Comfort. At the Great White Throne, he’ll have no excuse.)

Justin cites physicist Eugene Wigner’s comment on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” to describe how our universe operates. Not only do apparently simple laws describe the utterly consistent activities of electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, but it seems that man is designed to explore and understand these mechanisms. Justin got atheistic physicist Jim Al-Khalili to admit, “It’s a huge philosophical question: Why does nature speak the language of mathematics?”

The atheist, perhaps, sees coincidence. The Christian expects a God of order and design to fashion an elegant creation and to make image-bearers who can appreciate what He has done.

God’s image-bearers . . . isn’t that the core reason, within a Christian worldview, that human life should be valued? In the 1970s, nine-year-old Patricia Hilario da Silva was gunned down in Brazil. A note was pinned to her: “I killed you because you didn’t study and had no future.” He saw no value in the life of a child who lived on the streets. On an atheistic worldview, Justin sees no convincing objection to the killer’s claim. But if GOD IS THERE, Patricia is (still) an eternal soul worthy of care and consideration.

Moral laws seem to be universal, pervasive, and powerful, and certainly not explicable by natural laws. They are other-worldly, yet dominate our attention. On the Christian worldview there is no mystery here. The moral laws taught by Scripture are sourced in God’s very character, and thereby woven into the fabric of this world.

Justin observes that atheists deny objective morality, supposing that we have been duped into an illusion of it. Yet they don’t live that way. They don’t want to be “mugged in the street, swindled in the shop, or treated unfairly at work.” When those things happen, they act as if a universal morality is both vital and binding on all. They, too, embrace the same principles of justice, compassion, and right and wrong that Christians do. “Atheism cannot account for such a world. That’s why God is the best explanation for human value.”

On finding purpose in life, Justin mentions a Stephen Fry video encouraging UK humanists to be happy, finding meaning, perhaps, in “walking in the woods and caring for their grandchildren,” or “cooking, watching soap operas, savoring a favorite wine or a new food.” His takeaway was, “The time to be happy is now, and the way to find meaning in life is to get on and live it as fully and as well as we can.”

I agree with Justin and Stephen that these can be enjoyable and even satisfying pursuits (except for soap operas and alcoholic wine), but Justin makes the telling point that illness, divorce, other forms of loss, but especially the spectre of death taints our momentary pleasures. I have discovered that most people will admit that thoughts of their mortality – their eventual death – intrude on them quite often. So momentary pleasures serve as distractions, because genuine HOPE is not available without God, without an assured hope for eternal life.

At the end of Matthew 7, Jesus contrasts two men, one who built his house on rock and the other on sand. The metaphor is clear . . . you cannot really enjoy living your life unless your foundation, your worldview and your confidence in its truth, is secure. Jesus wants His children to have an abundant life in the here and now – John 10:10. We must be born again into His family to access such life.

Brierley invests a chapter in Resurrection apologetics. His approach is typical evidentialism, employing arguments used in this generation by Lee Strobel, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona. He describes debates between Licona and skeptic Bart Ehrman. Personally, I don’t like evidentialist arguments. They devolve into probability arguments about the veracity of witnesses, the historical reliability of documents (the Gospel accounts, particularly), and disagreements about human nature under stressful conditions.

Worst, evidential arguments cede ground unnecessarily to the materialist. That’s why I’m committed to presuppositionalism. God gave us an entire creation that is consistent with the Scriptural record, including the ultimate argument that we are made in His image – therefore we are more than brain chemistry, we have personhood, objective morality is an obvious truth, the galaxies and DNA and ecosystems are OBVIOUSLY designed, and so on.

Don’t just throw the kitchen sink at the determined skeptic. Throw the whole house! Demand that he defend his pitiful materialistic worldview, while explaining where his immaterial concepts and arguments come from.

When he fails and you can see that he knows it, then explain that God loves his image-of-God person, despite his sins, and Jesus came to offer him salvation. Certainly God would communicate what we need to know. Only the Bible has the message that makes sense of EVERYTHING – from the true guilt of his sins to flood geology, to fulfilled prophecy, to an assured hope of eternal life. Do the worldview thing first, and then give him the Gospel. Once he sees the landscape and the stakes, he can make his choice.

Many apologists, including Justin Brierley, see the problem of pain as the most poignant challenge to the Christian worldview. In Jesus’ model prayer (Matthew 6), the element “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” indicates that God does not get His will done on this Earth (in this present age) which, by the way, cancels the Calvinist doctrine of deterministic sovereignty. Justin’s argument is that we live under spiritual warfare in addition to dwelling in a fallen world under the Curse.

He interviewed Jessica Kelley, whose 4-year-old son died of brain cancer. She said it was incredibly freeing to know that when beautiful and good things happen, she can profess that they come from God and can thank Him. But when her son suffers and dies she could say, “This is not from God.”

We are all under the death curse from Genesis. Additionally, we fight against the principalities and powers under Satan’s temporary dominion. Furthermore, our own sins and the sins of those around us have consequences. That’s why the return of Jesus and the establishment of His kingdom is called the ‘blessed hope.’ All this makes perfect sense within a biblical worldview. Under materialism, there is no purpose to suffering. Life is painful and then you die with no hope. This dichotomy, more than any other issue, I think, is why I was open to the Gospel as a young atheist. I really wanted to find out if any hope was warranted. And it is! Revelation 21:4 – “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Over the years I’ve noticed that what the Bible teaches about Hell and/or the Lake of Fire, provokes a particularly visceral objection from atheists. Justin, unfortunately, has compromised on this one, deciding to embrace annihilationism – an utter end to the existence of those who reject God’s grace. I get why he’s tempted to avoid the Bible’s clear teaching on this. I’ve answered the objection as well as I know how within my free ebook on this website, One Heartbeat from Hell Plus Eleven Other Compelling Reasons to Become a Christian. If you check that out, don’t neglect the two chapters I’ve got on Heaven, too.

Although I recommend Justin’s book, watch out for the week-kneed evangelical dithering. He has a chapter where he mentions a number of doctrinal issues that trouble and divide the churches; for example, women pastors, LGBTQ issues, young vs. old earth creationism, biblical inerrancy, and others. He admits that many of these are important but not central, that we can agree to disagree.

One annoying claim he makes is that young earth creationism is a recent, 20th century phenomenon. What?!? No, Darwinism is recent! For most of world history, Bible believers have read Genesis chapters 1-11 quite literally.

In all this ecumenical compromise, Justin Brierley is, sadly, a wimp. Where in the Bible does God tell us truth, but does not care whether we believe Him or not? Frankly, all the issues he mentions are not hard at all to resolve – it’s just a question of whether you have the guts to stand against the Devil and the world.

I’ll end, though, on a positive note – I did enjoy reading the book and think you will, too. Justin interviewed a virulently anti-religious atheist named John Loftus. Loftus apparently claimed to be a Christian at one time, but fell “out with his church following an affair and then [came] to doubt the claims of Christianity.” He went on to write books and construct a website to attack the Christian faith.

At the end of the interview, though, Loftus told Justin that the hardest aspect of becoming an atheist was losing the Christian story: “The story itself was amazing. There is no other story like it of a God who comes down as his Son, dies on the cross for our sins, resurrects from the grave, and gives us hope. There is no other story in the world that is more beautiful than that one.”

And it’s not merely a story. It’s true. And that changes everything.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com